When you start an online business the thought of selling your own products can seem quite daunting. In this article I want to discuss how you can go about selling your own products so that you understand how easy it is.

I shall assume that you already have certain things in place:

• your chosen niche
• market research
• your product

Once you have your product created and you know that there is a demand for that you can begin the process of selling it.

First of all you need to find your target customers. These are people who need what it is you have to offer. You can find your ideal customer by going to the various websites online where they might be involved. This might be a forum for discussion group for example. The important thing is that you get targeted traffic to your offer.

In order to sell your product you need to develop a relationship because people will not purchase anything from you until they have built up a certain amount of trust. One of the best ways that you can develop a relationship with prospects is to communicate with them regularly. If you build a list of subscribers you will be able to do this easily.

Therefore the best way to do this is to offer something for free that is related to your product and use an opt in form so that people give you their name and email address in order to receive your free gift.

This will enable you to build your list with targeted subscribers – people who have shown an interest in your free gift bearing in mind that your free gift is related to your product.

As you build your list with targeted traffic you then need to work on developing a relationship with them. This means adding value.

Therefore your emails must provide valuable content for your subscribers so that they will look forward to receiving your written emails and will continue opening them.

You will use your email campaign to sell your product. This means that after a certain period of time you will promote your particular product as being the ideal solution to what they were looking for when they signed up to your list.

As you build up your relationship with your subscribers you can then find out what else they are looking for and what other help they need. Once you know this you can then create the next product and use your email campaign to promote that one.

This becomes an ongoing process throughout your email campaign. Selling products this way is far more effective because you are building a trusting relationship at the same time.

Curious how to connect, engage, and persuade your remote audience? More and more business presentations are held virtually. Find out how to make a powerful connection–when your audience isn’t in the same room.

Where are virtual presentations rising in popularity? Everywhere! Educational webinars. Sales presentations. Training sessions. More and more meetings and presentations are held with some or all participants participating remotely. With today’s economic pressures to reduce travel and slash costs, those who master virtual presentation skills can achieve tremendous success.

This dramatic trend reduces travel, limits costs and ensures that companies ‘go green.’ However, many professionals struggle with how to make sure that virtual meetings and presentations are truly effective.

Several years ago, virtual presenting was looming on the horizon. Diane, my busy HR client knew the writing was on the wall. “We’ve just had our budget cut for in-person training. I’m afraid that we’ll switch to virtual delivery…and never go back.”

Yes. That’s exactly what happened. The days of weeklong, and two-week long live training are still present in a few companies. But for most organizations, it’s a time long ago and far in the past.

At the time, it seemed almost impossible to imagine all training delivered virtually. We discussed at length. How could you recreate the intimate environment, skills practice and shoulder-to-shoulder coaching? How could you coach individuals and provide relevant examples? How could you structure the experience to be truly transformative?

As time has gone by, it’s clear that virtual training, remote meetings, and online presenting can be extremely powerful. Each question deserves a more in-depth answer, but here is a short version of how you can solve this challenging problem.

1. Shift Your Attitude
With new technology and new trends, embrace what’s possible with enthusiasm. Here are three big personal benefits to inspire a change of heart about virtual presenting.

A. Slash stress. Less insane travel. No airport lines. No jet lag. More time with the people you love and the things you love to do.

B. Increase productivity. You don’t have to waste time commuting across town or around the world. Jump on a virtual meeting and reach important clients in minutes.

C. Make more money. It’s easier to see what’s working-and what needs to change. You can try out new stories, new communication mediums and get better results, faster.

2. Embrace Technology
Make friends with what’s possible. Get comfortable with your virtual presentation tools. Ask a colleague if you’re just getting started. The more you are familiar and confident with the tools, the easier your job will be.

3. Build In Engagement
Encourage remote participants to get involved. Build this into how you structure your event and organize your story. Keep a laser-targeted focus on engaging your remote audience.

Oops. Not sure how to do this? Get easy pointers from an executive coach. Don’t wait. Your success is on the line. The faster you learn how to ace virtual presentations, the faster you’ll move to the top.

