Have you ever used a webinar to help you promote or sell your product or service to other individuals or companies?

Webinars are a great way to promote your product and service to multiple people at one time. The other great aspect to webinars is that your target audience can be anywhere in the world as long as they have an internet connection and a phone connection. The phone connection may not be necessary as some webinar software allows you to use Voip technology to use a microphone and headset through your computer.

If you choose to do webinars, it is entirely up to you as to what you want to present and how. Some ideas might include:

- Product presentation

- Live demonstrations of the product in action

- Industry relevant information

- "How To" topics

- Technology talks

- Social meetings

There are many other topics that you can present on, all you have to do is think about what would be relevant to your participants and what would they find useful.

Once you determine what you are going to talk about, then you need to figure out what webinar service you will use. Some webinar services:

- Dim Dim - This is a great service that offers a free and pay model. The free model allows up to 20 participants. There are numerous features, but one that I like is the ability to make an invitation widget to post on your website.

- Live Meeting - This is a Microsoft product and there are costs involved, but it works really well.

- Gotowebinar - This is from Gotomeeting.com and is also a great product. There are costs involved.

After you have found the topic and the service you will use (assuming that you have a conference call bridge or you are using a service that allows you to use VOIP), then you need to promote your webinar. Make sure that you have picked a time and day. A helpful hint is to try to make the webinar fit over a lunch hour of where your target market is. If you sell over multiple time zones, you may want to look at doing multiple webinars.

Here are some ways to promote your webinar:

- Post a link on your website

- Add information in your email signature

- Contact people you know

- Promote it on social media such as Twitter or Facebook

- Add information in a newsletter

- Classified ads like Craigslist

- Put an ad in an industry magazine or blog

This is by no means an exhaustive list and you will only be limited by your imagination. Make sure that you think about where your audience will be and how to maximize your exposure of the webinar to your audience.

So now that you have your topic and how you are going to present, your webinar service, the time and date and you have promoted the webinar, you are ready to go. There is one last piece of information, try to make your webinars regularly scheduled. Pick a time and a frequency such as every Thursday at noon or the last Wednesday of every month at 9 AM.

Chris Hamilton is a sales and marketing consultant helping small and medium sized business take their sales to the next level. Chris provides useful sales and marketing tips daily on his website Sales Tip a Day which is located at http://www.salestipaday.com. Sign up for the Sales Tip A Day Newsletter at http://www.salestipaday.com/p/email-newsletter.html and receive the "25 Must Have Sales and Marketing Tips"