WebinarJam and EverWebinar documentation Webinars for everyone!

WebinarJam Quick Start Guide

This tutorial will walk you through each setting available in the full configuration of a webinar.

 

Start Setup

Start by clicking “Add Webinar” from your dashboard and select Full Configuration (shown below). You can click Express and it will limit your options, but you’ll be able to get going in less than 60 seconds. In this tutorial we’re going to take probably a little more than 10 minutes because I’m going to be explaining every step. Let’s click next.

Webinar Configuration

We have a few options here:

  • Right Now. This is if you want to just get a one-off webinar done quick. You’re not going to have any notifications. You’re not going to have any schedule. You’ll send the webinar room link directly to your presenters and your webinar attendees.
  • Schedule for Later. This is when you want an actual date and time for your webinar.  If you also want to set up notifications (including an automatic email to send out the webinar links), you’ll need to select this choice.
  • Always On. This is a webinar room that can be used repeatedly. This could be used for meeting rooms, on the spot training, and can be used over and over again. Like Right Now, this has no notification emails or schedule.

We’re gonna select Schedule for Later so we can see the schedule settings that don’t appear in the other two options.

Basic Settings

The first box (shown below) is filled with Basic Settings; click the pencil icon to open it. You’ll find the following:

  • Webinar Name (for your reference in the dashboard)
  • Webinar Title (for your potential registrants to see)
  • Webinar Description (also for your potential registrants to see)
  • Webinar Language (for the registration fields and buttons)

On Demand

You can also list your webinar in the On-Demand section, so let’s take a look at that real quick. Shown below is our On-Demand portal. There’s a lot of webinars available and they’re coming up real soon. You can choose by category (cooking and food, for example) and you can take a look at what’s available.

Directory Category

Back in the Basic Settings (shown below), we can choose the directory category (like internet marketing e-commerce) and then you can click the circle to upload a thumbnail image.

Webinar Presenters

Next are the Webinar Presenters (shown below). This is where your information is entered by default (it’s already here!) so if you are the only one you can just click confirm and move on.

I’d like you to know two things though about this side profile here. First, “Webinar Host & Presenter” indicates you are the creator of this webinar (shown below).

You can add people without them being a presenter but instead as a moderator. So for example, let’s say I want Tammy to moderate my webinar. As shown below, I’ll add her name and email to the fields, select Moderator, and choose Save.

Once I’ve clicked save, her information will appear on the right. This time, “Webinar Moderator” will be visible by her name (shown below).

If you want to edit details of either person, you’ll need to select the pencil icon to the far right. You can change any details including adding a different profile image by clicking the profile circle on the left. Make sure to click Save before moving on!

Streaming Service

Finally, in Streaming Service (shown below) we have three available options for you to use:

Webinarjam Live (selected above) is our streaming service. It means that you’ll be streaming through our servers which are pretty darn fast and private.

YouTube Live (selected below) will stream using YouTube’s servers and will stream both in your webinar room and on your YouTube account simultaneously. You’ll need to connect your YouTube account to use this however (you can find full instructions here).

Facebook Live (selected below) will stream using Facebook’s servers and will stream both in your webinar room and on your Facebook profile, group, or page.  You’ll need to connect to your Facebook account (you can find full instructions here).


Webinar Schedules

The next step are the schedules. There are three options:

  • One single session
  • Multiple sessions
  • A recurring series of presentations

One Single Session

Think of a One Single Session (screenshot below) like a movie. There may be multiple sessions you can go to, but it will be the same content each time. Therefore, you would only buy a ticket to one session, not to all of them.

Let’s say that you want to run a morning and an afternoon run, just to give your users more flexibility to attend whichever of the two (and only one of the two) fits their schedule best. In this case, you could configure a session at 9:00AM and another one at 1:00PM. Remember to click the blue “ADD” button!

 

Multiple Sessions

On the other hand, Multiple Sessions (screenshot below) are like a mini-series that span through a few days, every day screening a different episode. In this case, you subscribe to all the individual events.

You would configure multiple date/time combinations, and they will all be bundled as an indivisible multi-event presentation.

 

Recurring Series of Presentations

Finally, a Recurring Series of Presentations (screenshot below) is closer to a TV show with each episode providing new information (maybe even building on previous webinars), and the show will have a rather fixed and recurrent scheduling over time.

Users registering for a Webinar Series will register for the whole daily/weekly series, for as long as it lasts.

To add a schedule as a series, select a day of the week, a time, and whether the series has no stopping date (Unlimited) or has a set number of sessions (Limited, in which case you type the number of sessions), and finally the timezone. For example: say that you want to set up a weekly session, running every Saturday at 5:00PM, for a whole year (52 weekly sessions). Take a look at the screenshot below to see how you’d configure that.

The last step is clicking “ADD”. In the above below, only one recurrent series has been added, and of course you could configure more series if you wanted.


Registration

Third step contains your registration settings. The registration page (shown below) is the first page that people are going to arrive at to register for your webinar. This is the first inkling of your webinar that they’re going to get!

Edit a Registration Page

Select a template and you will be brought into an editing window. Anything with a pencil icon can be edited. This includes images, text (as shown below), and even videos (provided they are from YouTube or a direct link to an .mp4 file).

In the above example, Tammy (our moderator) has been added to the page. If I don’t want her name visible on this page, I’ll edit those boxes and delete her from the list of presenters (as shown below).

