So there’s a new addition coming near soon! Even if you are not related to the happy expecting couple, you may still be invited to the baby shower and asked to bring a nice baby shower gift for the little one. Giving a baby shower gift is a great way to express love and care for the baby. Choosing from a line of so many cute baby items is an exciting and fun task. Even if it’s a bit tricky to decide which one to buy, but still everyone gets to smile as they look at adorable tiny pieces for a precious little one.

What makes shopping for baby gifts more fun and easy these days is the Internet. Now that there are thousands of suppliers which have incorporated online shops into their business, people can easily find and purchase the things they need without going anywhere out of comfort. Online shops usually have different lists of products and services on their web pages. People can easily browse online catalogs along with the prices and promos, if they have. Another benefit of shopping online is that anyone can shop anytime of the day. It’s a 24/7 shopping experience for savvy shoppers who prefer buying online than buying at a local store or mall.

When it comes to baby shower gifts, there are so many online shops that offer a wide variety of wonderful baby items to choose from. With the endless options of baby gift ideas, it can be a challenge to choose one. It is always a great idea to go for baby gifts that are useful and practical. Casual baby gifts such as clothing, blankets, bibs, diapers, baby bottles, and toys can turn out to be the most unique at the shower with just a bit effort and creativity.

There are several unique ways to present casual baby shower gifts. For someone who wants to offer an extraordinary present out of casual baby items, there’s no need to worry about because it is not something that is impossible to do. In fact, there are easy ways to make common gifts unique at the end of the day.

One unique way to present casual baby clothing is to have the clothes embroidered with the name or initials of the child. Embroidering names or initials doesn’t only limit to clothing because baby blankets, bur cloths, and even bedding can have an embroidered name or initials of the little one.

Engraved baby gifts also make unique presents. Pewter baby gift items are often the most popular to engrave. Baby jewelry are also among the best choices under engraved baby gifts. Casual baby clothing items and accessories can be packaged in a unique way. Through the idea of baby gift baskets, useful and practical goods for babies can be presented with creativity and style. A baby gift basket can contain various cute infant items that may include toys baby bath products, wipes, baby food, feeding supplies, brush set, booties and socks, and other more.

Webinars have become popular in the past couple of years for several reasons, the main one being logistics in terms of not having to leave your home or office to give them or participate in them. From a geographical standpoint, you can immediately see the advantage in the amount of time you will save.

Here is a quick and easy three-part guide to staging a successful webinar:

1- Planning. You will need to pick a date for you webinar and set up the software in advance. There are several choices for webinar software and services. I happen to believe that GoToWebinar is a good choice. So, you will need to register an account, pick the date of your first webinar, and then do a couple of practice runs with the software before the actual date of the webinar.

One good tip at this point would be to use two video screens, so that you can put the control panel for the webinar on one screen, and use the other one for your presentation; that is the screen that the participants in the webinar will see.

2- Promoting. If you are going to run a successful webinar, you need to promote it. You cannot rely on anybody just finding it by accident and wanting to register.

There are, of course, several ways to do this. One of the most efficient ways is to send out an invitation to your personal and professional mailing list. Many of the more popular webinar software and services will allow you to do this.

You are going to make the email as value driven and compelling as you can, so that it makes someone want to register. I would not recommend charging a fee your first time out. Get your feet wet by offering a free webinar, and in your invitation explain in detail what it is all about.

Another way to promote webinar is to use your social media connections, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace. You can simply let your connections know that the webinar is taking place, and again you must make sure the message that you send is clear and concise.

You could also promote the webinar through grassroots marketing word of mouth and through the telephone if you wanted to, but I think the most efficient way is defiantly by email.

3- Understanding the difference between your content and good context. Your content is, obviously, the information that you want to share, while context is the way that you share it.

If at all possible, I would recommend that you take some presentation training courses, but if you want to go it alone, there are a couple of points.

Make sure that your introduction, or the first five minutes of your webinar, includes an overview of what you will cover, so that people have enough reason to stick around for the duration.

Also, make sure that the introduction includes a little bit of what we call ETR (Earn the Right).

Tell a good story which shares your experience in a more entertaining way. Stories are fun to listen to, but they also help you keep your audience engaged, and help them learn more about you, so that you can build a little bit of trust along the way.

Try to stay away from PowerPoint as much as possible, so that you are able to change up your content when the questions start to come in. Remember, you do not always know what they want to learn, and it might be a good idea to ask them.

Finally you have to back in your webinar. It means making an offer for your product and/or services, which is really the whole point of the webinar, so that you can promote your business. We will discuss how to make a compelling offer in another article.

