Guest post by Zander Smith

A good politician gives lots of speeches. A great politician has the oratory skill to use his speeches to motivate, inspire, and convince people to follow him. The recent American presidential race showed the world the importance of giving a good speech, the importance of having great oratorical prowess. Barack Obama a black motivational speaker inspired millions of Americans to follow him to the White House during the course of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Most Americans have never met Barack Obama and they never will. They do feel connected to him because of the power of his pre-election speeches. On the campaign trail Obama used style to give meaning and believability to his words. This often ignored trait of great orators made Americans feel as if they knew Barack Obama personally and they believed what he had to say.

Obama is an expert at using rhythm and cadence during his speeches to involve his audience. Frequent pauses during his speeches allow the audience to participate by cheering, clapping, and chanting. It also gives listeners the chance to actually absorb what he is saying. Experts note three advantages to using well placed pauses during a speech.

-A pause will allow the speaker to take a breath and gives the audience a chance to respond

-A pause during which the audience responds lets people feel connected to the speaker – they are participating in what he has to say

-A pause which lets the audience respond shows the speakers generosity – he allows others to speak and does not take all the time for himself

Delivering a good speech is very difficult task. Bob Proctor, a great orator, breaks a speech down into 3 simple parts. First, tell the audience what the speech is about by introducing your material. Next, give the audience the meat of your material. Third, review what you have said in steps 1 and 2. The second step of any great speech is practice. A great orator will know his stuff. Study all of your information. The better acquainted you are with your material the better you will feel when sharing it with your audience.

Barack Obama’s campaign trail speeches, and his presidential speeches, are excellent examples of the above three advantages. Instead of following the modern, just the facts style of many of today’s orators Obama looked to the great speakers of the past for inspiration. Barack Obama may be a “new” style candidate but he has taken full advantage of “old school” techniques when speaking in public.

Zander Smith, Site Representative Great Black Speakers Member of Great speaker motivational society

Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com/a.php?a=53912

Andrew Dlugan, custodian of the list to top public speaking blogs, has just updated the list to include the Twitter profiles.

You can view the update list here.

Thanks Andrew for the update.

Guest post by Tom Antion

I’m darn good at selling at the back of the room. In fact, just this month I did three speaking engagements at multi speaker events and I outsold all the other speakers put together. What’s unique about this is the way I do it is not obnoxious and high pressure. Today I want to give you a low pressure technique that can give you way more sales than when you nervously wait till the end of your talk to suggest people buy your book.

What I want you to do is put a copy of your book on the chair of every attendee at your event. You will put a note in the book that says something like, “You don’t have to buy this book. We are just going to use it during the presentation.”
Yes, I know this is a scary thing to do. I know you’re thinking, “What if everyone just walks out the door with all my books?” Relax . . .this won’t happen. People are generally honest.

You will pick the two best parts of the book and read them from stage as you are teaching a related point. You might use the three best parts if you are speaking for several hours.

Here’s what will happen. You’ll sell three times as many books and you’ll hardly have to even mention it’s for sale. Just put a box in the back of the room at your table and mention that you’ll be at the table if anyone wants to take the book home with them it will be 20 bucks (or some round number). Also, tell them you will personalize it for them.
The idea here is that instead of just “selling” your stuff, show the value of it and you’ll sell way more than you ever have before.

Tom Antion is a professional speaker with over 2700 paid speeches to his credit. He is the founder of the largest public speaking membership site on the Internet, and the author of the best selling professional speaker course of all time “The Wake ‘em up Video Professional Speaking System“

PowerPoint is a great tool for creating presentations, but it has never been particularly good at creating documentation or handouts. However, it is a huge amount of work to maintain two completely separate sets of documents.

Enter George! for PowerPoint by Leaders Guide Pro. They kindly gave me a free license to play with the product.

This simple little addin fills the gap very nicely by providing a simple yet powerful documentation creating capability for PowerPoint.

Some of the features are:

• Create table of contents for your handouts
• A variety of elegant document templates, with titles, page numbers, headers and footers
• Can create speaker notes or delegate handouts
• Custom logos can be added to your documents
• It is very easy to use

Here is what a typical PowerPoint handout looks like. Nothing wrong with it, but kind of boring.

But put it through George!…

Notice the header at the top, and copyright details at the bottom.

You can finally add a table of contents to your handouts.

A variety of templates to choose from.

George! uses a simple process called “tagging” to create the table of contents.

Would I buy it – yes! Would I recommend it? Yes if you find yourself creating handouts on a regular basis from your presentations. If you are just using it for Speaker Notes, then the default printing capability of PowerPoint will probably be ok.

George! uses Microsoft Word to create the actual documents (I suspect the Office scripting engine), and as a result the actual document generation process is a little slow (especially for large documents). So, best to create your documents and grab a coffee or something while you wait. However the results are worth it.

You can buy George! for about $40 from Leaders Guide Pro.

A final comment: I had a few problems getting my free license to work. Nancy from Leaders Guide Pro was absolutely superb with assisting me, providing support and follow-up. Full marks for their customer support.

• Sample presentation (an extract of one of my presentations)
• Speaker Notes – generated by George
• Session Handouts – generated by George
• Handouts generated directly from PowerPoint