Become a Dynamic Speaker
A dynamic speaker speaks with energy, enthusiasm, commitment, and variety. Not being dynamic means being unconcerned, suffering from lack of confidence in one’s public speaking abilities, speaking in a monotone, and being just plain boring. So how does one become a impelling speaker? There are a number of factors that influence how other people react to your speech and it’s delivery.
Try to mix up the content of your presentation – never say the same thing over and over. Pay attention to phrases or habits you express frequently. Phrases like: “you know” or “eh?” or even the word “like” are often a part of peoples’ everyday speech patterns, but they become monotonous and boring during a presentation. Use your voice and your gestures to emphasize important points, a lot of gestures make you look more energetic, which increases dynamism.
You must be yourself to become a dynamic speaker, because if your audience thinks you are being fake they will not believe you. You’re cool, don’t worry about it, impress them with your dynamism and your arguments. Change the volume and tone of your voice, but don’t talk too loudly or too softly either. And slow down for the important points, but don’t go too slow or too fast.
Your face is the most expressive part of your body and studies show that people pay a lot of attention to the expressions on your face. Use facial expressions which match the points you are making. Don’t send mixed signals. And don’t be afraid to move around a bit, but don’t stray too far from your notes.
Stand erect, don’t bend over to read from your notes. And don’t take your pen with you when you speak. Especially, do not twirl the pen while speaking and keep it out of your mouth. Needless to say never smoke during your presentation. Smoking isn’t cool.
If you know anyone in the audience look straight at them. If you are delivering your speech to someone familiar to you will lessen the tensions and then gradually as you become more relaxed include other members of the audience. If on the other hand, you know no one in the audience, pick out three distinct personalities before you begin. Pick one in the center of the room, one on the right side and one on the left. Perhaps a lady with bright blonde hair, or a gentleman with a rose in his lapel, or even someone with a unique piece of clothing. Any thing that makes them stand out from the crowd. Give all three of them a quick smile and small nod.
During your speech you will feel more comfortable speaking to those three people because you have already established a link with them and as you look from one to the other the rest of the audience will see you look around and assume you are looking at everyone.
Most people are not born with the skills needed to be a dynamic speaker. Practice, perseverance, and keeping these tips in mind while delivering your speech will help you become a dynamic, powerful speaker.
Faye B. Roberts provides ways to overcome your fear of public speaking and puts you on the road to public speaking success. Visit http://www.publicspeakingreport.info
For more information about becoming a great motivation speaker visit http://publicspeakingphobia.blogspot.com
How to Turn a Third Party Informational Article into a Power Marketing Tool
Despite the fact that cyberspace seems filled, the world still craves fresh, interesting and unique content. To be successful both online and offline publishers must provide a steady stream of zippy content to catch and retain today’s demanding readers and viewers.
Viewers want content that is relevant, interesting, informative, entertaining and makes them feel something. Once viewers find good content they will keep coming back for more. And publishers know that. It’s their business to know that.
This content can include a positive article about your company written by a third party. You can take this story and use it as a promotional article for your business.
The article needs to be at least 700 words for widest Internet exposure and not be an obvious commercial for you. In fact, your company name may only appear in the article a time or two and probably not even in the title.
There has to be an angle or hook about your company that lends itself to a good story. Everybody has a story and most likely you have several angles a writer could use in an informational article.
The third party makes the article appear as if a reporter is doing a story on you and not a promotional public relations piece. To pull this off requires it be written in a lower key. Today’s savvy viewers know when they see an advertisement.
A good informational article writer will retain the copyright since many of the biggest article distribution services require the author own the copyright. But you should be able to get the use rights so you can use the article as a multi-purpose marketing tool, especially if you are paying a fee.
Depending on the nature of the article, it is possible to gain widespread exposure for your company including having the article posted on dozens or hundreds of websites and blogs.
You may even find that the article may be spreading across the World Wide Web and if you Google your company’s name you might find your own website way down on the search results list.
But not to worry. When your exposure suddenly leaps you should be glad. Remember the article contains the backlink to you so if someone is curious about your business they can just click. And the backlinks pull your own site’s search engine ranking up which is what it’s all about, no?
The first step is to put the article on your website. Make sure you use the author’s resource box or byline to show readers it was written by a third party and not you. If you have a company newsletter be sure to include your article there.
The author can also put the article on his/her website and then distribute it. A good, well written informational article can end up on hundreds of different web pages. Some sites may include the article in numerous categories.
When the article appears on other websites it also means you can print the article from those websites. That means you have a fourth party website which further improves credibility and distances the article from looking like an ad.
