A website is your global storefront that is open 24/7. Your website never sleeps, making it the perfect way to introduce your books and yourself to readers and reporters. It doesn’t matter where they are located, or what their time zone is.

Maybe your book appeals to a very large potential audience. It still has to compete with hundreds of thousands of other books for the customers’ attention and wallet. A great website lets the reader “meet” you as an author and sample a few free excerpts from your books. It will also help them delve into additional information that isn’t in the book itself.

At its best, an author’s website is almost as good as meeting the author face-to-face, because it facilitates a relationship with the reader. People buy from the people with whom they have relationships, so it pays for authors to reach out to readers through their websites.

Perhaps your book appeals to a niche audience. Maybe your topic is very academic. Perhaps it is regionally-themed or highly technical. The Web makes it easy for readers who are interested in your topic to find you, no matter where they’re located.

It’s OK if there isn’t a potential readership of millions for your book. You want to reach the largest percentage possible of the readers who are interested in your topic and capture them as customers. So if you’ve written a book that is limited in its appeal to aficionados of particular sport, hobby, historic event or other narrow topic, don’t worry about creating a New York Times bestseller. Focus your efforts on creating a website that will draw the people who are interested in your subject right to your online door.

Excerpted from  the new book, The Thrifty Author’s Guide to Selling and Promoting Your Book Online by Gail Z. Martin (Comfort Publishing) For a free chapter download, visit: http://tinyurl.com/7keehuz. Order your copy here: http://tinyurl.com/77ccggz or Learn more about Gail at www.GailMartinMarketing.com

The Fifth Key is Client Support. Do you need on-air assistance and consultations? Say you get a snafu in the middle of the program. Do you want an engineer who can fix something if it breaks or can you do that by yourself? Do you want someone to do the day-to-day details to the registration?

Here are the lower cost platforms. In this tier, you’ll see GoToWebinar and a program called Yugma. What’s the difference? Capacity, complexity and client support.

Then if we look at the higher end ones, there are Adobe, KRM and Wimba. Wimba is more of an online learning environment. It may not be as much of a webinar presentation as an online learning experience. They are focused more towards education webinars. With Adobe Connect, the capacity is much bigger. They use integrated VOIP. They have services that help with registration, recording and administration. It’s a very high level platform. There is a learning curve and there are so many features it can be overwhelming. You might not need something so sophisticated.

In terms of client support, Adobe has all kinds of things available. KRM does a lot of hand- holding. At the time we wrote this, they have a per-attendee fee depending on the length of your webinar. They do everything for you. They have engineers to handle everything. They provide an account manager, and an event coordinator. They will give you marketing tips but won’t implement your marketing for you. You even get online moderators. They have people with radio voices, people who will record intros. They are like a high-end expert.

A word about capacity. Each of these programs tells you the requirements it needs in order to run. Most need a computer that is two years old or less to have the right components as far as memory and operating system. A lot of programs will do a validation check. When you download their software, they make sure you have enough memory and the right operating system. The other constraint is storing the recordings. Every eight hours of video takes about a gigabyte of memory depending on the quality. That is why I tend to have an external hard drive so it doesn’t choke up my computer.

We’ve tried to cover the essentials in this course, but there is so much more we could say. Use these tips to determine what you want from a webinar program, realizing that the platforms change all the time in terms of features and costs. Don’t be afraid to experiment. I hope that we’ve shown you that webinars are powerful platform-building tools easily within your ability to create. Dive in and start experimenting today!

The Fourth Key is Communication. This depends on what you want for your event. If you want an account manager, they will walk you through everything and talk about strategy and getting people there, and what kind of pricing to use. It’s a basic thing where you pretty much know what you need. How about promotional assistance? Do you need help marketing your event? Do you want someone to critique your webinar afterwards? Do you want people to help interpret the results and analyze the reporting afterwards?

The Third Key is Complexity. That’s the ease of use for setting up your webinar and running your webinar. You want to understand how difficult it is to get it up and running and how difficult to produce. A lot of them will do marketing and follow up emails. The platform does everything for us. It’s almost like setting up an auto responder when setting up a shopping cart. What kind of marketing support do you want? Do you want them to manage the registration process and payment processing or to help promote you to search engines and blogs? Do you want them to help you with search engine optimization? This is a big area where the platforms differ in support. There are companies that will handle the registration for you but you might pay per person for it. If you are having an event where registration is $300, that might make sense for you, but if your registration is $20 per person, that might not be the best thing for you.

On the other hand, more complex platforms also have technical support. They can have an operator in between you and the audience. When someone has a question, it goes to the operator and the operator can say, “Mary from Dallas has a question.” There is someone mediating the question and answer period for you. You are going to pay for that. There are some that have engineers to help you with your audio and video. If you are creating a high-end product, you want a platform that offers audio engineering. They will have more sophisticated equipment to record the webinar at a higher quality and the expertise to produce it into a high end podcast or MP3. If you serve a high-end market, they won’t be satisfied with a low-end recording. We are using FreeConferencePro.com for our audio recording today. The more compressed something gets, the lower quality it is. If you are doing something over the phone, it isn’t easy to create a high quality product from it.

