We've all seen or slept through boring talks when the speaker droned along in a totally zoned out audience.
How to make the audience entertained and your presentation engaging?
- One idea per slide. It's important not to overload an audience with the exhaustive information. Learn to pause to allow an audience to form the picture of what you have just said.
- Keep the text simple Don't use a lot of text. Simple can be hard for the presenter, but it will be appreciated by the audience. Simplicity takes more forethought and planning on your part because you have to think very hard about what to include and what can be left out. What is the essence of your message? This is the ultimate question you need to ask yourself during the preparation of your presentation. Ask yourself: If your audience could remember only five things about your presentation,what would you want it to be?
- Images to help you to communicate Think of images to make your ideas come alive. If it doesn't strengthen your ideas, forget the photo.And another goal should be to produce graphics that do not need explanation. It's a whole lot easier to produce complex graphics that require explanation than simple graphics that communicate effectively on their own. Make a simpler graphic that only covers the relevant stuff.
- Keep the background simple Because intensive backgrounds distract attention from the text and from your presentation in a whole. Keep it simple!
- Consider the venue If the slides will be used in a large auditorium, be sure the text is large enough to be read.If the slides will be used in a flat auditorium, make sure that your presentation doesn't have a pointless image on the top and the meaningful message at the bottom of your slides, because nobody will see the message!
- Consider the audience Design for the audience's preferences and not your own. If you are presenting to people who are good at new technologies
- convert your presentation to video. For example, you can convert PPT to AVI with PPTmovie as AVI is the most popular and suitable video format for online sharing.
- upload it to YouTube or another video sharing website.
- send the link across. It's much easier for you to send just a link rather then a heavy presentation and it's much easier for your audience to communicate leaving comments and forwarding the links to their colleagues and friends.
Ok, you have built the logical flow of your presentation, designed supporting materials that are professional and appropriate. But you are still being nervous about it.
To reduce your nervousness, rehearse your presentation several times. If you know your material well and have rehearsed the flow, know what slide is next on the board you have nothing to worry about.
- Useful tip: to save your time you can rehearse your presentation while commuting to work or having a lunch by converting your presentation to MP4 video format and coping to your mobile phone (Pocket PC or any other phone which supports MP4 video format), iPod or iPhone! I like PPTexpert MP4 Converter because it's simple and does its job flawlessly.
- Step by step instruction on how to convert a PowerPoint presentation to MP4 video format for iPhone®, iPod®, PSP and mobile phones
But most importantly, be yourself, enjoy yourself and other people will enjoy what you have to say.