How to make a presentation

Overview

Making a good presentation starts with crafting the content. No matter how compelling your message is, if you don’t get it out of your brain and on to the screen in a simple way, you’ll be met with a sea of blank faces. So, where to begin?

Create an easy-to-follow structure

When it comes to what you have to say, break it down into three simple sections: your presentation needs an introduction, body, and conclusion.

A compelling introduction. Your introduction needs to briefly sum up what you’re going to talk about and why it’s useful or relevant to your audience. Offer a body of evidence. The body of your presentation is where you hit ’em with the facts, quotes, and evidence to back up your main points. Sum up with key takeaways. The conclusion is where you loop back to your original statement and give the audience some key takeaways on how they can put into practice what they’ve learned. No more than 10 slides in total. Who wants to sit through pages and pages of slides? No one, that’s who. By keeping your slide deck to 10 slides, even if your presentation is 30 minutes long, you’ll give the audience a chance to digest the on-screen messages in line with your talk. Using concept maps before structuring your slides can help keep to the point. Limit the amount of copy on each slide

Less really is more, especially when it comes to making a good presentation. Too much text and the audience will just be reading the screen instead of looking at you and feeling the emotional impact of your message.

No more than six words per slide. Marketing king Seth Godin says we should have just six words per slide – that’s not a lot of copy. Choose your words carefully and rewrite until you’ve got it just right. Think ‘bite-size’ information. We called ourselves Biteable a reason: studies have shown that information is retained better when it’s broken down into bite-sized chunks. Video is a great way to learn and research suggests it’s 95% more compelling than text.