When asked to deliver a professional presentation many of us can come up with a collection of thoughts we want to share with the audience. However, these often feel like a string of sentences that don’t necessarily produce a cohesive whole. And certainly don’t captivate. So how do you turn your ideas in an effective presentation?

Public speaking is an art and may take years to master at the level of a professional orator. However, all of us can incorporate a few key concepts and make our presentations more effective and captivating. There are four major characteristics of an effective professional presentation: it is informative, engaging, well-timed, and contains two or three captivating, memorable sentences.

1. An effective presentation needs to be informative. It delivers information, data, graphs, techniques, and other components which are of interest to the target audience and have the potential to inform, improve, or even transform professional practices. Make sure the information comes in a variety of formats, such as statistics, applications, examples, and does not overwhelm the audience with excessive volume.
2. Successful presentations are engaging to the audience and maintain their interest. In some situations it may be appropriate to solicit audience questions or participation. If you are looking for an interactive effect it is preferable to ask open ended questions, such as “would someone like to provide an example of this?” rather than yes/ no questions, such as “have you ever encountered this?”. At other times the presenter may role-play or otherwise practice a tool with the audience to reinforce the message and break down any barriers to application such as unstated doubt about effectiveness or difficulty imagining how to actually apply the concept.
3. A skillful presentation should be well-timed. This means two separate things. On one hand, it is important to monitor the length of the presentation to ensure that its duration is not so short that it leaves the audience with a lot of questions or a sense of incomplete coverage of the topic. At the same time, the presentation should not be so long that it bores, becomes diluted or circular, or introduces too many subjects at once. An additional aspect of good timing has to do with the choice of the subject itself. It is crucial for a presenter to have good awareness of the types of experiences, attitudes, levels of knowledge, etc. the audience may share in order to ensure that the topic (good as it may be) does not address an outdated issue or jumps ahead of the current interest of the audience.
4. In the long run, good presentations are remembers as a set of captivating, memorable sentences. The audience will quickly forget the majority of the content of any presentation and will likely not review most of the notes taken. However, when a skillful public speaker populates the presentation with two or three fascinating, humorous, insightful sentences, those stand an excellent chance of being remembered. Cautiously choose which sentences to emphasize – they need to be the most important or most innovative part of your presentation. Make sure the sentences you pick are short, flow well, and don’t use jargon. Incorporate each sentence in two or three parts of the presentation. These should come up as a natural summary of the concept rather than purposeful repetition.

Short presentations are becoming an integral way of communicating information to today’s busy professionals. Even if public speaking never becomes your favorite with a little effort and attention to the four components above, any presentation you deliver can be taken from mediocre to captivating and effective.

Have you ever wondered what clients get out of a website? Do they simply see a site as a listing of information the company wants to share with them? Or does the Web convey a deeper message about the firm? A recent study in the European Journal of Information Systems focused on scientifically examining the impressions that people form after having viewed a company website. The results were fascinating.

Creating a website is about impression management. This concept has been turned into a virtual science by marketing experts, psychologists, and technical specialists. The strategy of both multinational corporations as well as small companies can be greatly enhanced by a well-developed website. The study found that after viewing a website people constructed a detailed image of the organization including assumptions about the experience, innovation, competence, and customer-orientation of the company. These impressions stemmed from features such as the site’s content, graphics, layout, external links, fonts, and use of advanced technology.

An important insight gleaned for psychology is that users tend to approach a website with a certain generic image in mind, called schema, which serves to shape expectations. As long as the site meets the general expectation of the clients, people’s minds will fill in the missing information to match what would be found in comparable sites. This has two implications for the company creating a website:

1. Make sure that your overall site design is consistent with other companies in your industry so that viewing it activates a desirable image (schema) in your viewer’s mind.
2. For business characteristics that are very important to you, do not leave room for the viewer’s mind to fill in the gaps but provide the information yourself. For example, if you want to create an impression of customer-orientation, create a publish feedback/ contact link and explicitly state your commitment to customer service.

