Speaker 1: Hey, what's up everybody, Pat Flynn here, and welcome to episode 17 of SPI TV. In this episode, you're gonna learn how to create an awesome slide deck. For the next time you're up on stage or doing any sort of presentation, anything that requires a slide deck, I'm gonna help you make it look better, much better than what you see here. There's a lot of things you shouldn't be doing, a lot of things that I do see out there, and hopefully this will help guide you so that you can create an awesome slide deck and impress the people who you are presenting to, have a more memorable presentation, and you're gonna be able to stand out from all the other presenters out there who are gonna be creating slide decks the normal, boring way. So check it out, cue the intro. Have you ever sat in on a presentation, whether at work or at a conference, where you literally just wanna fall asleep, or maybe you have fallen asleep, or maybe you get bored or you just lose interest and you check your phone for email or Twitter or Instagram, or maybe you're playing a game or something, it's the worst, right? You just wanna leave your weight, you know you're wasting your time. Well, if you're a presenter, if you're up on stage presenting, this is obviously not what you want your audience to look like. You want to hold their interest, you want to captivate them, you want to engage them, you want them sitting on the edge of their seats, listening and hanging on to every next word that you have to say. That's what we want. And a lot of times, we don't do that. And one of the big reasons is because of the slides that we have. Slides are an amazing tool, unfortunately, we abuse the tool that allows us to create these slides, PowerPoint or Keynote. We use them in a way that bores people to death and that's why there's this thing called death by PowerPoint. I found this really funny cartoon where this guy's being executed, but he's not being executed by a guillotine or a hanging or anything like that. He's being executed by being bored to death by a PowerPoint presentation. There's a guy pointing at the presentation in the little mask and it's just so funny because it's so real, this death by PowerPoint. I mean, this is a typical slide you'll see at presentations, at board meetings, at conferences, and it's just, you're killing people when you do things like this. I mean, the bullet point situation, I mean, they're called bullet points for a reason. Why? Because bullets kill people, right? And because when people start reading this from the top, I mean, they see all these bullet points, they start reading ahead, and when they do that, they don't listen to what you're talking about. Plus, oftentimes, you're just reading off of this bullet point list. It sounds totally boring and unprepared. And then you might think, well, you know, having all the information there helps me cover all the points I need to hit. And yeah, if you don't practice, and that's what most people do when they don't practice, they rely on the bullet points, they rely on the PowerPoint to help guide them through, and it just sounds boring, and it just shows that you haven't put in the practice. This is what happens if you don't know the content and if you don't believe in yourself. But I'll tell you what, if you know what you're talking about and you do believe in yourself, you don't need this and you can make your presentation much more engaging. And here's the guiding principle. Slides are your trail guide. That's it. They're there to help trigger certain stories and case studies and things that you're gonna say, but you're not reading off of them. They're there to trigger something to be a visual to the story that you're telling to the point that you're making. If you can consider slides to be your trail guide, it's gonna help you in so many ways. You have to trust yourself to know the content that you're talking about. But you can use the slides as a trail guide, as that arrow that's gonna point you in the right direction. Now you've probably sat in in presentations that are amazing, that have amazing looking slides, and then you try to do it yourself, you try to make it look great, but then you get frustrated and then you punch a hole in your computer because it's too much work. But here's a hint, it doesn't have to be. And I'm gonna show you in the following nine tips that I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna give you nine specific tips to help you work your way through the slides, to give you some guiding principles so that you can totally crush it the next time you're on stage and so you don't have to rely on your bullet points. So let's get started. Okay, first up, get the correct slide size. Get the correct slide size, because different conferences, different events require different slide sizes. And you wanna make sure you know what the size is or what the ratio is of the slides you need before you start building your deck so that you don't build it on the wrong size and then the night before, or you come back to it... four have to switch over when really the night before you should just be relaxing or maybe going over your presentation a few more times. Typically the slides come in two different ratios or sizes widescreen, which is 16 by nine or standard, which is four by three. But again, check some do different and custom sizes, contact the conference director or the owner, or sometimes they'll have a packet or a PDF file for you to read over. Sometimes they also give you a template and you can use that template to guide you and have that be really the size that you want to use. Now, I will say one thing about the templates that these conferences give you. I never use them and you may be required to, but I often try and fight that because they don't really look very good. There's a lot of stuff on there that doesn't need to be on there. I want my slides to be exactly what they need to be. Not anything more. I mean, a lot of those things have the, the name of the conference. We all know what conference it is. We don't need to say it on every single slide. Anyway, that's just a pet peeve of mine. Try to be able to customize your slides for what you need to do based off of everything else I'm going to mention in this particular episode of SPI TV. Don't use the templates if possible. Number two, and this is a hard one, probably, probably the hardest one. Don't use any bullet points. What? Yeah. Try not to use any bullet points whatsoever. This is a gun-free zone, bullet to kill people. Try not to use any bullet points. Now there may