Your audience is logged in and ready to go. You have your materials all set up and the clock is ticking down to start time. Pause. Are you really ready? Do you know how to make your presentation go successfully?

There are a couple of things that speakers should practice, practice, practice before they begin going live with their webinars. Even the best presenter messes up sometimes, but multiple mistakes can be worse during webinars because, while people feel obliged to stay at seminars and workshops, they have no problem signing off or muting a webinar because no one can see them and no one besides the speaker will know.

Here are a couple of mistakes to avoid during webinars:

1.    Don’t be monotonous
Sitting through a presentation by itself can sometimes be a bore, but add a speaker with a monotone and things get painful. Make sure that you a mixing up your inflections so that people can stay awake.

2.    Don’t be disengaged
Too many times, speakers begin their webinar, power through and wrap it up without any engagement with the audience. This is a huge mistake because webinars provide many different tools that allow for participation. Presenters can include a question and answer session, send out polls or set up live chats. There are multiple ways to keep people actively listening. Make sure to use them.

3.    Don’t have lengthy slides
No one wants to read a novel on a computer screen while someone is talking to him or her about the exact same thing. Your Power Point slides should only contain bullet points about what you are going to be discussing. That way people are listening to what you have to stay instead of struggling to multi-task. Also, be sure to do a quick run through of the slides before you begin to make sure that the slides are in the correct order.

Find out more about webinars in our free white paper.