6 tips to nail your conference speech, from Colin James [Video]

Being asked to give a workshop or presentation at a conference is a fantastic opportunity. What a great way to get you and your message more widely known in your industry!

So if you’re invited to speak at a conference, what specific steps can you take to make the most of the event?

Well, to help you nail your talk, try the 6 tips in this 2-minute video by Colin James:

Colin’s tips are:

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Declutter your talk’s title! [A makeover with @LMFDesign]

Which of the many aspects of giving a presentation are you best at?

I’d say I’m best at writing a strong message, and that means I often focus on a talk’s words. So when presentation blogger Laura Foley posted her neat makeover of a title slide, I thought hard about the text on that slide.

In this post, we’ll look at:

Take your talk beyond “pretty slides” – Secret #14 of star presenters, by Laura Foley

(Short of time? Jump to the tips)

How do you create your slide presentations? Allow me a few sentences to guess…

If you’re like most speakers, you probably start in PowerPoint, where (to share your message, and to remind you what to say) it’s quite likely you write dozens of words on each slide. Then, to make your slides look more appealing, you might well “pretty them up” with graphics, a slide template, or even fancy fonts. And, to save time, you probably reuse whatever slides you can from previous talks.

If those steps sound familiar, you’ve likely found it hard to really engage your listeners. So you probably haven’t got the outcome you wanted from each talk.

Wordy slides make for a dull talk

That’s for a couple of reasons:

• As I’m sure you’ve found when you see other people presenting, wordy slides make for a dull talk.
• When you reuse slides from an old talk, the situation and the audience is likely different now. So your audience will sometimes get confused because the slides don’t fit with their viewpoint.

But, fear not. You can avoid those problems by using a different approach, as described by Laura Foley (presentation coach and blogger).

Laura says:

PowerPoint’s super-shortcuts – how many are you missing?

Here’s a quick quiz for you…

Do you know how to do these tasks in PowerPoint with just a few keystrokes:

• Align selected objects by pressing just 3 keys.
• Re-select the object(s) you last changed (by pressing just 2 keystrokes), so you can make more changes.
• Go back to a slide you frequently edit.

Well, read on to find out, and see how other neat PowerPoint shortcuts can help you.