The masses don’t relate to large, impersonal brands as much anymore. Our world has gotten personal.

Personal branding is the name of the game for a huge chunk of new businesses. Resumes are all but dead while LinkedIn profiles and personal landing pages continue to flourish in an economy increasingly focused on short-term “gigs” as opposed to long term “jobs.”

When you begin to explore the vast landscape of personal brands, a trend begins to emerge: The savviest and most successful of the bunch continually leverage various forms of video content. One notable version of this visual variety is webinars.

Webinars have become a focal point in the online business word for a variety of reasons — sales, exposure, clout, etc.

Webinras are one of the most powerful and effective weapons that a business can wield. When that same tool is leveraged for personal branding purposes, it becomes an explosive force that can have a massively positive impact.

If you want to find out exactly how this tool can propel a personal brand in extraordinary ways, then you’ll want to sign up for this free personal branding webinar, sponsored by ClickMeeting, that I’ll be hosting on September 27th.

During the webinar, I’ll be covering:

• Why webinars are important for your business.
• Webinar best practices.
• The most common webinars mistakes.
• How webinars help your personal brand stand out.

But before that goes down, I wanted to share some of this information with you all because I want to make sure this information gets to as many of you as possible.

Today, I’d like to dive into two of these aspects and show you why webinars are important for your business and reveal some of the most common webinar mistakes.

How Webinars Support Personal Branding

Let’s get one of the obvious ones out of the way first. When developing a personal brand – if you don’t already have a booming business – it’s likely that only a handful of people know who you are. This is where generating brand awareness comes into play.

By promoting a webinar to your existing audience via email, through social promotions, and by utilizing similar types of portals, you can begin to reach new consumers who are searching for the solutions that you are producing.

Moreover, since webinars are video-based, this gives the content an added appeal and extended shelf life; especially if you upload it to YouTube.

[clickToTweet tweet=”About 29% won’t register for a webinar until the day of the event. More webinar stats here.” quote=”Studies show that about 29% won’t register for your webinar until the day of the event itself. 17% will sign up more than 15 days before the big day.” theme=”style2″]

As your personal brand gains increased levels of awareness, it can begin to generate more interest from numerous clients, which can then lead to enhanced sales.

Since this is a personal brand, however, you likely have limited bandwidth to pitch to and manage potential clients, so employing a powerful and streamlined proposal software is a must for hooking consumers.

Outside of mere awareness, webinars enable digital professionals to share their intimate knowledge on a given topic. This intellectual showcase provides a personal brand with credence and credibility, positioning the mastermind behind the brand to become a thought-leader in their field.

Unlike sharing your insights via a podcast or YouTube channel, webinars also provide the advantage of lead generation. With every sign up your webinar receives, you gather an email; what’s more important, however, is that this is a qualified lead; someone who has already shown interest in your offerings.

Where webinars do match the offerings of YouTube and podcasting, however, is in the replay realm. Live events (like webinars) are, by their very nature, fleeting events. Through recording these events, however, you can extend the knowledge to audiences as a bonus offering, or just upload it to your website, YouTube channel, or other social destination where it can continue to drive goals long after the broadcast has ended.

Now that you understand why webinars are crucial to personal brands, let’s check out some of the most common mistakes presenters are making.

Common Webinar Faux Pas

One of the most frequent examples of webinar mismanagement comes from pitching sales.

Yes, webinars are awesome for creating additional revenue, however, if you go in with a hard pitch mentality that takes center stage, you are going to lose your viewers.

The key to a successful webinar is to put your audience first and provide them with valuable, actionable, and interesting information that they can use in their personal lives or careers. If you do this, the sales will come in time.

By approaching your webinar as an opportunity to teach useful knowledge above all else, you will inspire people to come back for more, at which time you can enter them into your sales funnel.

Anther massive miss on the webinar scene is failing to interact with the audience. If you think that you can simply talk at a silent, virtual room of people and throw up a few slides here and there, you’re sorely mistaken.

Just like everything else in the digital age, interactivity is a must. This means that you need to be communicating with your audience and engaging them through a variety of means.

Fortunately, most webinar platforms have just the tools for such a task. You can engage folks with virtual hand-raising, chatrooms to put questions in for a Q&A session, polls, and similar components.

The goal of all of this is to keep viewers interested and participating in the presentation for as long as possible; ideally until it’s over.

Finally, one of the most tragic blunders that you could have during your webinar is failing to practice beforehand. If your webinar is all about improvisation, then go for it; otherwise, you’re just going to look unprepared.

Preparing for a webinar is simple; do your research and compile speaking points that you want to discuss. Be sure to include any data or statistics that you’d like to reference. Run through that information aloud a few times but don’t try to memorize anything; you don’t want to sound like a robot!

Additionally, if it’s your first webinar or first time behind a camera, you might want to give your presentation a test run on your webinar platform and get comfortable with its features; this will ensure that you won’t freeze up when you go live and aren’t sweating bullets if something goes a wrong.

Webinars are such a powerful tool for personal branding and this only skims the surface of the uses and versatility. If you’re ready to dive deeper into how webinars can grow your personal brand, join me for the webinar; I’d love to see you there!

About the Author: Jamie Turner is an internationally recognized author, speaker and TV news contributor who has helped The Coca-Cola Company, AT&T, CNN, and other global brands solve complex business problems. He is the founder of 60SecondMarketer.com, a business blog read by hundreds of thousands of executives around the globe. And he is a regular guest on CNN and HLN where he provides insights on business, digital media, and leadership.