Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

The best favor you can do for your­self and your busi­ness is to always focus on one task at a time, and always finish what you start.

How the heck do you do that on the inter­net, when there are dis­trac­tions everywhere you look, and in affi­liate mar­ke­ting… when there are new offers every day ripe for you to promote?

The ans­wer is: if you’re going to pro­mote a new affi­liate offer, write all your emails and blog posts in one sit­ting, before you get bored or dis­trac­ted with another offer.

Sounds inti­mi­da­ting? It doesn’t have to be.

Remem­ber that when you pro­mote someone else’s offer, they tend to give you at least one cut-​​and-​​paste email. Sche­dule it as a future broad­cast and paste it in as-​​is, because time is limited!

If the email they pro­vide is more than a page long, I’ll split it up into two parts and sche­dule the second email to go out a week later.

Once you have those first cou­ple of emails, look at the sales let­ter and see if there are any huge chunks of sales copy you can paste into an email to further pro­mote the offer.

Any decent sales let­ter usually has an inte­res­ting story, a bene­fit list and a fea­ture list… so there’s three more emails right there.

After chec­king out the sales let­ter, I’ll tend to think of one or two things the sales let­ter hadn’t thought of, and I’ll write two quick emails explai­ning each one. Emails don’t have to be long, just a cou­ple of para­graphs will do, with a call-​​to-​​action at the end to get peo­ple to click on your affi­liate link.

And finally, I’ll type up a cou­ple of remin­der emails for peo­ple who might have mis­sed the offer and need to see it again.

Now you have 7 or 8 emails to pro­mote the affi­liate pro­duct. Don’t save them in a text file for later… sche­dule them in your auto­res­pon­der right now to send out a month apart.

Using this tech­ni­que, you can sche­dule over six months of email pro­mo­tion for just one pro­duct, in 10 to 30 minutes.

If you were really moti­va­ted, you could find the hot­test con­ver­ting pro­ducts in your niche (I pre­fer to look at the Click­bank mar­ket­place since those sort by the best pulling offers first) and in one day, fill up your auto­res­pon­der with affi­liate email promotions.

Or simply make it a point to add one new offer to your auto­res­pon­der every Mon­day mor­ning, before you do anything else.

If you have a blog of your own, you only need to write posts and sche­dule them on the same dates the emails get sent out… don’t overthink it.

That’s the key to finishing what you start: work in sprints so you can sche­dule it on a timer and not have to work on that promo, or even think about that promo ever again!

I hope you enjo­yed this series on affi­liate mar­ke­ting. Please leave your com­ments below so I know peo­ple like it and I can write more of these. If you want back-​​issues, here they are!

1. Add Your Own Unique Slant to the Offer.
2. Interview the Originator or Add Your Own Bonuses.
3. Bring Something to the Table: List and Traffic.
4. Invest in Your Business: Don't Ask for Review Copies.
5. Write Affiliate email and Blog Posts in One Sitting.

I know your time is valua­ble so I’ll get right to the point.

Pro­duct owners and affi­lia­tes for the last cou­ple years have lived a happy co-​​dependent exis­tence. In the begin­ning, affi­lia­tes had limi­ted choi­ces. Today, it’s an ocean of opportunity.

The rea­son I’m wri­ting you today is because I feel the industry needs a wake up call.

Here are the problems…

1. Affi­liate mar­ke­ters are beco­ming less depen­dent on pro­duct owners
2. Affi­lia­tes have more choi­ces then ever before
3. Affi­lia­tes have evol­ved with the times but pro­duct owners have not
4. Pro­duct owners are rel­ying too hea­vily on affiliates

Affi­lia­tes Don’t Need You Anymore

In the old days, an affi­liate could simply link to a pro­duct owner and that was enough.

Then over time, more and more affi­liate mar­ke­ters were crea­ted by the pro­duct owners — so many new affi­lia­tes that, in order to start making sales, you had to offer some sort of bonus or incen­tive that no one else was offering.

Now in 2009, you need to go even further than just bonu­ses, because almost everyone’s doing bonu­ses at this point.

To com­pete with the mas­sive amounts of affi­lia­tes, you now have to cap­ture leads from your traf­fic, offer a bonus, and then point the pros­pect to the pro­duct owner.

Don’t for­get that more and more peo­ple every­day are lear­ning that they can sign up as an affi­liate them­sel­ves and buy through their own links.

