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Business doesn’t need four walls anymore… it needs clarity, connection, and a plan you can trust. I’m Betsy Sabatini, and on The Virtually Reimagined Podcast, I share simple, real-world ways to run your business from anywhere. No jargon. Just what works.
You’ll hear my own shift from in-person to virtual… the wins, the fails, and the fixes. I’ll walk you through easy setups, smarter meetings, and little tweaks that make a big difference. If you’re a coach, creator, or entrepreneur, this show will help you create success in a way that feels calm, professional, and doable.
Come as you are. Leave with one clear next step… and the confidence to lead your business from wherever you are.
You're listening to the Virtually Reimagined podcast with me, Betsy Sabatini. This is where we're creating success leading from anywhere. And if you're ready to learn how to build connection, confidence, and success in the digital space, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hi, everyone, and welcome to this next episode of building your virtual office.
Betsy:In today's topic, we're gonna talk about how to map out getting started. Now when you think about meeting with your next audience online, I'm gonna take you through the steps that's needed to build the space using applications. And the one that we're gonna focus on today is Zoom. Alright. Well, it all starts with picking the right account type and what Zoom calls your license.
Betsy:There are choices that start with whether you want to use the Zoom meeting or the Zoom webinar, and then there are even choices above that. Zoom starts with the Zoom meeting. So let let's start there in our discussion. A meeting a Zoom meeting is a virtual event that is simulating, sitting around a conference table or a meeting room table or even a classroom where picture everyone is sitting at a table, and they're in a u shape, and you can see everyone in the room. That's what a Zoom meeting is simulating.
Betsy:As opposed to when you say you're having a Zoom webinar, I know if you go five, six years ago prior to what we now have this this Zoom era, prior to that, when we said we were doing a webinar or we were taking a webinar, we were typically taking sort of training online, but you couldn't see everybody that was there taking it. You just saw maybe the the instructor, the presenter, and you definitely saw the content, the material, the PowerPoint presentation, and that was taking a webinar. Well, that name a webinar in Zoom terms is specifically that you cannot see all the other participants. You don't even know what their names are or even how many are there. If the chat is there, you do see them writing text in the chat, and you only see the presenter and any panelists.
Betsy:So any co presenters. That's it. That's a webinar. There is webinars plus, which leads you into the Zoom events category, which gives you a speaker page, and it lets you run concurrent sessions. So your first step is picking the type of license.
Betsy:And today, in this podcast, we're gonna focus on the Zoom meeting, which is the Zoom Pro license. And with that, it's about a 150, $160 a year at the time of this recording, and you use the Zoom workplace app. It's an application that gets installed on your computer. It's included, so you get it from the Zoom website. And inside that Zoom workplace app is where your virtual event takes place, and all of the features that you will learn to use are all stored in there.
Betsy:Your next step is to decide how you're going to use the AI integration in Zoom. With AI trending everywhere today in technology and how it's woven into every aspect of our lives, Zoom also has AI woven, and that is integrated in something called AI Companion. So you get these meeting summaries because it uses a transcript. And so while your meeting is taking place, you run a transcript. And if you turn on a recording, that integrated AI is also going to give you smart recordings if you have that paid version.
Betsy:Now if you don't go with the pro version, there is a free basic version of Zoom. This gives you the ability to meet online. You can meet with up to a 100 people, but you're limited to forty minutes. So keep in mind that if you go for that free option, that really gives you the opportunity to send out invites, but you're not going to have all of the features that the paid version has. The next step is to set up your profile, and you put in your name as the owner.
Betsy:You put in your profile picture, and these are the things that are displayed on screen when you are hosting your event. In your account profile, there are settings, and one of the main settings is what's called a waiting room. Now if you go back and watch our first two episodes of this podcast, we talk about the waiting room and how important it is to greet your participants and really wow them before they've even entered your meeting room. Another step in mapping out how this virtual event is going to take place inside your virtual office or virtual classroom. It is planning out what your content is.
Betsy:What content are you going to share? You know, the success of a virtual event is just like the success of an in person event in that it's a planned agenda. What are you going to do when you greet people? Are you going to greet them as they enter? Are you going to make sure that they all have name tags?
Betsy:Well, in the virtual world, since we don't have physical name tags, Zoom has a way of indicating what their name is. And you can greet them just like you do in person. You can greet them in a virtual space, and that waiting room lets you do that. Once the event starts, just like if you were in person, when you're virtual, you can share your content. So you can share music.
Betsy:You can share videos. You can even share a presentation, which is done in either PowerPoint, Canva, Google Slides. And if that's not the way you like to present your content, you can bring up a Word document or a Google document and just do it real simple. You know, some people like to poll the audience, ask your audience to contribute and brainstorm, and you can just be typing your notes but sharing it through the meeting while everyone's talking. We move next into another part of your, you know, mapping out what you want in this ultimate Zoom meeting of yours, and it is how you're going to engage.
