I'm Just Sharing

As you know, yesterday I gave my webinar, and I’m just glad there were some people who signed up for it, because it would have been lonely without them. Truthfully, though, I’d have gone through with it even if people hadn’t shown up, mainly because I will be putting it up for sale at some point, once it’s cleaned up and edited a bit.

Here’s what happened overall. I called in about 30 minutes beforehand. After the Monday run through, I realized that I had to do some early setup work to make sure everything went well. This was a mix of Powerpoint and web pages, which I think is pretty neat. However, on Monday’s test, of course one of the websites went down during the test, and I knew if that happened live that it would mess me up. This time, I took no chances.

Also, you know I overcame the audio piece of things, which worked out great. All we now had to do was hook up with each other. The organizer, Renee, did some things after we connected, and I mentally prepared for it. Now we were just waiting for the magic start time.

Even without anyone calling in yet, I went ahead and started at 11:01; I wanted to start right at 11AM, as I’m kind of a stickler for time, but I didn’t have that control. I figured people would call in when they got around to it, so I went ahead and started. I got to 3 1/2 minutes when Renee suddenly piped in, saying that our first person had joined, but was having problems with the audio. What could I do? I was stunned, because you’d never have done that for one person if you had multiple people on, but Renee was worried that no one else would be able to hear either. I didn’t like it, but I understood.

So, it was about a two minute pause as she helped this lady get sound; no one else popped on during that point. When it was resolved, I started from the beginning again. It wasn’t easy; my rhythm had been broken, almost like trying to stop in the middle of urinating (yeah, I went there). Still, I do presentations for a living, so after a minute or so I got back to my normal self, and the webinar went on. People did eventually pop in, and I got some interesting questions along the way when I took breaks. Oddly enough, no one wanted to speak live, but the software had a chat feature where people could write in their questions, and Renee would read them to me during each break, since only the organizer had access to what everyone was writing.

I knew I wanted to stay under 90 minutes, yet get close. It came in at 83 minutes; not bad, considering I didn’t have a lot of questions. It was 2 minutes shorter than the full test we did Monday afternoon, but that’s okay, since we were simulating things on Monday. The thing about doing a live presentation is that you always want to make sure you have enough material so that, if no one interrupts you or asks questions, you only have maybe 10 minutes of time left, and no one will ever care if you get that close; well, unless you’re asked to do 30 minutes or less. If you practice speaking, you learn how to go faster if you need, or how to stretch out when you’re drastically short. I was just fine.

Anyway, it was a pretty good experience. I had no glitches, except for that early stoppage, and I guarantee that won’t happen again. But I do see more webinars in my future.