Affi­lia­tes are now gene­ra­ting their own leads, crea­ting their own offers, and then sen­ding the cus­to­mer to someone else. How long before the affi­liate thinks: “If I’m gene­ra­ting the lead and crea­ting the offer, then why am I sen­ding the cus­to­mer to someone else?”

Basi­cally, to com­pete in today’s world of affi­liate mar­ke­ting, an affi­liate has to do all the same things a pro­duct owner nor­mally does.

Most affi­lia­tes become affi­lia­tes to avoid the res­pon­si­bi­li­ties of a pro­duct owner. You must alle­viate some of the work your affi­lia­tes are having to do or risk losing them or worse gai­ning them as a competitor!

There’s a Net­work On Every Corner

Back in the day, Ama­zon, Click­bank, Linkshare, and a hand­ful of others were the only affi­liate net­works on the scene. Now you’ve got over 32 “major” affi­liate net­works, not to men­tion all the small or start-​​up networks.

It gets worse, too, because new net­works are cons­tantly sprin­ging up and these net­works are offe­ring much more then the typi­cal pro­duct owner.

Inside any one of the 10+ affi­liate net­works that I’m a part of, I’ve got all kinds of affi­liate tools and a dedi­ca­ted affi­liate manager.

The ave­rage pro­duct launcher just scra­pes by with a basic affi­liate pro­mo­tion kit. Ban­ners, emails, key­words, and some links are not enough anymore.

Today, affi­lia­tes need bran­da­ble videos, lan­ding pages, reports, e-​​courses, inter­views, and artic­les… The Inter­net in 2009 is a con­tent beast — your affi­lia­tes need content!

If your eyes are ope­ning and you’re seeing the pro­blems, then you should check out what the adult industry is doing for their affiliates.

The adult industry offers their affi­lia­tes free hos­ting, dedi­ca­ted mana­gers, a plethora of bran­da­ble lan­ding pages, even whole mem­bership sites that the affi­liate can pro­mote the pro­duct owner with.

Inde­pen­dents can beat the big net­works by offe­ring more cus­to­mi­za­tion, uni­que tools, and per­so­nal touch. If they don’t, then they’ll lose their affi­lia­tes. Which actually leads me into the third pro­blem I see happening…

Affi­lia­tes evol­ved and opti­mi­zed their methods for their product-​​owning part­ners. Howe­ver, the pro­duct owners are still offe­ring the same resour­ces they offe­red 4, 5, and 6 years ago. Not only that, but it seems pro­duct owners have got­ten gree­dier and lazier.

Pro­duct Owners Should Be Res­pon­si­ble For Conversions

In this last part, I’m going to speak for myself, and if anyone is fee­ling the same thing they can let me know in the comments.

The other parts I’ve already spo­ken with many other affi­lia­tes so I was com­for­ta­ble spea­king for the majo­rity. This next part could pos­sibly just be a weird fluke I expe­rien­ced and could be totally alone in it.

But I doubt it!

Here goes…

Lately, I have been making some sho­wings in the top 10s of dif­fe­rent joint-​​venture lea­der­boards, which sounds great. Howe­ver, for most of them my con­ver­sions have been almost totally depen­dent on my offe­ring a bonus.

“Wait,” you’re saying, “you make more sales by offe­ring a bonus to your subsc­ri­bers who buy through you?” No!

What I’m saying is, if I don’t offer a bonus, then I don’t make sales. I know because I tried it on the last JV lea­der­board I got on. I was in the top 10 for leads, and then when it came time for sales, I never offe­red a bonus.

Sure enough, I got an egg in my sales column as my reward for that test.

In the pro­duct launch right before that, I offe­red a great bonus and came in top five in sales, making seve­ral thou­sand in com­mis­sions plus win­ning a 52″ flat screen TV.

Here’s my pro­blem though…

I could have just emai­led my list, char­ged for my bonus, made the seve­ral grand myself, and not sha­red my cus­to­mers with the pro­duct owner.

If the pro­duct owner’s sales fun­nel requi­res that the affi­liate offers a bonus in order to make sales…

… Then what does the affi­liate need the pro­duct owner for?

(Read that again.)

