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PowerPoint presentations may be the curse of our age, while it can be an effective tool for backing up your talk all too often it becomes an ugly distraction from what you are going to say. The best presenters always remember their audience is there to listen to them and not watch a slideshow. Here are three simple tips for making sure your audience is with you and not flinching at your visuals.

Keep the Slides to a Minimum

The first key is to make sure you aren’t overdoing the visual information, if your audience has to keep up with an endless procession of slides they simply cannot concentrate on what you are saying. You should have no more than one slide for every 5 minutes you speak, excluding the cover page and the thank you/goodbye page. More than that and you won’t be the focus of attention and your message will be lost.

Keep Content to a Minimum

Let’s be blunt about this, your visuals should be visual. That means get rid of any unnecessary wording, and at most if you want to include words you should have no more than seven bullet points on a slide and no more than seven words per bullet point. The objective is to highlight key content, not to replicate your speech, if you really feel you need to churn out the whole content of your talk – then create handouts and don’t give them to people until you’ve finished speaking. The more you write down, the more your audience will be reading and not listening.

Wherever possible make sure your visuals are pictorial instead, use graphs, pie charts, pictures, flow diagrams, to enhance your points and reveal key data and trends. Audiences can then relate to your speech, which should explain what they see and add to it.

Lose the Effects

Yes, you can do amazing things with PowerPoint – graphics can swoop onto the screen, slide onto it, bounce, etc. and yet none of this adds any value to your talk at all. If you really must use effects, then be consistent, only use one and use it all the way through. It’s always better not to use them at all though, they are distracting and in the long run a huge source (of unintended) mirth for the audience.

Making a presentation can be nerve wracking enough without spending forever developing an all encompassing PowerPoint display which only detracts from your talk, keep it simple by following these three rules and you’ll always be better received.

Competence in presentation skills is a definite asset. Not only will these skills help you advance as an employee (great presentations help win deals!) they’re also a reliable source of steady income as a freelancer. Indeed, many today who need something extra aside from their regular 9 to 5 job, find moonlighting as a speaker a great way to make ends meet.

If you want to be a great presenter, and consequently get that speaking career off the ground, what are the presentation skills that you should master?

Content Design

Delivering a talk begins with designing a great program or speech. If you’re presenting a learning workshop, you would need to ground your presentation on the learning objectives of the course or training program. If you’re delivering short keynote speeches, you would need to anchor your speech on an overarching theme or central message. A speaker able to structure their speeches strategically are more effective in reaching their audience.

Designing great content relies on two sub skills: research and critical thinking. If you want your audience to leave the auditorium feeling like they spent their time well, make sure you share something useful in your talk. You can prepare quality content by researching books, academic journals and formal company literature; or you may draw from your experience or ability to dissect ideas. Critical thinking helps you lay your ideas with logical flow in mind.

Public Speaking Skills

Content design is for behind the scenes, but what about presentation skills for the day of the talk itself? To deliver a talk effectively, you would need to be a good communicator. Start with the clarity of your verbal communication; make sure you know how to project your voice well, enunciate properly, and vary the inflection in your voice so that you don’t sound monotonous. Non-verbal presentation skills are also critical; you must be able to exude confidence as you talk.

Public Speaking presentation skills also involve effective use of presentation aids, such as audio-visual aids, hand-outs and even actual samples for the audience’s review. These aids should enhance a presentation, and illustrate concepts and ideas that can’t be effectively described by merely using words. Care must be given so that they don’t distract your audience from what you are saying.

Facilitation Skills

If you have the opportunity, it’s great to make your presentation interactive. You can ask the audience some guide questions, solicit their ideas, or constantly verify understanding of what you are discussing. All these require facilitation skills. Facilitation skills include, but is not limited to, encouraging audience involvement, linking similar responses, brainstorming techniques, and throwing back questions to the group. A speaker who can not just deliver talks, but actually facilitate a group-centered discussion is a more dynamic speaker.

Evaluation Skills

Lastly, if you want to hone your presentation skills, you must know how to gather and use feedback. Evaluation is usually a neglected aspect of the presentation giving process, but it’s critical to not just a program’s growth, but the speakers’ as well. Handing out evaluation questionnaires, soliciting the opinion of randomly selected audience members, and getting peers to critique a presentation are just some of the ways speakers can evaluate their work.