The Cold Turnkey

In the present day, as countless companies & moguls are looking towards web video websites as a brilliant place to upload content to grab the interest of their potential customers, it’s necessary to differentiate the key principles of using online video marketing websites.

Here are a few crucial items you have to be acquainted with before you start to post professional videos on web video websites.

Always try to use promotional videos that offer value added information to your audience - Some business people erroneously presume you can merely add any sort of advertisement on a video portal, but nothing could be any further from the truth. Each and every video must offer some worthwhile information to the desired market, or start topic of debate.

Undertake some brand of market research on the video channels before distributing your very 1st video - It’s a good idea to allocate some time typing your market’s important keywords into MSN, in an effort to learn what other professional videos are currently available. Then write down the profile names of the most important companies in your niche. Possibly down the line you can become involved in a joint venture or have some sort of cooperation with these organisations.

Bear in mind that each & every video channel has a community built into it - Because of this you are suggested to respect the other members and it’s suggested that you write positive annotations to your rivals’ videos. First & foremost you need to be a member of the society, supplying feedback, ideas etc. And only then must you think of being a marketer & start to advertise your very own 1 & items

Commit yourself to creating quite a lot of promotional videos - You should have a clear strategy for making & posting various videos. If not, your company’s page on the video portals will give the impression of being bare if it merely has one solitary video live. So, assign extra time preparing the making of a number of short videos, instead of one significantly lengthy video. Enhance your businesses online Return of Investment with professional video production offered by Vidify.

Online video marketing is one of the most efficient & quickest ways of promoting your organisation just now.

You probably already know how essential uploading your company’s Internet video clip is. For an organisation’s online marketing manager, short format videos are a valuable medium that can effortlessly capture your potential clients’ attention & raise the overall amount of visits to your organisations site. Online videos are tremendously effective in holding the target consumers’ fairly short attention span. Furthermore, if codes are adopted and online video sharing is endorsed, short format video commercials can be a superb way to get one-way inbound links & thus positively affect your sites rankings on the search engines.

If truth behold, Internet video clips have become a useful tool for business or self endorsement. The following are a number of tips to circulating your own short format videos.

Firstly, you can post your Internet videos on your own company website; but this would involve you to find your own video hosting arrangements. Ask your online hosting solutions company if video downloading or video streaming options are supported.

Video downloading is where your visitors need to download your video commercial to their laptops hard drive. They need to save the Web video clip to their own personal computer before they can play it using their computer’s video player or a downloadable video player application. There are hundreds video downloading service merchants that cost nothing. There’s also a progressive downloading mechanism where your Internet viewers can play the short format promotional videos while downloading them.

While video streaming on the other hand entirely does away with the need to download the professional videos and lets instantaneous playback so it offers the most worth to your web viewers. Naturally, getting a video hosting business that supports video streaming can cost you a pretty penny.

Finally, the more fashionable way to distribute promotional videos is posting your sites to video distribution sites which have their very own video hosting platform. These web sites cost you nothing to become a member and will at times pay you to post video clips. They also have an immense market base and reach; for instance, YouTube receives in the region of thirteen million Web visits each month. Click here to find out about Vidify’s video production and marketing services.

There are many schools of thought as to how to address one’s public speaking fears.

For instance some therapists advocate elaborate skills training and preparation. Others ask you to do repetitive relaxation and imagery exercises. Others take you through endless hours of self awareness exercises and so on.

Unfortunately most of these types of approaches require a great deal of ongoing effort. Additionally the results that they yield are dependent on that effort.

The reason that so much on going effort is required with these strategies is clear. It’s because the root cause of the anxiety is still present within you. In other words it is not being directly addressed or for that matter cleared.

My experience helping individuals address public speaking and other phobias or fears over the last ten years has revealed that the root cause is always the result of some negative belief that the individual holds in their unconscious mind.

Once the belief is uncovered and its underlying illogical nature is exposed the belief vanishes completely along with the negative emotions that it was causing. In this case it would be the public speaking phobia.

What’s even more interesting is that most people who have such fears all hold similar negative beliefs about speaking in public.

