MBA1374 Creating Your Presentation Slides For a Conference Talk

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show, your business podcast of choice every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode, you will learn how to create your presentation slides for a conference talk. If you are going to be speaking at a conference now, in the near future, or anytime in the future, I'm going to walk you through step by step how to create great slides for your talk. I'm going to show you why less is more, how the title of your talk is so crucial, how to deliver the keynotes that drive your ideas home, and how to wow the crowd with your delivery and make sure that they're focused on you and not just your slides. I'm also going to show you how to put it all together and submit them properly. So it's a win for the conference, but also for you and your brand. When you're at a conference, when you're on stage, this is a golden opportunity for you and your business to build brand awareness, brand affinity, and just to connect with your audience. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, let's talk about preparing those slides for your conference talk. The first thing we're going to begin with is the title of your talk. The first thing I really want to drive home is that you don't want the conference to bully you into a title that you can't deliver often. A conference will reach out to you or you'll apply to speak and they'll come back to you and say, hey, we'd love for you to speak on this topic. Here's the title for your talk. And they basically corner you into a title that maybe you don't feel comfortable with, or maybe you don't feel you can give the best value in. You are the value deliverer. You got to make sure that whatever your expertise is, the title of your talk is something that you can deliver. Your title is really a promise. People are going to your talk because they say, hey, I want to learn this. And a lot of people get disappointed. You know, as a conference goer that if you go to a talk and let's say the title promises you how to redo your wardrobe for $500, let's say this is a fashion conference and you go to that actual talk and you don't learn how to redo your wardrobe for $500, you feel so disappointed. You feel like, wow, this was a waste of time. So see your title as a promise. So make sure you can deliver on that promise. This is why you have to control the title. Now when you have this conversation with the convert itself, you have to remember all they really want. Their end goal is a great talk. They want a great speech for their audience, a great experience, and that's what you have to convey to them. Hey, thanks for the suggestion, but actually, the best talk I can give you for your audience is this. And that's when you give them the title that you know you can deliver value. I can reassure you that it's going to be a fantastic, value packed experience for your audience. That's really all they want to hear. This is especially important if you're new to speaking on stage at conferences. If you're a known speaker, if you've been speaking for for a while, if you have, you know, video footage of your speeches on your personal website and they see, hey, your delivery is great and your content's great, they're just gonna trust you. And they're a lot more flexible with the title. So make sure you negotiate a title that you can stick to, that you can give value to. Why? Because the title really is the main point is the promise, like I mentioned. But this is what we're gonna be working off. For example, my partner, Nicole Baldino is gonna be giving a talk at a conference about the three ways to market your business with a podcast for avid listeners. You also know that Nicole is a producer of the show. Now, this title is Important why? Because this allows me to build out my content. And what I recommend is five major points that drive home what you promise. So obviously three of those five are going to be the three ways that you can market your business with podcasts. So obviously three of the five are going to be the three ways to market your business with a podcast. But two other points can be, why would you want to do this? What are the advantages? And another point could be just general data and demographics about podcasting in general. The point here is that all the information, these five points, they all just convince the audience of the point I'm trying to make. I don't want you to do more than five points. Why? Less is more. When it comes to public speaking, it's better for you to really drill home an idea and have people walk away from feeling different, changing their perspective, that you've actually had a mind shift that happened in that audience that's better than giving them 97 ways to do XYZ. No one's going to remember those 97 ways. No one's going to take down all those notes. A public speech. The opportunity that you have in front of you is to change people's minds about something is to convince them of an argument and give them value in the process. So I like to start with the title and. And then five points that I want to cover that drive that promise home, that drive that title home in an outline format. And that's literally just a word doc. And I just write down those five points. Now my presentation slides are going to really be a visualization of me convincing the crowd of my argument of the point I'm making with these five points. My advice is to keep the slides as simple and clean as possible. I like to say just use a visual, a picture to drive an idea home in a slide or a short statement in big, bold letters. Here's a rule of thumb you can follow. If I'm looking at your PowerPoint slides and I can read everything on the PowerPoint slides and get everything out of the talk that you're going to give, then you are absolutely useless. I don't need you to be there. I can just read your slides. But if I read your slides and I kind of get the gist of the talk, but I don't get the whole picture. I. Because there are a few statements, there's a few quotes, some images. That's a better set of slides. Why? Because the slides are supposed to aid you. They're supposed to help you. They're supposed to be Visual aids. They're not supposed to be delivering the speech. You're the delivery person of the information. You're the delivery person, you know, bringing the package of information. Your job is to deliver the information, not the slides. The slides are supposed to help augment your point, to support your point. There's also a rule called the T shirt rule. What would you put on a T shirt? Like a picture or a couple of words? You wouldn't put a paragraph. If you have statistics, just put a big statistic on one slide. 35%. What's 35%? That's your job, to explain it. Don't put all the data and all the information there. Of course, if you want to cite somebody or give a footnote on the slide, that's totally fine, but you want people to pay attention to you. So they see 35 and like, what? What's 35%? 35% of what? And then they are going to be attentive to what comes out of your mouth, because that's where the answer is going to come from. So keep your slides simple and don't overkill it. Right? Don't go overboard with the slides. I really think. I really think you really should have no more than a slide a minute. That's even a lot. If you can cut it down to a slide every two minutes, that's even better. Why? Because if you're jumping through slides and you're spending less than a minute on each slide, you're not really driving home any points. You're just rambling. You're just running through the content. You want to be able to have a conversation with your audience and look them in the eye and allow them to absorb what you are saying before you move on to the next point. So, for example, I have a talk coming up. I have about 40 minutes allotted. I have 30 slides. To me, that's kind of the limit. I could probably trim it up to about 25 slides, and that would even give me more time and more flexibility. If you need to look at your slides to remember what you have to say, then you're not prepared. You need to make sure you know your speech. You need to rehearse it over and over. You shouldn't be reading from the slides. That's just my personal experience. This is what I've been taught by people that I learned from public speaking. Great public speakers like Michael Port, Amy Port Scott Stratton. These people really know how to deliver a great speech. What I learned from those, once you start losing that eye connection constantly, where you're looking at your slides more than you're looking at your audience. That's a problem. You're losing that connection. What you want to do is make sure that you make eye contact with as many people as possible in the crowd. It's okay to glance at your slides or look at your confidence monitor, but you should definitely be looking at them more than your slides. I would say about 75, 25 is the split. And remember, you're going to be looking at your slides a lot more if you have a lot more slides. So the less slides the better. And the more you rehearse, the less you're going to be relying to look at the slide to remind you of what to say next or what you have to say to drive the point home. Now, I believe in personal branding. I believe that every slide should have your branding colors. It should have your business logo. It should have your name at the start, at the end. Some conferences, they want you to add their logo or their hashtag. That's totally cool. I like to put hashtags. If I have a slide that has a quote or, or a important point that I want to drive home and I hashtag it with the name of the conference or whatever hashtag the conference is using so that it can get shared on social. I give that to the conference because, hey, it's the way I can give back to them as I have the opportunity to be on stage. But make sure you have your branding colors, you have your actual logo on the footer of your slides so people can be reminded of who's delivering the speech. Who is behind this information? What business is behind this information? Next, when you deliver your slides to the conference, make sure you do it with ample time. Often the conference will give you a deadline when to submit the slides. Submit them as early as possible, earlier than the deadline. They remember this stuff. The conference will appreciate that you're organized and you're on top of it. Don't worry if come the day of the conference you need to make a change to your slide. You can ask the organizers and most likely they'll have it on their machine and you can go ahead and make the edit right there. I also like to save a copy of my presentation slide on my Google Drive, on my personal laptop and on my smartphone. The drive and the laptop are just backups, but on my smartphone because I like to go through my slides while I'm on the plane, while I'm getting to the conference, while I'm waiting to get on stage, while I'm getting mic'd up. It just allows me to be familiar with the slides and know what comes next. What comes next. And as I'm going through my speech, I know in my head what the next slide is going to be. I kind of test myself like a flashcard system. Lastly, a lot of speeches. At the end, some of the attendees will ask, hey, can I get a copy of the slides? This will never be a question. This will never be a request that you're going to get if you follow my formula. If the slides need you to deliver them where they're aids and not the actual content so you don't have to worry about that headache anymore. Lastly, if you have time to take questions, I definitely would add some time, 10 minutes or so so you can have some questions at the end of your talk so you can give specific value to people in the audience. I also like to ask the organizer of the conference to give me as much feedback as possible whether they survey the audience about what their favorite speech was or their favorite session. So that way you can get as much valuable feedback about how to improve your delivery your slides Looking for a.

