Laura Stack is a personal productivity expert, author, and professional speaker. Her mission is to build high-performance productivity cultures in organizations by creating Maximum Results in Minimum Time®. She is the president of The Productivity Pro®, Inc., a time management training firm, specializing in productivity improvement in high-stress organizations as well as the current president of the National Speakers Association.

Laura brought the spirit of Cavett Robert alive on Saturday for the 100 members and guests of the Northern California chapter who were lucky enough to attend an awesome meeting to kick-off 2012. “The spirit of Cavett is”, Laura said, “all about making the pie larger, and which other association would have members who openly share their best trade secrets with everyone else?”

And Laura shared, boy, how she shared!

Laura has built a successful business as The Productivity Pro® with clients such as Microsoft and DayTimer as well as a growing number of individual fans. Her 14,000 followers on Twitter receive a tip of the day listing “Time Management Skills for Maximum Results in Minimum Time”.

In fact, when the 2008 recession hit and her corporate business dried up, Laura actively sought out consumers and has focused her website around sales of consumer-friendly $39-$79 price-point downloadable audio and video products that have made her a quarter-of-a-million-dollars in income since then.

Here’s how she did it.

Build a website focused around online products

In addition to offering the usual speakers menu choices of keynote, seminars and coaching services, Laura’s website focuses on webinars, video training is, and courseware that can be ordered online. Here’s her step-by-step guide on how anyone can duplicate her success using these methods.

The secrets of selling on-line webinars

• Become a subject matter expert in your chosen topic.
• Choose a package like GoToWebinar or WebEx.
• Find companies or associations who will promote your events to their lists. Expect that only 50% of those who sign up will actually attend. Give an Association discount of 20% and kickback 20% of the registration fee to the Association. Make sure you keep the e-mails of all those who register for your own list.
• Charge $39 for an individual webinar and offer a series discount of $119.



• Guard against multitasking by the audience with a vast number of graphically compelling PowerPoint slides. If your topic would typically use 35 slides in an auditorium, plan on having 125 slides for a webinar. Make use of polls, encourage audience responses in the question monitor and deliver at a fast pace to keep the audience’s attention.
• Avoid specific references to your slides in the webinar. This allows you to strip out the audio and sell it for $7.99 as an MP3.
• Never, ever, distribute the PowerPoint source files. Only send out PDF to prevent people bootlegging your seminars.
• Keep track of any comments and questions as a source of topics for future webinars.
• Set up a shopping cart on your site to take money from customers for the webinars. Laura uses Cyberstrong – a one-charge chart that does what she needs.
• Charge a $390 site license if multiple people at one location if would like to take the webinar. A $1,390 licence covers multiple locations. A $2,500/hr fee for custom webinars.
• Don’t distribute the link for the webinars. Instead once people register, enter their name and e-mail into the system and have it generate a reminder for them to login— this prevents people sending the login to their friends.
• Take the raw video file from the webinar and turn it into a product for people who are unable to make the live event. Post the video on Vimeo — invest in a $200 Vimeo Pro license so that you can password-protect the screening download which you tag as private. Put that password-protected link in a page on your site available from an e-learning drop-down menu.

For me, that last tip was worth the price of the whole day!

Make money from home selling video training

Laura’s second major money-spinner uses a green screen studio at home to record compelling video tutorials. Again, she shared a step-by-step guide.

• Purchase a green screen backdrop or paint the wall of your spare room with the appropriate paint.
• Make sure you have a suitable HD digital camera and tripod and a 64-bit desktop computer.
• Sign up for a community college class so you qualify for the student edition of the Adobe Premiere or Adobe visual communicator software package.
• Purchase a GoSpeak portable microphone system with a wireless transmitter for a lapel mike. (You don’t need the speakers, they are an added bonus for your next podium presentation.)
• Hire a designer from elance or fiverr.com to create custom backgrounds for your green screen.
• Place posters with cartoon faces around the room you record in so that you have an “audience” to relate to.
• Record your video training: stand in front of the green screen, plug the wireless mic into the camera which feeds audio and video to the PC where the Adobe software records a timeline of the presentation. In post-production you add lower thirds and a suitable backdrop. Leave pauses for group activity and learner response.
• Distribute these large video files to customers who purchase via YouSendIt.com or, if they require, burn a DVD and mail it.