Once you save and exit (using the green Actions… menu in the upper right), you will be returned to the main settings. Split testing is also available here (shown selected below). You will need to choose what percentage of visitors should go to each page before Confirming.

Your Own Design on Your Own Website

You also may have noticed the option titled “Your Own Design on Your Own Website”. Choosing this will skip the design stage and give you a code to embed a button on your own webpage. This will be addressed later.

Registration Form Fields

For now, move on to the Registration Form Fields (shown below).

Here you can choose what details are requested from registrants when they register. At a minimum you must request first name and email (these are required for signing in to the webinar room). However you can switch the toggles to make the others not mandatory, or click the ‘X’ to delete them.

Auto-Subscription to Future Webinars

The next step, Auto-Subscription (shown below), gives your registrants an option to be automatically registered to your future webinars of your choice. They will only be subscribed to the webinars you choose, when you choose to do so.

Free registration vs Paid registration

Following this is “Free registration vs Paid registration” (shown below). If you choose to charge a fee, you’ll need to use a separate checkout platform to process the fee. Type in the amount in the first box and enter in the URL of your checkout page in the second one.

WebinarJam will redirect users to the checkout page when they choose to register. Once they complete the purchase, however, your external payment processor will need to send them back to WebinarJam’s Port-Payment Redirect URL. It is the final field listed in that setting and should be used as the product’s Thank You page (in most systems).

Password Protection

The final setting in registration is Password Protection. You can add a Master Password as shown below. In this case you will create a password that is the same for every registrant.

Alternatively, you can generate unique passwords for every registrant. In this case, WebinarJam will generate the passwords for you.


Notifications

Notifications can be found in the next step (shown below). WebinarJam allows 10 notifications before and 10 after your webinar.

Before you add/edit these you will need to choose an email gateway. If you do not have your own preferred SMTP service, we recommend just using WebinarJam Mail.

In addition to emails (as shown below), you can SMS, and recorded messages via phone calls, however those require further integrations.

Add Email Notification

For now, let’s walk through the included email system. Click the blue “Add Email” link (shown below along the right) to begin.

Edit Email

Clicking “Add Email” will open an email editing window (shown below). You can set the email timing (in relation to the webinar start time), the email subject, and the email body.

Something you’ll notice already in the body of the email (as well as listed on the right sidebar) are the Shortcodes {contained in curly brackets}. These are codes that are automatically replaced with the relevant information. You can learn more about these in our article about Notifications.

Finally, you can enter in your email address at the bottom to send a test email to yourself. This email will not replace the shortcodes, but will display everything else properly.


Integrations

With that done, you can move on to the next step: Integrations (shown below).

Here you can add integrations with various Email Autoresponders (such as Kartra) as well as add any tracking system you may have (such as Facebook Pixels).


Thank You

For now, move on to the Thank You step. There are two options here, the first being “Survey Your Registrants” (shown below).

Survey

You have four options for survey questions:

  • Poll allowing only one answer
  • Poll allowing multiple answers
  • Question for a short answer
  • Question for a long answer

Click the plus icon, next to a question type of your choice, to add it to your survey. Then fill out the question details on the right (clicking the ‘+’ to add each possible answer).

Thank You Page Design

The next box is for your Thank You Page Design. Just like the registration page, you’ll select a theme and edit whatever element you choose by clicking the pencil icon.


 

Live

 

The next step has the most options, all of them dealing with your live webinar (shown below). Let’s go through them one by one.

Autoplay

First up is Autoplay!  You can choose whether to use one of our splash pages with autoplay disabled, or choose to enable autoplay for most browsers!  Please note that autoplay will usually have to start muted.

Live Room Design

Next up is the live room design!  Here you can choose several neat options to add some branding to your webinars.

You can choose options from the above as follows:

  1. Select one of our pre-designed webinar room themes
  2. Pick which color scheme
  3. Choose whether to display presenter social media information

Polls and Quizzes

Next is the Polls and Quizzes option (show below). Any poll you set up here will be available when you are live, however you can set it up on the fly in the webinar room itself. The same can be said for all the following options (if you forget something, you can create it inside the live webinar).

Product Offers

Product Offers (the next option, shown below) are popped up in the chat box area and provide a button for attendees to click. Click “Add New Offer” and the below window will pop up for you to create the offer. As you edit the options, the preview on the right will change. Once the required fields are filled, you can click to save.

Broadcast Sales in Real Time

Note that the option to “Broadcast Sales in Real Time” will require adding a tracking code to your product’s Thank You page. This tracking code can be found on your dashboard for the webinar’s Advanced options.

Video Injections

Video Injections (shown below) are a way to play a pre-recorded video clip directly to your audience. All you need is a link to a YouTube video or a direct link to an .mp4 file.

File Handouts

You can also share files (of any kind up to 80mb) directly with your attendants (shown below).

Slide Presentation

Also, you can add your slide presentation to your webinar (shown below). PPT, PPTX, KeyNote, and PDF (up to 80mb) are acceptable file formats for this option.

 


 

Bad words filter

You can also prevent your users from using particular words.  Simply go to your Profile (1) and then Settings (2) to add any words you don’t want shared during your webinar.


 

Autoplay

You have the choice to enable autoplay for your webinars!  If disabled, you can choose your call to action text displayed on the video as well as the thumbnail that is displayed behind it!


Replay

In the next, and final, step we’ll be deciding what to do about the webinar replay. If you choose to enable the replay in the first box, 4 additional options will be available (shown below).

