A key trait of successful speakers is understanding their personal brand. They know what they represent, how they want to be perceived, and what success looks for them. It’s common for this knowledge to accrue with experience, but you don’t have to wait for your 10,000 hours in order to get to that point.

You’ll achieve success sooner if you follow the steps below.

• Define who you are as a speaker
  Are you a motivational speaker, an entertainer, a teacher, or a combination of all of them? Deciding on this highest level of goals will help you keep your talks on track, and remind you why you do what you do. For me, my goal is always to entertain, educate, and inspire—in that order. The vast majority of my energy comes from the energy of the audience, in the form of laughter.
• Know what you’re good at and what you’re not
  Not everyone is funny, and not everyone can speak for an hour without any slides while making people weep with joy. You need to be honest with yourself in order to optimize your presentation design. Bombing when you try to tell a joke is painful for everyone, and it will deflate your energy on stage. So if your key skill is data visualization? Wow people with that and leave the jokes to the comedians.
• Establish what you want the audience to experience
  Do you want them to laugh, or scribble copious notes, or enjoy a community experience interacting with their neighbours when you engage them in audience participation?
• What does success look like?
  When you know what you want the audience to experience, you can use it as your metric for success. If you want them to share photos of your slides on social media, you can measure that. If you want them to download your slide deck PDF from your landing page, you can measure that. Want them to laugh 15 times during your talk? You can measure that. Standing ovation? Well, we all want that. If you don’t have your success criteria defined you can’t gauge if you’re succeeding as a speaker. Optimization of your talks comes from observation. If that 11th joke fell flat, remove it or figure out why and change it.
• Develop an “Original Content” mindset
  Something that can really make your talk stand out is when your content is completely original. You took the photos, you recorded the videos, and you did the research—which can be something as simple as a series of Twitter polls. Seeing stock photos in a presentation is lame, making the audience feel cheated. In one of my talks I needed to demonstrate the ridiculously endless choice in supermarket toothpaste aisles. I could have shown a photo like this:
  

  But instead, I went to the supermarket with a friend (who was wielding my phone as a camera), and took a series of seven shots like this:

  

  The result is content that nobody else in the world has. This is critical if you’re speaking about a topic that many others speak about (the psychology of shopping behaviour for example). You already have your own original take on the topic, but if you use the same photos/charts/data points as everyone else, your message is watered down by the sameness of the visuals—even if what you are saying is completely new.

  At the end of the day, it comes down to extra effort and hard work.

• Develop a “Diverse Content” mindset
  Your audience will (hopefully) contain a broad and diverse cross-section of people. People respond best when your content is reflective of them. By developing a mindset of diversity, you can source different examples, use quotes from more varied sources, and recommend tools, businesses, and the advice of those who reflect more than just your own image. Not only is it the right thing to do, I guarantee it will make you stand out as a speaker people trust.

Presentations are unequal parts art, structure, story, design, interaction, flow, balance, emotion, and technical production. Sounds simple. It’s not. But it’s made much easier if you’ve defined the purpose of your talk (as described in the previous chapter).

Try these tips to get a head start:

• Reduce your big idea to a small one
  Can you recall a time when a colleague, stranger, or family member asked what you do, or what your latest talk is about? And you meandered for 2 minutes trying to explain it, only to leave them with a puzzled look on their face. Don’t worry, we all do it.
  How do you get past this problem? The best way I know—and this works equally well for an elevator pitch for a new startup—is to do a reduction exercise.
  It works like this: you write down a long series of bullet points that describes, in detail, everything you want to communicate in your talk. Dive deep into the minutiae and unpack it all.
  Once you’ve done it, start again, but this time, instead of 94 bullet points, you have to do it in 47, then 24, then 12, then 6, then 3, and finally 1. By the time you’ve completed this exercise you’ll have such a strong sense of your talk’s value proposition that you’ll be able to rattle it off without thinking.
  Not only will this help you describe it to someone, but you’ll be able to write better titles for your talk, and you’ll have a deeper understanding of all aspects of your content.
  It’s also a great dumping ground for all of your wildest ideas.
• Chunk your talk into “bits”
  This is a technique that comedians—some of the best storytellers on the planet—use to fantastic effect. It’s pretty simple in its execution. You go through your talk and break it apart into sections that make sense by themselves.
  This could be the intro, section 3 of your 7 points, or a story you tell in the middle. Whatever it is, practice the heck out of that part in isolation. You still need to practice your talk from start to finish, but this tech is so useful on several levels.
  • First, when you really know a section, it gives you confidence when you get to that point when presenting because you know it! and your execution and delivery will be much tighter.
  • Second, when you know a segment well, you can learn how to shorten or extend it depending on how much time you have. Sometimes you’re so short on time (you went slow or the previous speaker ran over their time) you have to cut pieces, and if you know them intimately you can whip off a quick summary of the whole point and tell the audience to check your slides afterwards. Conversely, if you have a lot of extra time all of a sudden, you can slow down and dig deeper into the topic than you thought you could.
  • Third, it allows you to ad-lib. This is one of the highlights of every talk, and something that comes with experience. It’s always a really fun moment because you just let loose and find new points and angles to your message–which is often where the true brilliance in your talk will emerge.
  • Fourth, aren’t you enjoying a break from standard bullet points in this section?
  • Fifth, over time you will start to build what I call a “Greatest Hits Deck” (GHD) where you store your very best work. It’s much easier when you have your bits chunked to grab 15 slides and copy them into your GHD. GHD’s are really useful when you get invited to give a talk to an audience you know isn’t familiar with your work. And instead of giving a new talk that you might not have time to prepare, or a recent talk that didn’t go down well, you can whip out the GHD and be an absolute crowd favourite. Whenever I get to rock my GHD I’m over the moon and look forward to the event even more.
• Establish an opening hook
  The start of your talk is the only time you will have 100% of the audience’s attention. They are sitting in anticipation of what’s to come which makes it a really important moment to get right.
  Starting with “blah blah blah, hello, blah, blah, a little about me, blah blah” will send people straight to checking Facebook.
  See if you can find a dramatic or bold statement, or tease the outcome of your story without giving it away. Experiment saying things out loud and see what feels like it’s going to build excitement. The magic comes when you open with that statement—without saying anything, ANYTHING—before it.
• Create a closing call to action
  “Thanks. See ya later!” Nope, don’t do that. You have a golden opportunity to ask the audience to do something. If they’ve stuck around ’til the end, you’ve probably done a great job, providing the audience with a ton of value. Choose between these options for what you want them to do next:
  • Visit your talk resources landing page to get your slides and all the other goodies you mentioned.
  • Connect with you on whatever social platform you prefer, to ask any follow-up questions. This is a fantastic way to create a 1-1 engagement with someone.
  • Promote your latest “thing” whatever that may be. You earned it. And if you did a good job of not being a salesy speaker, the audience won’t be against you doing it. If you pepper your talk full of sales however, they won’t like that.

