All of us have winds that blow through our lives. The winds are inevitable. There will be times when your business grows - you reach more clients, you receive more orders. And there will be times when your business slows. There will be times when everything just seems to be clicking along at a smooth pace. And there will be times when everything seems to go wrong at once.

When wind blows through your business, will you immediately give up on what you are doing and look for another business opportunity to try for a while - shape-shifting as you cross sky? Will you give up saying there's too much wind for you to be prosperous and fade away entirely?

Or, will you bend with wind and only allow it to affect your branches and not who you are or what you are doing? Will you remain fixed and stable because you have laid a solid root foundation in your business and built it slowly and steadily?

In end, choice is up to you. As for me, I'm choosing to be a tree. What's your choice?

Are you in training business? Courses can be devised which integrate voice and images. Live links can be introduced to take students to other sites and information pertinent to material being taught. Keep updated company policies online and couple them with news items and other materials relevant to employees. Motivational trainers can use text, audio, and video to sell their training materials when their audience is most inclined to buy!

Doing e-commerce? Show photos of product range with an audio track talking about each product as it appears. Use this in conjunction with text to take your visitors directly to order form for product while they're anxious and motivated to purchase.

Work with other merchants of complementary products; generate revenue by placing ads for their goods throughout your presentation.

Offering a service? Slide presentations can be timed so that bullet points come up in sequence on screen at specified time intervals. These could change color as presenter moves from point to point. Testimonials could scroll as you discuss your customer satisfaction policies. Restaurants could show a clip of chef preparing his "signature" meal while recipe is read or scrolled for visitor.

I've talked about Rich Media, of which streaming and SMIL are integral components, in many articles. (See: http://www.wbcimaging.com/articlesbyexperts.htm) Now Rich Media is in spotlight as traditional advertisers, losing faith in "tried and true" banner advertising campaign, start to hop aboard streaming bandwagon. As these advertisers shift their emphasis from banner click-thrus to ads that that are specifically used for branding, greater emphasis will be placed on Rich Media. With Rich Media, there are numerous opportunities to present complexities of branding that cannot be done with static banners - greater interactivity, sound, motion, and ability to display creatives in a larger space. As this occurs, SMIL will become key to making these ad campaigns an entertaining and "smooth as television" experience.

I'd like you to think about television news. It's pretty straightforward; information about events of day. But sophisticated audiences of today demand more than just "talking heads" on their television screens. So news is packaged as entertainment, with music and graphics to grab eyes and ears of viewer. When advertisers realize that web surfers are seeking this same experience, there will be a rush to duplicate this on Internet.

Then, all you have to do is...SMIL.