Getting results from your teleseminars and webinars means presenting your information to the right audience in the right way. Your effectiveness will increase as you gain more experience, but there is one skill you need to develop immediately:

To have success with teleseminars and webinars, you must build rapport with your audience.

The first several minutes of your presentation are critical. This is the time when your audience will gain their first impression of you, your subject matter, and why on earth they should listen to you.
Your introduction must do more than provide them with a description of what the call is all about. You must capture their interest. Rather than simply saying “This class will cover…,” tell your audience who you are and how listening to you is going to make their life better.

If your introduction is a long, drawn out, boring dissertation about you, or if it’s confusing and doesn’t tell the audience why they should care, they will tune you out or, even worse, just disconnect from the conference. Your goal in the first few minutes is to captivate them to the point that it would be virtually impossible for them to stop listening.

There are a few tools you can use to capture your audience’s attention – and maintain it:

• I’m just like you. Let your audience know how you’re like them. Share some of your experiences that they likely share, especially if it’s a problem that you can help them solve.
• Shock. Startling statistics really make people sit up and take notice. For example, did you know that 1,004,342 individuals filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. in 2008. That’s individuals, not businesses. Want to know something even more shocking? That figure is lower than it was in 1998: 1,398,182. What the heck? I thought the economy was getting worse?
• Story Time. Tell an interesting story to build rapport. This could be an anecdotal account of a personal experience, a funny story about something that happened recently, or just a quick tidbit that builds their curiosity so they have to keep listening to find out what happened.
• Think about it. Ask a question or make a comment to engage their intellect. Make them really think about the problem you’re going to solve for them so that, as you deliver your content, they apply it to their situation.
• Funny stuff. Humor is a wonderful rapport-builder because it effectively engages the emotions of your audience in a safe way. Be sure to use it wisely, however. Funny stories should be on-topic and should never be offensive.

Use a combination of these techniques to connect with your audience and get them engaged in your material. Again, your goal is to hold their attention.

The more you use these tools, the more you’ll be able to really build relationships with your clients and prospects. Relationships, of course, are the key to all of your business efforts.