I unders­tand there is a “game” to be pla­yed, but this is not the ideal situa­tion for affi­lia­tes. And as a pro­duct owner you want to take care of your affi­lia­tes as best you can. For exam­ple, I’ll never pro­mote for that guy again.

In my eyes, he char­ged too much money for his pro­duct and the price see­med lar­gely based on kno­wing his affi­lia­tes would offer a much big­ger bonus to com­pen­sate for it.

Meanwhile, the affi­liate is only get­ting 50% of reve­nue. Yet the affi­liate is moti­va­ting the crowd, gene­ra­ting the leads, crea­ting the hot offer, and gene­ra­ting the sale…

… While the pro­duct own just crea­ted the product!

Crea­ting the pro­duct is a big piece of the pie, but what I’m saying over and over again, here, is that, if I have to offer such a great bonus in order for your pro­duct to make sales, I might as well just sell my bonus!

More and more of the top affi­lia­tes are get­ting fed up with this.

Lazy launch days are num­be­red because affi­lia­tes are get­ting sick and tired of the pro­duct owners not evol­ving their methods to keep the affi­lia­tes hard work secure.

Here’s a quick solu­tions list so you can easily iden­tify what you need to be doing to make sure your affi­lia­tes are happy.

What You Must Do To Keep Affi­lia­tes Happy

1. You must offer something uni­que to your affi­lia­tes or risk losing them to the networks.
2. You must pro­vide every resource an affi­liate would need to make the sale, inc­lu­ding a variety of dif­fe­rent bonuses.
3. The more you update your affi­lia­tes tools (e.g., emails, videos, reports, lan­ding pages, etc), then the more they will go out and pro­mote those new tools.
4. As your affi­lia­tes’ job requi­re­ments evolve, so should yours as the pro­duct owner to make sure the affi­liate has what’s nee­ded and is doing what’s required.
5. Pro­tect your affi­lia­tes’ com­mis­sions during launches, and make their job as easy as you can — you are the CREATOR, they are the PROMOTER.
6. Never steal from your affi­lia­tes by den­ying com­mis­sions on bac­kend sales, espe­cially during the launch.

I’m not saying I’m the per­fect pro­duct owner, either, since I’m mis­sing a few of these ele­ments in my affi­liate pro­gram myself. Although, you can bet I won’t be let­ting much time go by before I start making sure I have them all.

Thanks for lis­te­ning to my rant. And please post your com­ments and tell me what you think of this situa­tion. I’d love to hear them!

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

As someone who runs affi­liate pro­grams for over 50 of my own pro­ducts, I can tell you 99% of affi­lia­tes are worthless.

They’ll sig­nup and send no traf­fic, or send traf­fic and only bring in a cou­ple of sales. What’s the com­mon thread behind all these affi­liate fai­lu­res I see again and again? It comes in two parts: not making an effort, and not brid­ging their mai­ling list to your offer.

I would be thri­lled if an affi­liate came to me and said:

“I want to inter­view you for 20 minu­tes about (a topic directly rela­ted to both our pro­ducts and skills). My list con­tains (size of list) subsc­ri­bers, and the last offer I pro­mo­ted con­ver­ted at (this per­cen­tage) and brought in (this amount of sales). I’ll record the inter­view, con­vert it into down­loa­da­ble form and get it out to my subsc­ri­bers within 24 hours, with a link back to your offer with me as the affi­liate, at the end of the inter­view. What’s a good time for me to call you up?”

Do you see all the points this e-​​mail hit?

Most impor­tant: this affi­liate already brings in results. He has a decent sized list, already had a pre­vious suc­cess pro­mo­ting affi­liate offers in this niche. He’s doing most of the work: he chose the topic, he will be inter­vie­wing you, calling you, and recor­ding the call.

He’s also going to take imme­diate action once the inter­view is finished, and pro­mote this offer to his subsc­ri­bers within 24 hours.

When you inter­view the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor with you as the affi­liate, it shows that you care about giving your subsc­ri­bers a good offer, and not just cut­ting and pas­ting the e-​​mail he gave you.

It shows you have an “in” with the ori­gi­na­tor so if your buyers aren’t get­ting sup­port or need a refund, they can get to that per­son through you… they trust the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor because they trust you.

Finally, it simply injects your per­so­na­lity into the offer. This offer isn’t being made by some outside source, it’s from you and the ori­gi­na­tor at the same time.