Here’s a sample of Laura’s green screen video:

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R), shares tips on overcoming procrastination. (C) 2011 Laura Stack, All Rights Reserved http://www.theproductivitypro.com

I’ve just come across Alexei Kapterev’s 2007 slideshare presentation that has attracted over a million hits. Take a look:

Kapterev will be presenting on February 23, 2012 at the UK Speechwriters’ Guild London Spring Conference.

Dona M. Wong’s slim volume is a beautifully printed guide to “The Do’s and Don’ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures”. As a former graphics director at the WSJ she set standards that made sense of complex data for readers. As a student of well-known PowerPoint critic Edward Tufte she takes the theories of the author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information out of the realm of academia and applies them in the world of modern finance and content-rich, data-intensive charts beloved of subject matter experts in the corporate world.

The book is a series of tutorials on all aspects of presenting data, from the choice of color and font to the correct way to align numbers and represent proportions in pie charts. It’s all deceptively simple – a simplicity which so often evades the grasp of the engineering or financial professional who is at a loss to communicate the essence of their data in a way people can understand and avoids burying the audience in detail:

Examples of confusing, misleading, and ineffective graphics are everywhere today. Many charts have sophisticated and intelligent underlying information , but the presentation fails to convey the intended message.

Each page of Wong’s book serves as a ready reference on the right way to communicate information.

Three essential elements of good information graphics

Wong states that good graphics are built on three elements:

1. Rich content – to bring meaning to the graphic.
2. Inviting visualization – that interprets the content and highlights the essence of the information for the audience.
3. Sophisticated execution – that brings the content and graphics to life.

Essential steps to create effective charts

The basics on which the book is based are worth memorizing as an antidote to clients who feel a need to do a data dump on an audience. In summary:

Start with authoritative sources … identify your key message … filter and simplify the data … choose the right chart type to present the data … review the outcome against the sources … let the data speak for itself … create the right comparisons … supply a reference point to frame the data … follow basic rules of legibility.

Do’s and Don’ts

The bulk of the book is a series of Do’s and Don’ts that examine each type of chart in turn. For example, with pie charts, Wong makes it clear why the largest segment should always be placed to the right of the 12 o’clock position:

It’s astonishing how often graphics designers ignore this simple rule and print counter-intuitive charts, as in this example published in the FT on Saturday December 17 (p. 12):

Low-hanging fruit

In fact, finding charts to improve is not a problem. Go browse the PowerPoint archives or visit the financial and engineering web pages in your organization. Armed with a copy of this book you’ll find lots of low-hanging watermelons to perform a makeover on, and score some brownie points with the VP of Communications in the process.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim kicked off the 2011 Gateway to the US program jointly hosted by ANZA Technology Network and CCICE at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View. His keynote reviewed the challenges and opportunities start-ups face in contrast to established companies.

He claims that the current uncertainties in the world economy favor start-ups. Andy shared his own experience starting Sun in the early 1980s when the economy was on the ropes. In 2001 economic hard times made Google’s paid search a viable alternative to expensive banner ads and the company took off.

Andy shared the five reasons new ideas fail and also listed the most promising areas for start-ups to invest in the I.T. space.

Hear him share his insights into why start-ups are more innovative than established companies by viewing the edited highlights from his keynote below.

I caught up with Alan Stevens at the National Speakers Association Influence ’11 Convention in Anaheim and asked him to demonstrate the hardware and software he carries with him on the road. He demonstrated the portable studio set-up he uses to create his web radio show.

Watch this brief video where Alan demonstrates the set-up and shared the tools he uses:

• Blue Snowball USB microphone
• Audacity software
• Creative Labs Vado HD camera

By Ian Griffin and Laurie Brown

Laurie Brown has over two decades of experience as a trainer and speaker, helping her audience improve their customer service, sales and presentation skills. She started her career as a professional actor, performing in hundreds of training films, commercials and movies. This experience has provided her with the ability to engage and keep her audience’s attention. Laurie has written extensively on presentations skills. She is the author of The Teleprompter Manual and Brand-aid.