This means that when I am working in a group (say a workshop or teleclass) helping a given individual release their negative belief my work is having a direct and positive effect on all the other participants no matter how many are present (say 2 or 200).

The effect is such that the other individuals need not even be actively listening to what is being said. That is because the negative belief is shared at a level in each individual that goes beyond the words themselves.

Although I won’t get into the technical details of how this works I will say that we are connected through what I call an “Energy Field” much like the electromagnetic fields that many of our electronic devices use to communicate with each other.

If you are interested in reading more about this phenomenon you may read my article “Some Evidence of How We Are Spiritually Connected” here in this ezine.

If you do suffer from a public speaking anxiety, phobia or fear you may wish to visit the web link below and register for this teleclass experience that I know will not only amaze you it will also change you life forever.

Dr. Nick Arrizza is trained in Chemical Engineering, Business Management & Leadership, Medicine and Psychiatry. He is an Energy Psychiatrist, Healer, Key Note Speaker,Editor of a New Ezine Called “Spirituality And Science” (which is requesting high quality article submissions) Author of “Esteem for the Self: A Manual for Personal Transformation” (available in ebook format on his web site), Stress Management Coach, Peak Performance Coach & Energy Medicine Researcher, Specializes in Life and Executive Performance Coaching, is the Developer of a powerful new tool called the Mind Resonance Process(TM) that helps build physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well being by helping to permanently release negative beliefs, emotions, perceptions and memories. He holds live workshops, international telephone coaching sessions and international teleconference workshops on Physical. Emotional, Mental and Spiritual Well Being.

Web Site: http://www.telecoaching4u.com/PublicSpeaking.htm

If there’s one important reason why you need to write effectively in the workplace, it is this: the quality of your writing imprints a lasting impression on the reader. This reader may be your boss, a client, or a person who is ready to make a billion dollar business deal with you.

Have you ever read a poorly-written document that made you lose interest right away? It was so poorly-written that you lost trust in the author and asked yourself why the author was wasting your time? How about those junk e-mails that sneak into your junk box like annoying cockroaches? You know the ones I’m referring to: the ones pitching vitamins, software, and sex aids. These e-mails are the biggest showcase of writing blunders, stricken to death with grammar mistakes, misspellings, and sloppy sentences. I doubt these e-mails pull a sale because their poor writing style immediately alienates the reader.

What impression does your writing leave on your boss, clients, or co-workers? Does your writing alienate readers, cause you to lose sales or clients, or cost you job promotions? Or does your writing build streams of loyal readers, increase sales for the company, and help you earn six figures a year at your job?

Whatever type of writing you do in the workplace, always know this reality: readers believe the quality of your writing reflects your skills, work ethics, and integrity as a person. If you write eloquently, clearly, and lively, the reader trusts you and you are able to build rapport quickly. If your writing is sloppy, disorganized, and riddled with errors, the reader assumes the rest of your work is flawed, your work ethics are flawed, and perhaps as a person you are flawed. Why should this reader waste his time reading the rest of your junk or even do business with you?

This article provides fail-safe strategies to help refine your writing and help you to communicate with clarity, simplicity, and impact so you will never write junk again. You will learn five masterful steps to guide you in planning, writing, and refining an article; and you will learn how to avoid common writing mistakes.

AIM! FIRE! FIRE!

To become a superb writer, your first task is to establish your aim.

Yiddish novelist, dramatist and essayist, Sholem Asch, once said, “Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.”

What message do you want to convey with your writing?

To establish your aim, ask yourself:

1) “Why am I writing this document?”
2) “What do I want to communicate?”
3) “Do I want to inform, educate, report, persuade, challenge, or entertain?”

Developing your aim will help you to adopt the best writing style for your reader. For example, an educational document will likely be more formal than one written for entertaining.

CONNECT WITH YOUR READERS

To write effectively, you need to connect strongly with your readers. Ask yourself:

1) “For whom am I writing this? Will I be writing for colleagues, my supervisor, my team of employees, or our clients?”

2) “How much information do my readers need?”

3) “How familiar are my readers with the topic?”

4) “How much time do my readers have? Would my readers prefer a short, succinct presentation of facts and statistics, or more narration and exposition?”

Knowing your audience will allow you to write content in a way that appeals to your readers.