If the ori­gi­na­tor isn’t avai­la­ble or you just don’t want to go the inter­view route, offer one of your pro­ducts as a bonus to that affi­liate offer, that way it’s a blen­ded offer.

If your subsc­ri­bers trust you but don’t trust the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor, they can still order from the ori­gi­na­tor with con­fi­dence… because if that pro­duct doesn’t deli­ver in value, your bonus will.

When you sell anything on the inter­net… whether you do it using e-​​mail mar­ke­ting, forum mar­ke­ting, blog pos­ting… if you sell e-​​books, phy­si­cal pro­ducts, e-​​classes, even a news­let­ter… the best way to sell anything is using direct res­ponse sales copy.

But not all of us can be world-​​class copyw­ri­ters like Michel For­tin. I con­si­der myself a pretty sloppy copyw­ri­ter, and althought I can whip up a head­line, quick story, bullet point list of bene­fits, test­mo­nials, fea­ture list, gua­ran­tee and a call-​​to-​​action… I will never be a great copyw­ri­ter.  Gary Hal­bert can’t hold my atten­tion for lon­ger than a few minu­tes, I’ve never read Scien­ti­fic Adver­ti­sing, so how do I scrape by wri­ting ave­rage sales copy?

The ans­wer is: prac­tice and resour­ces. I’ve writ­ten enough sales let­ters that I know what my audience wants and how I can pre­sent it to them to maxi­mize sales.  I rarely spend more than a cou­ple of hours wri­ting even 5 or 10 page sales let­ters, and some have con­ver­ted as high as 19 per­cent for me.

Even if you don’t have the skill or the prac­tice, you can still hit the follo­wing sites to pro­duce an ave­rage sales let­ter, enough for a copyw­ri­ter to rew­rite it or cri­ti­que it.

Site #1: Digg​.com
As far as I’m con­cer­ned, Digg is THE best place to find niche head­li­nes from popu­lar, spe­ci­fic and benefit-​​oriented, but funny news items.  Go to Digg​.com, type in your niche key­word and click Search.  Then refine the search to search by the title only (so your key­word is in the title), show all sto­ries (not just front page sto­ries), and sort by most diggs (so the news items “the peo­ple” like float right to the top).  Using the Digg tech­ni­que, I hel­ped a copyw­ri­ter come up with this head­line: “Man Wins Divorce Without a Law­yer In Sight!”  Makes you want to find out more, right?

Site #2: Hard​To​Fin​dAds​.com
Michael Senoff’s Hard to Find Ads is like an ins­tant swipe file.  He shows you ran­dom ads, most of them deca­des old, writ­ten by the most famous and best con­ver­ting copyw­ri­ters that ever lived.  You can take cle­ver head­li­nes, ideas and bullet points from these ads and rew­rite them as your own.

For exam­ple, the first ad I found reads like this: “Top Medi­cal Doc­tor Speaks Out!  An Open Let­ter to Anyone Who Wants to Lose Up to 20 Pounds in Two Weeks the Easy Way.”  If you were wri­ting copy for gro­wing orga­nic toma­toes, you might say: “Top Orga­nic Gar­de­ner Speaks Out!  An Open Let­ter to Anyone Who Wants to Grow 15 Pounds of Toma­toes in 8 Weeks the Easy Way.”  Obviously you’d change the num­bers to wha­te­ver you can prove, but that head­line is bet­ter than anything I could come up with from scratch.

Site #3: Ama​zon​.com
Amazon.com isn't just for buying books. You can use Ama­zon to find out seve­ral things: what KINDS of books in your niche are hot sellers right now.  You can also choose the top selling books and most of the time take a peek at the table of con­tents.  Bingo, ins­tant list of bullet points you can hit on with the sales let­ter.  Ama­zon also gives you a list of key­words rela­ted to that book, to give you even more ideas for bonus reports, videos, and emo­tio­nal hot but­tons.  If all that wasn’t enough, you can read through reviews of the book and make a note of the ter­mi­no­logy peo­ple in that niche tend to use.

Site #4: Archive​.org
Look at one of your com­pe­ti­tors’ sites in your niche.  Then look their site up on the Internet Wayback Machine to see how their page has chan­ged over time.  The other day I was watching the TV show “Mad Men” about adver­ti­sers in the 1960’s.  In one epi­sode, the men in the ad agency are tal­king about a maga­zine ad by Volks­wa­gen.  The ad was ugly, and the car was ugly, and the guys were baf­fled because Volks­wa­gen kept pla­cing the same ad… so it must be pulling in money!

