Do you want to host a great webinar? Webinars can be a wonderful tool for leading courses and sharing information with your clients. They also give you an opportunity to show off your expertise as an authority in your field.
What do you need to host a webinar? Having a good set of equipment can help with the overall quality of your presentation. At minimum you will want to have a good microphone or headset so that your listeners can hear clearly. Preparing backup equipment can also be helpful when an issue happens.
Most importantly though is the platform that you use to host the webinars on. There are many paid and free options available, and choosing one can be overwhelming. Each software will have features suited to different types of users. Here are fourteen webinar hosting options with features that may be suitable towards your needs.
ClickMeeting
ClickMeeting gives you the option of customizing the appearance and branding of your webinar to match your existing business. The registration page, waiting room, email notifications, and webinar can be customized with your own branding.
Webinar invitations can be customized to include the webinar agenda, formatted to a email template, and include a registration button and additional information to make it easy to sign up for your webinar. This can be done either on your desktop or the mobile app since they both allow full control over running your webinar.
Features:
- Moderated chat feature helps you engage with your audience. You can manage the feedback and reactions in real-time. The chat function allows you to accept, reject, or edit comments before the rest of the audience views them.
- 13 language interface options. This helps you work with attendees from around the world. The chat function also utilizes Google translate to provide instant translations during the chat.
- Interactive webinar room provides tools for document and screen sharing, whiteboard functions, along with polls and surveys to engage with your audience.
- Analyze webinar summaries, attendee stats, and attendee ratings with the reporting functions of the software.
- One click recording options. You can download recordings into a MP4 format and store webinars in the cloud.
- Redirect your attendees to a custom webpage after the webinar. This can be a call to action, a place to provide additional material, and make an overall final impression to your attendees.
- Share webinar invites on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
- Add functionality with connected apps that can help you manage files, scheduling, leads, and prospects.
Pricing: 30 day trial, $25 per month paid annually for 25 attendees.
Yondo
Yondo works as a full video ecommerce platform for hosting your webinars. This can be a good option if you have a library of videos/webinars to offer your customers. One advantage of Yondo is that you have several options to monetize the webinars.
If you have an existing website, Yondo can be integrated into your website to offer webinars to your customers. Alternatively you can utilize a custom landing page to provide a central location for registration.
Features:
- You can utilize a call to action tool to add a call to action at the end of the video or on demand during a webinar. You can customize the call to action with a title, images, custom text, along with button and links for your customers to click on.
- Create preview videos to give your attendees a sample of your on-demand webinars.
- Add team members to your account so that they can help manage your webinars.
- Your customers can book 1-1 sessions based on your availability. Booking is displayed in their local time zone based on your availability and can sync to multiple calendars.
- Integrated system allows you to view and chat with attendees, trigger call to actions during a webinar, and manage the screen, camera, audio, and recording options. You can also share items from your screen or link documents and other items.
- Live webinars can be recorded at ay time and the recordings can be added to your video on demand library at any time.
- Host up to 1,000 attendees on each of your webinars. Your attendees can sign up from a customized landing page that includes your branding and domain.
- Yondo integrates with Stripe and Paypal to accept payments. You can set up different monetization options including monthly subscriptions, one-time purchases, and pay per view rentals.
- Analytics dashboard gives you live event stats and customer information for follow-up.
- Create video courses for your website including resources that you can share as attachments to the webinar.
Pricing: Subscriptions start at $47/month for 25 attendees and there are discounts for paying annually.
Hangouts Meet
Hangouts Meet is the business-centered version of the Google Hangouts app. Meet comes bundled with Google’s G Suite, and has different features that appeal to webinar use.
G Suite comes in three pricing packages ranging from basic up to the Enterprise option. The main difference for Meet is the number of participants, and recording options. Here are some of the features available on Hangouts Meet.
Features:
- For the Enterprise version you can record your webinars straight to your Google Drive in a special Meetings folder. This can be helpful if you want to share the webinar with participants that couldn’t attend the session, or review them yourself for finding ways of improving them in sped-up mode.
- The Basic and Business editions of G Suite can support up to 25 participants. If you plan on having more participants to the webinar, you can switch to the Enterprise version to host up to 50 participants at a time.
- Video and voice options available for your webinar. You can share documents, spreadsheets, and slides with participants with just a couple of clicks.
- Built-in invite integration with your Google Calendar. Hangouts Meet becomes a default conferencing option so that you can schedule and invite people to your webinars. The calendar will automatically generate a Meet link for your event, and you can modify guest permissions from the event page as well.
Pricing:
- $5 per month for the Basic edition
- $10 for Business
- $25 for the Enterprise edition.
- The structure is set up to where you can upgrade/downgrade between editions.
Blackboard Collaborate
Blackboard Collaborate is a webinar/web conferencing program designed with educational use in mind. Blackboard can tailor the webinar solution options to specific business, government, or educational institutional webinar needs.
Collaborate allows you to create and schedule sessions for your webinar from within the interface. From here you can set up roles for participants beforehand, or make adjustments during the session. Blackboard does point out that the session links are generally long, so you may want to use a url shortener to make it easier for your participants to join.
One of the nice features of the software is that your participants can connect from most devices with a web browser. Chrome and Firefox are recommended for the best experience. The software is designed to be web based and doesn’t make use of Javascript. This can be helpful with reducing issues that your participants may have with connecting to your webinar.
Features:
Collaborate allows for session sizes of up to 250 participants. Larger groups can be accommodated by contacting Blackboard. With larger groups, features such as breakout groups and participant settings are turned off.
You can also record webinar sessions that capture audio, video, and shared content. You can also set it up to that recordings can be downloaded by participants.
View attendance reports to see which webinars have attracted the most participants.
Integration with PowerPoint and Openoffice to help lead training sessions.
Breakout groups allow you to put participants together for group activities. This can be a useful tool for implementing participant interaction.
Pricing: Free 30 day trial. Pricing available by contacting Blackboard.
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