The good, bad and ugly of my first webinar 💻

Let me tell you the tale of my first online webinar. I love telling this story to help you understand that we all have these “firsts” as business owners and the first one of something can be challenging. It can be ugly, uncomfortable and make us want to run and hide.

However, I want to encourage  - being open and willing to try things can lead to more success. Most of the time, we don’t nail things on the first try. Look at many successful business leaders and they have similar stories on doing something for the first time too.

It was the summer of 2013 and I had attended Chris Guillbeau’s conference and met a lot of interesting business folks. It was at this conference that I met someone running their own Facebook group, was introduced to Stripe, calendar scheduling tools and so many of other tools I use today.

I met a guy who helped other artists launch their online business. He was very successful selling his art online, had online classes and a community. He held a regular online webinar where he brought in guest speakers to educate and add value to his artist community. (This was right before podcasts exploded!) He invited me to speak on his online webinar. 

He thought it would be good to educate his community on what web hosting was and why it was important. At the time, I ran a WordPress web design firm and also offered web hosting At this time, SquareSpace and Wix were barely on the scene at this time.  WordPress was the most common web design platform and you HAD to have web hosting in order to have a website. My how things have changed!

I had never presented web hosting as a topic to a group of folks before (I had done speeches in Toastmasters, I'll share more about that later this year!). I tried to integrate some analogies and storytelling but most of you know, web hosting is pretty boring and NOT exciting to most business owners, especially artists.

I put together my slideshow and showed up at the webinar. I remember being very nervous and was intimidated with the amount of people that were attending.

As I gave my talk, I even lost a bit of interest in my topic and my mind wandered off. I kept wondering if I was interesting enough. I was totally doubting myself the whole time, wondering why I even signed up to do this webinar.

I have a feeling my presentation was on the boring side and the material was dry. However at the end, I gave an offer for a web hosting package with the hopes that I would get someone to sign up.

Low and behold within the week I got 3 folks to sign up for web hosting (I bet if I had been a better storyteller and more confident, I would have gotten many more). At the time, I was thrilled and glad to have that webinar behind me. The first one is always the hardest and you never know what will come of it!

Lesson learned -  put yourself out there and get the first one over with! It’s that simple, just do it. Also, get feedback, I didn’t do that with my first couple of presentations, I was too nervous. Getting feedback will help you improve (now I ask for feedback!) and know what your audience liked and what you can improve on.

Also remember your topic can really shape how people react. In my case, simply standing in as an authority for web hosting helped me get people to trust and work with me. 

What's stopping you from your first presentation or webinar?