Webinar Replay Contents

The first option is deciding to what the Webinar Replay link will lead; there are three options (shown below). First is the Replica Replay. This is a recording of your webinar as it happened, including chat, surveys, offers, etc. It cannot be paused, but instead closely mimics the live experience.

Custom video allows you to replace the video stream with your own video source (other than the recorded webinar). You can use a YouTube link or a direct link to an .mp4 file. Below that you’ll need to enter the exact duration of the video so the system knows when to close the room at the end.

Finally, you can redirect the replay link to any URL you would like. This is particularly helpful if people arrive after the webinar is over and you want to lead them to a specific page that isn’t the replay (such as a sales page or otherwise).

 Replay Controls

Next up is the option to either enable or disable replay controls.  You can choose to allow your replay viewers to fast forward, rewind, and scan through your replays!

 Replay Page Expiration Date

Next is the Replay Page Expiration Date (shown below). You can set a number of hours for the replay to be available. After this time, the Replay link will redirect to an expiration page (telling the visitor that they have arrived too late).

Allow Users to Submit Questions

The final option is whether to add a “Question Box” (shown below). By activating this, you enable the chat box for visitors to type into. Any messages they enter will be sent to the email address of your choice.

Your own custom confirmation page

This feature is available for both WebinarJam and EverWebinar.

Upon registration, you can choose to redirect your users to one of our default Thank You page templates, or alternatively to your own custom URL.

If you opt for the latter, there are a few things to keep in mind…

 

URL parameters

Since you’re going to be hosting the Thank You page on your server outside the WebinarJam/EverWebinar ecosystem, we’re passing some parameters in the URL in case your want to grab them and display them in your page. This is not mandatory in any way – it’s just an advanced feature for all of you with programing skills looking to implement some custom coding into your Thank You page. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to grab the URL parameters from your Thank You page, but do remember that it requires some basic JavaScript coding chops.

Here’s the list of the variable parameters being passed in the URL:

  • wj_lead_first_name
  • wj_lead_last_name
  • wj_lead_email
  • wj_lead_phone_country_code
  • wj_lead_phone_number
  • wj_lead_unique_link_live_room
  • wj_room_password
  • wj_next_event_date
  • wj_next_event_time
  • wj_next_event_timezone
  • wj_event_ts
  • wj_event_tz

Some things to keep in mind:

  • All parameters are always passed to your custom Thank You page automatically by the system. You don’t need to do anything on your end.
  • All parameters are passed every time, even if they are passed empty.
  • All parameters are encoded to be URL-friendly, so you will need to decode them before displaying them on your page. Example: email@domain.com will be passed as email%40domain.com
  • The parameters wj_next_event_timezone, wj_event_ts and wj_event_tz all refer to the time zone but displayed in different formats, so you may pick whichever works best for you.

Here below is an example of how those parameters would be passed on in the URL, variable parameters in blue, and their respective values in red, all of them concatenated by the “&” ampersand symbol. For this example, let’s say that my custom success URL is https://www.domain.com/success , and that the registration form only asked for first name and email address. Please note how some variable parameters carry no value since they were not requested in the registration form.

https://www.domain.com/success?wj_lead_email=johnsmith%40domain.com&wj_lead_first_name=John&wj_lead_last_name=&wj_lead_phone_country_code=&wj_lead_phone_number=&wj_room_password=&wj_lead_unique_link_live_room=https%3A%2F%2Fevent.webinarjam.com%2Fgo%2Flive%2F12%2F0g02hkd4m8vy&wj_event_ts=1598863500&wj_event_tz=America%2FLos_Angeles&wj_next_event_date=Monday%2C+31+August+2020&wj_next_event_time=1%3A45+AM&wj_next_event_timezone=Pacific+Time+%28US+and+Canada%29+GMT+-7

 

Activate the confirmation email notification

If you’re planning NOT to include any custom parameters in your Thank You page, you certainly want to activate the confirmation email at the Notifications step. The reason for that is to make sure the user receives (via email) his unique link to the webinar room, as well as a reminder of the event’s date and time.

Hosting and optimizing your video

In both WebinarJam and EverWebinar, there are multiple areas where you might need to plug in an external video file. There are only 3 things you need to keep in mind:

  • The allowed video file formats are MP4 and MOV.
  • The ideal video resolution for a webinar is 720p at 30 frames per second, as it balances good streaming quality and fast loading.
  • You need a place to actually host the video file itself.

Optimize your video file for online streaming

While chances are that your video recording camera or phone might record your video files at full HD resolution (even 4K!) and 60 frames per second, the truth is those extreme settings might actually ruin your webinar event! You see, some of your viewers might not have a pristine internet connection, or they might be watching on the go from their mobile phone, or perhaps from a hotel room, etc.

The point is that you want to lean down those huge video files so your viewers don’t suffer from constant buffering downtimes. Remember, this is supposed to be a web-based webinar, not a Netflix show watched from a 65-inch TV!

HandBrake

The good thing is that there’s a free software called HandBrake that will re-encode and optimize your videos, making them much leaner and without losing any quality at all.

