Speaking Your Brand: Public Speaking Tips and Strategies

Creating your signature talk can lead to clarity and better results not only for your presentations but for your business model, product offers, marketing messaging, and speaking strategy. In this on-air coaching call, I talk with my client C S Wurzberger about how our work together to create her signature talk (using my storyboard method) helped her narrow her niche, design her business model, an...

Here’s the problem I see with many of the presentations and workshops I attend: Too much impersonal information and data, not enough personal stories and connection. Or, to put it even more simply: Too much Wikipedia, not enough people. In this episode, I share examples of how you can create presentations that are personal and memorable for your audience and how, by having a signature talk, you cr...

Are you spending time going to networking events and not feeling like you’re getting enough out of them? There’s a way to approach networking that can get you better results and save you time. In this on-air coaching episode, my guest Dr. Carmen Landrau and I strategize ways she can network more effectively, from which groups to attend to who to say yes to for coffee or lunch (and how to politely...

As mission-driven entrepreneurs, we’re passionate and certain about the changes we’d like to see to make the world a better place. But, what happens if the people you want to reach aren’t as convinced as you are? You have a couple of options: You can work really hard to educate your market, to convince them that what you’re offering is what they need, to get them to change their behavior in favor...

How important are values to your company’s brand and culture? For Flipboard, a social news magazine that launched as one of the first breakout iPad apps in 2010 and now has over 100 million monthly active users, it’s been central to their decision making and their success. In this interview, I talk with Marci McCue, who heads up the company’s communications and content strategy, about the process...

We’re back with a coaching episode, so you can take the strategies we talk about and apply them to your own presentations. My guest Jodi Flynn of Women Taking the Lead and I go over an upcoming presentation she has, including why your presentation should only have 3 key points (less is more!), how to poll the audience so you can tailor your content and examples, how to transition between points, a...

What opportunities are you missing out on because you don’t have a signature talk? In this episode, I share why having a signature talk is critical for your business and your personal brand, including examples of what makes a great signature talk (and how it’s different from a training). With a signature talk, you become the go-to expert and thought leader for your topic and industry. You establis...

What does it take to do a TEDx talk? In short, a lot of work! But, as my guest and client Tammy Lally talks about in this episode, the process was tremendously rewarding and transformational. Tammy and I talk about the process we went through to create the talk, how she prepared for it, what it was like to be on the TEDx stage, what she learned about herself, how she opened the talk, and much more...

If you’re interested in speaking at conferences and/or being a guest on podcasts, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. I met my guest Kerry Gorgone over 8 years ago and I’ve seen her influence rise, both online as she’s become the host of the MarketingProfs podcast and a contributing writer to well-known sites like Social Media Explorer and Entrepreneur.com, as well as offline through speaki...

Community has been the most important component for me in growing Speaking Your Brand over the past two years, from online masterminds I’ve been a part of to local women’s business groups I’ve joined. In this episode, my guest Kat Mendenhall shares how community and mentors have been instrumental in helping her with her businesses. We also talk about how to turn passion into a profitable business...

There’s a LOT of content out there competing for your (and your customers’) limited attention, from social media updates and blog posts to podcasts and videos. Is the answer to create more content or better content? My guest today, Jay Acunzo, believes that the answer is not “more” or “better”; rather, it’s to create exceptional content. What exactly is exceptional content and how can you use your...

What’s wrong with being a good girl? What does striving for perfectionism and people pleasing cost us as women in leadership? How does it affect our message and our ability to have a greater impact? In this episode, my guest Regena Garrepy shares with us her journey to reclaim her essence - and the gremlins that keep us from doing the valuable work we should be doing. We also talk about the proces...

Have you thought about writing a book to boost your personal brand, your business, or your speaking career (or probably all three!)? I know I have, which is why I got a lot out of my conversation with author, executive coach, and keynote speaker Jan Bowen. In this episode, we talk about why Jan chose to write her book "It’s Not That Complicated", how she selected her publisher, what hybrid publish...

As solopreneurs and small business owners, we often get stuck doing tasks that we really need to delegate or hire someone else to do. We tell ourselves that it only takes a few minutes, or we don’t have time to train someone, or we’ll do it later. The problem is that a bottleneck occurs (us!) that limits our business growth. As the business owner, we should be focusing on doing the activities that...

If you’ve listened to some of my other episodes, you’ve heard me help my clients with on-air coaching calls. Now, I’m turning the tables and having someone do a strategy session on me. My guest Carolyn Delaney is the founder of OurCraft.com, which helps creatives and makers by taking care of their technology needs and digital presence through email marketing, SEO, content marketing, ecommerce, and...

This idea of empathy and sharing our stories, especially our deep and vulnerable ones, has been coming up a lot for me lately, from panel discussions on politics and social media I’ve participated in to podcasts I’ve been on talking about the power of public speaking to build trust and empathy. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I would add to that n...

As speakers, we want to use our voices effectively, feel confident, and project confidence on stage. In this episode, professional singer and vocal coach Freya Casey shares exercises we can do to improve and warm up our voices and how to reduce stage fright and project confidence. What I love about Freya is that she helps people discover the awesomeness in their voice and that she emphasizes minds...

If you’ve been giving presentations for awhile that are the typical 30-60 minutes in length, but you’re curious as to how to condense your idea into a speech that’s less than 10 minutes (it is possible!), you’re going to learn a lot in this episode. My guest, Tara Lynn Foster, is a leadership speaker and coach for women professionals and entrepreneurs. She spent her career in corporate America, du...

How can you get media coverage for your business? In this episode, you’ll learn common mistakes business owners make when pitching journalists, what to put in your pitches, how to show you’re an expert, and how the media landscape is changing. My guest is Christina Nicholson, an award-winning journalist with more than a decade of experience anchoring, reporting, writing, blogging, video production...

How many of us wouldn't rather market and grow our businesses with heart rather than hustle? It’s exhausting trying to keep up with every new social media channel and tactic (Facebook Live! Snapchat! Instastories!), much less everything else that goes into running our businesses and working with clients. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. In this episode, Lisa Princic and I talk about why "hopin...

We're going behind-the-scenes to look at what it’s really like to prepare and deliver a keynote. Keynotes are meant to be inspirational and aspirational, which is different from a standard business presentation or breakout session where you’re sharing tactical, step-by-step things that people can do. In a keynote, you want to take the audience on a journey, weaving in your own stories and experien...

If you've struggled with figuring out who your ideal target market is, what problems and needs they have, and what results you can get for them, this coaching episode is going to show you the process I use with my clients to help them identify this. We know that in our businesses and in our speeches, we can’t try to appeal to everyone, because then we appeal to no one. So, what do we do? We need t...

You are going to get so much out of my conversation with Donna Cravotta, who is a social media expert and founder of Social Pivot PR. This episode is part coaching - I give Donna feedback on her presentation content and how she should position herself. And then it leads into training. Donna is so good at what she does with social media that I couldn’t help but ask her questions I have and that I k...

What kind of topics are worthy of a keynote versus a presentation you would do in a workshop or breakout session? How can you position what you offer so that clients see you as a go-to expert rather than a one-time or infrequent purchase? Both of these questions are key if you’re looking to expand your business and get paid as a speaker. My guest, Danielle Liss, is a lawyer, but don’t worry - she’...

How can you set yourself apart from others in your field? What makes your approach different? We all have something that is unique to us, but it’s hard for us to see it in ourselves because we take it for granted - it’s with us all the time, after all! In this episode, I coach my guest Puja Madan to help her find her unique message to stand out, so that’s she’s attracting the right clients and cre...