A tech primer in NetworkWorld, authored by Cisco Systems, presents startling evidence of the coming surge in business video:

Video traffic is expected to grow from 50% of all Internet traffic today to 90% by 2013. In volume that will be equal to transmitting the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs across the network every month.

Cisco, being the network engineering company they are, provide end-to-end solutions for important technological solutions that support the growth in video, from high-resolution TelePresence systems to media-ready network architectures that will support multimedia.

However, the missing piece of the puzzle is not the technology, it’s people’s comfort-level and effectiveness being on camera.

As video becomes pervasive, it challenges the abilities of executives, trainers and “virtual experts” to present themselves on camera with poise and authenticity.

Looking into the camera in a brightly lit studio is an environment which most of us must be trained to be effective in. As challenging as it is to emote with a fish-eye lens, it is something to get over. Practice makes perfect, so invest in a personal video device and practice until you are natural.

Here are some areas to focus on.

A bad hair day is not an option

Communication is about more than the words you use. On a phone call, tone of voice, emotional intensity and volume all “color” the way communication is received. In person, add in facial expression, stance, angle relative to the listener. How you look is as important as what you say. You cannot help but leave a visual impression. Studies have shown that people are influenced more by the non-verbal clues we present when we communicate than by content alone.

So pay attention to clothes and grooming. Invest in make-up or at least a powder to remove shine (yes, guys, you too) and avoid fabrics with busy patterns, narrow stripes or herringbone tweeds.

Body Language Best Practices

Body language is a crucial factor to consider when you are on camera. Your posture and body language are crucially important. In fact, good posture is even more important in virtual communications than in person. It is best to try and deliver video messages when standing, feet apart. When seated, you should sit on the first third of the chair with your legs at a 90 degree angle and your feet flat on the floor. Sitting this way, keeps your diaphragm free so that you can breathe properly and speak dynamically. It also gives you a firm base, thereby reducing any unnecessary movement.

Movement

Movement on camera can be very distracting. Watch newscasters or actors and you will see that for the most part their bodies and heads are very still. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use gestures — you should, but do so intentionally. Be careful to avoid movement that doesn’t have purpose.

All movement is exaggerated on camera. If you want to lean forward to show interest, make it a slight move. Avoid frequently moving toward and away from the screen.

Gestures

Gestures are a great way to add interest to your communication. Be aware of the range and framing of your position in the studio. Never move any part of your body that is not in the shot. It will seem like disconnected movement. Also, how much of your body that is visible on-screen will impact how much movement can be used. Remember that unlike with in-person communication, less of your body can be seen by the other person. The less of your body that is visible, the smaller your gestures need to be. It helps if you imagine your viewer seated no more than a foot away from you. In “real” life, you would naturally make your gestures smaller so you don’t overwhelm the person to whom you are speaking.

Eye Contact

When you speak to the camera, maintain eye contact. If you are on a panel and not speaking, make sure that you are looking at whoever is speaking.

So, how are you finding the move to video? Is it something you are involved with? How’s it working out for you? If you have any comments, suggestions or questions please share them below.

In this third and final ‘how to’ segment I’ll cover the final step of importing images into PowerPoint 2007 and some of the options you can use to manipulate them.

Step 1 – Import: It’s really very simple. Choose [Insert] [Picture] from the main menu and choose the image file you want. It will be dropped into the slide in whatever size it was saved in. You can then drag and reposition it as necessary. Here’s the picture I took at the market in Laos imported into a blank slide:

Step 2 – Manipulate: Once the image is in the slide your options are endless. As an example, I can take the fabric photo and fill the screen then add a rectangle with [Insert] [Shape] and then right-click and [Format Shape] and assign a [Transparency] of 51% with a light gray color. Onto this, I [Insert] [Text Box] and put my title for the presentation.

Another use for the photo would be to add another rectangle with no transparency, leaving a small border, and then right click and [Format Picture] [Recolor] to give a muted border for an Agenda slide and a template for other slides in the presentation.

