A key message is the number one thing you want your audience to remember or do as a result of your presentation. Some experts call it “the big idea”, the core of your presentation or the proposition.

Start planning your presentation by deciding on your key message. It will make the rest of your planning easy and straightforward. Steve Bent, one of my readers, said in a comment on a previous post:

“…[T]hat’s when I had the Eureka moment of the key message for that particular presentation. Then all previous thoughts, notes and parts of the presentation were easy to classify in terms of how relevant they were, and which step they fell into (if any).”

If you’re preparing a presentation on a topic you know well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to decide on your key message quickly. I’ve trained hundreds of people and there’s not one that’s been unable to come up with a key message within 5-10 minutes!

But in Steve’s words you may have “message commitment issues”. You may be thinking that once you’ve got a key message, you can’t change it as you carry on with your planning. Rubbish! Think of it as an engagement, not a marriage. You can always change your message if you find that it’s not quite working for you.

Or maybe you’re expecting the perfect, clever and catchy key message to come to you fully-formed. If that does happen to you – you’re lucky. But more often a memorable key message is a result of crafting.

There are three steps to crafting your key message:

It makes sense. Start from your key point. But sometimes you can spend more time than you want to working out what that key point is. Olivia Mitchell offers a three-step process for "crafting your key message."

Public Speaking Blogs: The Definitive List

The public speaking blogosphere: a large and varied space with fuzzy edges spanning many disciplines. There are public speaking blogs which focus on speech delivery, visual presentation design, speechwriting, humor, personal development, and interpersonal communication.

Public Speaking Bloggers: A Diverse Group

One is a world champion speaker; some speak professionally; others chronicle their first speaking steps. Many are authors – some more than once. Many are Toastmasters. Or were Toastmasters. Or recommend joining Toastmasters. Women and men. Young and old.

The only unanimous traits are (1) a passion for giving so that others may be educated and entertained, and (2) a way to subscribe to their articles with an easy subscription.

Learn from the Public Speaking Blogosphere

I compiled this snapshot of the public speaking blogosphere with three primary aims:

• To aid readers in the discovery of excellent public speaking blogs;
• To build ties within the community of bloggers;
• To provide encouragement to current and future public speaking bloggers.

For each blog below, sample articles are linked to give a flavor of the blogger’s style.

Twitter List

You can find a comprehensive Twitter List containing all of the known Twitter accounts for these bloggers here: @6minutes/public-speaking-bloggers .

Valuable resources compiled by Andrew Dlugan at @6Minutes

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