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If you’ve been dreading online presenting but everyone is telling you, “You must do it!” there is hope. Use these 5-fast steps to feel confident and comfortable in online presentations.

Entrepreneurs, small business owners, and professional service professionals are searching for new skills. They know that online presenting is a must to promote their business. Getting found online is essential to survive in today’s market.

But what if you’re crazy busy running your business and don’t have time for presentation skills training? Fortunately, now it’s easy and fast to learn new skills to get ahead.

Use this 5-step plan to get confident, and get going. In minutes, you’ll discover how to present your business to your target buyers.

Step 1. Identify Your Story
No matter how long or how short you’ve been in business, you must identify your story. What is it that makes you unique? Why are you uniquely positioned to serve your customers? Why should prospects choose you over all others?

If you’ve been in business for decades, give yourself permission to start fresh. Imagine that you are starting from scratch. Do you love the name of your firm? Are you thrilled with your logo? Are you certain your brand matches the target buyers you want to attract? By taking a fresh look at your business, you’ll discover new keys for telling a successful story.

If you’re just starting out, look around. Discover who your competition is. What can you learn from them? What are they doing that you should emulate? What are they doing that you should avoid? You have fresh eyes to see opportunity. Jump on it and build your story on your energetic enthusiasm.

Step 2. Simplify With Pictures
Your customers and prospects all share one thing in common. They are suffering from information overload. If you want to appeal to busy buyers of your products and services do this: Simplify.

The fastest way to share your message and value is with a picture. Show the value you provide. Sketch it out at a whiteboard. Show it in a diagram. Prepare a one-pager chart to hand out. Repeat this graphic online as an instant download.

Make your business, products and services easy for anyone to understand. The more you do this, the faster you can expect people will want to work with you.

Step 3. Create Irresistible Information
A lot of business owners make a mistake of thinking that their products and services are the most important thing to present to clients. It’s true, right?

Wrong.

As much as you’re excited and on fire about the value of what you offer, take a step further. Look at the big problems and worries facing your clients. Provide valuable information about specific issues and share this with prospects and clients.

The result? They will find your educational offerings irresistible. And they are likely to share it with others. Make this easy and simple for people to do. This is where you can use all the social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share the value of your business.

Step 4. Learn Visual Storytelling
With these steps in place, it’s time to learn real-world skills of interactive visual storytelling. Make certain you can pick up a marker and show your business value on the spot. Oops…can’t draw? Don’t worry. In a short targeted online presentation training, you’ll learn how to map out information in pictures and words. Everyone will think you’ve gone to art school.

Hint: it’s not the beauty of your visuals. It’s the interaction that takes place while you’re showing your story to clients and prospects.

Step 5. Train Your Staff
When people come in contact with your business, who do they meet? They may meet your office manager, staff and sales reps before they meet you. That’s why it is essential to train your staff.

Prepare them with the skills to present the distinct value of your business in a lively engaging way. Arm them with tools, skills training and practice so they are confident and conversant.

By training your staff, you’re preparing the foundation for tremendous success.

If growing your business is important to you, take these steps today. The faster you start building your presentation skills, the faster you’ll attract target buyers online.

Home Based Business

More and more people today have been setting up their own businesses and learning about marketing small businesses online. Times have changed since the advent of the internet and there are a few elements to any successful marketing campaign that I’ll share with you here.

Web Presence

The point of marketing small businesses online is to drive traffic to your site and hopefully make a few conversions. A conversion rate calculates how many people must visit your site before you make a sale or generate a new lead. The following methods are each valuable methods of increasing your web presence.

Top Five Methods

1. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the single most important element to any online marketing campaign. By optimizing your site for search engine crawlers, you can improve your ranking in those search engines and generate long term organic web traffic.

2. Search engine PPC (pay per click) advertising is another way you can increase your presence. You set up your account with the search engines, choose your keywords and determine which sites you want your ad displayed. For everyone who clicks on one of your ads and lands on your site, you are charged for that. If no one clicks, you owe nothing.

3. Social networking is quickly becoming an amazingly powerful marketing tool. Setting up free accounts on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and HubPages you can start promoting yourself and your products. Include social bookmarking buttons on each of your web pages to encourage others to spread the news.

4. Article marketing campaigns in another excellent way to improve your web presence. By submitting good quality and informative articles to directories such as EzineArticles, you are not only presenting yourself as an expert to human readers, you are also creating valuable backlinks to your site which can greatly improve your ranking.

5. Commenting on blogs, forums and discussion groups is another powerful method of increasing your presence. Leave regular comments on sites that are related to your market’s niche. Doing this will also create valuable backlinks.

It Takes Time

Marketing small businesses on the internet takes patience and dedication. There is not overnight success, not even online. Be prepared to spend time each day building on each of the five principles. Keep at it and before long you’ll be reaping the rewards.

This Raymond Carver poem entitled “Happiness” was the opening to my women’s writing group this past week:

So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
The are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

It is not a complicated poem — the moment it describes is quite ordinary, really — but this poem generated about an hour of conversation. What is happiness? When do we feel the most happy? Why do we struggle to find, recognize and keep those moments? What are some things we can do to maximize our opportunities for true happiness?

As you might suspect, these are universal questions that extend far beyond one poem, or one class. For many of us, these questions emerge in one form or another almost daily. I heard from some of you last week, and two things really struck me about your thoughts on being present: 1.) Every person associated real happiness with very simple things, and 2.) those flashes of pure joy, pure calm, pure bliss all came from paying attention to and naming the small details in those simple moments.

Those precious experiences included a list of things that would make lovely poems in and of themselves: a morning cup of coffee; a bowl of chocolate ice cream; listening to a cat purr while curled up contentedly on the couch; going for a walk in the evening and watching the sun descend slowly; a mother noticing the warm smell of the top of her baby’s head; and catching the second when friends are seated around the dinner table and noticing three things — the candlelight flickering on people’s faces, the sound of utensils clinking on plates, and the comfort of familiar voices and laughter.

We do not live in a culture that readily acknowledges the urgent value of the present moment. We tend to be obsessed with the past or to fixate on the future — both realms over which we have no control. And of course, it isn’t the things themselves — in the past or future — but our addiction to trying to control or change them that cause the suffering.

The 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi had this to say about recognizing the sacredness of each moment by letting go of what we cannot control and embracing what we can:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty & frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that we often attach an idea of happiness to a quantity of things that could or might happen — I would be more happy if… — but the moments that we recognize as actually making us happy are pedestrian and predictable. The sun sets every night. Cats sleep on couches every day. We eat a meal every day. But we never say stuff like, “I would be truly happy if the sun would set tonight.”

If we did that, then, really, what excuse would we have left for not being content, for not being madly in love with the hours given to us?

So perhaps what we are missing in our quest for happiness is just the willingness to stop and call out the names of the ordinary things that are filling us with true joy. The study of our brain’s chemistry tells us that when we do this, we are simultaneously releasing a whole raft of chemicals that help us to ward off things like depression and anxiety and we are training our brains to think that way again and again by growing new connections that reinforce the activities that bring us pleasure and contentment. Our lives tell us that it isn’t even the moments themselves but our attention to them that really opens us to the experience of happiness.