When you think about it, the end goal of most presentations is to convince, whether that means convincing your audience to agree with your point of view, or convincing them to take the action you want them to take. Professional presenters with vast amounts of public speaking experience are usually great story tellers. In order for your presentations to come across convincingly to your audiences, they require the focus, logic and sequence of any engaging story.

You might or might not be aware of falling victim to some or all of the common mistakes that initially trip up novice presenters. Most of these learners’ mistakes relate directly back to the ethos of story telling in presentations – or lack of it. When preparing for forthcoming presentations, or looking back retrospectively at old ones, you might give yourself a confidence boost by answering a few hypothetical questions honestly.

Are you prepared to offer appropriate answers to the broad range of questions that might be posed by your audience?

If not, might your inability to appropriately answer audience questions be due to a lack of flow in your presentation?

Are your slides truly sequentially ordered?

Are you sometimes guilty of randomly leaping from one aspect of your subject matter to another without any logical connection between the two?

Do you put yourself in danger of leaving gaping holes in your presentations by trying to sound too clever, for example, by presenting answers and conclusions that lack supporting evidence?

Do you try too hard to amplify your knowledge of your subject matter by including information that is indirectly related but not directly relevant to your presentations?

Searching questions indeed and you might be wondering how they relate to the harnessing of your story telling skills to enhance your public speaking effectiveness. They do, as they are all about focus, logic and sequence:-

Focus – keep to the point. Identify information that seem interesting and smart, but realistically bears little relevance to the core messages you aim to send. Once you have identified these curve balls, eradicate them, even if you desperately want to include them because you think they sound good.

Logic – tempting as it is to provide answers and conclusions first, followed by rhyme and reason afterwards, it is illogical. Notice how the stories contained in your presentations flow so much more smoothly when you simply reverse the order of certain slides. Questions first, arguments and evidence in the middle, answers and solutions last but not least.

Sequence – stories lacking in sequential orderliness are confusing, often to the degree that they might initially capture attention, but ultimately fail to retain it. It is impossible for you to over check that your presentations are sequentially correct. When going to the time and trouble that preparation for successful presentations demands, it is a crying shame if your subject matter is right, but the sequence in which you present it is erratic and disjointed.

Your ability to recognise the mistakes you are prone to making, coupled with your willingness to improve your public speaking performances, equates to half your battle being won. So sit tight with a copy of your presentation in front of you and see how you can make instantaneously dramatic differences.

The idea of making money online is enticing because it is something we can do from the comfort of our own home. Many of us could use the additional cash to help pay off our credit cards, save for a family vacation, buy that car you have always wanted or whatever else it is you want. Working from home on the internet is a great way to make the extra cash without the fuss of going out and finding a part-time job. There are tons of ways to go about doing this, but here are the top 3 ways to start your home based business online:

1. Leveraging Someone Else’s Hard Work and Success – Become an Affiliate

This is touted as the quickest way to start an online business from home. The reason is because you won’t have to spend the time and effort creating your own product that you aren’t sure is going to sell, sign up an auto responder and shopping cart, worry about refunds or figure out how to create a website or how to host your website.

Actually, you can create a free website and spend a small amount of time searching for products that offer top quality and are already selling well, which means that there are people out there willing to purchase this product. The product should cure a specific problem that people are willing to pay for the answer on how to solve them.

Your job is to help the seller get this product out there by signing up to become an affiliate. No inventory, no creation struggles, no shopping carts, no hassle!

Becoming an affiliate means you will earn a percent of the sale price every time you direct a buyer to the product you are recommending. The average percent is typically 50%, and most people who have affiliates also give you excellent promotional material for you to help you make your affiliate sales easier.

2. Selling Someone Else’s Creation – Resale Rights Products

Products that come with resale rights are those that you buy once and can sell and keep 100% of the profits. You aren’t allowed to make changes, but it’s a quick way to make money online without spending a ton of time trying to create a product.

This method will require you to have a domain name, web hosting account and payment processor, like PayPal, in order to set-up your mini-site that you will use to sell your product. It’s not super difficult to set all this up, but if it is your first time doing any of this, it might take a few hours to set up the first time. Good news is, once you figure it out, you can replicate the process many times with different products.

A great thing about resale rights products is that they typically come with a mini-site that has a sales letter ready for a couple little tweaks for you to make. Writing your own sales letter is an art and can take many hours or having someone else create it can cost you hundreds of dollars. All you do is change the name of the seller, insert your payment processor information and upload it to your website and there you go. Drive traffic to your site and you are in business!

3. Tapping Your Unique Skills – Create Your Own Product

The third method of starting a home based business online is to actually create your own product. It is how you can make the most money out of these top three methods discussed here, but it is going to take way more of your time to create it. There are many forms of products to sell from an ebook, to a video or audio interview to an actual physical product. Just make sure you product provides a solution that people are willing to pay for.

If you have never done anything like this before, then you are probably going to spend a fair amount of time working on it. Do some research on types of products and see what type fits your personality best. If you aren’t fond of writing then the audio or video product is going to be a much better fit. If you are intimidated by the thought of starting completely from scratch, look into buying PLR (Private Label Rights) products that you can use as a base to edit with your unique view on the subject. This can save you hours of research time if you find a high quality product.

Although it might seem like the other two ideas above are simpler and less time consuming, being able to set your own price and keep 100% of the profits makes this method pay off in the end. Plus, no one else out there will have this exact product to offer, so your content will be completely original. That formula allows for the biggest profit for you in the long run.

