Internet Marketing and Public Speaking: Ten Tips for When the Two of You Meet

Internet marketing and public speaking? Not quite ham and eggs, right?

Those two sentences are rarely found in the same sentence. After all, many people choose to do their marketing in cyberspace so that they are never asked to give a sales presentation or speech.

If you are one of these people, you are making a big mistake by not developing your speaking skills, because you are isolating yourself from the vast offline market.

Why Internet Marketers Should Try to Improve Their Public Speaking For the simple reason that by doing so, they and their products can become known to people who are uncomfortable shopping online. They prefer to know that there is a human being on the other end.

In this short article, I’ll give you a “shortcut system” that will allow you to package your substantive knowledge so that it can be conveyed in an interesting and engaging way. It’s a distilled version of what I provide to entrepreneurs in my workshops who are almost universally in the offline world.

Who can your submissions be delivered to? What about Rotary clubs and other civic organizations that are always looking for speakers? What About Internet Marketing Fellows at Seminars?; And remember high schools and colleges, where your audience is likely to be more computer literate than the general population, experienced in online shopping but eager to get face to face with the internet marketer who has a great product.

Keep in mind that an effective speaker is one who focuses on satisfying the needs of the audience members, so that these people conclude that what you are proposing (selling) to them is the best thing for them: for their purposes, to buy your product, eBook or Service.

The ten tips outlined below are not classroom theory, but rather evolve from the real-world lessons I’ve learned in nearly 3,000 presentations and in my workshops for offline sellers. They have worked for me, they have worked for my clients and they will work for you.

1. Have a specific goal

If you don’t know what you want to accomplish with your presentation, your audience won’t either. Your goal can be as limited as making sure your audience remembers your URL or a full understanding of the benefits they’ll get from buying your product.

Remember that giving a great speech or presentation should never be your goal; it is simply a means to an end, and that end is what you want your audience to do with the information presented.

Be specific and, when preparing your presentation, explain your objective in no more than a sentence or two. Print it out and stick it on your computer monitor. This will keep your preparation focused and on target as you go through writing your presentation.

2. Know the problems, needs and concerns of your audience

To be a successful salesperson, your presentation must be audience-focused. You must know the problems of the people you are addressing, because your goal is to offer them a solution. This requires deep research on your audience.

Keep in mind that the main motivation for people to listen to you is their perception that your presentation will benefit them. “What’s in there for me?” is the classic question of all audiences, online or offline

3. Retrograde structure

We have learned to write and speak in a 1-2-3 structure: (1) Introduction- (2) Body – (3) Conclusion. For oral presentations, this is highly counterproductive: unlike reading a memo, people don’t have the luxury of going back and rereading what they missed the first time. You want your audience to hear and understand the bottom line: “This product will solve your problem.”

Start your draft with your conclusion, focusing on merging your goal with your audience’s issues, interests, and concerns.

Put your conclusion on a card marked (3), then develop an introduction that tells the audience that you know their problems and will offer a solution. Place this on a card marked (1).

Finally, place your supporting arguments on a series of cards marked (2A), (2B), etc. This 3-1-2 System provides focus, structure, and thematic unity, and is the heart of my training workshops.

4. Practice only with a recorder or video camera

After completing the draft of the presentation, practice yourself with a tape recorder or video camera. You will be at your weakest point in this initial practice, hence the advice not to have anyone present whose comments could seriously damage your confidence.

Listen to your presentation, take note of the rhythm and cadence, the “uh’s”, “you know”, and check your mastery of the topic.

If you videotape, be aware of your gestures and body language, and coordinate your gestures with your vocal inflection.

5. Practice with a colleague, friend or spouse

After completing the solo practice session, you are ready to practice in front of another person. Choose this person carefully, as you don’t want a hypercritic who finds excessive fault with his presentation style. However, you also don’t want the type of person who finds no faults of any kind and praises you to the heavens. You need honest, constructive criticism aimed at “tweaking” your presentation.

6. Suitable for “Murder Board” practice session

The “Assassination Board, a term I bring to my training workshops from my military training,” is a rigorous practice session. They are the loudspeaker equivalent of the flight simulator used to train pilots on how to deal with in-flight emergencies, or the mock courtroom that prepares lawyers for courtroom combat.

Select no more than four people to be your simulated audience and share with them all the intelligence you have gained about your potential audience. These four people will then play the role of their audience.

Their comments, questions, and criticisms help you correct your presentation style, find gaps in your knowledge, and anticipate questions and objections.

7. Arrive early for a meet and greet

Personal contact and interpersonal skills are important to the success of any presentation, but they’re absolutely vital when you’re trying to persuade people to buy the product you’re selling. We tend to accept information from people we like, but reject it from people we don’t like.

When you arrive early, you can get to know the audience members and let them relate to you as a human being. If it seems appropriate, mention names during your presentation of people you have had the opportunity to meet before the presentation. Nothing is sweeter to the human ear than the sound of one’s own name being positively mentioned by a speaker.

8. Use images to support, not impress.

Visual aids, including the ubiquitous PowerPoint, can make or break a presentation. The advantage of using them is that most people are visual and can more easily absorb information that is presented graphically.

Be careful about your word choice in your images, and of course your delivery, to avoid Geekspeak, unless you’re speaking to an audience as familiar with this unique form of slang as you are.

In a nutshell, Ionic Images: Don’t remember the wonders of PowerPoint, but forget the essence of your presentation.

9. Use rhetorical devices

Repetition of key concepts, careful use of strategic pausing, and parallel building are just a few of the devices you can use to add flavor and cadence to your presentation.

Two examples of such techniques will illustrate this important tactic. Winston Churchill, instead of saying “We in Britain owe a great debt to the pilots of the Royal Air Force”, expressed this thought with the memorable words “Never in the field of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few.” “.

President John F. Kennedy used a classic device of parallelism when he said, “We should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never be afraid to negotiate.”

Use your imagination to see how you can arrange the words to create such a cadence and rhythm.

10. Conduct Immediate Post-File Analysis

Your instinct after completing a challenging presentation is to breathe a sigh of relief and relax. Big mistake.

In a matter of minutes, sit down with a notepad or tape recorder and record the questions asked, the audience’s reaction to your presentation, their impression of your own performance, etc.

Don’t wait until the next day. Short term memory is just that, and you will only remember generalities. Immediate analysis will provide details.

Transfer this specific information to your database, and you’ll have a great lead to use on the Kill Panel leading to your next presentation.

Use these tips, and the next time you put down your keyboard, you’ll find that you’re now as eloquent in front of a group of potential clients as you are behind your computer.

Copyright 2005 Larry Tracy