Weddings, engagements, college and high school graduations, birthdays, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day-nowadays, it seems like just about every occasion warrants gift-giving. Perhaps you have bought so many presents by now that you are starting to feel like there is nothing left to give. But do not resort to gift cards or wads of cash-the best presents are lasting and memorable. And there are a number of gifts, which you may have not yet thought of, that keep on giving long after you have given them.

From satellite TV subscriptions, to gym or museum memberships, to magazine subscriptions, here is a list of some useful presents for when you have run out of ideas. The best thing about these presents is that each is suitable for recipients of all ages and can be adapted to fit a particular recipient’s special needs and interests.

1. A Satellite TV subscription. Having access to a wide variety of programming and entertainment options is one present that the receiver will be sure never to get bored with. This is a great option for birthday boys and girls of all ages, newlyweds, fiancés, mothers, fathers, and graduates alike. It can even be tailored to fit the recipient’s personal style and entertainment preferences by adding premium channels like HBO and other movie channels, or special interest packages, such as the NFL Sunday Ticket for football fans. A satellite subscription will also give the recipient the chance to view television in a whole new light, with many HD opportunities which they may not have previously had access to with cable or local broadcasts.

2. A gym or museum membership, like a satellite TV subscription, is a long-term present. Whether the recipient likes to work out a lot or has a keen eye for fine arts, a gym or museum membership is a great way to let them enjoy their favorite hobbies for an entire year. If you are going the museum route, choose a museum that has a lot of temporary exhibits and rotating installations. With new things to see frequently, the member will have a reason to keep going back and make the most out of the present. If the recipient is already a member at a gym or fitness center, contact the gym and find out about offerings that are not included in a regular membership, such as special classes or access to the pool and sauna or steam room.

3. Along the same lines as memberships, magazine subscriptions can make great presents, as they are actually many presents in one-the recipient will continue to receive a gift every week or month for the duration of the subscription. If a friend of yours has just gotten engaged, consider a bridal magazine or something related to the home. If someone is celebrating a birthday that allows them to retire, think about a travel or hobby magazine to give them ideas for how to spend their new free time. The possibilities are endless. Choose a magazine that you know will interest the recipient and is appropriate for the occasion, but one that they perhaps would not think to subscribe to themselves.

How many times after giving a presentation did you feel like you just did not have enough time to cover everything you wanted to? How many times have you had to cut some important points from your presentation because you knew you would overshoot the time limit otherwise? Or how many times have you finished a little sooner than you anticipated and were then left wondering about what else you could say with the remaining time? Everyone who has ever had to give presentations has experienced this one time or another in their lives.

There are numerous time management tools available on the market and almost all of them deal with managing your time on a personal level or professional level insofar as you need to prepare for something. But what do you do once it is time to actually deliver? More often than not when we think of pacing our presentations before an audience, we tend to think that it has to do with the speed at which we talk. But there is more to pacing one’s presentation than simply the number of words that can fly out of your mouth in a minute. In this article we will look at three aspects of that vitally important skill that has to do with your audience as much as it has to do with you giving the presentation:

Speed of Delivery

The first point is the most obvious one – the speed at which the presenter actually speaks. Despite what many time management exercises teach, some people are naturally fast speakers or they speak fast to counter their own nervousness. This is neither helpful to the speaker nor his or her audience. The human brain has a certain speed at which it can process spoke words and if bogged down by a fast flurry of content, tends to refocus on understanding the meaning of every word spoken instead of the larger context of the subject against which the words fit into.

Audience Can’t Keep Up

Sometimes even if the speaker paces his words slow enough, the audience may still struggle to keep along because of the incredible number of topic shifts and subjects that the presenter keeps jumping to. So while the actual words and phrases might not be coming at a fast pace, the transition between subjects or topics certainly is changing at break neck speed and the audience starts lagging behind. This is an equally important aspect of pacing one’s presentation.