be a part in your presentation where you will have to list a few things. There's a lot of different ways to list things. Maybe it's images. Like I'm doing a little bit of a video. I'm doing a little bit of a video. I'm doing a right now. I'm listing nine different things, but using a different image for each. Now, if that's overboard, you might have to put some bullet points in your presentation, but for the most part, try to avoid them as much as possible. You're going to make your presentation so much better. If you try really hard not to use the bullet points, it's going to help guide you in other creative ways to share that content with your audience. No bullet points. Number three, and this is my general rule for slides. Most of my slides look like this. You've probably already noticed that. I'm going to use a bullet point. I'm going to use a bullet point. I'm going to use a bullet point. I'm going to use a bullet point. I'm going to use a bullet point. I'm going just a few words about the topic and then one supporting image to support that topic. Again, this is used as a visual trigger for me so I know what stories to tell and what topic I should be focusing on. And it's a tool for the audience to understand in a flash what we're about to talk about so that they can then take their eyes off of the slides and put them back on me. That's what you want to happen. You want the people to look at you and focus on you and hear every word that you're saying and you get to control the experience your audience has. When you get people reading a slide, it's all over the place. Everybody's at different points. But no, here it's the topic, an image to go along with it. We're all visual learners and then they can focus on you and listen to the story that you have to tell. The topic, one supporting image, boom. Number four, choose a style that works for you. Well, what do I mean by that? What I mean is pay attention to other presentations. Pay attention to different slides. Go to sites like, slideshare.net and view as many presentations as you can and try to find a style that you like and adopt that style for yourself. Now, I don't mean copy. I absolutely don't mean that. Don't copy the fonts. Don't copy the images that they use. But copy the style. That's where I got this style of having the big blocky letters right next to a cursive styled font. And it just works for me. And whatever works for you is going to be different. But again, choose a style that works for you. View other presentations and see what you like. And you can pull inspiration from those to make yours unique and interesting for your audience. Number five, now you have to realize that when you're presenting, especially if it's in a large room, but even if it's not, there's going to be people who won't be able to see everything that's going on in the slides, especially if your text is on the bottom. You want to keep the text up as high as possible for everybody in the room. Never down here at the bottom. I've been in a number of presentations where people put a lot of important, information, URLs, for example, at the bottom of the slides. And you see people start to stand up and start to take pictures because they can't see. It just kind of ruins the flow of the presentation. Keep your text up at the top, never down at the bottom, especially your most important text. And now you may realize that the fact that we're doing just a few words with a visual image means that we can make the fonts much bigger, which means that as a byproduct, our audience in the entire, the entire room should be able to see what's going on and see what that slide's about. And then again, focus on us because they don't need to read anything. They see it up there. It's in big font. It's great. It's near the top. Everybody in the room can see it. Everybody's happy. Number six. Now one thing I love to do is to let people know where I'm at and let people know where I'm going and also how far along we are. In other words, I like to show a roadmap. And you can even see this roadmap that I've had since the beginning. We're at number six right now out of nine tips. And this is really helpful for you because you can see how far along we're at. It also helps you keep the bullet points kind of organized in your notes if you are taking notes. But also it helps me too. This is a little trick to help yourself too because then I can see which number we're on. It's another thing I can associate with either a story or a topic or a tip or something I can share. And it becomes much easier to memorize when you have a roadmap, not just for your audience, but for yourself as well. And they don't just come in numbers like this. There's a lot of different ways to do this. This is something I shared at the beginning of one of my other presentations, which was essentially the roadmap that I was gonna take people on. This is the Affinity Pyramid. And here in this presentation, I was talking about how to convert your casual audience members into raving fans. So you start at the bottom with your casual audience. You convert them into an active audience member. And there was a whole section in the presentation about that. Then I talked about how to convert your active audience into a connected community and then into a raving fan. And this is exactly how the presentation was split up. And I brought people back in. I brought people back to this pyramid every section when we added a new part to it. Here's another slide from a recent presentation where I had a roadmap built in. You can see it at the top here where I talked about the past, the present, and the future about different topics. And you'll also see the same format that I was talking about earlier with the few words talking about the topic and then the one visual to go along with it. So this is really helpful for people and also for me to understand where I was at in the presentation. Number seven, graphs and tables. A lot of us love to include graphs and tables. And it's great to introduce data to support your points. But when your data looks like this, I mean, think about it. If you're sitting in a presentation and you see this slide, what can you make of it? You have no idea what's going on. Even if the person who's presenting is telling you what to look at, you're gonna be confused and your eyes are gonna go in every which way. You just see colors and numbers. You won't know what to look at. And just imagine what it's like for the people in the back of the room. My gosh. You've all seen tables. You've all seen tables like this, too, where it's