If you do audio on the computer, it can handle a much higher voice quality. For support, you might get an account manager helping you along the way. Look for the things that apply to you. You will start to see that a lot of it follows the same formula with different flavors.

We talked about host versus panelist versus organizer. You really want to understand the kinds of people that are going to be interacting. Are you going to have a host and is it going to be you? Will there be an expert? Will your audience participate? You want to understand all of that. Panelists tend to be the ones on the open phone lines so everyone can hear them. GoToWebinar has 1000 capacity for the muted line and 25 panelists on the open line, including the organizer. The Organizer (me in this case) is the one who controls everything.

You want to know how many phone lines are available. Services like FreeConference.com and FreeConferencePro.com are limited to 100 people. What happens if you get 250 registering. Can you increase your capacity? What are the fees for that? Understand your contingencies. With VOIP, people can hear the audio through their computers so they don’t have to dial in. They don’t have to have a phone number and a link to connect. But they need a special microphone if they want to speak.

With VOIP, you can multitask and don’t have to tie your phone line up. Everything will come through your computer. If someone has a microphone they can talk back. If they don’t, they can just listen. You can have thousands of listening-only participants but only a couple who can speak. Here are some more questions to consider. What are the recording capabilities for audio and video? How simple is it to record a meeting or does it happen automatically? Where are they stored? What kind of format is used?

Look at the presentation tools. What kind of screen is showing? Can you show streaming video/audio? Can you chat? Do you have a whiteboard? If you show a ‘before’ picture and want to draw on it, does it have those tools? What kind of participation statistics do you get? Can you see how many people showed up versus registered?

Higher-priced webinars tend to have a lot more features you can use. People tend not to use most of the features. You are not going to want to pay for them if you don’t use them. How easy is it to schedule? How easy is it to create customized invitations and follow-ups? How easy is it to cancel? If you are on a platform to pay for an event and your speaker cancels at the last minute, what is the cancellation fee? What kind of contract is it? If you cancel, can you get a pro-rated refund?

Key Number Two is Capacity. How many users are allowed to participate? The programs that allow you to stream audio through your computer allow a lot more capacity because there is no additional cost for phone lines. When you have a separate teleconference line, that is where the cost comes in.

If we use GoToWebinar, it will set up a conference call for you and you just dial the number they give you. It gives you the option of having 1,000 people on muted phone lines. That doesn’t give you a lot of options if you want to have it more interactive. Those people will be on a muted line, so it’s really more like a radio broadcast or a TV broadcast with interaction happening through the computer screen. It does allow up to 25 people to be on an open line. It allows us to interact with those of us on the muted line. I can mute or unmute the line or set it to where listeners can mute or unmute it. If there was background noise I would say mute it but allow participants to unmute it.

Webinar Marketing Session 5: Choosing a Webinar Platform

Now we’re going to talk about choosing a webinar platform. There are many of different platforms out there. We will show you a table that cross references the different characteristics so you can get a sense of how they compare.

Now let’s talk about an overview. Choosing a webinar platform can be tedious. There are hundreds of webinar brands. I have an intern and one of his tasks was to do the research and put together a table of the feature sets of the webinars. At first he was completely overwhelmed. It didn’t take long for him to get the hang of it and it won’t take that long for you. Most of the programs have free trials. I would recommend doing a couple practice webinars using the trials to see which works the best.

You don’t have to have a fully finished webinar to try out the programs. Put together a couple of slides and audio and video, a website you will take people to. Have that laid out and you will have a sense of what features you need. You need something to play multi-media and to play audio and video. It’s really important to have a sense of what you will need and how you will use the program before you choose a solution. We call these the “Five Keys.”

Key Number One is Cost. If you are in start-up mode or don’t have a lot of working capital or cash to invest and webinars will be your income, it makes sense to start with the lowest cost platform.

As you generate money and webinars are a bigger part of your service portfolio, that might be a good time to upgrade.

When you’re looking at cost there are a couple of factors we consider, including the pricing of your event, the price of delivery of your event and the platform. Cost can be set on a variety of measures. Some programs have monthly or yearly fees. Some you pay by event or by participant. Some are set by length per person per minute. You need to look to see what makes the most sense financially for you.

So now let’s look at the seven most effective ways to promote and attract participants?

1. Meaningful content. Content has to remove the monkey on the listener’s back, the weight on their shoulders. It has to give them a solution.

2. Viral messaging. Word of mouth buzz. Give people a message that is so intriguing and unexpected that they pass it on.

3. Online marketing. Make the most of getting the word out through online publicity venues, blogs, links, search engine optimization. Use PR.

4. Your affiliate program. Give people an incentive to tell people about your program. Those are going to be the pillars of promoting and attracting participants. You share profits, but they give you free publicity. They become part of your marketing team. If you work with the super affiliates, the people who are really names out there, they want a bigger piece of the action. Some of those go as high as 70%.

In that case, you are getting endorsement by someone with an extensive following, someone with a known name, and you are getting endorsed exposure to their entire list if you get one of those people on board. It isn’t free but you may consider it to be invaluable.