Here are the must-have settings you want to go for:

  • MP4 format
  • 720p resolution at 30 frames per second
  • Web optimized option ticked ON
  • Audio bitrate set at 128

The following video overviews the whole configuration process:

*Please note: Though we do provide video quality options listed above, sometimes the use of HandBreak can change the quality, resolution, and compatibility of the video to work with most devices. Be mindful to test your content after you use HandBreak to ensure it works to your satisfaction as we cannot guarantee the content will function on all devices through the use of this feature. As sometimes the best option may be to use your original video rather then to optimize the size.


Hosting

Now that your video file is 100% optimized, let’s talk about hosting that file. There are 3 compatible hosting solutions:

  • Amazon S3 or any other actual file hosting solution.
  • YouTube.
  • Vimeo Pro.

Amazon S3 (or any other file hosting)

Amazon S3 is very popular because it allows you to host endless amount of files, and to stream them endless amount of times. As a pay-as-you-go cloud solution, you only pay for the bandwidth you consume, which is pretty convenient too.

This tutorial will not touch on the particularities of Amazon S3 or its interface. The only thing WebinarJam or EverWebinar care about is…

  • The video file permissions are set to “public”.
  • You copy/paste into your WebinarJam or EverWebinar console the MP4 file path.

Here’s a screenshot on how to set your file permissions to “public”:

And here’s how to grab the URL to the actual MP4 file:

That file URL is what you’d copy/paste into your WebinarJam or EverWebinar console. That’s it!

Amazon S3 Recommendations

Amazon S3 is great for file hosting, but not so much for video streaming. As a result, some of your users might see some buffering here and there. In order to fix that, we recommend you to indeed host your file in Amazon S3, but to stream it via Amazon’s CloudFront, their CDN service.

Don’t worry, converting a S3 video file URL into a CloudFront URL is relatively easy. Here the official Amazon’s S3 to CloudFront conversion wiki article.

Once you have the CloudFront URL, that’s the one you will copy/paste into your WebinarJam/EverWebinar console.


YouTube

YouTube offers both pros and cons as a video hosting solution. The pros are that uploading videos is very easy and that it’s free!

However, there’s a big drawback: YouTube’s legal terms and conditions disallow us to remove their branding logo and their video player controls. That means that people will be able to play, pause, rewind, and even escape the video altogether. That, obviously, is not the most desirable outcome in a webinar environment, so we do necessarily recommend YouTube as the best solution to host your WebinarJam or EverWebinar videos files.

At any rate, if you still want to host your videos in YouTube, the only thing you need to do is to copy/paste the actual YouTube’s page URL into the WebinarJam or EverWebinar console. See screenshot:


Vimeo Standard

Vimeo is a similar service to YouTube but, for Standard (and higher) customers, they allow to hide all branding logos and to overrule their video player controls. This, in return, facilitates us to fully govern your video file and make the best out of it in a webinar-centric environment.

Note that their Standard (or higher) plans are not free but they are still pretty affordable.

Here’s a quick video on how to plug in a video hosted on Vimeo Standard (or higher) into your WebinarJam or EverWebinar console.

When you need to provide the link to a Vimeo Standard hosted video URL for EverWebinar, simply perform the following steps:

  1.  Select the video on Vimeo
  2.  Go to the “Advanced” section ( seen on the right side of the screen )
  3.  Select the “Distribution” tab ( seen on the left side of the screen )
  4.  Scroll down to “Video file links”
  5.  Change the dropdown to “Download the video”
  6.  Copy one of the below links for use in EverWebinar
  7.  Paste the link into EverWebinar!

Please visit https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/224823567 for more information.

Uploading your slide presentation

WebinarJam allows you to pre-upload a PowerPoint or Keynote slide presentation during the webinar configuration process so, once you’re live, you can simply click on a button and broadcast that presentation to all your attendees.

Finding Upload Slide Presentation

You will find this option at the “Live” step of the configuration. See screenshot below:


Why Upload Your Slide Presentation

While you could achieve the same result by simply screen sharing your desktop and going through the presentation directly from the computer, uploading the presentation to our cloud servers is the recommended course of action for two reasons:

  • It will make the experience far more seamless and smoother for your viewers, since they receive the presentation feed directly from our powerful servers, instead of overloading your internet bandwidth as a presenter. As a result, the image quality on those slides will be better.
  • If you’ve uploaded the presentation to our servers, you will have access to cool slide transition and animation effects! See below


Supported formats and limitations

WebinarJam supports both PowerPoint and Keynote files, and also PDFs (each slide must be placed in a different page within the PDF document).

Something important to remember is that the max file size is 80MB, which should be more than enough for any reasonable presentation. If you see that your file is over 80MB, chances are that the resolution of the images inside your slides, or even the slides themselves, is too high. Neither your slide images or the slides themselves don’t need to be any higher than than 720p resolution, because WebinarJam’s video streaming signal is delivered at 720p anyway.

So, remember: make sure your slides and the images are set to 720p for maximum bandwidth efficiency.


HELP! The upload process fails no matter what I try!

First and foremost, remember that the file upload and encoding process can take up to 2 minutes to complete, so give the system some time to do its thing  However, no matter what you try, sometimes the upload process fails anyway for whatever reason. What can you do?

You may want to split your presentation into two parts. This means two smaller files.

Alternatively: Inside your PowerPoint or Keynote software, export the presentation to PDF format. The screenshot below reflects the PowerPoint interface, but Keynote sports a similar option.

The benefit of the PDF format is that it is much lighter and easier to upload and crunch than the PowerPoint or Keynote format. So, if your native PowerPoint of Keynote file is giving you problems, try to export it to PDF format and upload that PDF file to WebinarJam. That should work!

