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. :) )

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Questions and interactivity in presentations

I’m constantly asked how to “make my presentations interactive” because people “need to be more engaging”. Let’s set aside the fact that you don’t need to be interactive to be engaging for a moment, and look at how to be interactive – specifically being interactive by using questions – either digitally or physically. Something to think about …

Recording yourself in a PowerPoint slide

I recently spoke at the course creators engergize conference, hosted by Zenler giving tips on how to make your videos and presentations better for online courses. Why? Let’s face it, most of them are rubbish! 😉 In my presentation I made the observation that to make your videos really pop you should embed yourself as …

Stories (and authenticity) in Presentations

Storytelling is a big part of presenting… and frankly of our whole culture. When we go to the pub we don’t sit around in silence, and a lot of that time is filled with sharing stories. Gossip is a story after all. Back-in-the-old days is nothing but stories. When-I-was young… you get the idea. From …

Marketing Speaker

I’ve not been a marketing speaker in my head. I’ve turned down goodness-only-knows how many possible marketing and sales conferences, because I had in my head the idea that marketing conferences were aimed at marketers – not the ‘real people’ I mainly help with my training. Now however, it’s all changed and I’m looking for …

How to find stories for your presentations

In case you don’t know, I’ve got a new conference presentation called “StoryMaking“, which is about using stories in everything from marketing to motivation. One of the most common questions that floats around about using stories is how to find them. “Oh, nothing interesting ever happens to me“. Tosh! It’s particularly tosh ‘cos big exciting …