Objective of The Presentation is Unclear

Sometimes a third problem can arise out of the combination of the above two problems – the audience is unclear about the presenter’s goal or where the point of his presentation is headed. This can also make the audience feel like they are in the dark about where this presentation is headed or what the presenter’s agenda is at the moment. On the contrary, a good litmus test to know if you are pacing your presentation well is if the audience is able to track with your lecture and able to keep along with the context of everything being said. This is better than any time management tools or techniques.

Time Management Training is an important aspect of providing employees with the right tools necessary to manage and pace themselves well in all aspects of their professional lives. For more information on this please refer to the following article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2013/06/19/the-only-way-to-prepare-to-give-a-presentation/

Can being short affect your income? Well, if you are 5 foot, 2 inches tall, you will probably earn 20 percent less than an equally qualified 6-foot tall person. That is according to a University of Pennsylvania study.

Are things better in the executive suite? Actually, they are worse. More than 50 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are more than 6 feet tall. Only 3 percent are shorter than 5-foot, 7 inches. That is because taller people are perceived as being stronger leaders. In fact, the taller candidate has won almost every US presidential election.

So how can you boost people’s perceptions of you as a “strong leader”, if you are a man or woman below 5-foot, 7 inches in height? One technique is to have a commanding stage presence when giving speeches or presentations. Think of any great leader. Odds are, they were also great public speakers.

When you are the speaker, you are the center of attention. You are standing while the audience is sitting. Everyone is focused upon you. I am only 5 foot, 3 inches in height. But I have be able to “stand tall” as a professional speaker and seminar leader for the past 15 years.

Here are five tips to help short people make a strong impression while giving a speech:

1) Do not use a podium. Most podiums are built for people of average height. So if you are below average height, you will peer over the top of the podium like a little kid at a candy store counter. That is hardly the stuff of CEO legend. Get rid of the podium and let people see you.

2) Ask the event organizer to provide a riser. A riser is a 6-8 inch tall mini-stage. Standing on one allows everyone in the room to see you clearly.

3) Move around the stage to establish a physical presence. By doing this, you are staking out your territory. If you can not be “tall”, you can still be “big” by using more of the room.

4) Use a powerful voice. A short person with a vibrant voice makes a better impression than a tall person who sounds like Minnie Mouse.

5) Know your facts. This is true whether you are tall or short. Credibility builds trust. Trust is the cornerstone of leadership.

Use these tips to stand tall as a leader during your next speech. Be seen as a leader and boost your career.

© 2008 Reflective Keynotes Inc., Toronto, Canada

This is my third article in my video marketing series. The first article discussed the script, the second discussed putting the script into a slide show program like Microsoft PowerPoint and this article is going to discuss how to record your Power Point presentation and make a Killer Video.

Step 1 – Voice Over- One Of The Keys To More Sales

If this process is new to you, it may take a while for you to become comfortable with speaking into a mic. After you get you slide show ready, it is important that you practice reading through the script while clicking through the slides. Getting proficient with the timing of the reading along with the slides is critical for the video to look professional. Hearing the benefits as the slides go by adds emotion and emotion equals sales. There is a powerful relationship between what is said and what is seen, kinda like show and tell. Pretend that you are having a conversation with your best friend. The KEY to the voice over aspect of the video is to have a natural conversation.

Step 2 – Choosing The Right Screen Recorder

You now have your Power Point presentation and have practiced reading your script, you now need to find a screen recorder program like Camtasia or CamStudio. CamStudio is free but I found it more difficult to use. Camtasia cost $299.00 but there is a 30-day free trial available. During that 30-day period, you should be able to get several videos built. Camtasia also has excellent tutorials for you to watch. There are several videos that are available for you to watch before you sign up for your 30-day trial. I strongly recommend that your watch the free videos before signing up so you can get right to creating your video once you get the free trial.