This is the inter­net equi­va­lent of that.  If you know a site pulls in lots of sales, and it was writ­ten by a copyw­ri­ter who tests the head­line, phra­sing, bullet points, call-​​to-​​action, offer, and so on… you can open up the web page as it looks now, and the web page as it loo­ked 6 months or a year ago, and see what chan­ges have been made.  If a copyw­ri­ter kept twea­king the head­line over time but kept switching back to one in par­ti­cu­lar, you know it’s a money-​​maker and you can look at what makes it such a great headline.

Site #5: Goo­gle Ans­wers, Goo­gle Alerts, and (Your Niche) Forums
These sites “should” be a no-​​brainer for any copyw­ri­ter, but so few peo­ple pay atten­tion to them and as a result write very “flat” copy.  When you’re selling something, you’re selling a solu­tion, which means you’ve fixing a pro­blem.  Peo­ple are in pain whether that pain means not having enough money, gro­wing tiny toma­toes or not being able to play the piano.  Look at what ques­tions peo­ple are asking in question-​​and-​​answer sites like Google Answers and in the forums in your niche by searching for your niche key­word plus the word “forum.”

Site #6: Goo­gle Insights, Goo­gle AdWords, Yahoo! Search Mar­ke­ting, Quantcast

Can you tell I’m a fan of Goo­gle?  The fact is, simply searching for your key­word in a search engine and seeing what ads appear on the right side is the per­fect way to see what head­li­nes pull the best.  That’s the most logi­cal place to go and works won­ders com­pa­red to pulling out a head­line or a hook from thin air.

With those six free resour­ces at your dis­po­sal, you have finally run out of excu­ses.  You can write half­way decent copy for your next promo e-​​mail, blog post, or sales let­ter just by seeing what great copy is out there, and “cop­ying” it!

When you use screen cap­ture soft­ware for rapid video creation and record Cam­ta­sia videos with Power­Points or Mind­Maps, the pre­sen­ta­tion pro­cess beco­mes super simple.

A video pre­sen­ta­tion redu­ces the rea­ding time of a blog post from 5 to 10 minu­tes, to three minu­tes or less. That means you get a wider audience, more com­ments and more exposure.

To get more mileage out of an article, con­vert into a video using this very easy method that requi­res less than one minute of pre­pa­ra­tion per article. It relies on PowerPoint’s abi­lity to import text files.

In just a few seconds, you can take your article, apply a cou­ple of sim­ple search-​​and-​​replace actions, import the indi­vi­dual sen­ten­ces as indi­vi­dual sli­des, record, and dic­tate. Here’s the exact procedure:

Step 1: Copy and paste your article (INCLUDING the title on the first line) into a text edi­tor like EditPlus that allows for a multi-​​line search and replace.

Also copy your article title as the LAST line of the article so peo­ple will remem­ber what you just told them.

Step 2: Search and replace the end of each sen­tence to force a new line so that every sen­tence appears on its own line. Replace “.” (a period) with a period, and a newline.

In Edit­Plus, go to Search -> Replace, then click the “More” but­ton to show the multi-​​line search and replace boxes. In the “search” box, type that period. In the “replace” box at the bot­tom, you can simply type a period, hit Enter, and it will add the new­line for you.

Now you should have an article where every sen­tence is on its own line.

Step 3: Save this list of sen­ten­ces as a text file. Then open Power­Point and choose File -> Open. You won’t see the file you need at first.

Go to the drop­down that says “All Power­Point Pre­sen­ta­tions” and change it to “All Out­li­nes.” Browse to the fol­der con­tai­ning the text file you saved, and dou­ble click it. This will set each sen­tence as one slide.

Step 4: Select all sli­des by hit­ting Ctrl+A, right click and change the slide layout to “Title Slide.”

Want to change the layout of the sli­des easily? Go to View -> Slide Mas­ter to change the appea­rance of all the sli­des in that pre­sen­ta­tion. Then click “Close Mas­ter View” to switch back to the presentation.

If you want to knock out a bunch of article videos at a time, simply place seven of your artic­les (with each article title at the begin­ning and end) in one big text file.

