Back at the beginning of January I wrote about a whole load of techniques to break the ice with your audience – but I haven’t actually shown you it in action yet. So I thought I’d show you a little sneak preview of breaking the ice IN ACTION at my Presentation Profits Intensive seminar. Remember – there is one coming up in Melbourne 19th-21st March. Click here to find out more:
Presentation Profits Intensive

• The first few moments when you are up on stage are critical to
  how well your audience receives you.
• There can be a lot of pressure on you to make them feel comfortable quickly otherwise they’ll switch off
• You need to Break the Ice and make them connect with each other.
• There are many ways to do this, and a great way is to get people to get up out of their seats and go and greet five people they have never met like long lost friends.
• It’s a lot of fun and it takes the pressure off you, so you can compose yourself ready to be the awesome speaker that you are!

• Every seven minutes you need to elicit a state change in your audience
• It can be with a MASSAGE, a HIGH FIVE or a turn to your neighbour to say something complimentary and fun
• In order to know when to do this you can have a reminder on your autocue or just watch your audience’s faces for that glazed look.
• People can only absorb content for so long before they need a shift in state and since you are ‘leading your audience’ it is your job to
  ‘lead their state’ – otherwise they’ll do it themselves!
• Use state changes to keep your audience alert, focussed, and receptive to your content.

The venue and environment you select when doing your presentation is as much a vital part of what you do as everything else.

You want to choose somewhere that supports your message and adds to what you want to achieve. For Example: Don’t choose somewhere dark and gloomy if you have a bright and sunny message.

The place you choose to have your presentation will have it’s own story to tell. Make sure you find out what that story is (if it isn’t obvious) and make sure that it is in alignment with what you will be speaking about.

In order to become a speaker that moves hearts and minds and is memorable, you need to use an element to your language that is unforgettable.

Like Shakespeare did in his plays, if you can use verbs in a powerful way in your presentation, you will find it all comes to life.

This is the same trick that copywriters employ – using active verbs in their copy makes it come to life and its the same in your presentation. Using active verbs in your language engages the audience in a more powerful way.

One of the most common excuses I hear from my clients when they are stalling on doing the things they know they should do is “I don’t have the time”.

If you have ever said to yourself “I just don’t have the time to get these things done that I know I should be doing” then you should consider outsourcing.

This has allowed us to grow our business by implementing marketing strategies that we alsways knew we should have, make changes to our web sites that we always knew we should have – all these things that are on the “To Do” list but don’t quite get done you can usually outsource.

There are loads of web sites out there where you can post a job and people will bid to help you with that job.

So whether its help with writing copy, getting your book written or getting your newsletters written – there are so many strategies that you can use as a speaker to draw more attention to your business and build a relationship with your list that you don’t necessarily need to do yourself.

Some Outsourcing sites I recommend are:

• www.Rentacoder.com
• www.Elance.com
• www.Odesk.com