SHAPE YOUR DOCUMENT

You know your aim. You know the people who will likely read your document. Now plan your document. What information will it contain? What information will most likely grab the reader and hold their interests? What points do you need to get across? Start with a rough outline of ideas. Then go through the outline and add more information and more detail. An outline will create the structure for your document. Soon enough your writing will come more easily, quickly, and with greater clarity.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW BEST

At this stage, read over your outline and write the first draft. Establish the main idea of the document and support your argument throughout. If a blank white page glares back at you like headlights, just start writing on whatever topic you know best. According to American novelist Jack London, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Don’t worry about the sequence if the ideas come to you out of order. You can cut and paste later.

WORDY WEIGHT LOSS

If you have time, step away from the document. Come back to it later with a fresh mind. Now add material where needed. Trim away unnecessary sections. Refine the text to communicate what you want to say. Remember: less is more. Try not to repeat ideas. Repetition, unless necessary, is tiresome for the reader. Keep the piece moving along. Use a lively pace. Progress through your points efficiently.

The following sections address some of the most common writing problems. Use these tips to write more clearly, effectively, and lively.

I.) PUNCTUATION

a) Apostrophes

Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive form of “it.”

Incorrect: Our department submitted it’s reports for 2005 last week.
Correct: Our department submitted its reports for 2005 last week.

Do not use apostrophes in the possessive forms “his,” “hers,” and “ours.”

Incorrect: The window office is her’s.
Correct: The window office is hers.

Do not use apostrophes in plural nouns.

Incorrect: How many new computer’s are we getting?
Correct: How many new computers are we getting?

b) Commas

Do not connect two complete sentences with a comma.

Incorrect: The meeting was cancelled, I finished my work early.
Correct: The meeting was cancelled, so I finished my work early.
Correct: Since the meeting was cancelled, I finished my work early.

II.) MECHANICS

a) Split Infinitives

Do not insert words between “to” and the infinitive form of a verb.

Incorrect: I was told we needed to slightly tighten the deadline.

Correct: I was told we needed to tighten the deadline slightly.

III.) SPELLING

a) “A lot” is always two words.

Incorrect: I have alot of work to do.
Correct: I have a lot of work to do.

b) “To” is a function word often used before the infinitive form of a verb (to go).

c) “Too” is an adverb that means “excessively” (too difficult).

d) “Two” denotes the number 2.

Incorrect: This file cabinet is to heavy for me to move.
Correct: This file cabinet is too heavy for me to move.

e) “There” is an adverb indicating a place (over there).

f) “Their” is a possessive word that shows ownership (their computers).

g) “They’re” is the contraction form of “they are.”

Incorrect: There results for this quarter were excellent.
Correct: Their results for this quarter were excellent.

Incorrect: Their working very hard today.
Correct: They’re working very hard today.

IV.) STYLE

a) Sentence Variety

To write more lively, vary sentence structure. Use alternate ways of beginning, and combine short sentences to create different sentence lengths.

Before:

I organized the files for all the new accounts this week. Then I created a more efficient labeling system. I color-coded everything. I made sure all paper files had been documented electronically. I put these files in the empty file cabinet.

After:

This week I organized the files for the new accounts and created a more efficient color-coded labeling system. After I documented all paper files electronically, I put these files in the empty file cabinet.

V.) ACTIVE VOICE vs. PASSSIVE VOICE

The English language has two “voices”: active voice (the subject performs an action); and passive voice (the subject is acted upon). In business communication, all good writers write in active voice. Lazy writers write in passive voice. Writing in active voice shortens your sentences and makes your writing sound more direct and formal.

Examples:

PASSIVE: The recipe book is read by her.
ACTIVE: She reads the recipe book.

PASSIVE: The radio announcement should be listened to by everyone.
ACTIVE: Everyone should listen to the radio announcement.

PASSIVE: The photo is being taken by the photographer.
ACTIVE: The photographer is taking the photo.