Once you get your Power Point presentation into Camtasia, go to file, record slide show. Plug in your microphone and hit record. Again, if you are new, it will probably take you a few takes to get the right “feel” for the video. Remember, the more natural you are, the better the video. The process of recording your video is going to take a little while to master. Spend extra time on this step, and don’t take any short cuts. This is key to making a Killer Video.

My next, and last, article is going to be titled “Article 4 – Video Marketing – How To Get Traffic To Your Video And Make Insane Amounts Of Money.

It’s their birthday, and they are saying that they really do not want a gift, don’t you believe it. Everyone wants some form of recognition on their special day. Gift giving is a part of the culture of almost every society in the world. Giving gifts on the day of someone’s birth is a time honored tradition. A birthday gift is more than a trinket; it is way for to share in another person’s life. It is a way to make them feel special and show them that you truly care. Below are three great birthday present ideas.

Gift baskets are always in fashion. You can buy them pre-made or make your own. Today you can find a gift basket for almost any type of personal taste. If you are buying for fisherman or other sport enthusiasts they have gift baskets for them as well. Making your own adds an even more personal touch to the gift.

The gift card is less personal but extremely practical as far as gift giving is concerned. Some people are extremely difficult to buy for and for these people the gift card makes perfect sense. They can shop at their leisure and buy whatever suits them best. So lot of people seem them as taking the easy way out of gift giving but it makes sense when you consider the time it takes to return an unwanted gift.

Memories are what birthdays are about and making a memory book for the birthday person will be a hit. If you are making one for a best friend include things like concert ticket stubs, movie ticket stubs and photos of the two of you in various situations. For an older person make a book that includes pictures of family members past and present. Grand parents especially love to get a book that has the grand children’s pictures as they grew.

Personalized birthday present ideas include tees, pillows, blankets hand bags, wallets and ceramic items. You can choose a picture or slogan to be printed on these items and give it as a gift. One great T-shirt idea is to choose a picture of the person from a vacation or other event. You can add the number of the birthday or just say something heart felt.

The best birthday present ideas come from knowing the person you are gifting. Very close friends and family are a lot easier to buy for than strangers or co-workers. These ideas listed hear may be used in any situation.

A few years back I found myself in a situation where I had allowed myself to get roped into delivering a presentation to a university class. I was going to be talking about what I had learned during my IT career – a somewhat painful and introspective topic. My excitement level was at zero.

I put off creating the speech until the last minute. I threw together some slides the morning of the speech. I ended up showing up just a few minutes before the class started. All three of these actions are not how I do things – what was going on here?

The presentation ended up going OK (everyone clapped at the end). However, I was seriously troubled – why had such a simple speech come so close to being a disaster so many times? After running things through my mind a few times I came to realize that I had been a victim of self-sabotage!

I really, really didn’t want to do this speech. It turns out that because of this mind-set, I was working actively to make sure that the speech would never happen (don’t write the speech, don’t prepare the slides, don’t show up). Dang – what was going on here?

Kevin Hogan is both a psychologist and a speaker. His take on all of this is “Essentially, self-sabotage is consciously or unconsciously blocking yourself from succeeding or accomplishing some task or project.” Well there you go. It turns out that we all have some of this going on, but sometimes it can get out of hand.

What’s a presenter to do? First, you need to be aware that you are engaging in self-sabotage. Once you realize that it’s happening, you’ll be better able to deal with it. Next, use affirmations – tell yourself that you are good at what you are going to be doing. The simple act of saying this to yourself can go a long way. Finally, dig in – focus on what you want to get accomplished and shut out any negative noises that are coming from inside.

It turns out that I must have done better than OK on my presentation to that class because they’ve asked me back twice a year since then. I now look forward to this presentation because it the audience is always appreciative and it give me a chance to try out new material and techniques. I’m glad that I didn’t let self-sabotage do me in!

If you love your Dad, you probably want to honor him on Father’s Day and get him a terrific gift. So here are some Father’s Day present ideas to consider to make that special guy feel extra special.

