Why You Should Attend A Webinar

Full disclosure, I’ve only attended 3 Webinars. I only started attending them a couple of weeks ago. I always used to think they were a pain, what could I get from a Webinar that I couldn’t from a Podcast or Article? Turns out the answer to that is a lot!

There are a few advantages to attending a Webinar over a ‘real-life’ talk or training course. The first and most obvious is there’s no need to travel! As long as you’ve got your computer you’re pretty much good to go. Sometimes you’ll need a microphone but that’s about it. No travel time or expense and you’re still getting a real live person giving you the talk.

This means you can interact. That’s what’s great about Webinars compared to Podcasts. I could never be bothered to set aside the time to attend a Webinar, preferring to just download the video afterwards to watch at my leisure or to grab a Podcast. What I found was I’d end up pausing the video a few times to click off and search for terms I didn’t understand or to find the answers to questions that I had. I thought to myself, am I really saving time here? Especially when I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.

In a Webinar you can ask your questions and get an answer from an expert. What’s also great is that you might have 50 people attending the Webinar. You can bet one of them has a question you didn’t think of until they asked it. The interactive environment helps everyone learn. The fact that these are live events also means that the content is updated for each session. The people taking them learn what works and doesn’t work. What questions come up and what questions don’t. If you’re relying on a recording or an article then there’s a good chance that wont have been updated for quite a while meaning you’re not always getting the best content possible.

A lot of Webinars are free. I’ve found there’s not much to lose at least setting a reminder to check them out. After all, if they’re not your cup of tea you can always quietly exit and it doesn’t harm anyone. Not like driving miles to a half day conference to find it’s a bit of a damp squib!