By being an effective speaker, you can make a tremendous impact on your life and career and on the lives of others, both locally and around the world. Here are some tips for improving your presentations and growing your public speaking career.

Preparing Your Speeches
The purpose of a speech is to inform, entertain, and inspire your audience and to convince them to take action. The more you prepare for your speech, the more you will accomplish these objectives and become an effective speaker.

One of the keys to preparation is to create a good structure for your speech. Start out with a powerful, inspirational opening. Next, make your first point, then tell a relevant story, and then transition to your next point. Repeat this process of making points and telling stories until you get to your summary and close.

Telling stories is important because they engage and motivate people well; people connect with them emotionally and remember them better than they remember facts, statistics, or techniques.

During your presentation, get your audience involved as much as you can to connect with them, make them feel important, and get them to see your point of view.

Building Your Speaking Career
When first starting your speaking career, begin in the area where you live and choose a subject you are passionate about that will help people. Learn your subject well. At first, offer speeches at no charge and speak as much as you can to gain practice and credibility. Eventually, you will start attracting interest and people will begin to ask if you could speak for their company.

You can also offer to speak for organizations or businesses by calling them. Ask them if they are currently using speakers and when they might need one. Eventually, you will also start to get referrals, which is how speakers are usually hired.

It is important to stay after you have given your speech to network with audience participants. People will get to know you better and will be more likely to ask you to speak for them. Also, offer to do more speeches on other subjects. Even while giving a talk, you can promote yourself a little bit by saying that you give different versions of the speech to different organizations.

Once you have had success speaking in your country, you might start to give speeches in another country to launch your career as an international speaker.

Are you looking to start or grow your speaking career? A coach can guide you.