Last year, I created 44 unique presentations, delivered via a variety of mediums - webinars, keynotes, private presentations and conference panels. It's certainly not a skill I've perfect, but it is something I've been asked about quite a bit, so I thought I'd share my methodology and some examples in the hopes that it can help those of you who've learned to love (or at least live with) Powerpoint.
Step 1: Understanding the Presentation's Goals & the Audience
Before I start a deck, I try to learn as much about the audience attending the event/presentation as possible. When it comes to our PRO member webinars, we have lots of survey data and direct feedback, but for outside events, it's critical to connect with the organizers. Here are 5 questions I like to ask:
- What roles/titles are represented in the audience? What do the attendees do for a living and to whom are they reporting?
- What level of knowledge do they have about the topic? How many years of experience are likely under their belts?
- How do these folks hope/intend to apply the knowledge? What do they want to accomplish
- What segment(s) are being targeted by attendees? Are they B2B/B2C, small-medium business, enterprise, agency, consultant, etc.?
- How long do I have to present and how much time should be left for Q+A?
If you forget #5, you can often run into lots of trouble - make sure to get that one :-)
Step 2: Build an Outline in Email
It might seem like an odd way to craft a presentation outline, but I love to use my Google mail account. It autosaves, it can be accessed on my mobile if I want to add/edit/review and I don't need to worry about which computer (home/work/laptop) it's on.
A sample outline might look like:
The outline above comes from a presentation I gave in November to the Social Media Breakfast Club in Seattle (at the kind request of Kristy Bolsinger).
The outline accomplishes several key goals:
- It can be easily shared in email with organizers or team members for a review prior to building out the Powerpoint
- I can review it from a narrative perspective to see if the slides and concepts are going to create an intelligent "flow"
- If there's any additional research or digging around I need to do ahead of time, the outline can help indicate where those might exist
- I can copy and paste any relevant URLs into the outline directly and use them as references later on
- It's easy to put alongside Powerpoint on a wide monitor so I have a perspective on the outline while I'm building the deck in an adjacent window
Step 3: Create a Presentation Shell
Next, I build an "empty shell" presentation in Powerpoint using a template. Most often, that's the SEOmoz template, featuring lots of Roger and a consistent color scheme, but some events have their own requirements around templates and in those instances, I'll build the shell from their example.
The shell is especially easy to build because I can put it alongside the email with my outline and simply work from that spec, massaging slide titles, etc. One piece that's key for me is the segmentation of themes/topics. Whenever I move from a topic/discussion point to a whole new area, I use transitional slides that signal to the audience we're moving on. These slides in the SEOmoz template are blue and contain only a headline + Roger mozBot and his word bubble. I typically fill these with something relevant or fun.
In the transitional slide example above, the section covers inclusion in vertical/universal-style listings. Hence, Roger's alluding to Google's left-hand search menu.
Step 4: Add Pictures, Screenshots and Graphics
The next step is typically the most time-consuming and challenging.
My goal is to have as few words and bullet points in slides as possible (using them only where necessary). Thus, 90%+ of my slides are usually graphics, screenshots, diagrams, charts or drawings that represent the tactic or idea I'm attempting to convey. As you might imagine, this gets hard (which is why many presenters use the simpler bullet point/text format).
Below are a few examples of the types of slides I like to create:
I worry less about making beautiful, aesthetically-pleasing slides and more about graphics that help tell the story effectively. That said, I'm insanely jealous of those who manage to mix both phenomenal design/layout and powerful storytelling into their slide art. In the future, it's possible I might hire help specifically to help create those stunning, well-designed types of slide decks (currently, I make all my own decks).
NOTE: SEOmoz uses Shutterstock's stock photography, but I also will sometimes using Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr (and/or anything my wife takes).
Step 5: Insert Highlights, Arrows & Effects
Once the graphics are in, I'm in polishing mode. Oftentimes, that means adding effects to the deck, though I try to be very minimalist with these. You can see a few examples below:
I almost never use visual effects like fade-in/out, motion, sound, video, etc. Not only are there occasional (and painful) compatability problems with these features, but I haven't found them useful 90%+ of the time I see them or have tried to apply them.
Step 6: Run it By My Team / the Organizer(s)
Last, but not least, I send the slide deck out for feedback, either to SEOmoz's marketing team and/or to the organizers of the event. In the example below, Jen Lopez's feedback was invaluable. I added 4 additional slides covering the concepts she mentioned and it seriously improved the webinar we gave.
Even if I'm creating ~4 slide decks each month, the opinions and insight of others is invaluable to making every presentation better. When I don't have this luxury (up late the night before a presentation making something), it's never as good.