HELPFUL RESOURCES

To learn more about fixing common writing mistakes, check out The Electronic Writing Course ( http://www.ElectronicWritingCourse.com ). It’s a program that teaches the basics of good writing and editing. If you want to check your document against 36,000 style and usage mistakes, check out StyleWriter ( http://www.StyleWriter-USA.com ). It’s a style and usage Plain English checker. If you want to write more lively and creatively, check out WhiteSmoke Software ( http://www.WhiteSmokeSoftware.com ). It’s a program that fixes and enriches your text.

If you follow these guidelines, you’ll stop yourself from writing lousy in the workplace. Your writing will be lively, clear, and concise, and you will build rapport with readers. Perhaps it’s now time to e-mail your boss a perfectly-written e-mail requesting a salary raise?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Konradt has been a professional freelance writer for over ten years. He is founder of FreelanceWriting.com ( www.FreelanceWriting.com ) and LiteracyNews.com ( www.LiteracyNews.com ).

Does a title really sell a book? The short answer is, yes. If a book does not attract a reader initially, it will be overlooked and not purchased. The book title is the element that creates the initial attraction to the book.

Watch people who are browsing in a bookstore. A catchy title grabs their interest and makes them reach for the book out of curiosity. A great title makes browsers think, “Really?” or “What does THAT mean?” or “That’s what I need”. Think long and hard when choosing your book’s title. The title must give some clues about the book’s contents in a snappy “one-liner”.

Many authors struggle fiercely with the title choice, not realizing that the title is there somewhere in the book’s contents. They just haven’t recognized it because they are too close to the project. Sometimes it helps to talk to impartial, unbiased persons. Tell them what your book is about, and then listen to their feedback.

Alternately, on the tongue-in-cheek advice of one publishing professional, open a bottle of wine and start writing. Make a list of everything that comes to mind about what you have written in your book. Nothing is too silly, but do try to strike on the central theme or message.

When your list is complete (and the wine is all gone), group your notes into categories. Choose the snappiest, most intriguing words that say something about your book without sounding like a boring explanation.

Perhaps these titles will help you:

• Woman-Sense Rules!
• Fit to Cook
• Climb Your Stairway to Heaven
• Light the Fire
• Spell Success in Your Life

If you are planning on a series, your title should be your “brand”. Then as you make your brand into a household word, you ensure future sales. As each title in the series is published, you know that people will buy the latest book to complete the series. Think Harry Potter or Nancy Drew.

The subtitle of your book is a great way to increase sales. The subtitle gets to the heart of the book and convinces the reader of the book’s benefits. It lets people know that the book is unique and that they really can’t live without it. It makes the reader believe that he or she just can’t live without it - and that is your objective.

Check the following subtitles:

• Woman-Sense Rules! - The Spiritual Woman’s Guide to Finding Yourself When You Didn’t Know You Were Missing
• Fit to Cook - Why “Waist” Time in the Kitchen?
• Climb Your Stairway to Heaven - the 9 habits of maximum happiness
• Light the Fire - Fiery Food with a Light New Attitude!
• Spell Success in Your Life - A road map for achieving your goals and surviving success

In the title and in the subtitle, you can use humor or emotions to sell your book, but avoid clichés and “corny” expressions, or overly common sayings. They soon become stale and annoying. Keep your title unique, catchy and relevant.

Before making the final decision on your title, conduct a title search (see our home study course, Idea to Book…to Success - the fast, easy, simple way! for instructions on title searches). Although you cannot copyright a title, duplicating titles only leads to confusion, and you want people to buy your book, not a competitor’s book. Make your title one that increases the likelihood of increasing your book sales.

About The Author

© Copyright 2004 Ink Tree Ltd.

Ink Tree Ltd. helps authors publish, market and sell books. From “101 Things You Need to Know About Publishing” to our Ultimate Book Marketing Kit, we will help you make your book a success. http://www.inktreemarketing.com

info@inktreemarketing.com

Presentation skills are one of those assets that any employer would really like to have in an ideal employee.

Essentially, it’s the ability to get your point across to other people.

As a recruiter, I have to help prepare people for interviews where they are essentially presenting themselves in front of one or more interviewers. Once they get the job, they might have to regularly present in front of larger groups which only increases the stress and trepidation of presenting.

