| Start a career in public speaking and earn money while having fun. Learn how to make $5500 or more for each speaking presentation you do.  You can get all the latest public speaking tips and tricks for FREE by signing up for Tom's Great Speaking Ezine. Going Deeper Those who know me or have seen me do a speaking engagement know that I am really focused on pre-program research. By doing this research you give yourself plenty of information to connect with your audience on much deeper levels than you could have without it. There are many ways to research your program that will help your career in public speaking. You can review trade publications, do Internet searches, secret shop retail establishments, and use a pre-program questionnaire. I do most of these techniques for every single one of my presentations in my career in public speaking, but the one that is most effective for me is the telephone interview. Try to interview at least 15 people before your presentation day. If you can speak to some people who are going to actually be at the meeting. If they all have the same rank and job responsibilities, make sure that you get differing views, short timers versus old timers and/or male versus female. To get a variety of viewpoints ask some variation of these questions:
-- What are the three biggest challenges you have in accomplishing your daily duties?
-- Tell me about the organizational failures.
-- Tell me about the organizational successes.
-- Tell me anything funny that has happened. Once you have all the needed information it is time to bring it all together for your presentation. I always try to make the audience the stars and one way to do this is to use a very positive or insightful statement that you got from your phone interviews and project it or put it in your handout in a prominent position. A lot of the times my entire presentation is customized around the quotes I got from people I interviewed. I weave my material in and around what they have told me. I then give the overhead or disk to the person who gave me the information. Overheads are much better for this because I have seen them hanging on the bulletin board in the organization. Of course, my name and company are on it too. Using your pre-program research will also help you build rapport and gain an 'insiders' position because you will be exposed to the terminology of the group, i.e., you might have used the generic term manager, but instead you found out that the term 'team leader' is used by a particular organization. The information you receive can also be used to plant the seed for a future public speaking presentation or to land you more consulting work. You might say during a presentation, 'Joe, also told me about XYZ. We don't have time to discuss that today, but it certainly warrants some attention.' Besides promoting you, it shows you did your homework and that you know what is going on in the group to which you are speaking. Home
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