I would recommend in closing, if you have not ever staged a webinar before, that you try to seek out information from experts on how to do that. While you will learn from your mistakes, it is much easier to learn the information from somebody who is already giving successful webinars.

When you are looking for a new job you will undoubtedly have to produce an updated CV or resume as part of the application process. These are relatively short documents that on the one hand are easy to put together but on the other they are quite complex and easy to get wrong.

One of the first things to consider when putting a new resume or CV together is its presentation. The substance of it will also matter obviously but if it is not presented well then this can work against any good substance you have there and result in you not getting the job.

Our 3 top tips for getting the presentation of your CV and resume to a sufficient standard are as follows:

1. White space – you want to make the job of reading your CV/resume as easy as possible for the recruiter and one of the ways you can do this is to ensure there is plenty of white space on the page.

CV’s/resumes that try to cram as much in as possible and present themselves as one large block of text are very difficult for a recruiter to consider. Less is more when it comes to CV’s/resumes and you should therefore ensure that they are set out in clearly defined and headed sections and have plenty of white space in the margins and around the text on the page.

2. Use bullet points – following on from the last point you can drastically affect the presentation of the CV/resume by using bullet points for the entries. This will naturally mean there will be more white space on the page and it should encourage you to make succinct points rather than ramble on in long paragraphs.

Try to use a single bullet to cover a single point and try to express them in terms of the skills you have gained from your experience and an example of your experience to demonstrate each skill.

3. Fonts – it is important to tailor your CV/resume to the type of industry you are applying to and this includes the fonts you use. If it is a profession then you should be looking to use white or cream paper with black traditional fonts such as times new roman or arial to give your application that professional feel.

Do not be tempted to use colored paper and fancy fonts to stand out from the crowd as this will often work against you unless you are applying for a job in a particularly creative industry.

This is the second in a series of articles aimed at showing the benefits of presenting tabular data in a graphical format.

The first article explained how to carry out a simple survey which could be completed by children, the results being presented in a tabular form. Although the results could be reorganised to produce tables showing the data in different formats, such as by name in alphabetical order or in ascending order of height, the interpretation of the data is not immediate to the person reading it and conclusions may not be easily drawn. This not only causes difficulties for both the surveyor and the reader, but can be a little discouraging for the surveyor in trying to determine what they have achieved from their efforts.

We therefore need to display the data in an alternative format so that more can be achieved from the data gathered. One way of doing this is to use a graphical representation known as a histogram.

Histogram

A histogram is the best graphical method to use for plotting and displaying continuous data such as height or weight. It is not so good for displaying data known as discrete or discontinuous, where the subject has distinct survey criteria such as hat sizes or colours.

Let us assume that the child’s height survey, already mentioned in article one, consisted of a sample of 25 children all of the same age. The smallest child was 1.105m tall and the tallest height was 1.687m.

The visual representation of data for a histogram is a chart where the data values are represented by vertical columns whose heights are equivalent to each of the values of one of the survey’s criteria and all these vertical heights are proportional to each other. The width of the column is immaterial but is usually the same for each value displayed. It is preferable that the survey data is recorded in ascending order of height so that the smallest child’s height is recorded first.

Using our survey example above, the vertical axis, or as it is more commonly known, the ‘y axis’, would represent the height of each child within the survey and would range from 1.0m to 1.7m in ascending order. All the surveyed height values of 1.105m to 1.687m would be contained within the chart. The horizontal axis, or ‘x axis’, would represent the 25 names of the children in the sample.

For each child’s name a point is plotted on the chart corresponding to the height of the child. A vertical narrow column is then drawn above the child’s name up to the height point. This column can be given its own colour to differentiate it from its neighbours on the chart. All the remaining children’s heights are plotted in a similar way. If two or more children have the same height then the columns are drawn adjacent to each other. This is where using different column colours or patterns makes identification easier.

This simple histogram will be a series of vertical columns, the shortest on the left and the highest on the right. It will be clear from this chart which child is the shortest, which is the tallest and where each child is placed within the survey. It will also show in which height ranges the children’s heights are concentrated. As stated previously, the survey results will be of greater benefit for interpretation if all the children were about the same age or in the same class at school. Different colours could be used for boys and girls to show how their height ranges varied, if at all.

This form of data presentation is more pleasing to the eye and understandable than any of the spreadsheet tables. The person presenting the survey will find their output much more satisfying and should have greater pride in their achievement.

The next article in this series considers the use of vertical column, horizontal bar and cylinder charts. Details will be provided as to when they should be used, how they are constructed and the benefits that they can provide, both to the presenter and their audience.