When teaching and selling via video, nearly all of us could do just a little bit better. We could be a little bit more interesting, a little bit more enthusiastic, a little bit more entertaining and a little bit more charismatic.
It’s not easy to narrate a long slide show or to face the camera for a length of time and hold attention. Most of us are not professional presenters or announcers and we haven’t been trained in how to hold an audiences’ attention.
But there is one trick I stumbled upon that can instantly improve almost anyone’s delivery, and it’s this:
Speed up your performance just a little bit.
You can do this one of two ways:
Either edit your audio/video to remove any ‘umms’, ‘ahhs’, ‘let-me-see’s and so forth. Remove them entirely. Long pauses? Remove them. Anything that doesn’t move the story forward? Rambling? Needlessly repeating yourself? Remove it. If you don’t want to edit your video, get someone to do it for you.
The second thing is to speed it up. Just a little. You don’t want to sound like a chipmunk. But if you slightly increase the speed of delivery, either by speaking faster or speeding up the video, it can make a remarkable difference.
Play around with this and see what happens.
One last thing… smile. Regardless of whether they can see you in the video or just hear you, they will know when you are smiling. Laughter is great, too.
