Unlike a live in person event where you have the benefit of “seeing” your audience and their reaction to your presentation, this capability is unfortunately not part of virtual meetings, such as webinars.

Seeing your audiences body language and other non verbal gestures is invaluable. It provides feedback, in that lets you make adjustments on the fly to make sure you are connecting with your audience.

So here are five tips to help make sure you are able to connect with your audience when you are doing a webinar.

1. First, what do you know about your audience, such as their interests and what they’d possibly find of value in what you have to tell them, or why should they care in what you are going to tell them?

2. Then after you are introduced, before you start going through your slide deck, tell them what it is you want them know, what’s in it for them, and what you want them to do with this information? Taking a few moments before launching into your content goes a long way to develop a rapport, establish your credibility as a thought leader, and more importantly, it allows you to state your perspective on where you are coming from, making it a lot easier for the audience to engage and follow your thoughts.

3. Using the deliverables from the webinar invitation as your road map, give concrete examples to reinforce your key points. Better yet, tell a story about best practices or lessons learned or some of the results. This will go a long way to making what you have to say be something they might want to learn more about after the webinar by having a 1:1 with you. After all, isn’t one of your objectives in doing the webinar to extend the conversation with a more in-depth discussion?

4. Only after you’ve blocked out what you want to tell them, as well as your key points to support your message, start looking at developing your content. Rather than multiple bullets on a slide, use slides that have a visual appeal with lot’s of white space and interesting graphics. Remember, you want the audience to “hear you” not get lost in reading your text.

5. Think of your voice as an instrument, vary your pitch, tone and rhythm. Like any instrument, you’ve got to practice to sound natural. Rehearsing your talk several times with your associates really helps prepare you for making an engaging delivery. Rather than reading bullets to them, show respect for your audience by pausing long enough to let your audience know you really care and want them to think about what you are telling them. By all means now is the time to share your passion for the topic and even consider gesturing as it helps create more energy and your audience will feel it. But don’t sell or use a lot of hype, be yourself.

These 5 basic tips will help you develop credibility that not only helps to connect with the audience, it also keeps them from bailing on you, and more importantly, your talk will inspire them to want to learn more about how you can help them solve their business or technology challenges.

Let me know what other tips you use or would recommend for making sure your webinar presentations are successful.

By Mike Agron