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Many speaker and presenters find it a challenge to keep their audience riveted and absorbed in their presentations and talks. They worry about being able to maintain the right level of entertainment and information or building a rapport with their listeners. Whether you’re an online or off-line speaker, if you need to have tools and techniques to help break up your talk and retain audience attention, this article will provide you with quick and easy tips and techniques to leave them asking for more.

Most people have a concentration span of about 20 minutes before their mind begins to wander. The easiest and one of the most effective ways to break up your talk is to involve your audience. Interactive questioning, poll taking with a show of hands, getting them to repeat words or phrases or respond as a group, are great ways to draw in your listeners in an off-line setting.

If speaking in an online event such as a teleseminar or webinar, ask them to answer a poll or write a comment on the webinar platform or connect via a social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter and comment there.

You need to judge how often and to what degree you want to bring in the audience into the presentation – too many interruptions and you’ll break the flow of your talk or overrun your time. For the same reason, keep questions from the floor to the end as part of your usual Q&A slot – keep control of the interaction so that it enhances not detracts from the points you want to make.

Balance and judgement are also needed if you want to use props or comedy to engage with your audience. Inappropriate jokes or over-elaborate, vulgar or overly complex props are clearly out of the question. But gentle humour can build a rapport with your audience while suitable visual aids can highlight a point or concept to help them reach a better understanding more quickly.

If your audience can’t relate to what you’re saying, you’ll soon lose their support and interest. A key way to build a bond and keep your audience listening is to be relevant and genuine. People don’t want to be talked at – they want to feel that you’re sharing your knowledge as part of a common experience. Hearing about how you have dealt with your mistakes or difficulties, how you’ve overcome challenge and adversity is more interesting and relevant to them than hearing of unqualified success.

Keep this sense of sharing and intimacy through your body language and voice. Keep eye contact with people from all parts of the room; smile frequently which will again strengthen bonds and help your body to unwind. Make sure your body language is open and expressive – people respond to confidence, authority and someone who is relaxed and comfortable. For virtual events, show this warmth through your voice. Remember that your smile can be “heard” so keep smiling as you would if were onstage.

If the facilities are available, ask for a remote slide control so that you’re not tied to the computer to move along your PowerPoint slides. If they don’t have one, then break the routine by occasionally walking away from the computer to talk through a slide and then walking back to move the slide along. If the room size allows, you could move along the aisle space when you’re interacting with your audience, and then return to the stage area when you resume your talk.

Avoid Death-By-PowerPoint presentations. Don’t show over-wordy slides for every point you make in your speech. The audience should be listening to you, not reading long paragraphs on screen. Use the slides to emphasise and highlight only salient points and provide strong visual images that reinforce or explain a point quickly. New versions of PowerPoint allow you to easily embed videos and audio media – again judicious use can create a powerful impact for both online and offline events.

A speaker who clearly understands their topic and is passionate and enthused about it, is someone that an audience will respect and warm to. If they can see your obvious enthusiasm to share and connect with them, they will be only too eager to respond in kind. By offering content that is relevant, informative, addresses their issues and concerns, and which is tailored to their level, you’ll keep your audience interested in what you have to say.

Frequent PublicSpeakingsSkills.com readers know that the only way to assure your presentation audience will stay with you every step of the way is to maintain proper eye contact throughout your presentation. Proper eye contact involves delivering your presentation as a series of one-on-one conversations with each member of the audience, and holding eye-contact with members through to the end of a thought or complete sentence. Most presenters hold eye contact with any one person no more than one second – to effectively bond with your audience, you need to pump that up to a range more like three to eight.

The image to keep in mind here is that you are never delivering to a group of individuals, but rather to individuals in a group. (When people ask me what’s the largest number of people I’ve ever spoken to, I always answer, “one”.)

When delivering a PowerPoint presentation, maintaining proper eye contact becomes difficult if your slides are structured like most we see in the corporate world today – with way more information than the audience can digest before the speaker feels compels to start speaking. In order to maintain constant eye contact with members of the audience, you must restrict the volume of information that you toss up on the screen at any one time. Otherwise, you will do what most presenters do, which is to spend much of the presentation looking at the screen. In fact, you must restrict each new parcel of information to that which can be absorbed by both you and the audience in just a few seconds – ten at the very most.

That will set you up to then smoothly and coherently transfer the information from the screen to the audience. We call the procedure for doing this “Absorb, Align, and Address.”

Absorb

When new information appears on the screen, all eyes will follow it, and at this point it is OK, and desirable, for you, too, to look to the screen. By doing so, you “give permission” to the audience to get prepared for what’s coming next. That’s all the screen info should include, too: just enough information to set the stage for what you are going to discuss. At this point, because you are not looking at any individual in the group, you must be silent.