4. Ask For Input
Don’t go it alone. Ask peers who are well versed in virtual presenting. Ask your presentation coach. Ask your clients and prospects.

By keeping an open mind, you’ll quickly find out what’s working, and what can be improved.

5. Experiment and Evolve
Using all 5 steps, continue to experiment. Take an online class such as presentation skills training to learn new visual storytelling skills. Experiment with asking facilitative questions. Play with different ways to show your story in pictures and words.

The more you experiment, the more you’ll learn-and evolve.

See, many of the options that are available today just wouldn’t be possible in a face-to-face setting with physical materials. It would take too long and cost too much to be truly open to experimentation.

The virtual revolution has opened up a brand new era of collaboration and innovation. With powerful presentation skills, you’re at the front. Aren’t you glad you’re leading the wave?

Regardless, if your goal is to make a sale or educate. You don’t want to fall prey to the mistakes that many presenters make — loading us down with piles and piles of information and communication hodgepodge. Excellent presentations are designed to anchor in the key points that are relevant for influencing the listeners to take some kind of action.

When you make a presentation to a committee, corporate board of directors or presenting an all day seminar, your aim is to accomplish two very important goals. First, it is crucial that your audience walk away with a “Top of the Mind” memorable experience. Second, you want to influence your audience to take an immediate or future action. Every, presentation should have an outcome and action steps for your audience to take.

For us to accomplish those two goals we need to help the audience focus-in on our presentation so that we touch and communicate with the head and heart of our audience. Effectively, we want to mesmerize, hold their attention and filter out any outside distractions that would compete with our presentation and desired outcome.

We are visual beings by nature. Our eyes, being the most powerful information conduit to the brain, are always in motion feeding us images and disrupting our thought processes. People have limited attention spans and information processing capabilities. Therefore, we as presenters need to simplify the communications to hold attention for influencing the thinking of our audience.

I use a very powerful communication technique that anyone can apply with their very next presentation to accomplish extraordinary results. Your presentation and visuals will communicate faster, clearer, better and be more congruent — eliminating the communication hodgepodge that so many presenters use.

First, reduce all you visuals to pictures and either eliminate words and numbers altogether or reduce them to three or less per visual. Visuals should be used as anchors to support your key points that you want your audience to remember.

Second, your visuals must be associated in some ridiculous and/or illogical way for transferring key points and word phases for your audience to remember and retain your information.

A simple example is: You are giving a financial report showing an increase in earnings for your division. You could use a rising balloon lifting a building block, showing the percentage of increase stenciled in the block, giving your audience and image of growth and profits. Visuals that are your typical bar charts, graphs, and lines of words are boring and have a lesser impact connecting with your audience. Whereas, ridiculous and/or illogical visuals add retention, entertainment, and can illustrate with greater impact the benefits, not just facts and figures of your presentation.

Third, support your key points and visuals with a story.

Here’s how it works:

In delivering a presentation, recently to a group of sales people, one of my key points was that we have to understand our customers buying strategies and buying incentives for us to influence them to make a purchase from us. The visual that I used (now visualize this in your mind) was a man peering over a chessboard with his chin snuggled on his tightly clutched hands with a very pensive look in his eyes. The picture was stretched and elongated to exaggerate the image to influence the inner thinking process that our customers go though in their decision-making.

I then illustrated the point with a story of how one of my clients went about uncovering his clients’ strategies, buying incentives and how this same presentation process helped him get the sales and acquire a major key account for his company. Most importantly during the story I explained how my client was able to fine out what would create a win situation for his client. That gave way, for transitioning, to the next key point and slide in the presentation.

The visual was dynamic in that it supported the key points and anchored the story in the mind of the audience. The story used was linked back to the visual and was congruent with the key points.

This presentation process reinforces your points and makes them easy to understand. You can take any subject from a ten-minute annual report presentation to an all-day training session and use this approach of structuring your presentations. When you substitute lines of words, boring bar charts and graphs, with key points, supportive stories anchored with ridiculous visuals, you make it easy for your audience to assimilate, focus, remember and become engage and mesmerized with your material.