5. Meaningful content. Meet a need that solves a problem. Create high perceived value. Is the product worth $100 to your audience? If so, they will spend the money. If the problem bothers them, but not $100 worth, they won’t pay.

6. Social Media. This is where your Facebook page, Squidoo lens and MySpace page come in. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. Pass the word and say, “I have to tell you about what I am doing.” If you are excited, that excitement is contagious. Do something crazy. I have gone to bookstores in full Renaissance garb. At least it gets attention. I am guaranteed eye contact with everyone who walks in the door, regardless of whether they buy my book or not.

7. Online marketing. Use search engine optimization. Make sure your title has the words that people would use if they were looking for help on Google on your topic. Remember to use as many online resources to promote your program as you possibly can. These options may not be right for your next program, but at least you can consciously screen them in or out. Do a virtual and real media tour. For example, in October, I have set up a blog tour for my fantasy adventure series since it deals with ghosts and magic and vampires. Halloween and Day of the Dead are great marketing times for me. I don’t have to leave my house but I will speak about my books. You can do a lot about publicity without having to leave your house.

Remember media deadlines and how far in advance releases need to be sent. Make sure you follow up. I can’t tell you how many times I have asked a reporter whether they received a pitch and they hadn’t. Don’t assume silence from a reporter means they did not like the release.

Doing this solo, you may be the content creator, but you may also be working with speakers and writers or have a marketing team to get the word out. Others may be handling shopping cart details, writing auto-responders, sending solicitations to speakers, creating how-to guides and checklists. Not all of these pieces are sexy, but they have to happen. Then you have your content deliverers. In live presentations, these are your speakers. Your transcriptionists also deliver content. The program that records your audio delivers content.

Somebody has to write the media releases and follow up. Someone has to manage your affiliate program. Your affiliates are part of your marketing team, and your speakers should be getting the word out to their lists. There are event logistics. In a live event, this person runs around looking haggard and worried making sure you have enough to drink and resetting the thermostat when it’s too cold or hot. You have the equivalent online to help when the volume isn’t working, or the recording levels are bad.

Last but not least, your webmaster makes you look good online and is key to the success of your follow up and downstream. After the event, people can order transcripts and audios. Someone has to keep up with that and update the site, and that person is your webmaster.

For Momference, Mike was the producer. I know there were a lot of people working behind the scenes in administration, marketing and publicity, and logistics. He had a great webmaster and a couple of people working on web support and 50 people speaking.

It helps to have a friendly relationship with a web designer who won’t charge an arm and a leg or to use a program like CityMax. Your marketing is an opportunity to leverage your speakers and their lists and create affiliates. With Momference, 50 speakers brought their list with them. They promoted to their newsletters, blogs, websites, and followers. Getting them to help market the program was key to getting the word out. If you are using other speakers or you have an affiliate program, (and I would strongly suggest creating an affiliate program if you are going to be serious about doing webinars), leverage those people. If something is interesting, people tell other people about it.

Utilize free PR and marketing resources. It still takes time to post to these programs, but sites like OpenPR don’t charge. Evangelize. You are your own best marketer. Put it in your newsletter over and over, set up special editions of your newsletter, get your word out. If you are not excited about it, nobody else will be. Think about an electronic goodie bag. Something that is an incentive for people to opt-in or for signing up early. Maybe it’s a free white paper or a discount on ebook. Maybe you throw the transcripts in for free and after a certain date they are an extra charge. With Momference, Mike got speakers to contribute white papers, ebooks, audios, and they were part of the incentive package you got at a certain dollar level. Think long term revenue. It isn’t just what you get at the gate, what people pay at the live event, it’s also what can you make of the recordings and transcripts down the line, and what you make of the relationship you create with these people.

You may find it makes sense to create a membership community for free access to your webinar and teleseminars and events. The question is: Is your goal to sell the main event or your services? Your team is the last component here. Mike and I can tell you how important that is. I know Mike has put in a lot of time offline doing everything that he has been showing you how to do. You can be your producer or partner with someone else to be your producer.

A lot of it depends on if it’s a new program you developed from scratch, or whether you adapted existing program for the webinar. Before you spend all this money, get a group together and run one session using a webinar platform as a test. All the programs have free trials. See if that platform works for you. Walk before you run and test, test, test as much as you can.

Gail Martin: The first time out of the gate for doing a webinar on a topic, you are probably not going to make enough to pay off your house. The question is, how committed are you to investing in this in the long term? You’ll need to build on what you created, offer the program multiple times, learn from each session, and create the long term benefit of an information product.

Think about your goals to avoid frustration. “If you build it they will come” doesn’t work. Marketing is crucial for a webinar. You want to have a site for the program. Having it as a backslash addition to your main URL isn’t going to do as well as giving it a standalone URL and linking it to your marketing. For this program, didn’t use an internal page on the DreamSpinner Communications site or the Jaffe Life Design site. We gave the program its own personality to make it more attractive. I did the same thing with my marketing class and Mike did it with Momference. You are talking about less than $20 to get a URL. You’ll also need to think about how to turn that URL into a webpage.