Hating on PowerPoint is pretty fashionable these days.

I see it all the time – complaints about the evils of PowerPoint, “Death by PowerPoint”, and how people groan at the sight of text bullets on a white screen. To which I say…

Enough already!

Seriously. This might seem like a bit of a rant, but I’m surprised at people. The problem isn’t PowerPoint, it’s BAAAAAD PowerPoint. Why can’t we recognize that? I mean, when inept do-it-yourselfers build crooked bookcases, we don’t lament the evils of hammers, do we?

I actually think that PowerPoint is a fantastic tool that you can use to grow your business, both online and offline.

In this post, I’ll give you presentation ideas (and give you some great examples of presentations that do it really, really well).

The first step to using a tool properly is understanding what it is for, and what it is NOT for. Let’s start there.

What is PowerPoint for, and what is it NOT for?

Let’s imagine, for a moment, a lousy presentation. Not hard, is it? You imagine a set of slides full of bullets of text, with a presenter facing the screen instead of the audience, and narrating the text that they are perfectly capable of reading on their own.

Now let’s imagine a really good presentation. This might be a little harder, so here are a few examples:

The Secret to Building a Popular Blog

RSA Animate – Drive

“Business Fireproofing” Intro

Steve Jobs introducing the iPod

(You can also watch this video deconstructing Steve Jobs’ presentations – a topic for a post all on its own!)

The most important lesson to learn from this presentation is that the slideshow and the presenter have different jobs!

Let’s try something, to illustrate what I’m saying: watch any of these videos, with the volume off. Can you still follow? Probably not.

This is because the presenter tells the story, and the slideshow helps. The presenter does the heavy lifting, and the slideshow drives points home, illustrates, and assists – but doesn’t do the job by itself.

That’s not what people attempt when they create slides that are brimming with text – in that case, they’re really just using PowerPoint as a document creation program, and then they’re reading the document to their audience.

But that’s not what PowerPoint is for – no wonder the results are lousy!

How to do it right?

Creating a great slideshow isn’t that hard, it just takes a bit more work, because there are two steps to the process:

1. Script your presentation.
2. Create slideshow.

This is more work than people are used to, because they usually skip the second step, and just use their script as the slideshow!

Instead, take your script, and highlight each key idea. For each key idea, create a slide. You want as little text as possible – ideally, no text at all, and just a picture. Just one idea per slide.

This may sound overly simplistic, but this is a process that I use all the time – for our video lessons, for our “Business Fireproofing” video course, in presentations to investors, and tons of other places.

You can do this yourself (I promise, it’s easier than you think), or you can get someone to do it for you.

Another great example of a very well-done presentation is on the Samurai Sales Videos landing page.

Yes, that’s an affiliate link – we’re sharing it with you, because we’ve seen them do a really great job at a really reasonable price – a kick-ass sales video costs all of $499.

Now, if you’ve been around Mirasee for any length of time, you know that we don’t flog affiliate links – we don’t even use Amazon affiliate links when we interview an author. We’re sharing this with you because it can do a lot for you.

Okay, over to you. Of the videos that we linked to in this post, which do you find most effective? Which do you find least effective?