Once you get going, you could even sign people up to be your affiliate, wanting to sell your product for you. Having affiliates means more money in your pocket with very little extra work on your part. Who wouldn’t like that?

Are these the only ways to make money online? Absolutely not, but they are the top 3 quickest ways to start a home based business online because they are fairly simple and you can have the up and running in a week or month, depending on how much time you work on them.

Ok, here’s the bottom line: if you are thinking about starting a home based business online, the possibilities are endless. The only real limit is your imagination, ingenuity and effort.

Salary Negotiations Tip #1: Know your value and be able to clearly articulate the returns that an employer can expect from hiring you. Never forget that as an employee you are investment. When a company hires you, they are making a financial investment through the compensation and benefits that they provide you (as well as many other expenses involved in hiring), and they are doing so with the expectation that their returns on that investment (ROI) will be greater than the cost. It is up to you to know what your worth is, to make sure the potential employer is clear on what that is, and to make sure that they pay you the best possible price for your contributions.

Action Step: Document 6-12 of your most impressive career achievements. Jot notes about the challenges and problems that you were facing, the actions you took to meet those challenges, and the results of those actions. Now quantify those results. Dollar figures or percentages of increase or decrease that represent dollar figures are often the most powerful way to present results. But, even if you don’t have dollar figures, there are often other quantifiable measures that you can use to express the value of your contributions and achievements in the workplace. Now, review all your success stories and practice until you have committed the details of each to memory and are comfortable discussing all aspects of them. These are the stories that you will use during your interviews with companies, to establish and illustrate your financial worth and your proven ability to deliver a strong ROI to your employers.

Salary Negotiations Tip #2: Wait until the right time to talk about salary with a potential employer. Wait until a job offer has already been made. When a potential employer brings up salary prior to a job offer, it is almost always for the purpose of screening you. Before the job offer, if you answer a salary-related question with an actual dollar amount and you give a figure lower than their range, believe it or not, you are likely to be screened out. Why? Because the employer may think that your low amount indicates that you are not capable of handling the responsibilities of the position. And sadly, even if you do make the cut and eventually win a job offer, your salary offer will be held down by the low-ball figure you mentioned too early in the process. If you mention a figure that is too high, you will also be screened out. At this early stage you have almost certainly not had the opportunity to establish your worth and value to the employer. So wait…postpone discussion of salary until you have a job offer.

Action Step: Think of ways that you might respond to questions about salary and practice saying them out loud until you are comfortable doing so. You’ll want to find your own natural words for this, but here is one suggestion for postponing when you are asked that inevitable question: “Salary? If I’m the right person for the job I’m confident that we can come to an agreement. Before we discuss salary, let’s make certain that I am the right person.” Or, “I’m sure you pay a fair salary, and I clearly understand that I need to make you more money than I cost, so I’m sure that when the time comes, we can come to a fair salary agreement.” You could soften either of these statements with a preface statement, such as “I’m very interested in this position and I’m a little concerned that a discussion of salary at this point could screen me out or box me in…”

Salary Negotiations Tip #3: When you are offered the job, and it is time to talk salary, let them talk first. If you have been offered the job and have now been asked about salary, just respond with a simple: “What range did you have in mind?” If you have accomplished what you set out to do and have clearly established your value and worth during the interview stages, you should have a fairly easy time getting the employer to state either a salary figure or range. Now, put a look of thoughtful consideration on your face, and restate the figure or the highest figure of the range with a question in your tone. In other words, say something like “Hmmm…$50,000…” – and then, just be quiet and look thoughtful.

Action Step: Prepare yourself mentally to be comfortable with silence. Know in advance that the silence is necessary and a key part of your negotiations. If you must, keep tally quietly in your head for a count of 30. The most likely outcome of your silence is that you will make the employer slightly nervous that they will lose you as an employee and all of the benefits that hiring you will bring them. Don’t be surprised if, in response to your silence and thoughtful stance, the employer proactively raises the offer before you even have a chance to say anything.

Salary Negotiations Tip #4: Be prepared with market research. With the Internet, you have numerous resources available to determine the salary ranges and all the related salary statistics for people who do the type of work you do in your geographic area. Use the resources available to you and be armed with the facts when you enter salary negotiations. The salaries that others are making are just one piece of the puzzle, but these statistics are an important piece of the puzzle. Having printed research from reliable sources that you can reference to support your desired salary during negotiations, and to help you realistically evaluate job offers that have been made to you, will be invaluable at this stage of the negotiation game.

Action Step: Go to the Internet now and Google “salary research.” Spend an hour or so researching, compiling, and printing salary research relevant to your situation. Be willing to pay for a comprehensive salary report. It will be money well spent and it will give you the ability to respond confidently to a job offer and associated salary offer with a researched response. If the offer made is just what you were hoping for or higher, go ahead and seal the deal. But, if it is a little low, you now have the researched knowledge to respond with a sincere “From my research, I estimate that positions like this for a person with my qualifications pay between X and Y. What can you do in that range?”

Salary Negotiations Tip #5: Remember that monetary compensation in the form of a salary is only part of the deal. What other benefits and perks might be important to you? Once you have come to an agreement with the employer on an actual salary figure, it is time to continue your negotiations to win an offer complete with the benefits that are most important to you.

Action Step: Take some time right now to think about the benefits that would be important to you. Take out a sheet of paper and list them so that you are prepared to discuss and negotiate them when the time comes. Examples may include sales commissions, performance bonuses, insurance, vacation time, a flexible work schedule, professional memberships, expenses for relocation, investment programs, use of a company car, special training or education benefits, and company discounts.