Below are a few embedded finished products:
Some Caveats to this Process
The methodology I described won't work well for everyone, and I should make some more things clear:
- I don't create or memorize a script, but I do rely on the slide deck itself to provide an order and narrative to the story I'm telling.
- I only present on topics I've personally invested time and energy into doing (and thus can feel confident about adding value). I'll occasionally talk about a topic about which I'm not extremely proficient (e.g. raising venture capital, which I failed at in 2009), but these are rare and include lots of caveats.
- I've tried some other formats, like an all-whiteboard-drawn presentation and using Prezi (like Martin Macdonald's brilliant one on the MayDay update) and even, long ago, some hand-made, Flash slide decks. None have worked as well for me personally, though I certainly encourage others to get creative and give it a shot.
- I often re-use slides, individual graphics, charts and talking points, but I almost never give the same presentation twice. Although audiences differ, there's frequently at least some overlap (often other speakers) and the world of web marketing/SEO moves so quickly that it demands fresh content and topics. I've also found that I'm best when giving a presentation for the first time - I'm more excited about the material and it shows through in my delivery.
- I set a goal of being in the top 3-5 presentations as rated by the audience at any given event. Someday, I hope to improve that goal to #1, but currently, . I'm religious about asking organizers for my scores and any written feedback to help improve. To date, nearly every time I present, there are a small handful of comments asking for more basic, beginner-level content and a slightly smaller handful who request more advanced material. Someday, I hope to find a balance, though I suspect this will always be challenging.
- I have several verbal disfluencies that frustrate me and that I intend to work on diligently this year. As I recently tweeted, I'm going to look into a professional coach / trainer to assist (recommendations are welcome!).
Hopefully, you can put this methodology (or portions of it) to good use and crank out some awesome presentations of your own!
p.s. If you want to see some of the best in action, join me (and the Distilled team) in London on March 18th and/or New Orleans on March 25th for the first ever Link Building Conference. I expect it to be phenomenal.
p.p.s. One important note (from my personal experiences) - when giving presentations in the US/Canada, Q+A is often a big part of the event and very important to attendees. In the UK, Australia, New Zealand + Germany, it's slightly lower. In other countries Q+A can be very, very dead, (even if private Q+A after the session is very lively) so make sure to plan accordingly.
Hey there...
On the subject of verbal disfluencies, over the course of a little over a decade, I went from having a horrible stutter, to being an 'um'/'ah' champion to being able to deliver some dominant presentations. At one point, a judge in a speaking competition remarked that I 'make speaking seem effortless, it comes naturally to you'. It took over a decade of work for it to 'come naturally', but I digress.
Three things really seriously helped me move from the world of 'um'/'ah' to being totally comfortable speaking in front of anyone anytime. Perhaps one or more of these will help someone out:
Seriously, if I can go from the sad teenager whose kindest nickname was 'retard' to a confident speaker, anybody can overcome whatever it is that they dislike about their speaking. It will take a whole lot of work, but if anyone who reads this wants to learn more of the little exercises I picked up, please let me know - I am always 100% available to help anyone with their speaking.
Best of luck all :-)
Greg
Wow - Greg; thank you for sharing your story and for the great tips. I'm going to try some of these!
That's a great artcile and I agree with PaulMartin. If you have the personality for it, your slide deck never has to be perfect.
Rand, you wrote "I don't create or memorize a script, but I do rely on the slide deck itself to provide an order and narrative to the story I'm telling" and this is a great summary for me! We very often forget that not what we say, but how we say it that makes the difference... Research shows that in a presentation before a group of people, 55% of the imapct is determined by your body language- posture, gesstures and eye contact- 38% by your tone of voice, and only 7% by content of your presentation. Obviously the exact figures will differ in different situations, but it is worth a mention...
I have never attended any of your presentations but heard many "super-stories" about them:) so will do my best to take a part in the Linkbuilding Seminar in London.
Very great article, Rand! A BIG thumb up for this ;) The presentation is vital when you're trying to sell to a company a SEO service, because usually, they don't understand how this can help them, and presenting them a lof of graphics and charts, as you said in point 4, is the best way to show them how SEO can improve their business. The key is to keep it straight to the point and show only the positive results, highlight them and impregnate, very subtile, in their subconscious mind, the positive impact that a SEO campaign can have over their ROI. And of course, you do that with a perfect presentation. Thanks for the article!
This post is very interesting and helpful. I especially appreciated the recommendation to not use the same presentation twice. In the ever-evolving social media world, it is so important to keep your content relevant. I feel like this is something that can be easily overlooked, but essential to remember. Thank you very much for sharing these presentation tips!
I broke out in a cold sweat just skimming the article. I have serious stage fright issues!
