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Webinars: how to regret saving money for many years

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 09 March 2009


It is (says Owen Linderholm, Webinar expert) very easy and cheap to promote your new product by running a Webinar. It's easy to put it up on YouTube, or Facebook, or whatever. What's not easy, is to unmake it once it's out there. But that doesn't mean you should spend a lot, he says.

"Until recently it was really only a realistic possibility for large organizations with lots of spending power and also pretty big media organizations that could afford to produce them themselves, to do Webinars," Linderholm told NewsWireless.

But while the technology and pricing structures have dropped dramatically, webinar producers haven't kept up - or, rather, down. The question is: how far down should you go?

"Many small companies have noticed that they can run their own webinars for very little (in the $100 to $1000 range depending on circumstance - and you can do one offs for free but there are limitations on those). But they really don't have the experience to pull it off so they do really badly thought out and frankly crappy webinars that aren't interesting to their audience," Linderholm warns.

In his work producing webinars, Linderholm has seen that a fairly typical price for getting the presentation made is around $15K. I think I found a niche," he says "- producing high-quality webinars for small organizations - not just businesses - that are high in quality but affordable."

Specifically, he is doing webinars in his new startup company in the San Francisco Bay area, for $500 to $1,000 - and leaving it to his clients how they promote it. (Apologies to readers who saw the original price, posted in error!)...

Take a look at the website, and tell me what you think. WebinarAce is hoping to do more author/publisher webinars - "It is a great way to virtualize a reading in a bookstore. This evening (US time) I am doing a webinar for 'Medical Grand Rounds' - a blog roundup event for medical bloggers."

You can find out more on two web sites: here and here - and WebinarAce also has some small business webinars in the planing stage, one for a consultant who does executive coaching on the topic of training small nusiness CEOs to give presentations and one for a business that provides financial services to transportation companies that wants to try to reach an audience of truckers.

"One of the big changes as well is that it is easy now to record webinars and distribute them via social media and embedded video, etc. The book reading video in my portfolio is an example," said Linderholm.

If you hover over the icons in the bottom right you can get the code to embed the webinar in any website.

"But that means that planning and strategy in producing the webinar is critical because if you do it right it will have a multi-year life on the web."


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