The fundamental nature of PowerPoint makes it an ideal selling tool. You have a group of people, stuck in a room, listening to a speaker for an extended period of time — anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more. This enclosed environment exists only for the presenters to sell something, whether it is a product, a service, or an idea.
However, many presenters, especially those with a corporate interest in mind, fail to capitalize on that environment. Think about it. You have a hundred people in a room. They are all listening to you, but they are also watching the giant screen behind you, staring at the messaging, absorbing the graphics. Make the best of their fixed attention by creating brand reinforcement in every slide.
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Using Your Brand
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“Brand” is admittedly an ambiguous term. It encompasses and summarizes everything about a company that makes them unique, better and memorable. Elements of the brand can be broken down into various building blocks, one of them being visual identity. A company’s visual identity includes things such as their logo, letterhead, tradeshow booth, brochures, website and yes, PowerPoint.
Logo and Slogan
Every single slide should include the company logo, at a minimum. The logo should be unobstructed at all times, and should be large enough to read easily — never assume everyone in the audience has heard of you or understands your brand. Also, if the company has a slogan, consider building it into the design. This doesn’t have to be blatant, but sometimes a repeated phrase, no matter how small or subtle, can have enormous effect.
Colors
If possible, the slides should consistently employ the company’s corporate colors. If you’re McDonald’s, use red and yellow; if you’re BP, use green. The colors can be part of header and footer graphics, titles or even arrows and bullets. The effect can be subtle, but it makes for a more consistent and professional-looking piece; often, it’s small embellishments and attention to details that build brand awareness.
Fonts
Along those same lines, consider font usage. If you’re not distributing your PowerPoint presentation, you have immense freedom of choice in type since you can use any font stored on your local machine. In this case, simply contact your graphic designer to obtain your corporate fonts. These may very well be esoteric typefaces purchased from Adobe or another foundry, so be sure that you have a proper license to use them. (Most fonts come with a license for five users.)
If the file is going to be publicly distributed, you are restricted to fonts that come with Microsoft’s default installation. Study your company’s collateral and try to match the face as closely as possible. Ask the company’s graphic designer for a suggested font.
Photography and Illustration
Often, a company settles into a particular theme with their photography and illustration. For instance, IBM’s photography is very straightforward with little or no effects. Microsoft’s photography is always full color and usually has smiling people. While it would be near impossible to perfectly mimic a company’s entire art direction, it is best to complement the established style as much as possible. This is another case where the small details slowly but surely build ever-important brand reinforcement. Under no circumstances should you use the cringingly bad clip art included with Microsoft’s Office suite; at best the stuff is tacky, at worst it cheapens your slide show and corporate brand.
Miscellaneous Information
This encompasses the extras that might benefit your audience. For instance, a booth number might be a wise inclusion if you are at a trade show. A URL is almost commonplace these days. For sales-heavy presentations, an e-mail address for the presenter is often a good addition, or the company’s toll-free ordering line if you want to be more brazen. Including everything is not necessary — it’s just as important to keep the slide design uncluttered.
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Benefits
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If done correctly, a PowerPoint presentation can be a whole branding experience. Without ever directly discussing your logo or font choices, you have successfully educated the entire audience about your visual identity, and that positive reinforcement breeds market awareness.
Maybe they mentally noted your URL to check out later. Maybe they scribbled down your e-mail address to ask a question later. On a more tangible note, an audience member will identify the corporate branding of your tradeshow booth when they walk by; they will recognize your corporate colors, logo and typography. Maybe they don’t remember why it looks familiar, but it hardly matters when they stop to talk to a company representative.
Kevin Potts is the webmaster of Blogging Articles and ConsumerFriendly.org.