This is the holy grail of power point presentation tactics. I am bookmarking this and sending it out to all of my followers, and friends. Thank you for sharing this knowledg with the community, it's stuff like this that makes me keep coming back day after day hour after hour.
Edit: The idea of using gmail for structuring your outline is great, i use gmail to store files, but this is just another great usage for it.
2nd Edit: Day after day is supposed to be crossed out, but it's not updating that way when i hit save changes =(
Thanks Rand for a great plan.
This is remarkably similar to my process - only one real difference (apart from tools - I don't tend to use email for drafting):
I will try to think hard at this stage about what exactly I'm going to say - and I try to force myself always to practice and do a real run-through (or more than one for big events). Any time I skip that step, my performance suffers dramatically.
One other tip as well - make sure you connect with the other speakers on a panel about exactly what they are going to say - another lesson I've learned painfully in the past.
+1 on the "real run through" - it makes a world of difference for me (and I need all the help I can get :-)
Many thanks Rand
Really appreciate the advice. One question I do have is which tools to you generally use to create your gfx. Every now and again I see gfx that look like they have been done in the same package. Like the gfx for your indexation above.
Does anyone know how can we get teh £100 discount (for Pro memebers) for the Link building event organised by Distilled in London?
Great Post Rand, very useful will help me with my presentations for sure.
Hi
Great post and comes just at the perfect time for me.
I am planning a presentation for an internal meeting and have your article open beside me as I work through what I need to cover. Doing the outline in an e-mail already shows me that it would be good to split what I have been asked to present on into two separate sessions.
Presentation 101 is simple. And yet as we all get slammed with more work and the same amount (or less) of hours in a day, posts like these are awesome reminders of how to not cut corners and instead offer our audiences what they expect from us as marketing professionals. I'm more of a visuals kind of guy, so my presentation outlines are usually drawn out inside boxes on an 11x17 sheet. But I really like the Gmail-based outline plan. Both for the ability cloud storage offers for access "from anywhere," but also for the chance to share out the presentation to teammates before I spend time building out actual slides.
To those ends, a question: How much time do you invest in presentation development?
Thanks Rand for the good post.
I recommend that anyone doing a lot of presenting read the works of Edward Tufte - he'll challenge you in a good way. If you wanted to cut to the chase, start with his writing about Powerpoint:
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
Much of that essay content is also contained within the book Beautiful Evidence:
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_be
His other works are great, but the above two are particularly focused on presenting.
Another great post. This is very useful as I am always struggling to get started creating my presentations. I will try to incorporate some of your processes to help improve my efficiency.
I really like the idea of using email to set up the outline! I'm going to use that next time. I often make my outline in Powerpoint, but that makes for lots of scrolling and such. Plus as you mentioned this way I can easily access it from my phone or wherever and email it quickly if needed.
When I presented in Spain last year, I was really looking forward to the Q & A portion because I thought we'd get tons of questions like we do in webinars and such. Sadly I only got 2 questions, but I hadn't realized that this is somewhat of a norm outside the US/Canada.
Oh... and how strange to see my email in the post! :)
I never had the pleasure to create that kind of presentation for a huge audience - but e.g. for internal meetings some items of your personal guide can we very usefull, too.
I think another major part of a presentation, aside from the actual slides themselves, is the energy and personality of the presenter.
I found that, at the last SEOMoz ProSEO in London, Rand was particularly engaging. Enthusiasm, along with a mix of both thought-provoking and humours slides, helps hold the audience.
If you have the personality for it, your slide deck never has to be perfect...just make sure you get your points across in your own personal style!
Mmm... the fact is that Rand wants to put the score against Will from 3:1 to 3:2 next match ;)
Haha very true. Probably best to get some tips from Will ratrher than Rand on this ;-)
If you want to add a little extra to your presentation, you can use the same process and replace powerpoint with prezi. This online tool is realy impressive, give it a try, it changed the way I interact with the audience. Thanks for tthe creativity process description, it's still very helpfull !
Hi Rand,
great post as always, while I was reading through it I copied this paragraph:
"I almost never use visual effects like fade-in/out, motion, sound, video, etc. Not only are there occasional (and painful) compatability problems with these features, but I haven't found them useful 90%+ of the time I see them or have tried to apply them."
Which I was going to pick on, that is until I saw the subsequent reference to my talk at the PRO SEO seminar ;)
Many thanks for the shout-out, and I'm aiming to improve on the last presentation in buckets, with my talk at the Distilled Linkbuilding Seminar.