a little bit more organized. This person was trying to do a better job of making the fonts a little bit bigger and helping you understand exactly what's going on. Again, I just randomly pulled this image from Google. But just to show you, this still doesn't work. And for one, I don't know why it starts with 2006 on the left-hand side and goes to 2002 on the right-hand side. Typically, it should be flipped around. But let's say, for example, this person put this up here to show that they finally have, in 2006, a positive net earnings per share. Well, if that's the point, then you don't need any of this other stuff. Here's the trick. You only want to show what is necessary to prove your point. That's it. You only need to show what is absolutely necessary to prove your point. So net earnings per share, positive in 2006, this is how I would go about it. And again, I'm not even gonna put fancy graphics. And you shouldn't even try to make it so fancy. I'm just doing this to show you the impact of just how, when you just focus on the information that's, important to this point that you're talking about, the kind of impact it can have on your audience. So net earnings per share. So, hey guys, we've had a interesting few years here. In 2002, our net earnings per share was minus $5.09. In 2003, it improved a little bit, still in the negative at negative 87 cents. In 2004, getting a little bit better, negative 13 cents. In 2005, negative two cents. In 2006, guess what, guys? We're in the positive. 12 cents net earnings per share. Woo-hoo, yeah. You see how much more impactful that is? I mean, you don't need the picture of the kid there. I just put that there for dramatic effect. But that's much, much better than looking at this graph here like that, right? It's much more impactful. It gets the point across. And I'm only sharing little bits of data that are required to prove that point, not all this other stuff. People put too much on the screen. You don't need to do that. Okay, let me fast forward here. Okay. Next, I have a really cool trick for you. This is called the lightbox trick. Now, I already did a video for you a long time ago, actually, that shows you how to do this in Keynote. And I expect that you can also do this in PowerPoint. But it's a really cool effect where you can highlight one portion of your slide. For example, if there's a lot of text going on and you want people to focus on one thing, for example, if I want you to just focus on this URL, which will redirect you to the video, boom. You see how clear it is? What the call to action is just by the lightbox trick? So go to smartpassiveincome.com slash lightbox dash trick and that'll redirect you to the YouTube video where I teach you how to do that. So again, smartpassiveincome.com slash lightbox dash trick so you can grab the information you need to create that effect. All right, and to finish off, number nine, one of my favorite tips, something that's very subtle, but it can make a big difference in how your audience responds to you. And that's what I'm gonna talk to you about today. I'm gonna talk to you about how to turn your slides off during your stories. Now the thing is, we've been talking this whole time about what to put on the slides and what to not put on your slides. This time, I want you to think about turning your slides off. Now that's not turning your PowerPoint presentation off or your keynote presentation off. It's not shutting down your computer. It's the fact that when you're presenting and you know there's a part in your presentation that's coming up where there's a story that you're gonna tell, where you really want people to focus on, you essentially are turning the slides off, taking people's attention away from any slide distraction and putting that focus directly on you so you can tell your story on stage and really wow people. This is one of my favorite tricks to do, and you'll notice this if you've seen me speak on stage. I do this quite often because I try to control where people's attention is. And if it's story time, I want them to focus on me. And you should focus on that in your next presentation, too. I really feel like that's gonna be a big game changer for a lot of people. If you do that, it's a small, subtle thing, but it makes a huge difference, and it allows you to really get deep into your story, and the stories are truly what make presentations memorable. It is the stories you tell. It is the people in the audience putting themselves in your shoes or in the shoes of those who you are telling the story about. And the next time you go into a story, go dark. Obviously, you'll need to put that into your PowerPoint presentation. This is essentially, like I said, your PowerPoint presentation. This is essentially, like I said, your PowerPoint presentation. This is essentially, like I said, your PowerPoint presentation. It's not a slide. It's just a dark slide. And to get into that fading effect, I just used the dissolve effect. So it dissolves from one slide to the next. I'm not gonna go into exactly how to do that now, and sorry, you've been looking at a blank screen for a while. But I'm gonna switch to the next screen and just say, first of all, thank you for watching this. I hope you got a lot out of it. I'd love to know what you think. Leave a comment here on YouTube or on the blog. And also, I have the slides for you. If you wanna download the slides to this presentation, you can go to watchspi.tv slash episode 17. That'll take you to the blog post. If you're on the blog post now watching this YouTube video, you can just use the form there to download the slides. Or you can actually, and you can test this out, and this is brand new, you can text slidetips to 33444 you can text slidetips to 33444 and just respond with your email address, and you'll get it sent right to you immediately. So again, slidetips to 33444. Hey, thanks so much, guys. I really appreciate your time, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of SPI TV. Make sure to subscribe. Make sure to subscribe. Because we got a lot of great stuff coming up. Got a little bit of a break during summer because I'll be headed to Ghana. I'm also going to Hawaii and also Australia. But on the other side of that, you'll see actually some footage of me in Ghana with a couple schools that I built. And I get to meet the kids and the teachers and just see what the schools are like. I'm just so excited for that upcoming trip. You'll see it in a future episode of SPI TV. So make sure to subscribe, and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.