Today, more than every before authors are presented with publishing opportunities that have never existed before. This is not to understate the hard work that authors have to go through to get recognition, write great books, and make a full time living from their passion of expression. However, it is to say that today, due to advances in communications technology, authors can now get their books distributed much easier than they could a decade ago. One very popular way that authors are distributing their work is digitally through ebooks. Digital books are gaining so much popularity that even some of the most popular authors in the world have used it to distribute their books. Stephen King for example published “Riding the Bullet” exclusively in ebook format. When this ebook began distribution over Barns and Nobel and Amazon.com there was so much demand for the download that the servers of these two book giants slowed down almost to a halt. People that wanted to download the ebook were put in a large queue with the hundreds of thousands of other who downloaded the ebook as well.
It’s not only big name authors that are finding success in ebooks. We at Ebook Architect have been helping authors create, market and sell their ebooks online for years now with great success. Many of these people are first time authors and are often amazed with the success of their ebook sales. Below are some of their ebook writing tips.
Don’t underestimate the power of the Ebook
Ebooks are still looked upon as unpopular by many authors who have not yet taken the time to learn about the success within this industry. For example, while the traditional publishing industry growing at the sluggish rate of 5% a year the digital publishing industry is growing at rates between 30% -50%. This means that the opportunities within the publishing industry are growing at a fraction of the rate that opportunities within the digital publishing industry are growing.
To set up an ebook you don’t need to be a tech wizard
Setting up your ebook from the idea conceptualization stage to the selling stage can’t be completed overnight but it is definitely something that can be done by anyone regardless of your technological background. If you can use a word processor then you can create and sell an ebook online. While it is recommended you set up your own website, it is not necessary. There are outlets such as amazon.com, EBay and Lulu.com to name only a few sites that allow you to post your ebook on their servers.
Setting up an Ebook site is virtually costless and you keep 100% of the profits
With traditional publishers you’ll be lucky to see 10% of the profits from your book. With ebooks however, you keep 100% of the profits minus the fees required to set up the site which are minimal. Here is the fee breakdown for ebooks vs traditional books
Ebook vs Book cost
Ebook = Free to create an unlimited number of copies
Book = Approximately $1500 for 200 copies of a 200 page soft cover book
Rights and profit
Ebook = You keep 100% of the profits and rights to your ebooks
Book = You get 10-40% royalty (usually about $2-$5/ book)
With the above examples it is easy to see that for first time authors ebooks make a lot of sense. The risk associated with publishing an ebook is much lower than it is with distributing a soft or hard cover book. Likewise, as an ebook author you’ll keep virtually all of your own profits.
If nothing else, it is something worth consideration. Ebooks may not replace traditional paperback books, but they certainly are gaining popularity at a rate that should make all authors stop to think about how they could use ebooks to their advantage.
Written By John R.
Ebook Architect
www.zizzoo.com/guides/ebook/index.php
The selling of products/services online all require one ESSENTIAL ingredient, TRAFFIC. Marketing a small business online faces greater challenges, such as manpower and budget. However there are some great tools on the market that can effectively improve traffic to your site or affiliate site.
Investing in a good keyword tool is essential for online and offline marketing. A keyword tool can be used to write copy, find niche specific competitive keywords, and to plan advertising. Why you may be asking? A good keyword tool can determine what and why people are searching for in relation to your product. Wordtracker is the choice of the professional marketer. What I liked about this company, is they provide a FREE keyword-guide which will alter how you market on and offline. If your budget is tight they offer membership for 1 day or 1 month. Or you can look at some of the excellent FREE TOOLS on the market.
A popular technique used by many in the affiliate marketing field, is building optimised pages that refer the visitor to the main affiliate site.This technique can be applied to marketing a small business online. There are several software products on the market that will build optimised pages for your main site. Two I particularly like are Traffic Panther and Traffic Hurricane. I personally use Traffic Panther as I found the ease of setting up the software easier with them. They both offer excellent customer support, even to free users. However the Hurricane creates 1000’s of optimised pages for your site, whereas the Panther only creates 25 per project. Bear in mind the engines can drop your site if they think you are spamming.
