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Internet Marketing – The Importance of Presentation

One of the most important aspects of internet marketing has to be presentation. Your website must at all times look professional. As must all your correspondence with your clients. This is the image and impression you must seek to convey to all who visit your site and join your list.

It must be appropriate for your target market. If it is aimed at teenage girls, think pink, If it is aimed at the black magic market, Black, strangely enough. If your market is self improvement consider something calming like blue.

Colours and graphics are a major part of any website and go a long way to determining if someone will stay on the site or just click away. They should not be too bright or garish to the point where they hurt your eyes. Use animated gif files sparingly they can be a distraction. If you want to use them consider putting them on a page after your squeeze page, once you have acquired the prospects email address.

Text needs to be clear and easily read and understood. Consider which is the smallest text size you should use for ease of reading. Don’t change styles and fonts at every opportunity. Your text colour should be coordinated with the background colour to ensure good readability by the viewer. Remember there are numerous people out there that do not have 20/20 vision and you don’t want them struggling to read your words through lots of colours. And there are of course many people out there who suffer from colour blindness. This does not necessarily mean that they cannot see colours but that they have difficulty differentiating between similar colour tones and hues.

Your text needs to also be well laid out. Crammed together text screams the word “cheap” and should be avoided at all costs. You need to put plenty of white space in between lines. Strangely enough space sells! When anything written is not spaced correctly and sits there like a lump of letters on the page it looks sometimes as almost unassailable to the reader and they are very likely to click away and onto someone else’s web page. Try and cater for all the types and ages of readership that might be interested in your site from the young to the senior citizens, who, are becoming more internet wise as time goes by.

Finally, use pictures and graphics to illustrate points that you are trying to convey in the text. They must be appropriate to the text and improve on peoples understanding of what you are trying to relate on your web page. Ensure that the text and picture are positioned in such a way as not to cause confusion between one image and another. There is a saying that “a picture can paint a thousand words.” With today’s photo editing software you can probably get them to paint double that.

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Designing E-Learning: It Is Much More Than a PowerPoint Presentation

E-Learning is now more than an emerging trend, it is the preferred way of learning for industries worldwide. Forward looking organizations are serious about training and L&D managers keep looking into the needs of the learners to create learner-centric e-learning solutions. To keep up with the increasing need, they also often employ e-learning services from external resources to cater to the ever changing and dynamic learner needs.

To make e-learning truly effective, it needs to be developed keeping the nature of technology-aided delivery in mind. So designing an e-learning course should not follow the same strategies as designing a PowerPoint Presentation. If the same strategies are followed to create custom e-learning, the result is bland and uninteresting. Furthermore, it fails the first and foremost objective of training – it fails to engage the learner and as a result fails to perform his or her job within expected standards. The solution is to treat e-learning development separately and create strategies that align to the strengths of self-paced learning.

In the absence of an instructor, custom e-learning courses cannot just have one word ‘pointers’ with no explanations. Even if there are space constraints, e-learning designers have to make sure that each point is well explained to aid novice learners. An impactful way of doing this is to utilize audio to describe concepts in detail without taking up too much screen space. While the visual impact of the screen remains intact with minimalistic text, audio provides suitable descriptors to help learners understand better.

To further aid the individual needs of the learners, the option of turning off the audio can be provided for expert learner who do not need explanations of the introductory concepts. To provide learner re-enforcements and a chance to revise the topics taught through the e-course, the audio script can also be provided as a downloadable resource. The learners can later refer to it to re-enforce learning as per their needs.

Images are a powerful way of communication in an e-course. But here too, keep in mind that only appropriate images should be utilized and enough space should be provided in each screen to create visual ‘relief’.

Diagrams and Tables are also useful in reducing the text in an e-course – and can be liberally added to e-learning just like a PowerPoint presentation. But the difference is that diagrams and tables have to suitably labeled or explained to create the intended impact on the learner. Complicated diagrams or detailed graphs can share a lot of information. But this information can also confuse or startle the learners – especially if they are new to the subject.

In addition, detailed documents can be provided along with all e-courses that can be used as a job-aid as well as easy reference from time to time. This provides the learners the opportunity to study the subject in detail – as per their own need and pace.

E-courses should also be accompanied by a detailed ‘Help’ file -that aids the learner go through the course without any hitch. At any point if they are stuck or want to take a detour in the course, the help document should give them the required information then and there. Many learners are not accustomed to the technology-aided platform and e-learning developers should keep that in mind and create provisions for them.
E-Learning is an impactful way of delivering training in the corporate sector. But it is impactful only when its strengths as well as weaknesses are suitably studied and understood. Treat e-learning like it is and reap its many benefits.

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Sales Presentations – Three Questions to Answer

Everyone sells something. You sell your buddy on a new fishing spot. You sell your neighbors on a new restaurant to go to for dinner. Your kids sell you on raising their allowance.

Everyone sells something. We present our case. We persuade. To persuade by definition is the ability to convince by appealing to reason or understanding.

If you are going to make a sales presentation you need to know that presenting the case for your product isn’t enough. You need to be sharp, articulate, time oriented, entertaining and persuasive to get the job done.

Terri Sjodin, author of Sales Speak wrote that too many sales presentations are going the way of information overload and not enough about persuasion. I agree. Anyone can deliver information. Really. Anyone can read a brochure and figure out what it is that’s being sold. The key is to be able to answer three questions:

o Why you?
o Why your company, product, services?
o Why now?

The last question, “Why now?” is the call to action. It’s the answer to the sense of urgency you’ve created. Many sales people drop the ball here. They never close. They never make a call to action. They just sort of pack up and go after the information giving. Don’t make that mistake.

Persuasion isn’t about being pushy. It’s about being excited about the idea you’re bringing to the table and leading others to join your excitement. It’s about being able to make a call for action and having decision makers act on that call.

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