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A couple more tips when it comes to creating your slides, I highly recommend getting a actual slide deck, whether it's PowerPoint Keynote, customized for your business and brand. So you can hire a freelancer to do this. You can find them on Fiverr, you can find them on upwork, where you give them your branding colors, your logo and they can actually craft a unique slide deck for all your presentations. I'm talking about the design of the slides, the background, the colors, all that kind of stuff, the, the fonts. And that way you and everybody in your company can use that. It could be a unified brand for your business. Also, if you can record with your smartphone, even with a, you know, gorilla tripod kind of thing, record your session. See how well you deliver your presentation and how you actually deliver the slides, how you talk about the slides, how much you look at the slides, do you have too many slides. Are you rushing over the slides? You can watch back the tape at your convenience with nobody around if you like, and that way you can improve. I do this all the time. I record every single time I get on stage so I can keep on improving. The first couple times I did this about five or six years ago, it was cringe worthy, right? I was not having a good time, but I just got over myself and realized, hey, this is important. I need to learn from my mistakes. I gotta improve. And if I don't look in the mirror, so to speak, or look at my video, I'm not gonna be able to get better. I don't want to keep doing the same things wrong. So go ahead and give that a shot the next time around, no matter how big or small the actual conference or the speech is. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 Ombre Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now and make sure you don't miss a beat. By hitting subscribe, we make sure that the next episode, when it's available, gets downloaded straight to your device. Also, if you love the show, leave us an iTunes rating and review. We'd love to hear from you and hear what you think of the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Conferences are a great way to connect with your audience, like I mentioned, to build that brand awareness and brand authority. So when you do go to a conference to speak, make sure you don't schedule too much on your calendar. It's really hard to work when you're traveling and you're at a conference. You want to have your full focus on the conference goers. You want to be able to go to those meetups and go to those, you know, networking parties and go to the speeches, other people's speeches, and connect with other speakers. You could do the work later or before, but you can't do all this after the conference is over. You can't do all that networking and that relationship building after the conference is over. That opportunity is there right then in person to take advantage of it. All right, thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

Sam.