Both introduce the technology of RSS, but the Traffic Panther introduces the small business to the power of marketing using Blogs. And how they can be beneficial to your business. So whether you are an attorney marketing your services, selling children’s books online, or looking for the secrets of successful network marketing, these techniques can be beneficial to your business online. With these tools you can firtly learn more about your potential customers and then how to get those customers to your sites.
Mary Aldoseri - Blogger, web designer, and mother.
This article may be freely reproduced but must have a link pointing to
http://www.online-selling-tools-products-services.com/
Do you have a product that you can sell online to your local market?
If you are already in business and you are thinking of promoting your products or services online, one of the first questions you have to ask yourself is “Do I have a product I can sell online?” Or perhaps in your case the question should be, “Can I sell my current product line online? These questions are at the very heart of the decision whether or not to try online marketing.
Most of the problems with products are the result of delivery issues. Either your product must be delivered within a narrow time frame (like pizzas and fried chicken), or it is too fragile or too large to be economically delivered, or there is not enough profit margin built into your pricing to allow for delivery. Most local businesses address these issues by a combination of strategies. Either they do not provide delivery, or they charge for it, or they will deliver only within a narrowly defined geographic area.
This question will take different forms for different products and services. If your business is selling specialty household items like custom made candles, the chances of modifying your current sales approach to reach a broader online market are pretty good. But if you sell a service like pool cleaning or home renovations, your online objectives will probably be different. Unless you are prepared to travel hundreds of miles to perform your services, you are probably only interested in reaching local prospects.
Are some products suitable for marketing online and others not?
Think of all the plumbers, home renovators, auto refinishers, pool cleaners, landscape suppliers and so on in your community and ask yourself if it is feasible to market these kinds of products and services online.
For instance, say you sell landscape products such as paving stones, top soil, crushed stone and so on. And say you already have an established business in your local area. Your geographic market area is roughly the area you can reach with your trucks in less than, say, 30 minutes. In other words, your target market area is any place within about 25 miles of your shipping depot. Dealing with customers beyond this radius becomes to expensive because of the shipping costs.
Would it be worth marketing your landscape products online specifically to this narrowly defined target market area?
Well, it depends. Obviously if your marketing efforts were free there would be no question. You should just go ahead and do it. But your marketing efforts will not be free. To do effective online promotion you will have to create a website, create some sort of online marketing program, and then have the response system in place to answer customer enquiries and take online orders. None of this is free. Most of the costs will be in designing and creating the website. But there will be ongoing costs for regular marketing efforts and online advertising.
Regular marketing efforts? Online advertising? Absolutely! It is important to realize that you will be wasting your money if you just set up a website and expect customers to flock to it. It just won’t happen. You need an ongoing marketing effort that includes, as a bare minimum, Search Engine Marketing and probably Pay Per Click Advertising.
Thinking about other products in this way will very likely lead to the same conclusion. Say you are a chiropractor and you are wondering about promoting your service online. Is it worth the effort? Probably not in the short term. You will probably not gain instant recognition or instant clients. But a concerted, sustained effort over a long period of time will help you create a web presence in your community and establish you as one of the leaders in your area. And that will result in sustained and lasting results which should eventually translate into sales.
Virtually any product can be marketed online to a local market if you are prepared to put in the time, effort and expense necessary to make an impact. You may be able to get relatively fast results with some products. But generally speaking because you are dealing with a confined geographic area the number of prospective customers looking for your product at any given time will be relatively small. So the response will usually be slow in coming.
But if you are planning to be around for the long haul, persistent online marketing efforts will eventually pay off. And the best time to get started is right now.
Rick Hendershot is a writer and creator of the Linknet Publishing Network - http://www.sbo-linknet.com/products/article-program.shtml and Premium Listings - http://promo-blog.linknet-blogs.com - two awesome methods of promoting your website with articles and listings.
Regardless of whatever it is you are selling, you have to create what is called perceived value. In other words, if somebody sees your resale rights package, after reading the description they have to walk away from their reading saying to themselves, “This is something that I believe will be very valuable to have.” So, how do we do that?
