In today's competitive marketplace, every business person needs to be very smart about how they grow their business and their bottom line.

If you're still in the mode that face-to-face is best way to build your business, think again. According to a study by Wainhouse Research (2006), new generation of small and medium-size businesses now regard interactive webinars as more vital than in-person meetings to drive revenue. What a startling finding: More vital than face to face!

The Internet has changed all the rules about how to grow your business today. Have you changed as much? Even if all of your clients or local, every business today competes in the global marketplace.

If you're not out there finding, gaining, and wowing customers with interactive webinars, your competitors are--and they're targeting your customers, too. That's why it's important to know about interactive webinars and how you can use them to build your business and gain your own competitive advantage.

How do you know if webinars are right for your business? One way is to look at what your business does. Webinars are great for professional speakers, consultants, trainers, sales professionals, authors, corporate leaders, or any of a number of professional service providers such as attorneys, accountants, financial advisors, public relations firms, and website developers, among many others. If you communicate with prospects, customers, employees, or others through the internet, then webinars are probably a good fit.

An even better indicator of whether interactive webinars are right for your business, however, is to answer this question: What is your business is trying to create in the global marketplace? Read each of the five bullets below. Place a check mark next to any that describe your aspirations for your business.

You want to grow your business globally through the Internet. You still want to keep and grow your list of local customers, but you're not stopping there. You also want to add more customers in different cities, states, or countries. You want to expand your client base to include larger businesses, with larger projects, and larger budgets, too.

You want to multiply the impact of your training and consulting services. You pride yourself in delivering excellent training and consulting services face-to-face. You're finding less time to travel as much as you used to, but still need to deliver high quality training. You do not like tele-seminars and will not do them because they are just not interactive enough.

You want to create more and better leads, and then convert a greater percentage of them into paying customers. Right now you are doing most of your lead generation face-to-face. You attend networking events, give face-to-face presentations, and do cold calls. All are slow and laborious. You have tried other Internet marketing methods, and they're producing some results, but you feel these other methods are not as personal and compelling as you are when people are face-to-face.

You want to leverage your time and everyone else's time better. As your business does more business through the Internet, you are finding yourself spending too much unproductive time on the highway and in airplanes. In fact, you often spend more time traveling to and from a meeting, than you do in the meeting. Of course, there are times that you have to travel, but you are looking for an effective alternative.

You want to ensure a consistent excellent brand experience in your virtual organization. Branding is important to you. The people that deliver products and services for your business do not work in the same office with you. In fact, some are contractors and franchisees in other cities and states. Even though you've created excellent branding documents and experiences, you have grave concerns about keeping attention on the brand experience when people work from multiple locations.
If you made even one check mark, it's important to begin learning about interactive webinars and integrating them into your business. If you checked several, you need to be on the interactive webinar fast track. The faster you implement interactive webinars in your business, the faster you will be able to impact your bottom line. Once you know that interactive webinars are right for your business, you will need more than great technology. You'll also need to learn how to create and highly collaborative online lead-generating webinars, sales webinars, training webinars, collaborative webinars, and brand-building webinars. If you want webinars to catapult your business to success, remember this: Interaction quality is everything! It is not good enough for interaction to be the same as face to face. Interaction in your online presentation or online meeting needs to be better--more frequent, more specific, more participative, and more compelling.

Jaclyn Kostner, Ph.D. is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and webinar guru who trains individuals and organizations to improve interaction, engagement, participation, and results in web conference meetings. Sign up for a FREE webinar "CA$HING IN ON WEBINARS" at http://www.distance.com/Free_Webinar.html Access her eBook, 5 WAYS TO USE WEBINARS TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS?FAST! at http://www.distance.com/estore.html