(If anyone is unaware of the fantastic seminar being planned at the moment, the full details are on this post: https://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-training-strategies-tactics-and-tips
The style of your presentation was very engaging. The only problem of it could be an over use of the cinematic effects, that could lead:
Yes I agree mate - Im prototyping my next deck already, and experimenting with lots of subtle tweeks - unfortunately some of that means hacking the flash output files that prezi makes, but I *think* I can really blow the last one away.
I know you can't make the London seminar which is a huge shame, but I'm sure I can let you see a copy after the event ;)
I always lead off with a pic of Lynard Skynard on stage while Freebird is blaring for the intro. I'm pretty sure I was doomed from the jump-off being born in MN.
That is a guide! I will wait for a second part of this ("How to present in public the great presentation you have learn to do in part 1") whenever you will have - hum, well - refined your speaking skill ;).
Obviously I am joking, as you speak quite (very) well and, especially, you do not make your audience fall asleep as, unfortunately, some great SEOs do. Or you do not read Powerpoints (as others do).
About Q&A phase: as you have tested in Italy, us Italians can be quite shy in breaking the silence after the "Someone have a question?" moment. But it's just that moment: if the silence can be broken, then you can expect very entertaining Q&As. That's why it is important - IMHO - that the host has some Q&A questions ready in order the make the ice melt.
Great post Rand. What's going on with the labeling of the pictures? ; )
Thanks Rand, this is really great.
Now we know why your presentations always rock.
I use my gmail account in the same way! Whenever I'm working on something, I tend to just start an email because it saves in the drafts section and I can edit or edit it from anywhere. Very handy!
Thats a great idea on how to use the gmail account. Thank you. Do you have a site or source you like to get your graphics from?
I can't thank you enough for this Rand. This is by far where I waste the most amount of hours any given month.I have such a hard time finding good routines for my PZ's so I tend to spend way to many hours working on this. Going to steal a lot of this to see if I can cut some hours for our different projects.
Cheers,
Niklas Aronsson
The Duffy Agency
Thrilled to hear it Niklas. As a PRO member, you've also got access to all of our webinar slide decks. Feel free to download and use any of these or the slides/graphics in them. You can also download all of my decks from Slideshare and Scribd (free to any/all). Last, our free charts page is getting a bit out of date, but many of the graphics/charts there might be helpful too.
Any graphics from this blog are fair game, too; just please use attribution if/when you do use them :-)
Rand i use your slide decks a lot in seo training sessions and educating clients. Your pretty charts, cute roger, presentations, research work all come in handy in site audit reports or when i need to explain a seo topic like page rank. Plus the label of 'seomoz' on each slide gives all that authority and credibility i need to back up my recommendations. I even used few of your whiteboard fridays videos in meetings to prove my point.
I would strongly suggest all seomoz members to maintain a record of all important research work and posts being published on seomoz and use them to back up your recommendations (off course with proper attribution to the original source). For e.g. to justify my recommendation 'Linking out to authoritative sites has positive impact on ranking' i refer clients to this whiteboard friday video where NYTimes’ SEO, Marshall Simmonds, talk about how adding external links to articles on the site had a noticeable positive impact on the Times’ rankings and traffic. So here i am with real life example and now it is hard to disapprove what i recommended.
Wow, that's awesome Rand, not only giving an outline to make these but also providing us with quality SEOmoz content! Thanks for that.
Also isn't the date for the New Orleans link building session the 25?
Ahh man, awesome guide. Even though I think the presentation looks great and the slides are professional I believe the person giving the speech needs to do a great job at delivering the slides. Building up each slide and creating a WOW effect. Otherwise its just a bunch of pictures and words on a screen.
My favorite of all presenters "Steve Jobs" has been a great inspiration and others like Zig Ziglar too.
Anyhow I appreciate the time spend on this post.
Wilson
Great models. Mine is Seth Godin: I think he owns a true ability in intelligently entertain his audience.
Great tips, Rand. I've always wondered how those who are so prolific with presentations are able to produce what they do. I also thought how interesting it was that while there's a million ways to create a presentation, there are some best practices in there somewhere. Thanks for the insights.
Great tips Rand! I attended a meetup in my local town yesterday and thought up the idea of starting a meetup to provide some insightful points for small business owners on the importance of SEO and putting their business on the web. One of the troubles I've always had is figuring how to structure and design my powerpoint slides. These are some great suggestions, I will for sure put some of it into practice. Again, I find that your enthusiasm backed up with what SEOmoz provides to the SEO community really emphasizes the passion behind helping others succeed in their respectful fields.
Hey Rand awesome post! I think you had given us the most useful & important steps that shows how to create a presentation. As we all know that presentations are so important for proper undestanding of the niche which the presentator wants to convey to the audience. I am sure that this post will really help us to enhance our presentation skills.Thanks Rand for this post.