There are a few ways to create perceived value. One way is to load up your package with a number of extras at no cost. This is not to suggest that you give the customer a ton of useless junk. People will see through this in a heartbeat. You want to give them things that will compliment the main part of the package.
For example. Let’s say you are giving somebody simple resale rights to an ebook on how to make money online. This book teaches people the basic steps of creating their own web site, how to promote it, how to build a subscriber base and so on. What you may want to do is give them a few things in addition to the book itself that will help them accomplish these tasks. You might want to consider throwing in a book on effective ad writing so people can learn how to write good ads. Maybe include a book on web site design for the person who doesn’t know anything about HTML for creating his own site. This would be something that he would normally have to pay for elsewhere and now you are giving it to him for nothing. If you throw in enough of these items the potential customer is likely to feel that he is getting more than his money’s worth and will be more likely to purchase your package. Many of today’s sites have as many as 5 or 6 of these add on products.
Another thing you can do to create perceived value is through real testimonials. Obviously if the product is new you’re not going to have any testimonials. That is an easy problem to solve. Simply contact a few people and tell them you are giving them your product to test, free of charge. All you ask in return is that if they like the way it performed that they submit a testimonial to use on your sales page. Most people will jump at the chance to try out a new product. Once the testimonials start coming in, you can put them up on your site. When people see these they are more likely to believe the product is legit and valuable.
But the most important thing to creating perceived value, believe it or not, is the actual look of the product itself, especially with ebooks. It has been tested and proven that a 3D shot of your ebook cover, suggesting that it is a real book and not just a PDF file, makes people feel it has more value because they believe that a real hard copy of this book exists. There are a number of software programs out there that can create these covers, many that are very inexpensive.
Just these three simple things can add more perceived value to your product than anything you can do with the actual product itself. Try it. You won’t be sorry.
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Learn more…
HBNezine… Home Biz News & Tips… Is A Home Based Business Right For You? Receive weekly up-to-date powerful strategies to outsmart, out market and outsell even your toughest competition. Learn how to drive traffic to your website and explode your sales. You don’t want to miss this ezine… A must read! Receive 4 FREE gifts when you subscribe!
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You are free to reproduce this article as long as no changes are made, the author’s name is retained and the link to our site URL remains active.
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Salehoo: United Warranty Wholesalers
I have been actively selling on Ebay for about 5 years. The stock that I sell is sourced from the local market as well as imported from abroad. My intention is not to brag but to position myself as someone who can give some advice to people when it comes to sourcing goods to resell for a profit. By raising just a few points I hope I have been able to demonstrate the Salehoo truth.
The way to increase profits from wholesale is to build your own website and/or open an eBay store Are you an eBay seller flea market vendor or retailer looking for wholesale sources? Finding the right wholesale source can be a daunting challenge especially if you have no previous experience in the retail or wholesale business. Salehoo is a unified platform bringing together wholesalers drop shippers and liquidators from different continents
Salehoo Wholesale Boxing Rings:
But the one problem with trying to find a wholesale or dropshipping product is the prevalence of scams. As a result, many people risk getting ripped off by websites that offer bogus merchandise.
What you come across a fair bit is wholesale membership sites. Whatever your reason SaleHoo can provide you with the contacts. See Salehoo Review.
Imagine 24 hours from now doubling your website’s
effectiveness, getting twice the sales, twice the leads,
twice the sign ups, with the same amount of traffic! You
can do it for free in 15 minutes just by improving your
landing page conversion rate. Most people focus on traffic;
however your site conversion rate can dramatically increase
the bottom line and open many doors for you. Traffic comes
from a variety of sources (search engines, email lists, Pay
per click, etc.) but all of the traffic ends up at 1 place:
your landing page. By improving 1 of your traffic sources
you marginally improve website results, but by improving
your landing page, you improve the results from all your
traffic sources! It is strange that people will spend tons
of time and money on getting traffic and very little on
improving conversion rates; stop throwing your money away.
