ReadyTalk and MarketingSherpa recently hosted  How Webinars Should Fit into Your Content Marketing & Audience-Building Efforts, a webinar packed with ideas on using webinars for content marketing and creating your audience.

Todd Lebo and Daniel Burstein of MarketingSherpa shared 21 great rules for creating well-attended, engaging webinars.  Here are just a few of the key rules (watching the recording for all 21):

BEFORE THE WEBINAR

Repurpose live event content.  Ideal for companies that host live events for prospecting or teaching (think road show or user group presentations), use your in-person seminar content to create multiple webinars. Repurposing presentations builds your content library, just make sure you record those webinars for ongoing use.

Think beyond the email invite. Driving attendance should go beyond an email to your targeted audience. Think big and broad – use your partnerships, your web site, your sales team to make phone calls, your social media streams and your blog. Make the most of the tools you have in place.

DURING THE WEBINAR

Start a conversation. If you have hosted webinars before, then you know how important it is to have a team behind the scenes to help you pull off a dynamic event. Have someone posting to your Twitter account during the event to help take your conversation further. Create a hashtag and be sure to promote it throughout the event. Ask your audience to post questions and comments to your hashtag while you are presenting. Your Twitter handler should post periodically throughout the event, and retweet audience tweets.

Two tiers of webinars. Just as content webinars provide value to potential customers and loads the top of the sales funnel, a sales webinar gives you the opportunity to share your solution with attendees. As you promote the event, be clear and up front that you are presenting your production/solution to a problem.

AFTER THE WEBINAR

Share, Share, Share. You have two elements in a webinar that are worth sharing; the recorded event and the slide deck. The easiest way to share slides is on SlideShare but use blog posts, photos, podcasts, YouTube, videos, presentations and eBooks to repurpose your content (YouTube is the second-largest search engine).

Offer a gift. Your audience is giving you their time; offer them a gift for attending. Most common gifts include whitepapers, eBooks or case studies relevant to the audience and the webinar topic.

This is a perfect lead-in to ReadyTalk's offer. All of the attendees from the webinar received a FREE whitepaper, New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content. The whitepaper includes two great case studies from companies that have found a winning formula for their webinars. Be sure to download your free copy today.

What are your must-do rules for a successful webinar?