Public Speaking: Tips on How to Keep Your Audience Listening to You

There is going to come a day in all of our lives where we have to stand up in front of an audience and speak. Whether it be a classroom, a job, a wedding, or a funeral we will need to be prepared to know how to keep our audiences attention. Today I would like to give you a few pointers on this very thing. There is nothing worse than standing up in front of people to talk and no one is listening to you. You can always tell how your speech is going by the amount of yawns or slouches that you get. With the few tips that I am going to give to you it should make your speech day come off well.

The first thing that you are going to do before you ever prepare your speech is to know what kind of audience that you are going to be talking too. For example, on an average how old is your audience? If you can find this out then you can put some interesting topics into your speech to keep them involved. Another question to ask is what demographic are they from. You will want to be able to be prepared with information about their locations. Your speech would do you no good if you were talking about something that they could not relate too. A third question that you will want to know about your audience is what their average income is. This will tell you a lot about the people. If their income is very high then this tells you that you are probably speaking to an audience that has been to college and has degrees. If the audience's average income is low then it will tell you the opposite. It is at this point that you will know what type of vocabulary you can use as well as what documentation that you can present. You will also know how to dress if you know what type of audience you are speaking too. This can help your audience be attracted to you and pay attention to you.

Another important tip that I can give to you is to be sure that you are either the first speaker of the day or the last speaker of the day. The reason for this is that you have a better chance of your audience paying attention to you this way. If you are the first speaker then the audience will not be tired yet. Of course this is the best place to be. If you end up being the last speaker of the day you will have to struggle to keep their attention. The advantage that you have in being the last speaker though is that you can try to top all of the other speakers. You can bring some humor into your speech to liven your audience back up. Another advantage is that your audience will probably remember your speech more than they would the first speaker. If you have this information ahead of time then you will know how to handle yourself. If you are the last speaker you may want to adjust your speech so that there aren't so many statistics involved. This can be very boring. You can bring more life to your speech by being creative. One way to be creative would to get your audience involved. Ask them questions or have them come up on stage. This will keep people involved and alert because they will want to see how someone else responds or they might think that you might call on them next so they better stay alert. This will be a great ending to the day and they will remember you forever.

I hope that these few tips will help you the next time that you have to give a speech of some sort. These tips should smooth the way for you and help your speech day come off as a success. They will also help when it comes time for your audience to pay attention to you. You can walk away with confidence knowing that you left a great impression to your listeners.