Creating Live Elements

When creating a webinar, you can set up live elements ahead of time so you are ready to go when you’re live!

NOTE: while all of these elements (except video injections) are available in both WebinarJam and EverWebinar, EverWebinar elements require you enter a timeframe for them to appear correctly. EverWebinar has some additional live elements you can read about in the Quick Start Guide.

 


Polls and Quizzes

Polls and Quizzes (shown below) can be configured here ahead of time as well, in case you want to survey your live attendees.

 Add New Poll

Click Add New Poll to start and a configuration window will appear (shown below). You can add the poll question, the options, and more options by clicking the blue button at the bottom.


Product Offers

Product Offers are shown in the chat room. They use an image, text, and button to link out to whatever page you choose.

Clicking to add a new offer reveals a lot of options. Let’s take a look at the main options shown below. As you change these settings, the preview on the right will update. You can name your offer (for your reference in the live room), enter a headline, upload an image, place text inside and above the button, and enter a link.

Scarcity and Urgency

Below all of this are some options that may bring some urgency to your offer. Broadcast sales in real time will display the name of anyone who purchases. This can only be used if you have used the sales tracking system which you can read about here.

Scarcity displays to your attendees the number of available products you have. In the live room you can click to make this number go down as people purchase.

Scarcity can also be used with sales tracking (ticking away live as people purchase). However, it will only track so long as the offer is open and in the same webinar session. If you create a cloned webinar, the tracking number will be reset.

Urgency (the final option) is a timer set to expire when you choose. The timer begins when the offer is first displayed.


Video Injection / Hybrid Webinar

In WebinarJam live, you can inject a pre-recorded video into the webinar stream. This is called a “Hybrid Webinar”.

The configuration window for this (shown below) is simple: add the name for your reference and the URL of the video. Keep in mind, you can only use YouTube or direct links to .mp4 files. Since Vimeo Pro allows access to the .mp4 link, you can use them for hosting your video injections.

Hosts like Wistia or DropBox will not work for this feature.


File Handouts

Sharing files with attendees is possible, and highly recommended you set this up ahead of time.

To configure a file for sharing, name it (your audience will see this name) and upload the file. You can upload a file up to 80mb in size.


Slide Presentations

The final live element is the option to upload a slide presentation (which can be managed in the live room).

Just like the file sharing system, you will name your presentation and upload it in the configuration window. You can upload a presentation up to 80mb in size.

Scheduling

WebinarJam Scheduling

There are three options for scheduling in WebinarJam:

  • One single session
  • Multiple sessions
  • A recurring series of presentations

One Single Session

Think of a One Single Session (screenshot below) like a movie. There may be multiple sessions you can go to, but it will be the same content each time. Therefore, you would only buy a ticket to one session, not to all of them.

Let’s say that you want to run a morning and an afternoon run, just to give your users more flexibility to attend whichever of the two (and only one of the two) fits their schedule best. In this case, you could configure a session at 9:00AM and another one at 1:00PM. Remember to click the blue “ADD” button!

 

Multiple Sessions

On the other hand, Multiple Sessions (screenshot below) are like a mini-series than span through a few days, every day screening a different episode. In this case, you subscribe to all the individual events.

You would configure multiple date/time combinations, and they will all be bundled as an indivisible multi-event presentation.

 

Recurring Series of Presentations

Finally, a Recurring Series of Presentations (screenshot below) is closer to a TV show with each episode providing new information (maybe even building on previous webinars), and the show will have a rather fixed and recurrent scheduling over time.

Users registering for a Webinar Series will register for the whole daily/weekly series, for as long as it lasts.

To add a schedule as a series, select a day of the week, a time, and whether the series has no stopping date (Unlimited) or has a set number of sessions (Limited, in which case you type the number of sessions), and finally the timezone. For example: say that you want to set up a weekly session, running every Saturday at 5:00PM, for a whole year (52 weekly sessions). Take a look at the screenshot below to see how you’d configure that.

The last step is clicking “ADD”. In the above below, only one recurrent series has been added, and of course you could configure more series if you wanted.


EverWebinar Scheduling

 

Because EverWebinar is pre-recorded, there are a number of additional options for scheduling (shown above). We’ll review them one by one here. First is simply adding individual times and days/dates (shown below). Choose Every (a repeating schedule) or On (a specific date), then choose the day, time, and time zone.

User’s Own Time Zone

As shown below, I am choosing The user’s own time zone instead of a specific time zone. The system will automatically detect the time-zone for your potential registrants and set the webinar for them. Makes sure to click ADD to ensure your schedule is added!

 

Instant Watch Replay

The next option is the Instant Watch Replay (shown below). With this turned on, the Registration Page will show “Watch the replay now!” in addition to your other schedules. A visitor clicking this option will skip the wait for a session, and watch the replay immediately.

It is important to note that, since it’s a meant to mimic a replay video, the webinar room will not display any rolling chat feed. Remember to also enable the Replay session itself later on in this configuration wizard!

 

Allow Late Attendance

After this is “Allow Late Attendance” (shown below). This adds another option to the available schedules (like the above setting), but this time for visitors to join a webinar that is already “in progress”. When they enter the “live” room, the webinar will auto-forward to the correct time stamp.

