But before all of this crescendoed into a great event, there was lots of behind the scenes preparation primarily surrounding selection of a webinar partner. Our primary requirement was live high-quality video and no other visual aids. Now, before I dive into things it is important to point out that this vendor fit our needs and there are many great providers out there. You just need to find the one that fits your requirements.

Two major types of vendors

As I dove into the selection process I went to the name brands of webinar providers and quickly discovered that there are two types of vendors – presentation-focused and video-focused.

Presentation-Focused Vendors

These are the vendors that usually come up in a discussion of making a webcast. Names like WebEx, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect are fantastic for delivering webcasts where the focus is on the presentation or document content while the video goes along with the presentation. Since we were basically doing live television without any type of presentation documents, these weren’t the best for this situation.

Video-Focused Vendors

Since we are focused on doing a webinar that is similar to a live news broadcast with a panel and uses mulitple cameras, the choices were pretty narrow.

Narrowing the Field and Testing the Finalists

Since we are focused on doing a webinar that is similar to a live news broadcast with a panel and uses mulitple cameras, the choices were pretty narrow. We narrowed the choices down to uStream.TV and Mogulus. uStream.TV is a leader in the live video space especially in the area of “lifecasting” where people are live on video engaging an audience while they go about their daily lives. Both had a free and professional version, the free version which was ad supported wouldn’t be appropriate so we focused on the pro packages. They both supported chat, embedding, live broadcast and on-demand replay plus their pricing model is usually a flat fee in addition to a combination of user views and bandwidth.

Selecting Mogulus and Going into Production

After testing both, what it came down to was the ability to use multiple cameras and the graphics options that the Mogulus studio platform provided. uStream.TV is an excellent platform and has some excellent shows and companies utilizing the platform but we had a two camera setup (one wide shot and one focused) that Mogulus was able to handle. I would offer that if you have other technology on the front end like a Tricaster, you can accomplish the same thing but we did not, so Mogulus was the winner.

The Results Were Fantastic with a few hiccups

I have to commend Max Haot, CEO of Mogulus and his team for their help in the preparation, testing and monitoring during our live show. It went off without any major issues and the announcement on their web site in addition stellar promotion job done by Network Solutions and CRT/Tanaka, we had 700 viewers over the course of the hour and the chat room along with Twitter and our #growbiz tag was buzzing. The only thing we ran into was when switching back and forth between cameras too fast, the sync up seemed to cause a hiccup and pause in the audio but that only happened once or twice. This platform and its development has come a long way over two years and this year looks to bring two major requests – live HD (you can only broadcast HD if it is pre-recorded) and all cameras on one machine (only one camera per machine) – to its fall release. It is truly amazing that in the last few years companies have developed the equivalent of a multi-million dollar production studio for your browser.

Truly amazing and the result of everyone’s hard work was what you see below:

Part 1 Choosing a Domain Name

Part 2 Choosing a Hosting Package

Part 3 Website Builder

Part 4 Content

In addition to having interesting content there are many things happening in the background. You want to make it easy for people to find your site. When people search in Google & other search engines, you want your site to rank as close to the top of the search results.

To understand the importance of keywords & SEO (search engine optimization) one needs to know what’s going on in the background: Search engines have ’spiders’ out crawling the web. An algorithm is used to index the sites based on keywords. Keywords are the main topic words associated with your product or resource. To decide which keywords are most appropriate for your niche think backwards. What would people be searching for? There are free tools for finding keywords.

Free Keywords

Good Keywords

SEO is an area that is a specialized service. Network Solutions also offers Search Engine Optimization packages that are sold in quantities of keyword phrases.

Once you have a keyword list to work with then you can focus your content on making sure that you include those keywords.

One thing to note is that search engines are continually changing their algorithms. Personally I prefer to write my content with the reader in mind rather than a focus on keywords. SEO & ranking is also based on the number of links that people make to your site & this happens over time. (All of that can be gamed & that’s why the algorithms are adjusted).

Metatags are keywords placed in the code on each web page. They also contribute to SEO, but not as much as they did in the past. I would make sure that they are there though.

SEO & keywords sounds really complicated but it’s a matter of being consistent. There are two important things: 1. Having a good site structure & 2. Make sure that your topics are related to your content area as you add it, then you will build your SEO organically.

For further reading there are many articles in My Solution Spot:

10 SEO Tips

How to Get Your Business Started With an SEO Strategy

Can Small Businesses Benefit From SEO?

and many more at My Solution Spot

You can also ask questions in the forums there.