The topic of slide design requires multiple intensive courses to cover all you need to know (I’ll be releasing those in due course), but you’re probably sick of scrolling in this guide so I’ll keep it short and sweet. By short I mean huge, and by sweet I mean sweet.

In this chapter I’ll cover:

• Slide design basics
• Finding content for your presentation
• Using media in your slides
• Animations and transitions
• How to show data in your slides
• Using paid presentation templates to accelerate your work
• A few cool design tricks
• Making your slides Tweetable and shareable
• Using master slides (Keynote has respectfully changed this term to be “Slide Layouts”, PowerPoint still uses “Slide Master”)

Told you it would be short.

Part 1 – Slide Design Basics

The old-school aspect ratio for slides was 4:3. This was established based on the shape of those projector pulldown screens common in classrooms. However, it’s more common—and significantly more modern and cinematic looking—to use a 16:9 aspect ratio. This is how most on-stage screen look, and it closely mirrors how laptop screens and computer monitors are designed.

This is precisely why this chapter comes after defining your presentation’s purpose. By starting your work inside PowerPoint, staring at a blank slide, you’re going to work more slowly and will end up with spaghetti slides that don’t have a coherent structure.

A skeleton outline breaks down the sections and subsections of your talk into a simple list. This view makes it easy to re-order the sections to create the right story arc.

Once you have your outline, it’s time to open the software and work on your slide layouts to create the structural chapter/section slides. But don’t add your content until you’ve established a theme (if you want one) and your typography selection.

Themes can be good and bad. Having an overarching concept to follow can make things easier for you, but if you choose one based on a currently popular meme, you can end up looking like everyone else who also had this bright idea. Star Wars and Game of Thrones themes for example, are insanely overused.

If you know the makeup of your audience, and know they’ll be familiar with the theme it can work in your favour, but if it’s an atypical audience for you and they don’t recognize your inside jokes, GIFs, and topical references you risk falling flat.

It can, however, be a good tactic if it fits with your goal as a speaker (to be known for your themes).

Personally, I like to create my own theme from the talk concept. Sometimes based on a known theme but then expanded into my original style.

As an example, I did a talk called “The Conversion Equation” which was very mathematical in nature. I started by creating an opening slide, taking my own photo based on the movie A Beautiful Mind and then built out my own designs following that.

Yes, I used a known theme as the opening slide, but I used the original content mindset from the previous chapter to make the bulk of the content my own.

I used a chalkboard to channel Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting for other parts of the design. Slides like these can take a lot of time to create but they are well worth it because they will be memorable.

I’ll be doing design breakdown videos in the future, that show how I did this.

At the end of the day, you do you.

When working with a theme, it will only work if the typeface you choose merges seamlessly with the concept. Fortunately, there are thousands of free fonts available to help you create the right aesthetic and avoid the standard selection of typefaces that’s bundled into your presentation software.

In the following example (the chalkboard background) I hunted through free font sites for a chalkboard style. You can see the search results from the font site DaFont.com.

To demonstrate the importance of choosing an appropriate font, consider the example below where I used Arial, one of the many bog standard default fonts. It looks pretty terrible, and the theme is diminished as a result.

For some types of presentation you’ll be giving on Zoom, such as an internal corporate presentation, it can be really helpful to lay out in advance what will be covered. While this isn’t something I do personally—I like to keep it all a mystery—it can help set expectations.

The only thing I ask of you if you have an agenda slide, is to use the Progressive Reveal technique so that you’re not kicking off your talk with a giant wall of text.