You never know when you might be required to make a presentation, so it’s always worth having a few great tips and tricks up your sleeves ready for when the next one is sprung on you. Your manager might ask you to prepare a presentation to give during your next team meeting or in the coming pitch to a client. Some employers even get applicants to create a presentation to present in their job interview. It’s also regularly asked of students in high school and college, and a portion of their final grade in a subject might rest heavily on their presentation skills.
So, as you can see, it really is worth brushing up on these skills if your current presentation skills are fairly weak. To get started, you might want to use a few of these useful tips.
Make Your Slides Look Great
First of all, you need to make sure that your slides look amazing. If they look quite plain and dull, then your audience might get bored of them pretty quickly. There will be nothing intriguing about them that will make them want to read all of the content on them. It’s easy to brighten up your slides, though. Reading The 78 Best Free Google Slides Themes will give you an idea of the kinds of themes you can use to make the slides look as entertaining or professional as you need them to be. Make sure you stick to the same color scheme on each slide, as using too many colors and patterns could make them look very messy and there may not be much flow between them.
Follow The 10-20-30 Rule
Have you ever heard of the 10-20-30 rule before? This was devised by Guy Kawasaki, who is something of a presentation expert! It basically means that there should be no more than ten slides in your presentation; it can’t last for more than twenty minutes, and the font that you use shouldn’t be smaller than thirty point. This will help you get to your point quickly, without including any information that isn’t really necessary and might end up boring your audience.
Add Some Humor
One surefire way to keep hold of your audience’s attention is to add some humor to your presentation. Even if it is a professional presentation for work, you should still try to keep it light by adding a few jokes throughout. You might even want to add some to the content of your slides for your audience to read themselves. If you do add enough humor, you should find that the audience end up on your side quickly and will be a lot more open to what you have to say. That will also help you relax as well, as knowing that the audience like what you have to say should help remove some of your original nerves.
Concentrate On Your Main Message
It can be all too easy to end up waffling about matters and topics that aren’t all that related to the main topic of your presentation. Make sure you don’t do that, though, as this could be very distracting for people watching your presentation, and their minds might start to wander elsewhere. So, whenever you are speaking, make sure that it is only ever about the main message that you want to get across in your presentation.
Tell Stories
It will always pay off to try to appeal to your audience’s human side, and the best way you can do this is to tell some stories and anecdotes. People love listening to stories and they will connect with you a lot more than if you simply read out facts and statements. One way to use stories in your presentations is to use some real-life examples. Just make sure that they are related to the topic of your presentation, though, or else they might seem pointless to your audience.
Don’t Force Your Gestures
Using body language throughout your presentation will help you come across as very relaxed and natural. Some people try and force some gestures to try and come off as feeling relaxed when in fact they are actually quite nervous. This will only make you look even more nervous, so it’s best not to force anything and instead just let yourself make your regular natural body language and hand gestures.
Hopefully, all of these tips will help you do a good job of your next presentation. It could help you get a new job, promotion, or sign a new client!
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