Fear of Public Speaking

This is one of the most common fears that people have, which is making a speech before an audience. Although this task appears to be rather straightforward, there are several factors that could come into play, which makes this a legitimate type of fear instead of being an irrational one.

Even those people whose job requires them to speak before a group of people are not exempted from this fear, which is surprising knowing that they do it often. So you might as well picture those individuals who only get to perform public speaking on given occasions and the amount of fear that is entailed with the task. In fact, the fear is so massive that it can result to stress for some people. This requires some attention knowing that some people who experience fear of public speaking end up not delivering a quality speech since they are overtaken by that fear. Indeed, the feeling of fear can cloud one's ability to focus on the task at hand. After all, an effective public speaking produces a satisfying experience for both the public speaker and its audience.

Steps to Overcome Fear of Public Speaking

Public speaking isn't an activity to be feared about. If this does not do the trick for you, then you might want to consider applying the following perspectives and behavior towards this and hopefully be able to overcome this type of fear.

Public Speaking Isn't Supposed to be Stressful

Fear of public speaking is quite common that some people think it is inherently stressful. Well, it is time you know it is not! Communicating with others is an activity with which humans do everyday, so why should public speaking be any different? Therefore, one way to overcome the fear of public speaking is to imagine this activity as any regular communication that you do everyday. The only difference with public speaking is that you are addressing more people than you normally would.

Acquiring this new perspective is not something that you can achieve overnight, though. However, just focus on what you need to share during your public speaking and less on the actual delivery process to lift off the burden.

Give Up The Idea of Delivering a Perfect Speech!

This is another major culprit as to why people fear the idea of speaking in public. Indeed, the idea of embarrassing yourself in front of many people is frightening. But the content of your speech is what is these people will remember, not how you flawlessly delivered the speech. Once you are able to get rid of this anxiety, then you will find that you become less frightened with the idea of making public speeches or talking in front of large groups.

Focus on the Purpose of the Speech!

One of the most common "hidden" causes of stress associated with public speaking is related to the cause above, which is trying to impress the audience with your delivery. Focus on what value the audience can get from your speech delivery instead of trying to make an impression on them. Although delivery will boost your success at a public speaking activity, the most important thing is to communicate effectively with them. If it offers any consolation, not all public speakers get 100% approval from their audience anyway.

Becoming a Good Public Speaker

Now that you have recognized the major cause of fear that most people experience when public speaking, here are factors that are important in not just overcoming this fear but also doing a good job at your speech.

• Study your subject matter thoroughly so you can be confident when its time to deliver it.

• Polish your speaking skills. This will enable you to relay the information clearly and authoritatively.

• Prepare all of your presentation materials so you can deliver an organized speech.

• Practice your delivery. Even the best public speakers do this.

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The Death of Michael Jackson was of course a major shock to everyone, at least those of us who have never experienced such a major celebrity death in our adult lifetimes, "where were you when he died" is a question to be asked many times in the future.

What does this have to do with the art of promotion you may well be thinking? Well the 'event' caused an incredible amount of promotion to Jacksons back catalogue of work which was completely reappraised by a previously generally doubting public and even more so it has created a whole cottage industry for hangers on and celebrities to gain valuable free pr and thats not to mention the journalists and Editors who have managed to fill millions of column inches with more or less the same words repeated over.

It's the way in which the individuals are promoting themselves that interests me and its indeed a study into the human thirst for information no matter wether it is true or not, so many people flock to hear the words of a spoon bender just because he mentions the words Michael Jackson, or indeed they will buy books and magazines written by people who hardly knew him for long or hadn't seen him for years that it seems an easy way to promote yourself if indeed your moral standards can go so low (whilst you bank account gains $$$$$).

I even saw a seemingly delusional woman claiming to be his wife and lover, commanding the attention of a full horde of reporters on a ridiculous press conference in what was the most incredible moment of madness.

So as the rest of us try to work out ways of promoting ourselves and/or our business I suppose the lesson is to find whats hot and jump on the back of it no matter how tenuous a link we have to it, wether that be the days Twitter trends or the latest way of Optimizing for Google or creating a viral ad,  maybe if we just say that we knew Michael Jackson that will be enough.

 Click the arrow to listen to an incredible mashup mix from Norwegian Recycling:

*** Special offer: Buy Michael Jackson Essential Collection at sale price Here 

I decided to list some great free online Tutorials that are really useful for when trying to create great marketing materials either online or for print publication..

1. Learn Illustrator CS3 in 30 Days

   Illustrator is an outstanding tool for design and this FREE 30 days Illustrator crash course is created for beginners interested in learning Illustrator.
   

         2.  Create a clean website layout in Illustrator

This tutorial is perfect for the beginners to intermediate illustrator artists. It is a guide to the creation of a clean layout for a Website and the steps involved in the preparation for its Web use.

 3. 15 Excellent Logo Design Tutorials Using Illustrator

When creating a logo design, it’s good practice to use a vector-based application to construct it so that you’ll have a flexible logo design that can be used in numerous print and web-based mediums. Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard when it comes to creating vector-based logo designs.

In this collection, you will find 15 hand-picked tutorials from a variety of talented graphic designers and illustrators that discuss the logo creation process using Illustrator.

4.  19 Photoshop tutorials to design your own business card

Everybody or every company like to have a beautiful unique business card, but if you aren’t  going to outsource it, this post is your chance to learn how to make your own professional business card using these awesome Adobe Photoshop tutorials.

 5. 30 Excellent Brochure Designing Tutorials Plus Tips

Creating Brochures can be a very time consuming process, the temptation is to pay a marketing company $$$$$ for it, see on these Tutorials how it can be easily achieved

6. Some of the Best PS button/banner design Tutorials

A great list of useful tutorials on how to design essential banners etc for your website.

This is not a blog about why to get more Twitter followers or indeed about how to sell your product or links or whatever else to the new followers, but it is purely a simple method for growing your Twitter followers quickly and easily and without getting banned by Twitter. 

Generally speaking on Twitter, if you follow someone then many times they will reciprocate and follow you back, thus adding new people will grow your own audience.

The idea is to add quality followers preferably who are in your category of interest, for instance if you are an Author then it will be good to have thousands of followers interested in a similar subject although it would be restricting to limit this to just other Authors if you are trying to promote your book then you need a wide audience.

I have 2 favourite ways of adding and growing to my twitter followers:

1: Hummingbird:

This incredible application will do everything needed to add followers automatically and can be left unattended to do so.

 

All you need to is add your Twitter account details, search for targeted followers (if you wish to target a particular niche) and then click on follow all.  Once you have done that then the software will follow everyone for you, the neat thing is, it remembers who you have previously followed so will not attempt to follow them again (even if you  have unfollowed them).

 

This is Twitter Automation at its best and will enable you to reach many thousands of followers in weeks and increase your audience easily.

  

 

2:TweetLater

This handy Free tool will allow you to completely automate your replies to all new followers and is a great way to introduce yourself. There is an abundance of features with this tool as well like automating Tweets and Bulk Scheduling as well as terrific Spam control and Automatic following of those that follow you.

Both of these Tools are cheap (or Free) and can save you an incredible amount of time to get your following grow at a great rate and well recommended amongst the Twitter community.

It is important to use these tools carefully and respect the limits as they can grow your account by 1000s a day but if you go too fast too soon then Twitter will suspend your account. This is also the case for excessive spamming so it is well worth following the advice given on the support pages for these sites as they have great info.

Looking around Youtube for some good tutorials on marketing ones self on the internet and found this interesting video.

What do you think?