 

Just In Time

Possibly the most important feature here is “Just In Time” scheduling (shown below). Using this, you can allow for visitors to see a session coming up very soon! You can choose to display sessions at 15, 30, and 60 minute intervals:

  • Every :15, :30, :45 or :00 (15 minutes)
  • Every :30 or :00 (half hour)
  • Every :00 (hour)

Hide Night Time Schedules

You can also Hide night time schedules to create the more realistic appearance of a regular working schedule. If someone visits your registration page at 2am (and you have blocked schedules from 11pm-7am) the next available session will be in the day time.

 

Displayed Schedules

Which schedules you actually display is shown in the next setting Displayed Schedules (shown below). You can choose how many available schedules to display to visitors. If you choose the first option, only the Just in Time schedule and Yesterday’s replay will be visible.

 

Block Short Term Registrations

If you don’t want last second registrations, you can block up to 6 days out (shown below). If you choose to block any short-term registrations, Just in Time scheduling will not work.

 

Block Dates

Finally, you can use this last option (shown below) to block holidays or any other dates you may not want available.

 

 

EverWebinar Quick Start Guide

This tutorial will be an overview of every EverWebinar setting, with links to more information where needed.

EverWebinar Configuration

EverWebinar Source

The first essential step is to choose your webinar source (shown below). This is the video that will play in the webinar room as the “live stream”. You can choose between an external video file or a previous WebinarJam live session.

External Video File

In the case of an external video file, add a link to a YouTube video or a direct link to an .mp4 file. Make sure to accurately enter the duration of your video so the webinar ends/closes at the correct time.

 

Previous WebinarJam

For a previous WebinarJam live session (shown below), just select the webinar and event date/time. No duration settings are necessary since the system already knows how long the source is.

When using this option, all live elements will be imported. This includes chat, offers, broadcast messages, and more.

 

Basic Settings

The second step is for your Basic Settings (shown below). This includes:

  • Webinar Name (for your reference in the dashboard)
  • Webinar Title (for your potential registrants to see)
  • Webinar Description (also for your potential registrants to see)
  • Webinar Language (for the registration fields and buttons)

 

On-Demand

You can also list your webinar in the On-Demand section (shown above at the bottom of the frame), so let’s take a look at that real quick. Shown below is our On-Demand portal. There’s a lot of webinars available and they’re coming up real soon. You can choose by category (cooking and food, for example) and you can take a look at what’s available.

Webinar Presenters

Next are the Webinar Presenters (shown below). This is where your information is entered by default (it’s already here!) so if you are the only one presenting (or rather, on the video), you can just click confirm and move on.

 

I’d like you to know two things though about this side profile here. First, “Webinar Host & Presenter” indicates you are the creator of this webinar (shown below).

You can add people without them being a presenter but instead as a moderator.  So for example, let’s say I want Tammy to moderate my webinar. As shown below, I’ll add her name and email to the fields, select Moderator, and choose Save.

Once I’ve clicked save, her information will appear on the right. This time, “Webinar Moderator” will be visible by her name (shown below).

If you want to edit details of either person, you’ll need to select the pencil icon to the far right. You can change any details including adding a different profile image by clicking the profile circle on the left. Make sure to click Save before moving on!


Webinar Schedules

The next step is the final essential step: Webinar Schedules (shown below). As long as this is filled out, you will have a functioning webinar!

 

There are a lot of options for scheduling, but for this tutorial we will simply add an every day, 2PM webinar. As shown below, I am choosing The user’s own time zone instead of a specific time zone. The system will automatically detect the time-zone for your potential registrants and set the webinar for them.

 

To add a schedule, you must click the ADD button on the far right. Only once this button is clicked will your schedule be added. For further detail on scheduling, click here.

 


Registration Page

The following step deals with your registration page. First (shown below), is your registration page design. You can choose from a number of templates.

 

Once you select a template (shown above), you will be sent into an editing window (shown below). Here you can edit any element on the page that has a blue pencil icon in the corner.

When you are ready to move on, use the green Actions menu (in the upper right of the window) to preview your page and save & exit.

 

Enable Split Testing

If you’d like, you can split-test your registration page (as shown below) by clicking “Enable Split-Testing” and choosing a percentage of visitors to send to the second page.

To choose the page design for page “B”, click the toggle switch in between the two letters, choose a template, and edit it just as you did the first one.

 

Registration Form Fields

Following this, choose the information that registrants are required to enter for registration (shown below). By default First Name and Email are on and required. This is because these two bits of information will be used to login to the webinar room itself.

Last Name and Phone Number can be added to your form as well, but you can make these optional by clicking the toggles on the right.

 

Free or Paid Registration

If you’d like, you can charge for your webinar in this step (shown below). You will need an external payment processor and/or cart system (like Kartra!) to use this feature. Once a registrant finishes their purchase, they will need to be redirected to the link at the bottom to complete registration.

 

Password Protection

Finally, you can password protect your webinar (shown below). If you choose this, you can decide between one master password or unique passwords for every attendee. A master password is one you choose yourself that all attendees will use. The unique passwords option has the system create a unique password for each registrant.

 


Notifications

The next step (shown below) is all about your notifications. First (at the top) is your email gateway. By default this is set to our servers, however if you have your own SMTP gateway you’d like to use, click here to learn how to integrate properly.

Otherwise, just move on to the next part: Reminder Notifications.

You can add up to 10 notifications before and 10 notifications after the webinar starts. You can integrate Twilio to add calls and SMS notifications as well, but we will just discuss email here. Click here to learn more about integrating Twilio.