1. Keepsakes. There are many different kind of keepsakes Dad will really appreciate. It’s a great way to show him how special he really is to you and how much his love and support has meant.

Keepsakes can include plaques with special messages or even mugs, desk items, clocks or personalized picture frames. It will mean a great deal to Dad when he sees it comes from the heart with a special message.

2. Sports Related. There are many kinds of sports related gifts you can give to Dad which he is sure to love. This can include everything from golf clubs to golfing accessories. Or if he is a football fan, then maybe a jersey from his favorite team or even a signed football from his favorite player.

The choices are huge but it will be a greatly appreciated gift when you take the time to get him something which you know he has passion for. There are many websites which offer many types of gifts for Dad which are sports related.

Check them out and you can get a lot of terrific ideas just from browsing alone. There may be a number of things you haven’t even thought about.

3. A Special Trip. Perhaps you are grown up and want to share a very special time with Dad. How about arranging a trip for just the two of you to spend some quality time together? A great place to go is Disney World since you probably went there together when you were a child.

So this might be a great way to relive your childhood a little bit and spend some great time with Dad. He’ll be sure to appreciate it and will find the time spent together an unforgettable experience.

A good rule for presentations using slides is to follow the 10-20-30 rule suggested by Guy Kawasaki. Ten slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font. This idea works.

A good pitch can easily be covered in ten slides. I learned as I started implementing and perfecting this rule that most of the time I could get my material comfortably into three slides. In order to do that you have to know your subject matter cold. You should never rely on presentations as your queue for what to say. That is how we get to those enormous slide decks in the first place. We, on the sales end, are loaded with information we think will convince and move someone to action. On the other hand, the person listening to us is really in a state of courtesy. He or she granted us an audience, but they are not necessarily convinced we have a real solution to their problem yet. These people naturally want to minimize their time investment because they are very busy. Accommodate them and get to the point quickly.

When you do good research, listen carefully, and ask good questions, the content on the slides will be less important because you will have that information already well-stored in your mind. As a result, rather than putting the focus on the slide-show, you will be able to keep the focus on you and the interactive dialogue needed in order to pick up on buying signals or important objections.

The most impressive sales process I ever witnessed occurred on a very large deal we worked on with a multi-billion dollar telecommunications company. We used two slides, talked for 60 minutes, and this was done with a group of 8+ senior managers sitting around a table. At the end, we were enthusiastically moved to the next level of the buying process for additional discussions. What really impresses me with that presentation is that we did not even use the computer. The two slides were printed. We walked them through the slides. Interestingly, those senior leaders were fixated on those two relatively simple pieces of paper. They focused much harder on the content of those pages than they would have if they were watching a magic screen with fun animations and a few poor attempts to be funny. This was a powerful lesson. Be concise. Be real. Be alert. Connect to your audience. Presentations done over the computer on a big screen rarely achieve those aims. Find ways to be personable and highly interactive.

In another situation, as the Vice President of Information Technology Operations, I had to help the CEO of a company understand why moving to a Voice over IP solution would be valuable. The CEO had a feeling it would be important, but he did not know how or why. I used three slides to communicate the complexities, the nature of the benefit, and the potential implementation strategy. The reason the method of using very few slides works with senior leaders is they do not have time to focus on a ton of detail. In the same way, having few slides gives you great control. If you put too much content into the slide it may cause the audience to drift into areas that are tangential and not relevant to the mutual agenda. The best thing is to keep your audience focused on precisely the issues at hand by keeping slides to a minimum and only use them to augment what you are saying.

You might want to watch Guy Kawasaki’s presentation on this topic to Stanford students at this link Click Here. Guy is a great presenter and entertainer. This short video is worth watching.

Can an automated webinar presentation – run weekly – really bring in an extra $25,000 in sales you otherwise might have totally missed? You bet… and $25,000 is on the conservative side, depending on the scale of your business.

