Faderhead has taught people since 2007 how to give presentations (it was one of the subjects he taught at the sports academy) and this course is a mix of 15+ years experience as a lecturer for presentation training and 27 years as a musician on stage.

If you ever have to give presentations for school, job or in any other setting, then there’s a 99% chance that you have never had useful training for how to communicate your ideas to people. And no, the one weekend seminar your company paid for in 2007 doesn’t count. Neither does the thing your professor told you 30 years ago or that article you read in your favorite online mag.

Faderhead hasn’t found any course online that’s even remotely close in content quality for this specific topic. Because they either are “public speaking” courses (like Toastmasters) or “How to design Powerpoint slides” classes.

Or they are €1000+ in-person weekend seminars, where you spend a ton of time (16h) in a hotel and in the end still have to do all the work to improve your skills at home.If you have to give presentations in any setting, then you will benefit immensely from this course.

The website Rockstar Presenter is providing good value and so here is a bonus lesson that Faderhead also added to the course recently:

10 STEPS TO BECOMING A ROCKSTAR ONLINE PRESENTER

The Covid-19 pandemic became the beginning of online meetings and presentations on a mass scale.

While almost all rules for giving good in-person presentations still exist in online meetings, there are new pitfalls and skills that you need to master to become a Rockstar Online Presenter.

The first major issue is that – very quickly – the presentation becomes about your shared screen and not about you as a person/presenter. That means: everyone just reads your slides, while you have disappeared. This is terrible, because everyone can read the slides much faster than you can talk about them. It also removes you from the presentation.

My favorite way to get around that is by using an app called mmhmm

Faderhead knows the name sucks, but the app is great for engaging presentations, because during a virtual meeting it lets you be on screen at the same time as your presentation slides:

It works with Zoom, Teams and Google Meet and if you give a lot of presentations online, mmhmm is my favorite choice for virtual presentations.Zoom also allows you to do something similar, by setting your PowerPoint or Keynote slides as a virtual background. For an in-depth explanation on how to do this, you can read more here.

Unfortunately neither Teams nor Google Meet seem to allow this, which is why Faderhead preferes mmhmm, which is a standalone app that acts as your virtual camera.

Regardless of which technical solution you choose:

Make sure you are on screen at the same time as your slide content!
The difference in connection this creates is off the charts!
Try it and bathe in the positive feedback you will get!

10 Steps To Becoming A Rockstar Online Presenter:

Step 1:

Know your software inside out! Be it Zoom, Teams or whatever you are using.
Do you know how to:
Share your screen
Share files
Give admin or speaker roles to other people
Use the chat
Mute/Unmute yourself and others
Turn your camera on/off
Use filters and evaluate if blurring the background would be appropriate

If not, figure it out before you move on to step 2.

Step 2:

You have to give a very engaging presentation;
Reading facts off a slide doesn’t cut it anymore!
It’s harder to keep people engaged when they’re looking at a screen and may be getting distracted by something in their real life. Unless you have a clear system and plan to do this, you will be terrible at it. Trust me, most professional presenters are terrible at it.
Luckily my course teaches you exactly how!

Step 3:

If the meeting is just about communicating facts, save everyone the time and send a PDF or a pre-recorded video (Faderheaduse Loom for that).
Live presentations/meetings should only happen if you are personally trying to communicate ideas that need your presence for emotional reasons or to clarify/negotiate/persuade.

Step 4:

Online presenters often look at their screen instead of into their webcam.

This looks very impersonal!

Put your presentation content window right under your webcam and look at it! If you have a separate webcam, put your webcam above the screen that has your presentation content. Then put your presentation content window right under your webcam and look at it.
Faderhead can’t stress this enough. It makes a big difference!

Step 5:

Get everything ready long before the meeting. Online meetings often start late because the presenter has to check this or that. Or has technical issues (see step 1).

Step 6:

The presenter should be in a quiet space with no background noise. If that is impossible, use a good headset mic with background noise cancelling technology.

Step 7:

Enforce mute for everyone except the speaker;
Background noise from many people builds up quickly and ruins any online meeting/presentation! In discussions: mute yourself when you are not speaking. Setup “push-to-talk” for that! That is a function where you have to press a key to temporarily unmute yourself and talk.

Step 8:

Know how long you will talk.
Leave ample time for Q&A and plan it 50/50 or 60/40 with your talk.

Step 9:

Giving presentations is not natural for anyone. Often “good talkers” are the worst presenters because they think they can just wing it.
Don’t be that person!

Step 10:

Additional steps for successful and productive online meetings:
Only invite people who are actually relevant to the meeting. If it’s unclear who the participants are going to be: try to sort that out beforehand!
Send an agenda before the meeting. If there is no agenda, the listeners can’t prep and don’t know what’s needed of them.
Include 2 additional sections at the very end: “next steps” and “q&a”
Send a summary email after the online meeting, especially if to do’s were agreed upon. Include: who, what, by when in a simple list format.

Seth Godin said it best when he wrote:

The purpose of a meeting is not to fill the allocated slot on the Google calendar invite. The purpose is to communicate an idea and the emotions that go with it, and to find out what’s missing via engaged conversation.If you promise not to check your email while we’re talking, we promise to not waste your time.

Hope you got something out of this, even if you don’t have to give presentations for school or work!

When writing down these 10 steps, my initial thought was

“Duh! That’s all so obvious!”,

but less than 1% of all presenters actually do all of this!

80% don’t do ANY of these things – and just by incorporating the easiest ones would improve their presentations by a lot, and that is the interesting part about life:
Most people are terrible at what they do, and being better than most people isn’t that hard, It just requires attention to detail and a little bit of effort.

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