Creating a website for your business can be a daunting task. However, with some help from the latest research any company can dress up its site and achieve the image that would best serve its business purposes.

Regardless of all your advertising and efforts to bring new customers to your online business, your success will depend on your ability to attract the attention of new viewers. The marketplace today is replete with new businesses trying to get noticed. Clearly, this is a tougher task than some may think as about 50% of all new businesses will fail by the end of their first year and the number will be close to 90% after 5 years.

So how do you go about helping your online business stand out? Here are five tips to help your endeavor:

1.    Keep some tried and true basics. An unfortunate number of ‘new age’ professionals have started neglecting the foundation principles of good presentation. When dressing up your website, follow a consistent layout, keep the colors neutral enough that they are easy to read, don’t experiment too much with font styles, and don’t try to cram too much information into a front page. Readers’ brains respond better to a presentation that follows familiar patterns. If the information is easy to physiologically process after a quick scan, it is much more likely to catch a client’s attention than if special effort is needed to adjust to colors, text wrapping, etc.
2.    Find your edge. Keeping the traditional basics lays the foundation to get you noticed. Your unique edge will help you stand out. It is relatively easy to let your imagination roam free when working on a site. Find a graphic that truly captures the spirit of your business, use a (short) catch phrase, or give the viewer a taste of your unique ideas. However, remember this is a first impression only. There is such a thing as too much edge and it can hurt you.
3.    Invest time in research. Give your customers a sense that you have noticed them, together with their interests and preferences, and they will notice you. The hurried way in which many new ventures are started today leave a lot of consumers at least mildly dissatisfied with how not unique they are. A little time put into research early on will spare you a lot of time in follow up investigations and attempts to salvage a loss.
4.    Practice customer service. Customer service is an art, it’s a skill, it’s a must. If you don’t provide a superior experience to your customers, be sure that your competitors will. So create your website in a way that is user-friendly and provides easy links to help navigate the site and communicate with you. Respond to inquiries as soon as possible or post clear timelines for the frequency with which inquiries are addressed. You never know which email inquiry comes from a potential investor who is feeling you out before making a business proposition.
5.    Reserve a couple of tricks. This is the test of true creativity. The challenge is to keep your audience interested after having caught their initial attention. For your online business this may mean setting up a feature that activates a particularly appealing graphic for any user which has lingered 20 seconds on your front page.  If you have banner ads, you may want to adjust the ad sequence and duration to first show those of the most reputable or relevant advertisers you have. This may indirectly increase the time the viewer spends on your site. Your initial presentation has already been noticed, the final touch you add will make it actually stand out.

First impressions and the moments immediately following those are crucial for the success of your online business. It is often in that period that your customers will be making a (not completely conscious) decision whether to give you a further chance. Take a creative but moderate stance to get yourself noticed and you will have a larger audience to dazzle with your unique ideas.

There is a large amount of people year after year who start up their own businesses so they can enjoy the benefits to be had in working for themselves. Are you an individual who would also like to kiss your 40-hour a week job goodbye? You don’t have to feel alone; there are thousands of individuals who are just like you, who would like to be in the position to do that very thing!

Taking hold of the opportunity, and starting an exciting business venture of your very own may not be near as hard as you may think. You just might be surprised at the information you will be able to find, right in the comfort and privacy of your own home. There is a plethora of information that is available on the informational highway of the World Wide Web that is very detailed with helpful information and great ideas of ways that you can start up your own business. There are also a large amount of different support groups, blogs, and online chats that are available, where you will have the opportunity to talk to other like-minded individuals. This can be extremely helpful in learning a variety of tips and ideas for starting your own home based business.

There is also a large amount of opportunities available where you can work online owning your own web-based business. Websites that are already ready to go with existing clientele and products, so that you do not have to worry with all of the technical aspects of setting your site up. The possibilities are literally endless on the types of businesses you can run from your very own website.

People today have so many more possibilities than individuals just a few short years ago. The sky is the limit when it comes to starting your own business.