To track the article’s exposure, do a Google search for the article name put in quotation marks. This will give you a listing of where the article appears. Give it some time as it can take up to four weeks or more to get picked up with some search engines.
Check the websites that have the article to see which sites are more appealing and bookmark the best sites using them for your article reprint files. Don’t forget you have a third party article posted on a fourth party website.
Article reprints can be used as handouts, flyers and brochures. These can be used in word of mouth campaigns such as ‘here is a story about us and an extra one for a friend you think might be interested.’
Article reprints can be mailed out with statements or other mailed material.
E-mail allows you to send the article’s URL or Internet address and the viewer simply clicks on the link to view the article. The article can also be cut and pasted as a text file in an e-mail message. Either way there is no handling, paper or postage and those are big advantages.
One of the best uses for the article is in providing media leads. Include the article in your media packet or use the article as a lead teaser for a reporter or interviewer. Show hosts, reporters, and program managers are constantly looking for new and interesting material and the article you provide them can point them right to you.
Like any tool, a marketing informational article is best when used. Its flexibility and low cost make it a perfect fit for any marketing plan.
The marketing informational article might just surprise you and become the most cost effective power tool in your marketing tool chest!
Jack D. Deal is the owner of Deal Business Consulting. He can be contacted at jddeal@jddeal.com Related articles can be found at http://www.jddeal.com and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com
Digital Product Bundling – The Hidden Secret to Massive Sales
What is the single most powerful marketing technique you can use to grow an existing business? Opinions vary on this point, but having produced and promoted more than 50 products online, my answer is resoundingly clear: digital products.
But how can a “product” be a marketing technique?
It’s all in how you use it.
You have probably heard the idea that you should sell “benefits” rather than “features.”
That’s basic marketing, and good advice. But there’s a problem.
There tends to be a gap between a product with all the potential benefits it can provide, and the customer actual “getting” those benefits. And that gap typically involves the customer actually using the product. And using it properly. And using it fully.
After all, if the customer doesn’t get the benefit from the first product they buy from you, why would they buy a second one? Or a third?
And this brings me to the second problem, which I call the “smart marketing dilemma.”
If you only plan to sell one product one time to a customer, then maybe it’s not that critical that he get the full benefit of the product. Desirable of course, but not critical.
But “smart marketing” dictates that often the first sale to a customer is not where you make most of your money. Why? Because the first sale has to pay for the marketing and advertising to attract the customer in the first place. In fact, if you just “break even” on that first sale, you may be doing pretty well.
The implications are that there must be additional sales to the customer in order to actually make any significant amount of money. But the trouble is that if the customer failed to get the benefit from his first purchase, what makes us think there will be any additional purchases?
You see the dilemma.
Now, I’m going to tell you about a shocking statistic I pulled directly from my own business 3 or 4 years ago that almost knocked me over. I sent a survey out to a large number of customers for one of my consumer software product lines, asking them what they liked, disliked, wanted to see added etc.
I received quite a large number of replies, but the thing that absolutely blew me away was the fact that nearly half – nearly 50 percent – admitted that not only had they not used the software, they had never even installed it.
I couldn’t believe it.
Here I am looking for ways to add more value to the product in order to increase the benefit to the customer, and half of them hadn’t even bothered to look at it. They’d bought it. They’d received it. But they hadn’t ever gotten around to loading it.
Talk about an uphill battle. These folks clearly weren’t getting ANY of the benefit if they didn’t even install the software, much less use it. How on earth was I going to sell them a second product, or a third?
So as I’m mulling over this little gem of information, I received an e-mail from a fellow who started out by saying: “Jason, I am planning to buy your program, but I have no intention of actually using it…”
I laughed out loud when I read this.
Things had gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. Now the prospects weren’t even planning to use the program, never mind the customers. Good grief.
But, I went on to read the rest of the e-mail. It turns out that he already had a business which sold a physical product to the same market that I sold my software to, and that my software provided the “missing link” between his product and the benefits he wanted his customers to receive.
So his plan was to bundle my product in with his, and sell one complete solution to his customers.
Neat idea.
So we came to an agreement and he sold a large number of them that way.
A couple of months later, I got an e-mail from another fellow who wanted to do the same thing. Different product, different market, but the same idea. And he ended up being very successful with it too.
All of which got me to wondering whether I should try that concept with my own products. (D’ya think?)
So I did.
I started with one of my higher-priced business to business products, and added a video training series showing not only how to use the product, but how to streamline the customer’s business in the context of using the product. This went well beyond just a “user guide” and could have stood on its own as a business improvement product.
Best of all, there was no way a customer could fail to get the benefit from my product. This video series covered everything from the time the customer paid me money until the time his business was running smoothly as a result of using my product properly.
