Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at
12:07 pm
Webinars are a hot topic these days and a great way of interacting with people who are interested in your products. The biggest problem is finding a service which suits your needs and price is usually a major consideration. I recently discovered Anymeeting which looks like an ideal webinar solution for most people and best of all it’s free! Anymeeting achieves this by displaying adverts while the webinar is running. My strategy would be to test the platform and see how well it converts and then move on to the paid solution which is still not bad for $70 a month.
Anymeeting overview
As I mentioned earlier Anymeeting’s free service is ad supported and if you don’t like the idea of your potential clients seeing these ads then you might be wise to go for the paid option. It’s amazing to consider that the free version will allow you to have 200 attendees! The platform is web based and simple to use, so even if you are a complete newbie then you’ll get your first webinar up in no time.
Pros
In the free webinar domain, nothing else on the market comes close in my opinion. you have a great selection of tools and free support too! Signing up for the service is quick and painless and there is no requirement for you to download any software.
Cons:
The only possible annoyance I can possibly see is adverts in the free version, but that is a small price to pay for the functionality that you are getting.
Price as stated before is free or you can get the Ad free version with up to 200 attendees for only $69 a month
Joining and starting your first meeting
The sign up process is simple, you just visit the website and choose an email and password, click submit and you’re done! You will receive an email requesting confirmation and once you have confimed your membership you are good to go! The whole process takes less than five minutes to set up. (I love it when things are this easy)
One you have signed up, your’e all set to start your first meeting or schedule a meeting in the future if you prefer. You can use a USB microphone or your telephone during the conference. the software uses one way broadcasting, so only one person can speak at a time. This is handled by pressing a button when it is time for the attendee to speak.
Once you have started your webinar by clicking on the “Start Presentation” button you can then choose what application you would like to share and also adjust the bandwidth so that attendees on slower connections can get the best performance.
Screen Sharing
You have the option to share your screen or to share a single application on your computer. It is better to opt for the share full screen option if you are using several applications as otherwise you have to stop and start screen sharing as you move from one application to another and this will interfere with the flow of your presentation.
Interacting with your Webinar attendees
With anymeeting you can engage with your audience in several ways. Including chats, status updates, polls and sending out links.
The status feature alllows users to ask a question and to interact with the presenters and to give their opinions on the webinar. Presenters can see these updates but the rest of the attendees don’t, which prevents the flow of the presntation from being disrupted. Presenters can also see how many attendees have questions and if they are having any issues with the presentation.
You can have private and public chats as well as converse only with other presenters. You can create polls “live” or in advance or save them for future webinars. This is very easy to do and you can switch efforlessly between poll questions by simply ending voting on the poll and moving on to the next open poll.