Reducing PowerPoint File Size

I mentioned in the first posting in this series about the risk that very large high-res pictures will make your PowerPoint file too bulky. I’ve seen slide decks that exceed 20MB – impossible to share via email. You can reduce the size of the PowerPoint file, often by over 70%, by using the ‘Compress’ menu option. This is difficult to locate. Follow these steps:

Step 1 – Once you’ve added all your pictures, click on any picture in your presentation.
Step 2 – Look for the menu bar on the top right to change to [Picture Tools]. Click on [Format] [Compress Pictures] and be sure to check out the [Options] in the pop-up window:

If you want the smallest possible file size, choose the [Target Output] [Email]. Otherwise [Screen] will be best, and significantly reduce the size of a PowerPoint file with high-res images.

Expert Advice

I’m embarrassed to show any more of my lame examples of how to manipulate pictures in PowerPoint. Now you understand the basics, I suggest reading books which deal with the purpose and aesthetics of creating visually compelling slides written by professionals in the field. The two best books that I know of are Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte. Both books are jam-packed with practical ideas and many examples to help you create beautiful, well-designed presentations.

Also, check out Garr’s Presentation Zen blog for exquisite examples of slides which use visuals in a compelling way.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of three blog postings on how to use images in PowerPoint and will be able to move away from relying on plain text and boring clip-art in your next presentation.

In my previous posting, I discussed how to save, crop and resize image files.

But where can you find images – photographs, logos, graphics – that illustrate your subject and match the theme of your presentation?

Google Image Search

An obvious place to start is with a simple Google search and select ‘Images’ from the top menu bar. This is a fast way to find images on any topic. But the big danger is the copyright ownership of almost all images. Google warns:

The images displayed in a Google Image Search may be protected by copyright, so we can’t grant you the right to use them for any purpose other than viewing them on the web. If you’d like to use images from our image search, we suggest contacting the site’s webmaster to obtain permission.

So be aware, just saying “Picture copyright XYZ” does not cover you.

Assuming you needs images which are not just for your personal use, but for slides which will be shown to an audience, it’s not worth the risk grabbing one from Google or the trouble of asking the sites webmaster for permission.

Your own photographs

Don’t overlook the obvious. Use pictures you’ve taken with your own digital camera or a still from a Flip video. Manipulate them by cropping, resizing and saving to your computer.

I took this picture in a market in Laos and I’m just waiting for the right moment to use it as a the background for a title slide.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an extensive description of the copyright on uploaded images. This means that most of the images in the various articles have clearly labeled copyright terms of use. For example, the article on Ben Franklin has an image which is a photo of the painting by Duplessis hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. The information page on the image makes it clear that it is a Creative Commons image and “photographic reproduction is … considered to be in the public domain.”

Flickr

Flickr is an awesome image hosting and video hosting website, now owned by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. In September 2010, it reported that it was hosting more than 5 billion images. It has very clear guidelines on copyright for the images. Many of images are made available under the Creative Commons license. To find these, choose [Advanced Search] and check box near the bottom of the screen ‘Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content’

The cleanest Creative Commons license is the simple ‘Attribution’ which gives express permission to use an image if you give attribution to the owner – usually by inserting their name from Flickr under the photo. It could also be included in a closing frame in a video. If you are planning to deliver in a business setting, be aware of the ‘Non-Commercial’ limitation.

Here’s a great photo of a statue of Benjamin Franklin which I’ve attributed to the photographer:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by tonythemisfit

Hint: Compfight is a great tool for speeding up your Flickr searches. Be sure to set ‘Creative Commons = only’ to the right of the search bar.

istockphoto

There’s a number of stock photography sites. istockphoto.com is my favorite. The images cost $1-2 each and include rights to reproduce for commercial or non-commercial purposes without attribution. There’s a wide range of photographs and graphic illustrations. This photo of Ben Franklin on the $100 bill came from istockphoto.