If you have trouble with presenting or feel that your presentation skills are an area of weakness, here are some tips to help you improve:

1. Practice certainly makes perfect. You won’t get better by thinking about it. You really need to practice speaking in front of other people whether it’s at work or in social settings. Look for any opportunity - work or social - to speak and gain confidence.

2. Look for opportunities to present topics that you like and feel comfortable discussing. Try to find opportunities outside work to present where you might feel less pressure to perform but will still allow you to practice in front of an audience.

3. Join a Toastmasters club or other organization that will help you improve your presentation skills and will give you the opportunity to speak publicly in front of other people trying to improve their skills and are in the same position you are.

4. Consider signing up for presentation skills training. Not only will you get to learn from someone who knows what they are doing, they will be able to focus on the areas you need help with most.

5. Think of your main strengths and try to incorporate them into your presentations. When appropriate, injecting your sense of humor and personality into presentations can help to build a rapport with your audience while making you more comfortable too. Essentially, try to be yourself when presenting and let your real personality come out.

6. Try not to place undue pressure on yourself before a big presentation. Prepare well in advance and avoid last minute changes that increase your stress. If you have properly prepared and know your topic well, convince yourself that this isn’t a big deal and that you have nothing to be scared of.

The more opportunities you have to apply your presentation skills, the quicker you’ll be able to improve them. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to being a skilled speak is nervousness. The more confident you are, the more comfortable you will be in front of an audience and the less likely you’ll be to have to read off of prepared notes.

Practice does make perfect but in cases where you still feel your skills are not improving fast enough, consider training with a professional.

Carl Mueller is an Internet entrepreneur and professional recruiter. Carl has helped many job searchers find their dream career and would like to help clear up some of the job search myths that exist while helping people avoid common mistakes that cost them jobs.

Visit Carl’s website to separate yourself from other job searchers: http://www.find-your-dream-career.com

Ezine editors/Webmasters: Please feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your website. Please don’t change any of the content and please ensure that you include the above bio that shows my website URL. If you would like me to address any specific career topics in future articles, please let me know.

Every time I look at the writing gigs listed on Craigslist, I see headlines like the following:

• “Publicity & Rewards For AMAZING Admission Essays & Personal Statements”
• “Model Essay Writers Needed”
• “Individuals Needed to Help Students Write and Edit Essays”
• “Do You Love School and Writing?”
• “Looking for help on writing essays for business school applications”

And those are just the ones from the essay factories. The ads posted by students are even less subtle: “Were you a straight-A student?” or “Write my college paper.” To add insult to injury, the students usually want the paper written overnight for little or no pay.

Selling student essays is big business, and the Internet makes cheating of this kind simple for both buyer and seller. Not that it was by any means impossible for students to cheat before the advent of the World Wide Web, but they’re no longer limited to their own classmates as sources of better writing skills.

Craigslist being what it is, a number of people have posted responses to these ads blasting the would-be cheater. (The lower the amount of money offered, the more forceful the response.) Yet someone presumably responds to them often enough to make it worthwhile for the repeat posters.

The Professor’s Perspective

I work as a ghostwriter. In most cases, I’m perfectly happy to write something that someone else gets credit for as long as I receive appropriate payment in exchange for my work.

Before I was a ghostwriter, however, I was a career scholar and a university instructor. That’s why, no matter how good the pay, I won’t write essays for students.

I can be fairly confident that my own students never paid someone else to write their essaysor at least, if they did, they didn’t get their money’s worth. (Or their beer and pizza’s worth, for that matter.) For one thing, the overall style and quality of the typed or printed papers they handed in matched the style and quality of the essays they wrote on exams where I and others were watching them. For another thing, whenever I had the option, I asked students to choose their own subjects. At the very least I would create a list of several possible themes, each specific enough that it would be difficult to find an already-written paper on the topic available for sale. And since the texts covered and the essay topics differed from year to year, students couldn’t sell successful essays. (It would in any case be a very foolish student who tried to re-use an essay from the previous year’s class of 15 people.)

I did once create a sample essay, however. This was when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, and after seeing some of the essays handed in by Classical Civilization 101 students, I realized that many of them, even the bright ones, knew very little about how to write this kind of a paper. So I wrote my own essay on the same topic they’d all been assigned and gave it to themas well as to the professor I was working under and the other teaching assistants. In retrospect, it probably depressed them as much as it helped them, but there’s no way any of the professors would have believed it was actually written by a freshman.

