Sharing Your Training, Updates, and More with Webinars

Ok, so you are building your business online, have possibly built up a nice team and would like to do a training webinar or perhaps just have everyone together in one room to go over notes and updates rather than trying to call each person individually.

While conference calls are great and there are plenty of free conference call services, such as freeconferencecall.com , freeconferencecalling.com, freeconference.com and plenty of more, sometimes you just need that visual presentation whether it’s to go over a powerpoint presentation, to share your screen to possibly share other websites in realtime or maybe go over getting around in your company back office, this is where webinar services are great.

I’m sure many of you have are familiar with gotomeeting or gotowebinar and have possibly attended a meeting hosted here, but there are many great options out there to try depending on your needs, and some nice free ones as well if you are having a small presentation for say 10 or 15 people.

Mikogo is a nice service, you can easily share your screen with up to 10 people and it has a nice Firefox and Skype add-in as well making it quick and simple to start a session if you use either of these 2 services. You can use a whiteboard, share your screen, transfer files and more with this free application.

Another nice free service is Freebinar You can have custom registration forms, meet with up to 150 people, share your screen, get survey reports and appears to be a great service. I do have to say during my test I was able to login and set up fine, but was unable to share my screen and was prompted to contact support, most likely a firewall issue. However, when disabling my firewall and virus protection for and logging back in and trying again it was still no go. However, the service looks to be a great one if you can get it to work on your system and it doesn’t cost anything to try.

For those needing more features and have more users, Gotowebinar is probably the most well known as Webex, but to me both of these are pretty pricey with Gotowebinar recently changing their pricing structure making those who need more than 100 participants paying a bit much in my opinion.

DimDim is one that I’ve also been using and learning my way around and I think is a very good service in comparison to Gotowebinar, keeping in mind that I’ve used gotowebinar much more in the past so I have a bit of a learning curve within DimDim still but all in all it seems like a service worth giving a shot.

Another one with more participants, lots of features and seems easy to use (but again with this service I had the firewall issue with sharing my screen) is InstantPresenter, they were good with the followup after I enrolled for a free account calling to see if I had questions, but since I was testing a variety of services at a time, I didn’t have time to try to mess with this firewall issue and don’t want to deal with something like that if I had a scheduled session with a group. But you can sign up for a free account, test it out and see if it works out for you and if so it appears they have a pretty good package in terms of features and pricing.

The free services typically limit you more on the number of people you can have attend and or their features, but that is to be expected. However, Freebinar.com did appear to have a good setup and it was free, wish I could have gotten it to work for me. In most cases if you are planning on having a large group consistently and want more features such as recording your webinar, changing presenters, uploading files, etc… you’ll most likely need to go with a paid service such as DimDim or InstantPresenter.

I’m sure there are other great ones out there, but these are the few that I am most familiar with but by searching for webinar service, I am sure you’ll find something that fits with what you are looking for!

Live For Prosperity

Rhonda

Tags: free conference calls, presentation and meeting tools, webinars

This entry was posted on May 19, 2010 at May 19, 2010 and is filed under Building Your Biz Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.