10 tips for delivering a riveting webinar presentation

After all, the audience members are invisible, so they can be up to anything, unencumbered by the guilt a regular viewer might feel for checking his or her email, catching up on reading, or exiting the room altogether.

While you can gauge attention by monitoring comments or noting when people log off, it’s not the same as being in the room with living, breathing humans. It’s a little like shouting down a dark well—only without the helpful feedback an echo provides.

You’ll need to work harder than ever to avoid the mistakes that plague conventional presentations and take your performance to a higher level. Here are 10 tips to help you grab your audience and keep them tuned in.

1. Focus and structure your content

Your online audience is easily distracted. Emails pop up, visitors pop in. This is no time for nuance or meandering. Tighten your structure, avoid tangents, and offer guideposts along the way that signal where you are. For example, “Here are 10 webinar tips” and “The second way to grab your audience is …”

2. Limit the word slides