Click ADD EMAIL (shown above) and a window will pop up to create/edit your notification (shown below). You can choose the timing of the email by number of hours before or after the webinar starts.

Post Webinar Segmentation

If this is a post-webinar notification, you can limit sending this email to:

  • All Registrants
  • Those who did or did not attend
  • Those who attended and did or did not order your product
  • Those who left before a time you specify
  • Though who stayed to a time you specify, but didn’t purchase

Email Shortcodes

Finally, take note of the shortcodes in the right sidebar. These are replaced with relevant information, automatically, when the email is sent out. You can read more about those right here.

ADD EDIT EMAIL IMAGE

 


Notifications

After completing the notification step, you can add various integrations and tracking systems to your webinar (shown below). Email autoresponder integration allows you to send registrant data to a third-party platform. 3rd party tracking systems allows you to add things like Google Tag Manager and Facebook Pixels to your webinar pages.

 


Thank You Setup

In the next step, you choose options for your Thank You page.

Survey

The first option (shown below) is a Thank You page survey for your registrants. You can add a:

  • Poll allowing only one answer
  • Poll allowing multiple answers
  • Question for a short answer
  • Question for a long answer

Or a combination of them! Once people respond to the survey, you will find results here and in the Live Links button on your dashboard.

 

Thank You Page Design

The next option is the design of the Thank You page itself (shown below). Just as with the registration page, you’ll select one template and edit the appearance before moving on.

 


Live Settings

Finally, we arrive at the live room settings. Each live element you can use in WebinarJam (such as file sharing and offers) are available to be precisely timed here. You can read about all of them in detail here, but for this tutorial we will discuss the live element settings that are unique to EverWebinar.

Live Chat Options

First of which (shown below) is the live chat box.

If you choose to Enable Live Chat, you can add pre-written lines of chat (or “chat roll”) by entering the time the message appears (in hours, minutes, and seconds), the name of the person sending the message, their role (Attendee or Admin), the message itself, and finally the mode (chat or question). Once this is all filled out, click Add to add the line of chat.

If you used a previous WebinarJam Live Session as your source, the original chat will already be in here! If you would like to add messages in bulk, you will need to upload a formatted CSV file. You can read more about that here.

 

You can also choose to disable the simulation of live chat in exchange for a Question Box (shown below). Enter your email address and all messages in the webinar room will be emailed to you directly.

Alternatively, you can disable the chat options altogether.

 

Highlighted Announcements

Next are Highlighted Announcements (shown below). In a WebinarJam Live webinar, you can choose a chat message (such as a glowing testimonial) to highlight. If you are trying to simulate live chat, make sure the message you are typing here also exists in your chat roll from earlier.

 

Redirect to External Websites

A WebinarJam Live webinar allows you to redirect users to a page of your choice, so EverWebinar allows the same! You just need to choose the time at which attendees need to be redirected.

 

Sticky messages

Sticky messages (shown below) are displayed at the top of the chat sidebar. You can choose a start time (for the message to appear) and an end time (for the message to disappear).

 

Display Number of Attendees

If you are trying to simulate live room attendance, it may be helpful to display a number of attendees (shown below). You can choose between fixed and dynamic. Fixed is one number that you choose, which will stay on screen for the whole webinar. Dynamic will mimic the attendance of a real webinar with an initial increase in attendees (to the number that you specify) and gradually falling off.

 

Live Sales Notifications

Finally, in the live room options, you can add Live Sales Notifications (shown below). This is a banner that announces an attendee has purchased your product and can be used to encourage other (real) users to purchase as well.

 

 


 

Bad words filter

You can also prevent your users from using particular words.  Simply go to your Profile (1) and then Settings (2) to add any words you don’t want shared during your webinar.


 

Autoplay

You have the choice to enable autoplay for your webinars!  If disabled, you can choose your call to action text displayed on the video as well as the thumbnail that is displayed behind it!

 


Webinar Replay options

In the final step, you’ll set up your Webinar Replay options. The first option is whether to enable the replay at all. Below, the webinar replay has been added by selecting Yes, record the webinar session.

 

Just like the live room, you can add a question box to the webinar replay (shown below). Just add your email address.

 

That brings us to the end of the setup process! You can now retrieve your registration links to share from your dashboard. Just be sure to test first!

Understanding your account

Dashboard

The first thing you’ll notice is that the entire WebinarJam platform is web-based. You can use the entire platform from within your browser window! 

My Webinars

Shown below is what your account dashboard looks like. This area is called “My Webinars”. My Webinars is where you will find all of the webinars you created.  Here you’ll find your links to invite people and to go live, or if you’re not ready to go yet you can run test webinars.

Top Right

At the top right (also shown below), you can find buttons to find support (in case you find an issue and need assistance from our team), community (where you can connect with other users in our official Facebook group), my profile (where you can find information about your account, integrations, and billing), and finally Log Out.

Sidebar

Just to the left (shown below) are the different areas of the WebinarJam platform.

Analytics

 

 

Analytics (shown below) shows you data about your webinar. Here you can find out who has been visiting your registration pages, information about what happened during your live webinar, and data about any notifications you set up

My Registrants

 

 

Most importantly, the My Registrants area is where you find the list of those who have registered. You can filter the list by webinar and registrant behavior. 

Finally, the Training button leads to where you are now!

