Using Humor in Your Professional Speaking Gig

If using humor in your professional speaking presentation, understand this. People will pay more to be entertained than they will to be informed. Look around you and you will see that the top industry is the entertainment industry. Encompassing sports events, comic acts, movies, television and music, the entertainment industry steadily received trillions of dollars worldwide.

Humor accomplishes many things in your presentation. Here are some things that humor can do for you!

1. Humor helps you connect with your audience. Make yourself more relatable with your audience as they begin to see that it’s not all about the information. Humor draws your audience to you because people are naturally drawn to positive things.

2. Humor makes you more approachable and likeable as a speaker. Your audience will see you as being more down to earth and again, relatable.

3. Humor creates interest in your topic as well as yourself. Humor just makes things interesting to follow. People like to laugh.

4. Humor helps to keep the attention of your audience. Your audience tunes out because they get lost in your presentation. By using humor, it’ll be harder for your audience to tune out because they will want to hear your humorous story.

5. Humor strengthens point and ideas you want to highlight in your presentation. Funny stories are memorable and can strengthen the point of your message. Television sitcoms are famous for taking real life situations and presenting them in a humorous fashion.

6. Humor removes hostility in your presentation. If there were any ill feelings towards you or your message, humor lightens the mood of your audiences and disarms negative emotions.

7. Humor helps connects pieces of information in your topic. Work humor into the transition points of your presentation. In that way they will be the bridge that connects the points of your message together.

8. Humor helps paint mental images in the minds of your audience. Self-effacing humor is often relatable to your audience because they can see themselves having those same situations.

9. Humor makes your presentation more memorable. People remember when they laugh. They’ll remember funny stories or funny instance during your presentation.

10. Humor lightens a heavy topic. People can only take so much of heavy topics. You don’t want to make your audience feel depressed even if your topic discusses a very grave matter.

11. Humor can bring in better evaluations and more product sales. Humor warms your audience up to you. In doing so, your audience will be more open to purchasing your back of the room products as well as give you a better review.

12. Humor will make people happy. People want to enjoy your seminar. They want to have a good time and they want to be happy. Humor helps you achieve that.

Humor can add so much variety to an otherwise dull, information only presentation. Helping to connect you with your audience, humor is a great addition that can bring you better speaker reviews and increased revenue. Add some spice to your message by incorporating humor!

Easy Ways to Remember Your Material

One of the most common reasons people fear public speaking is that they blank out and forget their entire speech. You can practice and practice and practice and when the moment comes that you need to remember your presentation, everything goes blank! There are ways that you can fool proof your message so that the parts you actually have to memorize are minimal if at all.

This means that you incorporate the use of triggers in your presentation. These triggers can be things like power point slides, props, and story telling that you’ll scatter throughout your speech. What the triggers do is prompt you to talk about the next point your trying to make. The triggers can also serve as a trigger to help you remember what to say next.

There are four primary ways to remember your presentation.

1. The first one is memorizing. This can work for presentations less than an hour, but if you’re teaching a six hour seminar course, you’re going to have to find some other way other than memorizing. This is actually one of the worst ways to remember your presentation because there are no safe guards that protect you once you forget.

2. The next way to remember your presentation is to read a full written version. People write out their speeches, but reading from the full written text can cause you to sound stiff and unnatural.

Most commonly occurring in business settings (i.e. – at board meetings or company meetings), reading your speech may be necessary. If you have to read your speech, there are things you can do to help you sound natural. Keep in mind the business tone may be necessary, but there may also be parts in your presentation that require the monotony to be broken!

3. The third way to remember your presentation is to use notes – a condensed outline form of your presentation. Have your notes on a single page sheet or on note cards. Highlight key points to make in a way that you can easily understand the emphasis that the points need. Having notes does not mean that you do not need to work with your presentation!

4. The last way to remember your presentation is to use visual aids (props) as your notes. Let your visuals and images prompt you to speak. Tell your audience a story about the image you’re showing. You can also let your visuals and images do the talking for you. You can post your outline on the screen and say that it’s because it will help your audience stay on track with you!

Work with creating mental images of the points you are trying to make. This will help you sound more natural and more “impromptu” with your audience. When you sound natural, you sound genuine.

Utilize one or more of these ways to remember your presentation. Use various ways to “trigger” your memory to say what needs to be said. Use overheads to lead you through your speech as you place keywords on the screen.

What Does the First Year of Professional Speaking Look Like?

Unless you’re already a celebrity, you’ll have to work through building your professional speaking career from the ground up. This does mean work, but if the topics you plan to be speaking on are your passion, this will not be a chore to do! Also, depending upon how fast you are able to build connections and establish your reputation as a speaker will determine how fast you pass through this phase of career building.

The first phase of building your career is filled with getting the word out that you are available for hire as a professional speaker. You’ll also gain experience as you speak for free. Yes, that’s right – free. Your goal is build a database of clients and testimonials concerning your work before you hit the big time. One resource stated that you should plan on speaking for free for at least 200 hundred times to build a successful reputation and foundation of experience. The reason for all of this is that many speaker bureaus and meeting planners want speakers with experience and an established reputation in the field they’re in. As of now, you are working on creating your future success!

Here are some things you can do as you begin your professional speaking career.
1) List the topics you can speak on. Join a social network like LinkedIn (known as the social network for professionals) or forum and list those topics there.

2) Write some articles on these topics and post them on the free article websites. You can also post articles on your own website and add them to social bookmark sites. Whoever reads your article will see your bio at the bottom of each article and you’ll promote yourself as a speaker for these topics!

3) Get as many free speaking engagements as possible. Check with your local library or the Chamber of Commerce. Get feedback from your free speaking engagements and start compiling a list of these.

4) Take a professional picture of yourself. People want to feel connected to you and personalizing your website by adding your picture to it is just one of the ways. Additionally, you’ll need a professional photo for your portfolio

5) If you’re an expert in a trade, write articles for your industry’s trade publications. Sometimes these publications will ask for a short (1-2 sentence bio) where you can list “professional speaker” as part of your career listing. One benefit is that you can also get paid writing.

6) Get online and create a blog or website about the topics that you cover. Utilize social networking to build relationships with potential clients as well as peers in your industry. Promote yourself as a professional speaker and a thought leader in your industry.
7) Add a tagline to your email signature. Whoever gets your emails will see that you are a professional speaker for hire.

Research the industry for pay rates and start developing a fee schedule for your speaking engagements. We mentioned earlier that you should expect to speak for free, however, speaking for free could easily turn into a paying job for you. What would you charge?

9) Create a demo video of a speaking event you’ve done. You can use clips from several of your speaking jobs (including the free ones).
During this first phase, you’re basically building your professional speaking portfolio. You’ll need this portfolio to go after higher paying jobs with speaker bureaus and meeting planners. You’re already working towards your future success!

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