First we need to define 2 terms:
Landing page: The final page a visitor lands on before
they take your most desired action (buy, fill out a lead
form, optin for emails, etc.).
Conversion rate: The number of visitors that take your
most desired action divided by your total visitors. If 100
people visit your site and 3 sign up to receive emails, the
conversion rate is 3%.
100s of factors that affect conversion rate, the single
greatest factor being your page headline. The headline
answers 2 questions for the site visitor: “am I at the
right place?” and “does this apply to me?” People will read
less than 15 words on your site before deciding whether to
stay or not. The headline keeps the visitor on your site
and maximizes the most important part of those 15 words.
The headline has 1 task: it exactly matches your traffic
source phraseology. Does your page headline exactly match
the keyword phrase that caused the site visitor to click
through? You can accomplish this site headline, traffic
source harmony by using 1 of 2 methods:
Method 1. Dynamically generate the headline With some code
at the top of your page you can get the search phrase the
visitor used from the referring url given by the search
engine; then use that phrase as your page headline.
Method 2. Make multiple pages each tweaked for 1 popular
phrase. If you sold dreamweaver video tutorials,
You could go to overture:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion
and search on “dreamweaver”
You could then immediately see 3 phrases that account for
over 95% of the dreamweaver tutorial traffic: “dreamweaver
tutorial”, “dreamweaver training”, and “dreamweaver mx
tutorial”
By doing this analysis you realize 3 pages are needed, 1
for each of the most popular keyword phrases. If you use
adwords and one of your ad titles is “Dreamweaver
Training”, then you’ll send all of those clicks to the
“dreamweaver training” page. Depending on your traffic
source, you will direct the client to 1 of those 3 pages.
You can achieve an immediate explosion of increased profits
by applying the same strategy to your websites. After
modifying your sites, you should see an instant 0.3%-0.5%
increase in your conversion rate, imagine an extra sale for
every 200-350 visitors!
Michael Cutter, PhD is a nationally known speaker, author,
and uses his rare problem solving abilities in a variety of fields. Some words that describe Michael are:
dad, husband, mind mapping, mensa, joint venture, mastermind groups, dream team, life long learner, money, reason for human existence, use strengths for success, ENTP, games, puzzles, audiobooks, video tutorials.
Mortgage companies in U.S are facing huge competition and often have great difficulty to get new customers. Leads are the life line for mortgage companies. The situation is more difficult and hard for the agents to get new clients. The more clients they can bring, the more flourishing their business prospects become. To achieve success in bringing new customers, companies and agents need to focus on making their endeavor more time-bound.
In such a competitive market only one thing is the key to your success. And that is “innovation”. Either you are Mortgage Lead Generation company or an agent or broker you need to devise new ways to attract people in your offer. For this one should thoroughly research on where the mortgage industry stands at the moment and what problems people are facing to get mortgage from companies. Only then you can be able to make a plan to address the problems of people resulting getting the attention of customers and eventually lot more business than your competitors.
The other thing to do is to streamline your organization as far as its functional aspect is concerned. In doing so, most of the companies find themselves racing against time. Good time management can really help. Against this backdrop, good mortgage leads can boost their effort and are an integral part of the burgeoning mortgage business.
The most important thing is to establish a good channel to generate leads. Buying the leads can be an option but if you can generate leads on your own you will be saving thousands of dollars each month. An important lead channel can be created by telemarketing. It can be an appropriate tool to make a flow of leads. Also these leads will be of highly qualified contrary to leads bought from some lead company.
Businesses - no matter the size - need to measure the effects of their marketing so they will know what is working and to discover what needs improvement. There are many areas for which marketing is responsible, and in each are indicators of performance that can be measured.
For smaller organizations, there are two key areas that I believe you must track:
• Customer acquisition
• Customer retention
Customer growth rate helps you measure acquisition, while customer longevity as well as frequency and recency of purchase are metrics of retention and customer value.
