Webinar to guide

What webinar to guide is

Webinar to guide takes one recorded presentation and its slide deck and turns them into a document a reader downloads, keeps and refers back to. Not a page to read once. A file that sits in somebody's folder and gets opened again in March when the problem comes up.

It is not the slide deck exported as a PDF. A deck is a prompt for a speaker, and on its own it is a series of headlines with no sentences between them. It is also not the recording with a download button on it. The guide is a new document, written from both the slides and the words, and it contains a great deal that was never on a slide at all. Repurposing in general is covered by the umbrella service; this is the one conversion, sold on its own.

When you need one

You need this when you give the same webinar more than once. If a session runs twice a year, the guide is the version that works the other three hundred and sixty-three days, and it does not need you in the room.

The second case is a sales team asking for something to send. A recording link is a poor thing to send a prospect, because it asks for an hour. A twelve-page guide asks for ten minutes and can be forwarded to the person holding the budget.

You do not need this if the session was mostly discussion with few slides, in which case the article is the better output and that is podcast to article. And if there is no recording yet and you want a proper long-form download, write it directly as an ebook or guide rather than recording one first.

What has to be added

The input is the slide deck in its original file and a recording of the session with the talk track audible. The work is mostly writing what the slides assumed and the speaker supplied out loud.

• The spoken context. A slide says three words. The speaker spent ninety seconds explaining why those three words matter, and that explanation exists nowhere in writing. It goes in as prose.
• The definitions. Terms the speaker defined verbally, or assumed the live audience knew because of who was invited. A reader who downloads the guide six months later was not invited.
• The references. Standards, forms, regulations and documents mentioned by name and never written down. Each one named properly, so a reader can go and find it.
• The questions. What the audience asked in the chat or at the end, answered in full. This is often the most-read section of the finished guide.
• The parts that only worked live. The poll, the "put your hand up if", the joke about the weather. Cut, and replaced with something that works on a page.

What you get

The guide. Eight to twenty pages of finished text, with a contents page, headings, the slide charts and diagrams placed where they belong, and a short section at the end saying what to do next. Delivered as an editable document and a PDF.

A one-paragraph description. The words that sit on the page offering the download, plus a title and a subtitle, so the guide can be published without anybody writing more copy.

A note on layout. A short list of what a designer would need to do to make it look like the rest of your material. Design itself is coordinated separately.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Calgary occupational health consultancy runs a sixty-minute webinar twice a year on respiratory protection programmes. The deck is forty-one slides. Eleven of them are a single photograph. The speaker names two standards and a provincial form by number, none of which appear in writing anywhere in the deck.

The guide runs to sixteen pages. The eleven photograph slides become four written sections. The two standards and the form are named in full with their numbers, which is the reason a safety manager keeps the file. The nineteen questions from the chat become a five-page section at the back, answered properly. The consultancy stops sending the recording link to enquiries and sends the PDF instead, and puts it behind a short form on the site as a download. The webinar still runs twice a year. The guide works in between.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the session covers, how often you run it, and who will be downloading the guide. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on the length of the session and the size of the deck, agreed before anything starts.
3. The files. You send the recording, the deck in its original format, and the chat log or question list if you kept one.
4. The work. Transcribe, map the talk track against the slides, then write. Eight to twelve working days for a one-hour session.
5. A technical read. Whoever gave the talk reads the draft, because the guide states things they said aloud and they must be right.
6. Delivery. The guide as a document and a PDF, the download description, and the layout note.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. The price depends on the length of the session, the number of slides, how much has to be written in rather than transcribed, and whether the guide is one file or part of a series. The pricing page shows the four ways of working so you can see the shape of it, and the number is fixed in writing before the work starts.

What happens next

Once the guide exists, the usual question is whether to put it behind a form, which is a decision about what it is worth rather than a design choice and is covered under lead magnets. Many people then cut the same material into a run of posts that point at the download. And the next webinar tends to get planned differently once you know a guide comes out of it, which usually means a tighter script for the parts that matter. One guide from one webinar is a complete piece of work, and nothing further is assumed.