Before I ever used PowerPoint for business, I taught it to fifth and sixth graders as a part of the curriculum while I was working as a classroom teacher. The kids discovered all kinds of things about it by experimenting, and then shared their findings with everyone else. Now PowerPoint is an integral part of my online business and adds to my income on a regular basis. You can do this as well.
So if you’ve created your first PowerPoint presentation – congratulations for taking the next step in marketing your business to your clients. You will find your options open up with multimedia presentations by showcasing your product or service. With PowerPoint you can add sound bites, videos, photographs, charts, graphs, and much more. It truly is a dynamic platform.
Why do you want to add these bells and whistles? First, using PowerPoint makes your presentation more interesting and more interactive with your audience. Whether you’re presenting to a room full of live people or presenting virtually in a webinar room, showing examples of your work, statistics, graphs, or simply sharing your desktop will keep your audience paying attention.
Second, there are many different ways of learning, including auditory and visual. By simply speaking you will capture the attention of those auditory learners but by adding the visual PowerPoint slides, you will also capture your visual learners.
Lastly, think about the topic of your presentation. If you are presenting a tutorial or how-to presentation, using slides to showcase the steps of how to do something is much more concise and helpful than verbally trying to describe each step.
Put yourself in the audience for just a moment. If you are teaching a course about how to install and use WordPress, for example, would you rather listen to the directions or see the steps? When it comes to computers and technology, adding PowerPoint slides to your presentation is highly recommended so your audience members can compare their own computer screens to what you’re showing on the slides.
The beauty of PowerPoint is that it’s dynamic but very user-friendly. All the icons are rather self-explanatory and if you do hit something by mistake, there’s an Undo arrow at the very top left corner of the window. Another tip is to save your work frequently. A good habit is to click the Save button after you finish each slide, which decreases your chances of losing the work if your computer crashes or hitting a wrong button and losing everything!
Don’t forget to have a strong ‘Call to Action’ at the end of your PowerPoint. Business can be enhanced when you let people know what you have to offer while they are actively engaged in learning from you.
The very best training on using PowerPoint for Business is available from Nicole Dean and Melissa Ingold as a part of their online training and tutorials.