So what is it?

An automated webinar presentation consists of prerecording a webinar, and then setting time sequence parameters to have it run automatically. The benefit to doing it this way, as opposed to the traditional way of airing webinars, is that the host doesn’t have to physically run the webinar. You can simply automate the entire process using modern webinar hosting tools.

Many marketers are apprehensive about using this technology because the event may come across as being prerecorded. On the contrary, an automated webinar presentation can be fine-tuned to look and feel extremely genuine – in terms of appearing live. There are a number of techniques that can be utilized to give the presentation a “real-time” feel, which doesn’t come across as being contrived (prerecorded).

Many online marketers have already embraced the idea of using webinar prerecords and have put them into their sales funnels. What this means is that once they get a new opt in, an email sequence starts running immediately, inviting the sales leads straight to these promotional webinar events. Once there, the viewers are offered additional products and services – leading to higher sales conversion and increased revenues.

Marketers who have not yet embraced the science of the automated webinar presentation may want to reconsider. As the online market grows, increasing time demands are continually being placed on marketers to better manage their prospects. Automating sales funnels, along with webinars, is providing many of the solutions. Not to mention, it frees up time for entrepreneurs to develop future business ideas, instead of having them manage remedial tasks.

Automated webinar presentations offer their greatest benefit because they need to be setup once. Beyond that point these events will run automatically without the further need for intervention, or maintenance. The first step in developing automated webinars is to find a quality webinar hosting service provider. Although a handful of these exist, finding the right one does require some serious consideration. There are good ones out there, if you know what to look for.

To recap, an automated webinar presentation can give you a competitive edge, while simultaneously freeing up your time to focus more on other marketing efforts. These prerecorded webinars can be produced at your leisure, and with focused messaging in mind. Once set-up, they never have to be adjusted again. The possibilities become endless as new webinars are created to compliment older ones – all running in perfect harmony. They can each be configured to run any time of the week, all based on your sale funnel’s parameters. There isn’t much that can’t be done with this new and innovative technology.

Blackberry, e-mail, mortgage payments, stuff; when you step up to make your presentation no-one in the room is thinking about you, they’re all thinking about themselves. They’re all in an information overload stupor, and you’re potentially the final piece of information that just might break the metaphorical camel’s back. Unless you use tactics that prod and poke them awake. Here’s how.

Recently Seth Godin, author of marketing book ‘Purple Cow’, wrote this in his blog “No-one cares about you”, unfortunately he’s right. Yet many business presenters start their presentation by saying “I’m here today…, here’s my agenda for today…, and I’d like to explain…” And right there within the first few moments of their speech, less than a second, they’ve lost their audience.

The audience were hoping it was going to be about them not you.

That’s the first thing you can do to keep your audience engaged, simply put, turn everything you’ve written about you and make it about them. In-fact, make a vow today, that never again in your business presentations you will use the word ‘I’. Do you promise?

You’ve just been handed the next clue to keeping them engaged, did you get it? Start each section of your presentation with a question for your audience, and back it up with the promise of a benefit. You see when you ask a question it makes the audience want to know the answer, and even better if that answer is going to help them live better, get richer, or save money.

Let’s look an example from a recent presentation on call centre improvement.

“Are you aware that targets used to motivate staff in call centres are actually the cause poor morale? Stay tuned for the next five minutes and I will tell you why you shouldn’t use targets, give you an alternative which will put plutonium fuelled rocked under the seats of your call centre employees.”

And the final alternative to wedging match sticks under their eyelids: use action verbs and colourful language. If you were paying attention, were you? It’s in the previous sentence.

The sentence would have been fine with the words
“And the final alternative to keeping them awake”; but would it have painted a picture of you physically keeping your audience awake with matches? Probably not.

So in summary:

• Make it about them not you
• Start with a question
• Use action verbs and colourful language.

Oh and one more thing, summarise regularly.