But before you can measure, you have to know a few facts. Who are your best customers? In each organization, the answer will be a little different. How do you define a “best” customer? Are they the ones who buy the most and cost the least to service? Are there other parameters that tell you they are “best?” Do they refer more business to you? Are they brand ambassadors?
How did you acquire them in the first place (special offers, referrals, newspaper ads, DM)? What is your customer growth rate/attrition rate? Which customers did you keep/lose? Why?
Then you need to define what the best ones look like demographically. Are they 35 - 45, married couples with children and a mortgage, or 18 - 24-year-old singles who live in condos? Urban or suburban? Readers or radio listeners?
Once you have a picture of them, it is easier to develop a strategic and tactical plan to acquire and retain more of them and fewer of the bad ones. Additionally, it becomes more apparent what you need to measure to ensure you are making headway and spending your marketing dollars correctly.
RESOURCES
• Marketing Metrics White Paper
• Marketing NPV, a website devoted to marketing measurement
Harry Hoover is managing principal of Hoover ink PR. He has 26 years of experience in crafting and delivering bottom line messages that ensure success for serious businesses like Brent Dees Financial Planning, Focus Four, Levolor, New World Mortgage, North Carolina Tourism, TeamHeidi, Ty Boyd Executive Learning Systems, VELUX, Verbatim and Wicked Choppers.
1. What is a domain name?
A domain name is the name that identifies a web site. Your
domain name in the online world is the equivalent of our retail
name and address in the real world. It is your address because
it shows customers and computers online where to find your site,
store, products etc. It is your name because you can move your
domain name from one web host to another at any time.
2. Who owns the domain name? When you buy a domain name, you are
actually leasing the name. It is a lease because there is no way
to own a domain name forever. You pay a fee on an annual or
bi-annual basis to your registrar to continue using the name. If
you stop paying your annual fees, it becomes a lapsed domain
name and goes back out on the market where anyone, perhaps even
your competition can purchase the domain for their use.
Note: Online traffic will follows the domain name. If you fail
to renew a name, it is basically sending free traffic to another
site owner.
3. Who is in charge of the domain name system? ICANN or Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority is the non profit organization in
charge of the domain name system. ICANN performs some of the
following duties to keep the domain name system running smoothly:
Approves Top Level Domain Names - .com/.biz/.edu etc ICANN is in
charge of approving domain name extensions such as .biz and
setting up standards such as which domain names such as .us or
co.uk belong to a particular country.
Regulates the domain name registration process and services
ICANN approves registrars who are who are responsible for
keeping track of registered names, billing customers, sending
out renewal notices and selling top level domain names to anyone
who wants one.
There are many reputable resellers on the web that are not
approved by ICANN but are simply organizations and individuals
associated with a registrar that are allowed to sell domain
names on their own. Whether you purchase your domain name
through a registrar or a reseller, always find a reputable
source for your domain name.
If a registrar or reseller does not maintain an active database,
you might find yourself on rare occasions paying for a name that
is already registered. If you ever receive such as note from
your registrar, or reseller, contact them immediately using an
online form or via the phone. Make sure the notice is legitimate
otherwise, you might be the victim of a domain name scam. If it
is true, your registrar should immediately make a correction,
preferably at their expense.
This integrity of a registrar or reseller’s database of
available names should be maintained at all times.
Sets up conflict resolution policies to prevent domain name
theft and copyright (brand name) infringements. ICANN has setup
and is always revising its dispute resolution policy so that web
users can have fair access to any domain name while protecting
the sanctity of commercial trademarks. You can get any name you
want as long as it is not trademarked by another person or
organization.
It is always in your best interest to get familiar with the
ICANN website as well as its rules and policies. To build a
successful online presence is a long term proposition. If you
fail to do your due diligence upfront, it can have serious
repercussions later on due to lost time, web traffic, money and
possible loss of a domain name.