It was like having a “greased chute” between my product and the benefits my customer wanted.
Then I bundled it in, just as the other two fellows did, and nearly doubled the price of my offering. Actually, I think I bumped it up about 75%.
The really neat thing is, that in the few months that followed, my unit sales actually increased – even at the 75% higher price. The overall revenues from this product more than doubled. In fact, it allowed me to completely re-work the economics of that entire line of business, all because I made it easy for my customers to get the full benefit of my product.
And this brings me to the take-away lesson for you.
If you sell a product or a service – whether online or offline – if there are any steps that your customer must take in order to use your product properly or get the full benefit of your offering, this digital product bundling technique is dynamite!
The digital product you add could be training material, usage information, or even a management tool.
It might be printed, audio, video, even software that you outsource.
Maybe it’s a spreadsheet template, a tutorial, even a tele-seminar.
Whatever it is, the key is that it be fast and inexpensive for you to create, and essentially free for you to replicate. (How much does it cost to burn something onto a CD? 30 cents? 50 cents? It’s virtually free.)
When you do this, you can enhance the value of the product or service offering to your customer, you can increase your unit sales, and you can send your customer satisfaction level through the roof!
You improve your positioning in the marketplace, you create a much more defensible Unique Selling Proposition, you have more ammunition for prospecting, and you can even subdivide the content into more sequential contacts to your prospects, which can improve your sales conversion rate.
You can even create a stand-alone product line.
It’s all good. There is such an enormous up-side, it’s almost insane not to do this!
And best of all, it’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s very easy to do.
In fact, there are tools and resources available on the Internet that will let you automate or outsource for pennies on the dollar, almost any aspect of digital product creation that you don’t want to do yourself.
And with the tools that are available, doing it yourself is extremely easy too.
Make a point today to look at your own product and service offerings. Identify exactly what your customer has to do from the time they pay you money, until the time they get the full benefit of the product you are offering. This represents the single greatest, easiest and most immediate profit opportunity for a digital product in your business.
You may just find that bundling a digital product in with your existing product or service is the greatest marketing technique you ever use.
Jason Jantzi has produced over 50 digital products. You can use his exclusive Online Resource Blueprint, showing 130 key tools, from how to create digital products in under an hour, to website marketing strategy tips to increase web site traffic. Download free at http://www.OnlineResearchLabs.com.
Successful Marketing Tools of the Trade
Marketing is defined as the act or process of buying and selling in a market, but what are some of the strategies that successful corporations use to gain an advantage over their competition?
Successful companies invest up front to develop an advertising and promotions plan, which clearly outlines the goals and strategies of the organization. Once the plan is in place and ready to implement, identification of target markets must be determined.
An advertising and promotions plan will include such items as identifying target markets, creating messages to the market and what avenues will be used to communicate the message. The plan should also identify how successes are measured through the use of a quantifiable list that tracks whether or not the tasks are accomplishing the goals.
With the rapidly advancing technologies that are occurring in modern business, companies are required to be ready, and able to adapt within their ever-changing environment. It is true across all diverse industries that in order to stay competitive, companies must be able to use the various tools that technology has to offer.
Technological factors have been of growing importance, particularly in recent years. A major factor involved in these technology issues is the use of the Internet as a major issue to modern companies. Internet marketing has been rapidly growing since its inception and is now commonly used in all sectors of societies, in all corners of the globe.
The Internet has quickly become one of the most valuable assets in modern technology, and as such, is developing as an integral part of modern commerce. As with past technologies, the Internet will have future technological advances develop from its own growth.
The Internet has lead to the birth and evolution of electronic commerce or E-commerce. E-commerce has now become a key component of many companies in the daily running of their business.
Online marketing challenges traditional practices, and opens up a vast array of issues that companies must address. An understanding of the implication E-commerce has on a company’s divisions can help businesses gain understanding hence plan for its inevitable continuing evolution.
In terms of marketing, the modern company must be critically aware of the development of E-commerce, and the implications that it entails. In assessing the implications of E-commerce in terms of marketing, it is important to understand its impact in respect to marketing strategy formulation. As the Internet, and in turn E-commerce has developed, and continues to evolve and grow, it is vital that any company, in any particular industry, must base its strategic planning around such a rapidly growing medium.
Long gone are the days in which marketing simply meant hiring a few people and throwing them into the street to sell products. Such marketing strategies are obsolete now, and although once effective, they are overwhelmed today by the internets vast medium. And whether we like it or not, as it is revolutionary in everything else, the internet does the same with marketing too.
Professional resources for successful marketing
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