Rule Number 9: If your eyes aren’t locked, your jaw must be.

When you have absorbed the data bite, you can now think for a moment on how to phrase what you want to say to start off. This would not include expounding on the point, but merely filling out the talking points to make a grammatically correct statement.

Align

Once you and your audience have had the opportunity to take in this info, you then need to turn your attention away from the screen, and lock eyes (align) with a member of the audience. This is the most difficult part, physically, to perform, as the natural tendency is to begin speaking as soon as you have formulated your statement.

Address

Locked on, you finally can address your selected member of the audience with your version of the talking point.

Understand that if what you’re addressing is a bullet point, this address should not be the actual words. You may always say more than the line on the screen, but never, never any less. Keep in mind that the group will read everything that’s on the screen, so if you put words up there but don’t speak to them, you are actually insulting your audience: These words aren’t important enough for me to bother with but I wanted to take up your brain’s time and effort just the same.

How many times has this happened to you: You go to a presentation and see slide after slide with all kinds of footnotes and small type, or graphs with legends and data to which the presenter never refers? You’re looking at all the elements on the slide trying to figure out which stuff is most important, and then the presenter never even mentions half the stuff you’ve read. How does that make you feel? For most people, the first slide that contains more information than the presenter chooses not to discuss is the point at which they check out, deciding to figure it all out later from the handout, which, of course, they trash at the first can they see outside the presentation room.

Once learned, the Absorb, Align and Address system is a beautiful thing to behold. Slides designed with this system never suffer from TMI, and thus never have too much for the presenter to deal with. Presenter confidence is high, and the audience feels this big time. The audience is forced to turn their attention to you, because there’s not enough information to allow them to jump to their own conclusions. By the same token, you are now able to direct all of your speaking to the audience and not the screen.

But here’s the really fun part: When you follow this simple plan for both design and delivery, almost anyone can look and sound like an expert on their subject, regardless of how much prep time they’ve put into rehearsing the presentation! We prove this in our corporate training classes by having participants deliver other participant’s presentations that we have edited and revised to comply with the “rules” (next chapter). Preferably, off course, you would have a good background in the subject matter, so that you can deliver the “meat on the bones” part effectively. But if you know to what the talking points refer, and you also know that no more material than you can deliver in just a few seconds will appear, you can actually give a presentation for the very first time and sound like you know what you’re talking about!

In the past, most of the solar products in the market were considered as novelty products. Today, solar energy is very popular in most parts of the world and many people continue to appreciate this versatile source of renewable energy. In a nutshell, solar energy products continue to become part and parcel of different communities.

Types of Products Powered By Solar

There are myriad products that are powered by solar. Take for instance the solar panels; they generate adequate power that is enough to power different appliances in your home and can replace your conventional electricity systems.

Solar panels aside, there are also many other types of solar energy products that are essential for your day-to-day needs. Solar powered lanterns and different types of flashlights, for example, are very significant solar energy products that come in handy during emergencies. They can form significant part of hikers and backpackers who may spend days in environments where there may be no other source of light apart from sunlight.

Solar powered radios are other significant products that are powered by solar. These radios can enable you listen to the news or your favorite programs even when there are power outages or in cases of natural disasters. Similarly, batteries that can be charged by solar energy can be used to run important electronics in your home during power outages.

Another vital range of solar powered products are the outdoor lighting systems. Today, different types of lanterns, fake candles, and tiki torches that are powered by solar energy are common. These products will collect solar power during the day when there is a lot of sunlight and will start to glow when the sun goes down.

Pool heating discs are other amazing products that are powered by solar. These discs absorb sunlight and convert the solar energy to heat up your pool. Heating your pool to desired temperatures, especially during winters can increase your power bills greatly. Therefore, if you want to heat your pool and save on your energy costs at the same time, installing these products is a good bet.

Advantages of solar energy products

The advantages of using solar products are manifold: They are non-polluting: using solar powered products do not emit harmful wastes or greenhouse gases into our environments and are therefore very environmentally friendly. Solar energy products provide convenient way of saving for power generation, especially in remote areas where the cost of expansion of the traditional utility grids can be very high. Most of the solar powered products are very easier to maintain and can last for several years. They are easy to install and therefore bring much convenience and flexibility. Most of the solar products have solar cells that do not require moving parts- meaning less overall maintenance.

Solar powered products can therefore cut down your electricity bills. And with many environmentalists advocating for green sources of energy, many cities will soon run on this clean and inexpensive form of renewable energy. As such, while you may think that putting up solar panels on your roof is expensive, there are myriad small-scale solutions that can allow you reap the environmental and economic benefits of solar products.