In today’s information-dense, time-starved world, you may only have a few precious minutes -- or even seconds -- to make your case.

At Haiku Deck, we’ve designed our apps to make it fast and easy to create the type of presentations that help you get that elusive yes. And as we’ve studied the advice of experts and hundreds of thousands of presentations, we’ve zeroed in on some tips you can use to make your presentations more persuasive -- no matter what tool you’re using.

When you’re putting slides together, it’s easy to spend time on the wrong things. We often tell ourselves that if we spend longer on something, it’s better, and typical presentation tools encourage this way of thinking.

Fancy transitions, complicated builds, and animated bullets won’t help your core message be understood and remembered, however. Getting extremely focused about that core message will.

Think about your core message like a headline -- a very clear, compelling takeaway. Make this your opener and your closer. Let it inspire and inform everything you include, and take out everything that doesn’t directly support it.

At Haiku Deck, we keep the slide creation process simple so you can concentrate on your message. We’ve also intentionally limited the amount of text you can include on each slide to help you stay focused. Less is more!

Another common mistake is to pack slides full of text, but for nearly everybody, that’s an instant turn-off. Try using powerful visuals to communicate your key points instead.

Research consistently shows that we process visuals thousands of times faster than words, and that images improve both comprehension and retention.

Finding visuals and including proper attribution can be time-consuming -- we’ve made this easy by building a keyword-based Creative Commons image search right into Haiku Deck. You can find free, beautiful images like this one to illustrate just about any point, and all of the sizing and credits are handled automatically. (You can also upload your own images if you prefer.)

An unending cascade of statistics can be overwhelming, and anecdotes without the data to back them up can feel too lightweight.

A powerful technique is to let them work together -- select a hard-hitting data point to highlight, then bring it to life with a well-chosen story or anecdote.

Just remember to keep the statistics and trends you present simple, so the story behind them is clear and easy to grasp quickly.

In Haiku Deck you can easily create simple, beautiful bar charts, pie charts, and stat charts to showcase your data in a way that’s easy to grasp quickly. Your audience will thank you!

More evidence of the persuasive power of keeping it simple: Here's why a Colorado couple chose John James over other realtors vying for their $1.4M listing.

Check out the whole story here:
http://blog.haikudeck.com/how-a-colorado-realtor-used-haiku-deck-to-land-a-...

If you’re trying to make a case for a cause or inspire action, you’ll want to close with a compelling vision of what is possible.

Help your audience picture clearly what the result can be if they contribute their support, and be explicit about what action you’re asking them to take.

In decades past, presentations were, by nature, a bit formal. With the rise of mobile devices, that’s no longer the case. A slideshow flipped through on an iPad over a cup of coffee has a much more personal feel than one delivered with a projector, or emailed as a bulky attachment.

If you’re using the techniques described previously, your presentation can be more like a conversation, instead of a soul-numbing recitation of the text that’s plainly visible on your slides. And, when it comes to being persuasive, a conversation is more likely to pave the way to yes.

Haiku Deck began as an iPad app to make this type of casual pitch or presentation easy and relevant to the way we work today. You can now create Haiku Decks on the web, and deliver them from an iPad, an iPhone, or any device with a browser -- whether you’re in a meeting room, a coffee shop, or grabbing a cab.

If I’ve persuaded you to try Haiku Deck for your next presentation, you can get the free iPad app or try the Web App at http://www.haikudeck.com.

And if you have a success story (or another tip) to share, let us know at gallery@haikudeck.com!