Start the Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, record your pre­sen­ta­tion in Cam­ta­sia. Stop, save, and start a new pre­sen­ta­tion once you’ve reached the end of the article.

Don’t have the article writ­ten? That’s no pro­blem, just use my mindmap technique to create the pre­sen­ta­tion. But if you only want to con­vert a text article into a Cam­ta­sia video, this is the fas­test way to do it.

Whether you are crea­ting blog con­tent, a sales pitch, or a pro­duct, the fas­test way to create con­tent is with video — no wri­ting required!

If you want to create a fancy-​​shmancy video like Michel and Syl­vie, create a Power­Point slide and record your screen as you talk. This is my pre­fe­rred way of recor­ding video, but if I’m in a hurry, I can whip up a mind­map pre­sen­ta­tion in one-​​third of the time as a PowerPoint.

The easiest kind of video to create is screen cap­ture video. This is where a pro­gram records your desk­top and you talk into a mic­rophone. Use Camtasia if you’re wor­king in Win­dows, or ScreenFlow if you’re on a Mac.

Both come with 30-​​day trials and there is a free ver­sion called Jing which is limi­ted to five-​​minute recor­dings, so nothing is stan­ding in the way of you crea­ting screen cap­ture videos.

Size your reso­lu­tion down to the sma­llest pos­si­ble (I reduce to 640x480), start a Power­Point slide show, record the screen, and start tal­king. (If you can’t afford $79 for Mic­ro­soft Office, use OpenOffice.) That’s all there is to it.

Pre­tend you’re recor­ding live at a semi­nar in front of a crowd and explain what you have to say in one take. No one says it has to be anything near perfect.

The only pro­blem with recor­ding those pre­sen­ta­tions is it some­ti­mes takes a while to make them. For a 20-​​minute pre­sen­ta­tion, I have to make about 15 sli­des with a head­line on each slide and three bullet points. That can take a while! So when I want to whip up an inter­view quickly, I create what’s called a “mindmap.”

What’s a mind­map? It’s basi­cally a brains­torm with thought bub­bles, like you use to draw in grade school when you took notes or out­li­ned essays. You have the root “node”… or thought bub­ble, which is the title of your pre­sen­ta­tion, and other chil­dren “nodes” (thought bub­bles) under them, thought bub­bles under those, and so on.

Because it’s on a com­pu­ter, you can expand or con­tract mind­maps to only show the one sub­ject you’re tal­king about. It’s a per­fect way to quickly orga­nize your thoughts, and makes it per­fect for audio inter­views, webi­nars, or stan­da­lone videos.

Unlike a Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, you can pre­sent items in any order and skip over items if you run out of time. You can also export your mind­maps into PDF or HTML form so your atten­dees get the exact notes you used to present.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Grab a mind­map­ping tool. I pre­fer FreeMind because it’s free and works on both Win­dows and Mac. (Go to that link and find the “Down­load” area.)
2. Get an idea for your 10 to 90 minute pre­sen­ta­tion, rename the root node to the title of your presentation.
3. Right click and choose “New child” to create a child node under the root node. Use this as your sub­point and create other chil­dren under the root node for addi­tio­nal subpoints.
4. For each sub­point, create a child node under that to pro­vide details… usually a cou­ple of key­words or some VERY con­cise sentences.

It’s not roc­ket science. Once you’ve crea­ted your nodes, you can drag them above or below other nodes to rea­rrange them in the map. You can drag nodes into other nodes, and so on.

I recom­mend you move all nodes to the RIGHT side of the root so they all appear as a “list”… and limit your­self to 2 to 5 chil­dren per node to keep the map from get­ting messy. Never go more than three levels deep.

I can whip up a mind­map pre­sen­ta­tion in just a cou­ple of minu­tes this way. Using mind­maps, I use seve­ral key­board short­cuts like the Insert key to add new child nodes, the Enter key to add a bunch of “sibling” nodes at once, the F2 key to rename nodes and the arrow keys and spa­ce­bar to navi­gate bet­ween nodes.

For a well thought out but easy to create pre­sen­ta­tion for videos, webi­nars and inter­views… create a mind­map and expand on each point you’re trying to make one at a time as you pre­sent. Com­bine this with desk­top recor­ding soft­ware or built-​​in webi­nar screen cap­ture soft­ware… and you’ve got your­self an ins­tant pro­duct, blog post, or interview.