ESL Basics

Webinar? Is that even an English word? According to dictionary.com, no, it is not a word yet, but if my suspicions are correct, it will be a word sometime soon. Even though it is not technically a word, it's a word you will see sooner or later as you do business in English. To better understand the term webinar, we must first start with the term seminar. A seminar is a meeting of people to discuss a specific topic. It does not have to just be business related, but they are a common practice in business. 

Webinar takes the term seminar one step further to explain a seminar that is conducted solely on the Internet. Another common term to describe webinar is the term, web conferencing. Now that we know what a webinar is, why should we care about a webinar? What good is a webinar for my business?

Well, as a business person, you can benefit from a webinar in two main ways, as a customer and as a seller. As a customer, you can get free webinars from your vendors or sometimes you can find a good paid webinar to help you or your team, learn or get trained on a certain topic. An example of this is from a company that I use for data collection and surveys called SurveyGizmo.  They offer free webinars to train their customers on their product and help them as they learn more of its functionality. (you can check out their survey blog here)

That leads me to how you can use webinars for your business. As you saw with SurveyGizmo, they offer webinars as a support function for their customers, which increases the value their product. Also, webinars can be your product. If you are an expert on a certain topic and there are people willing to hear you teach or speak on that topic, you could charge them money for your webinar. 

Webinars are a great tool to help you learn a topic, conduct e-commerce, or increase support services to your clients so take a look at your company and see if adding or attending a webinar is right for your business.