Giving a presentation is an anxiety-producing experience for most people. Whether the audience is composed of six co-workers in a meeting room or 200 strangers in an auditorium, the prospect of speaking to a group can be frightening. The following five tips will not necessarily alleviate your anxiety, but they will help to ensure that your presentation is effective.

#1 – Know your material

This is the first and most important point. Whether your presentation is a five-minute talk to colleagues or a keynote address at a conference, you need to be in total command of the topic. Your listeners expect you to be an authority on whatever subject you’re discussing – and you shouldn’t let them down.

#2 – Write down your presentation

The best technique is to write down a complete, word-for-word version of your talk. However, if there is insufficient time, write down only the key points. Whichever method you use, the text should then be distilled into a series of phrases or titles on note cards. It is unwise to omit altogether this step. Some people believe they can present in an interesting and informative way without any written preparation. They are invariably mistaken – and the audience suffers because of the speaker’s lack of humility!

Write down also the answers to the most probable questions (in preparation for the Q and A). While this takes some time, the extra effort (including any necessary research) is worthwhile. It is rather discouraging – for both speaker and audience – when someone delivers a persuasive talk but then is unable to give a clear answer to a simple follow-up question.

#3 – Use multimedia only if necessary

Many presenters overestimate the importance of multimedia elements. A presentation stands or falls on the words uttered by the speaker. Multimedia elements should be included only if they complement the speaker’s words in a helpful way. Don’t use PowerPoint slides that contain the same words you’re going to speak, and don’t use images solely for the sake of showing pretty pictures. Use PowerPoint slides to display calculations, tables, graphs, or long quotes that you don’t intend to recite. Use images or video to illustrate something that can’t be easily conveyed by words alone.

If you are using PowerPoint for Windows, I can recommend an add-on that makes finding the right images, shapes, tables and graphs much easier: ShapeChef. This little tool helps you organize your PowerPoint assets into categories and also gives access to image collections and templates that can be downloaded from the ShapeChef server.

#3 – Rehearse

This step should not be omitted. Using your note cards to deliver the presentation to an empty room or to a volunteer audience is invaluable preparation. You learn the length of the presentation, and often you discover – or your volunteers mention – the weak points in the talk. For a very important presentation, more than one rehearsal is advisable.

#4 – Engage with your audience

During your delivery, try to make eye contact with the audience as much as possible. Looking down (at note cards) or up (at a screen) results in the audience becoming disengaged. Project your voice sufficiently that everyone in the room can easily hear every word you say (obviously a microphone affects this aspect of the event). Using a little humor at the beginning is usually a good idea, as it relaxes everyone and promotes engagement.

#5 – Stay on message during the Q and A

Sometimes a person does a wonderful presentation but then – perhaps relieved to have finished the main portion – adopts a different tone and terminology during the Questions and Answers period. You should consider this portion of the event to be almost as important as the prepared speech – so maintain your focus until the audience begins to clap.

These techniques should enable any speaker to avoid the most common pitfalls in giving a presentation. The good news is that, the more presentations you do, the easier it gets!