EverWebinar Chat CSV formatting

Adding chat into EverWebinar can be easy for a few lines of chat, but tiresome for anything more. So we have provided the option of uploading a csv file with all your chat lines in it (shown below). If you have a previous WebinarJam chat that you liked, that chat can be downloaded from the WebinarJam analytics and uploaded here. Otherwise, you will need to create a new csv file.

When clicking to upload a file, you’ll be shown the requirements for your CSV. Your CSV file must only have 7 columns, containing the values below separated by commas. Each row in the CSV file will represent a new chat line.

  • Hour: from 00 to 07
  • Minute: from 00 to 59
  • Second: from 00 to 59
  • Name: name of the person
  • Role: either Admin or Attendee
  • Message: the actual chat comment
  • Mode: either Chat, Question or Answer if role is “Attendee”, or Chat, Question, Answer, Highlighted or Tip if role is “Admin”.

Here is an example of how this will look:

The above file has all 7 columns and in the second row is the first message in the chat. The first three need to have double digits so hour is listed with 00 to represent 0 hours. Continuing to read, you’ll find that Janet, an attendee, entered the message Great to be here! as a chat message.

If any of the messages you are adding have commas included, you may want to add the messages in quotes like this:

Here’s a sample CSV file for you to model.

Once you have filled out your chat roll to your liking, you will need to export/save it as a CSV file with UTF-8 encoding. Now it is ready for upload to EverWebinar!

 

Maximum chat limits

In order to ensure your EverWebinar runs smoothly, the maximum number of chat lines to be pre-loaded are 5,000, or 1 Megabyte if you’re uploading a CSV file. Otherwise, the webinar would struggle to load up so many chat lines and the webinar experience would feel rather choppy.

So, if you see that you’re exceeding that limit, you’ll need to cut short the number of lines.

If you’re importing a live WebinarJam that already exceeds those limits, the system will import the full webinar except the chat itself, and the system will prompt an error message letting you know.

What you want to do at this point is this:

  • Leave the configuration wizard of this EverWebinar, go back to WebinarJam, and download the chat history for the particular live webinar you were importing.
  • Then, open the downloaded CSV file and manually delete chat lines until you’re under 5,000 lines. Then save the file and confirm that it’s under 1.0 MB (otherwise, delete some more lines).
  • Finally, go back to EverWebinar, resume the configuration and, at the “Live” step of the wizard, upload the new, lighter version of the CSV file.

Finally, if you’ve activated the “Save real comments” options (see screenshot below), please note that the system will continue adding up real chat lines to your EverWebinar session until that particular session reaches the limit of 5,000 lines of chat. At that point, any further line will be ignored.

Charging for Webinars

In the registration step of your webinar, you have the option to charge a fee to attend then webinar!

Please note that this process requires a 3rd-party checkout system. That means that WebinarJam or EverWebinar do not process payments themselves. Instead, we simply redirect your users to your 3rd-party checkout system of choice so they can submit their payment from there. We recommend Kartra, but any payment processor will work: PayPal, Stripe, etc.

 


Registration Fee

First, enter the amount you are charging for your webinar. Many currencies are available, however you can charge via whatever you like on your payment page. This information is only used for your analytics to keep track of what you have earned on your webinar.

Payment Checkout

Next, enter the URL of your payment checkout page. This will be the page where your visitors will actually pay for the webinar subscription. You will need a 3rd-party checkout platform for this. WebinarJam/EverWebinar will simply redirect your users to your checkout page before they complete their webinar registration so they can submit their payment.

Post-Payment Redirect URL

Finally, copy the “Post-Payment Redirect URL” and set it as your Thank You (or Success) page inside your 3rd-party checkout platform configuration. Therefore, once the visitor has successfully submitted the payment, your 3rd-party payment processor will redirect them back to the post-payment registration page (shown below) so they can finally complete their webinar registration.

When they click the “REGISTER” button in the footer bar, our standard registration form will appear (shown below). This is where they complete their registration for the webinar.


Incomplete Registration

If you receive payment for a webinar, but no new registrant, the purchaser did not complete their registration (it is possible they left the page or were never properly redirected to it). You will want to send them this link to have them register for the webinar.


How to Charge Using PayPal

Before we begin, ensure that you have a business account with PayPal and not a personal account. This process will not work with personal PayPal accounts.

Log in to your account and, from your profile menu, click Account Settings (as shown below).

On the left, under “Products & Services”, select Website Payments (marked 1 below) and click to Update PayPal buttons (marked 2 below).

Because a webinar is a one-time sale, select the Buy Now button (shown below).

In Step 1, you’ll add the basic information for your webinar name under Item Name (marked 1 below) and ticket price under Price (marked 2 below). The rest can be left blank, and you can move straight to Step 3.

In Step 3, you will need two links from your WebinarJam or EverWebinar account: the Registration Page URL (marked 3 below) and Post-Payment URL (marked 4 below)

You may also add a message to the customer (marked 1 above) and, since this is for a digital event not a physical product, you can disable the request for a shipping address (marked 2 above).

Finally, click Create Button , and you’re ready for the final step. Click the email tab (shown below) and copy the URL in the box.

This URL will be placed in your webinar settings under Your payment checkout.

How to Grant a Free Registration

Finally, here’s a nifty trick: if you wish to allow a free registration to one specific user, simply give him the directly link to the Post-Payment Redirect URL so he can bypass the payment process. But do not send it to anyone you want to charge!

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