I make use of Lightboxes to save multiple pictures for a project, and email Lightbox contents for review by colleagues. While you are spec’ing out a project you can download a ‘Comp’ version – a low-res image with the istockphoto watermark embedded. These work as placeholders in your PowerPoint slides to see if they look right.

Once you decide to purchase simply buy some credits and then download the images you like. You’ll only need to download the smallest size available (the one with the minimum number of credits) which work fine for PowerPoint or blogs.

Other resources

I’ve just given a couple of examples from the sources I use. Garr Reynolds has an extensive list of inexpensive and free sites, with many more suggestions in the comments to his original posting. Presentation magazine also lists sites. Some of the commercial stock photo sites like Getty can be quite expensive. Oliver at Rethink Presentations has a useful comparison table which includes pricing information.

At a recent Toastmasters Club meeting, Tevis encouraged us to appreciate the impact of adding pictures to PowerPoint presentations. Unlike plain text, a memorable photograph adds to a talk without distracting from the speaker.

It was obvious from the discussion that some Club members did not know the basics of how to find, save and manipulate images. Since this is part of my day job, I offered to write up a series of simple ‘how to’ guides for Windows XP users.

In the first of the series, I’ll show how you can start to build up a library of pictures for future presentations by learning how to save, crop and re-size image files. These can be used in PowerPoint presentations, posters, magazine and newsletter layouts, websites and blogs.

Saving an image file

Putting aside questions about where to find image files, copyright issues and how to insert image files into PowerPoint – which I’ll discuss in a later posting – the first practical step to understand is how to save an image file.

I’ll take as an example the photograph of the book cover I used in my last blog posting. It was sourced from a Google Image search for the title of Harold’s book: 4 Steps to Financial Security for Lesbian and Gay Couples. (I had permission from the author to include his book in the profile, so copyright was not an issue).

Step 1 – Save: Right-click on the first file from the Google Image search results and you’ll be given the opportunity to ‘Save As’. Choose .JPG or .PNG and a name for the file that makes sense.

Step 2 – Crop: The image as saved includes white space on either side of the book cover. Right click to ‘Open With’ Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Then choose [Picture] [Crop] and move the left and right handles in until the white space is removed

Click ‘OK’ and [File] [Save] and overwrite the existing file.

Step 3 – Re-size: You can re-size images inside PowerPoint so they’ll fit your slide. But for newsletters and, especially, web pages and blogs, it’s crucial to have a source file that’s the right size (width and height).There’s also the question of file size (in MB’s).While a small book-cover image is not a problem, other images, especially high definition photo’s, will make your presentation file size very large. So shrinking it down in Picture Manager can be useful. Select [File] [Resize] and choose from a number of pre-defined width and height settings or reduce by a percentage of the original width and click [OK] to save.

Experiment with different sizes and see what resolution you get when importing into PowerPoint.

Putting it into practice

Here’s an image I purchased from istockphoto.com of a railroad yard.

I used the [Crop] function to select a narrow band of tracks to insert in a title slide

Knowing these simple steps for manipulating image files is useful for building an image library for your future presentations.

In my next posting I’ll deal with various sources for photographs on the web and all-important copyright issues.

My recent post on representing large numbers in a speech coincided with preparing to publish the second part of Denna Jones’ guest posting on why she’s switching from PowerPoint to Prezi. Denna, an architect and speaker, references the 1977 film, Powers of Ten, by Charles and Ray Eames. The film

… has the capacity to expand the way we think and view our world. Over ten million people have seen the film, and it continues to be shown in classrooms, business meetings, festivals and retreats around the world. Starting with a sleeping man at a picnic, the film takes the viewer on a journey out to the edge of space and then back into a carbon atom in the hand of the man at the picnic, all in a single shot. It is an unforgettable experience.

This illustrates how, at the scale of the very large and the scale of the very small, all is light. As Adi Da Samraj has said:

All manifest things and beings appear within a universal cosmic theater of the physics of light.

Today’s newspapers carried the most recent image of the Planck telescope’s image of the ‘known universe’:

Better than any words or abstract mathematical formula, these pictures and the 9-minute Eames film brings home to viewers the scale of the universe we inhabit; consider how images such as this could be used in your next talk.