Welcome to the better presentations blog!

I do my best to make this blog a resource for presenters - not pro-speakers, but real people who need to make presentations as part of their 'day job'. If there's something you really want to know about, just email me and I'll see what I can do (no promises except that I'll read your email - use simon@ and you can guess the rest of my address. :) )

Also, I have to be honest, this blog only gets updated every month or so. If you want a bit more, consider signing up for the (almost weekly) newsletter instead called "TalkTactics". You can also sign up for a bucketload of freebies too!

This month's most popular (and useful?) blog posts are:

Or scroll down if you're just browsing!


 

Presentation Images

Images can make your presentation rock. They can also bankrupt you. For example, the 500lb Silverback Gorilla of the image-being world is iStock and they start at £7/image for the absolute basics. For the (over-used) image of a woman looking out of a window while holding a coffee, it’s £20. Two of three of those …

Story-telling myth-busting: the big hero story

You know the ones. The rags-to-riches story. The against-all-the-odds story. The bad-to-worse-to-victory story. We’re told to use them because they’re inspirational. Whoops, that turns out to be a mistake. Why? Because… Because pretty much be definition such a story deals with exceptional people over coming staggering odds. And, again by definition that means these people …

Story-telling myth-busting: the big start

We’re often told by experts (for which read “well-meaning friends who’ve read it somewhere online”) that we should start our presentations with a big bang to grab the audience’s attention. A powerful story is often cited as one of the best ways of doing this. Alternatives are a challenging, shocking fact or a provocative question. …