College instructors are not stupid. If a student performs poorly in class and on exams but hands in a flawless essay, it’s going to look suspicious. And getting caught cheating is the fastest way to fail a course completely. You might get away with it at the time, but you’d better hope you never run for office, because someone will dig it up and use it to discredit you.

Why Students Need to Write for Themselves

In business, the purpose of writing is to communicate: internally, with vendors, and with customers. The important thing is the message. If a professional writer can convey that message more clearly than the CEO, then the CEO should hire a professional writer. Professional writers can also help experts get their hard-earned knowledge out to a wider audience.

In academia, the purpose of writing assignments is to help students learn about a subject and develop their critical thinking as well as their writing skills. A consultant who hires a ghostwriter to help with creating a business book already knows the material and can probably express his or her main points clearly when speaking. A student who asks someone else to write a term paper doesn’t know the material, or what to say about it, or how to say it.

Undergraduate essays rarely tell their readers anything new, at least as regards the facts. (They do sometimes include very creative interpretations of literature, however.) Their professors (or teaching assistants) aren’t reading these essays for their own edification. They want to know whether the students have understood the material and can synthesize it in support of an argument.

Twenty-page term papers are not intended to be instruments of torture. I always tried to make the topics I offered students interesting and to give them the opportunity to pick subjects they wanted to know more about. It’s true that some instructors assign the same reading materials and essentially the same essay topics year after year, but even the more obvious “compare and contrast these two characters” essays serve a pedagogical purpose.

In order to produce a satisfactory essay, the student has to read the material closely, think about it, create a thesis, and provide supporting arguments and evidence for that thesis, perhaps reading and quoting from secondary literature as well. In doing so, students develop skills they need throughout their lives. By avoiding the work of writing the essays, the cheaters are pouring their tuition money down the drain. The purpose of going to college is not to get high grades, or even to get a degree. It’s to learn.

The penalties for an honest but unsuccessful attempt are lower in college than they are anywhere else. If you screw up your first term paper, you have a chance to make up for it with the next one. You might even be able to do an extra-credit assignment and come out of the course with a good grade after all. If you screw up on the job, there are at least a dozen people waiting to replace you, and you’d better have a compelling reason why your boss shouldn’t fire you for incompetence and hire one of them. Having someone else write your school papers isn’t just dishonest. It’s wasting the opportunity of a lifetime.

Getting Help with Academic Writing

So what avenues are open to students who know their writing isn’t up to their instructors’ standards? Rather than having someone else do the writing, look for help in improving your own writing. Take classes in English composition. Read books like The Elements of Style. Pay careful attention to the comments and suggestions you get on your term papers and exams. And ask the people who are already there to help you, paid for out of your tuition fees.

Professors (or at least their teaching assistants) should be available to provide you feedback on a first draft of an essay before you hand in the final version. If your professor doesn’t do this, check to find out whether there are any student-run services to help with term papers. (When I was a student, they were called Writing Fellows, and the application process to become one was quite competitive.)

U.C. Berkeley, for instance, has an Academic Achievement Program for students from low-income families who are the first generation to go to college, in addition to the Student Learning Center writing program which offers drop-in and scheduled tutoring as well as writing workshops (http://slc.berkeley.edu/writing/index.htm).

If you are dyslexic, disabled, or not a native speaker of English, check with the programs for disabled students or international students. Universities will provide special accommodations (e.g. a quiet test-taking environment or extra time to complete an examination) for students with learning disabilities, psychological disabilities, and AD/HD, as well as assistive technology for those with physical disabilities.

Earning a B+ is a much greater achievement than buying an A+, and the value of it will last you far longer. Even if you pay someone else to write every word that comes out of you after you graduate, do your own writing while you’re in school. You’ll be glad you did.

© 2005 Sallie Goetsch

Author-izer and Collabowriter Sallie Goetsch specializes in turning busy professionals into authors. Get more free articles for your e-zine, newsletter, or website from her article blog or e-mail authorizer@fileslinger.com and take the pain out of writing.