Betsy:You wanna get engagement. You wanna improve engagement and interaction so that attendance stays high. And that starts with two of the features that are very popular inside Zoom, and those are built in, which are called surveys. Zoom has a survey feature, which includes a survey, which is a form that you can share before people even arrive, as well as a poll and a quiz, which you can launch live. Get real time feedback and then share that back into your audience.
Betsy:When you're not sharing a live poll, you can break people up into smaller groups, move them from the main meeting room into a breakout room, And the engagement that happens inside a breakout room really sets your Zoom event apart from the rest because people will leave that event remembering who they spoke to. Think about it. You can have a a speed networking event for your association and bring the people in, have them pair up, meet someone maybe for five or six minutes, and then mix it up, mix up the pairs, and send them into different breakout rooms with different pairs. Inside the breakout room, they cannot hear anyone else except who they're in the room with. And you can even, as the host or presenter, you can share your content from where you are in the main meeting room into their breakout rooms.
Betsy:It's quite fascinating. Engagement continues with what Zoom gives us as the chat. We have emojis in the chat. So just like you text your colleagues and family and friends with emojis and text, you can do the same inside a Zoom event in the Zoom meeting. You know, nonverbally, you can indicate with emojis what you're thinking, what you're feeling without unmuting your microphone.
Betsy:And there's even a way to poll the audience casually and ask them, you know, give me an answer. Yes or no. And there are buttons on the screen, green for yes, red for no. And so without unmuting, you can engage with your students. It really keeps the flow moving forward seamlessly without a hitch.
Betsy:And the more that you can engage with your audience, get them to tell you what they're feeling and thinking without you talking is a way to get them involved even before they unmute. Next on our list in creating your virtual office is getting them to come to you. So if you had a physical space, and I call it a virtual office, but if you think about your physical business meeting place, that could be an office building. Your office could be in there. You could have a conference room.
Betsy:You could have your meeting room. It could be a conference center. And my goal always when I work with my clients is to imagine that the Zoom meeting space, that your Zoom meeting room can be just like a physical space. We're gonna bring it as close as we can to being there in person. And that means how do you get your people to come?
Betsy:Well, Zoom has a way that you can create a unique meeting link. You create this invitation. You can send that out via email. You can put that in your social media posts. And once they click that link, they can either get a registration page where then you can find out how many people are planning to come even before you start the event, or you can give them the link directly in there.
Betsy:So if they're purchasing a ticket to your event, after they purchase the ticket, they don't purchase through Zoom with meetings, but they can purchase through your third party application platform. I use a platform called Kajabi, which is very popular in the space that I work in. And if you wanna know more about Kajabi, you can certainly look in the description of this episode. I'll give you a thirty day trial to try out Kajabi, and that's where I keep all the names of my students and clients, and I can give them a checkout page where they can pay and buy a ticket to the class that they're taking. And then once I send out an email after they've paid, then in that email is the link to the Zoom meeting.
Betsy:If there is registration involved, then I can put that link out weeks in advance. People can sign up, and then I can check. In real time, I can see how many registrants I have at any time, and so I'll be able to tell how popular that event is. As we move down our list into mapping out how your virtual event is going to run, it brings us to what kind of content you're going to share and what the variation is. Now if you think about it, if you're going to be sharing a part of a website, let's say, Zoom has a way that you can share that website from different aspects.
Betsy:You can share an entire second monitor. There are other ways to share content than just sharing your entire screen. Zoom gives you a way that you can share what is on your phone or tablet. You can also share information that comes from a whiteboard. So just like if you were in a physical space and you had an easel or a smartboard I mean, back in the day, we had a chalkboard or nowadays a dry erase board, there is a digital version of that inside Zoom, and it's called a whiteboard.
Betsy:This whiteboard allows you to draw concepts. It also allows you to collaborate into the meeting. And as you continue to map out your virtual event, keep in mind that as the event is wrapping up, Zoom has key features that allow you to follow-up. There is a meeting summary that is generated by your AI companion, and there are reports, a variety of them. There's a report that gives you attendance and usage.
Betsy:Now at the Zoom meeting level, you're going to be shown how many minutes people were in the meeting room as well as how many minutes they were in the waiting room and in the breakout rooms. If you have a webinar, then you'll be able to look at different statistics based on on who signed up and then who attended. That's really the benefit of using some of those other paid features because Zoom webinars is an add on feature. You need to pay extra per month in order to get those features that are in webinars. Thanks for listening to the Virtually Reimagined podcast.
Betsy:I'm your host, Betsy Sabatini, and I'll see you in the next episode. Until then, keep leading from anywhere.