For Virtual Presentations a Slide Per Minute (or More) May Work Best

More evidence of our mounting inability to concentrate on anything that isn't singing, dancing and twittering in front of us... just a few years ago my rule of thumb was one PowerPoint slide for every five minutes of presentation. At most.

They had to be darn good slides. Charts. Sample screenshots. No stock images or bullet-point-list extravaganzas. But if any of speakers at our conferences had too many slides I'd tell them to condense and cut. People can't concentrate and understand if you're whipping along at breakneck speed.

Recently, though, I've begun to add in more and more slides to my presentations. Perhaps one slide for every 2-3 minutes offline and one for every 60 seconds online. Otherwise you just lose the audience. You fritter away their attention if one slide stays up there too long while you drone on and on.

This Tuesday I did a lengthy speech -- an online tutorial on membership site marketing. It had 45 slides for 75 minutes of talking. I did it live on GoToWebinar, so as I spoke I could see the "audience attention" bar flickering at me. The bar measures involvement, I'm not sure how, but probably seeing if people are surfing other windows or not. It was very educational. Whenever I changed slides, the attention bar would pop up to 83-100% involvement. When I talked for more than about 30 seconds while sitting on one slide, the bar would slowly flicker downwards until it sat at about 50%.

Wow. When I did a recorded version of the same tutorial later that night (GoToWebinar is great for live webinars, but the recording quality isn't fabulous, so I try to re-record in Camtasia for posterity even though it's more work), I cut out some of the slight meanderings and brought the speech in at precisely 61 minutes. So, it's probably better now.

However, for my next tutorial, I'm going to ramp up the slide count and try to get it to one per every 50 seconds. The key, though, is I won't be presenting such densely populated slides. Less content per slide. Just enough to be useful and support the speech itself with examples. And to give that continual "flickering" faster-slideshow-feeling that I think may work best in this environment in the Twitter age we now all live in.

90 Hours to Produce 60 Minutes

I was having a quick lunch with an exec from Lynda.com -- one of the most successful online training firms around -- when he said something that made me drop my tortilla. "It takes about 90 hours to produce about one hour of really good online training."

I thought that was an insanely high number. These people know what they are doing, but come on! It usually takes me a handful of hours to toss together a presentation. An enjoyable morning's work. Maybe I just work faster than other people?

Now I've learned how right he was. Because online business training is 100 times harder to put together than a typical webinar. You're not just up there vamping on a particular topic, maybe a few facts and figures, a few screenshots, some tips.... Instead, you have to begin at the beginning and carefully explain something from stem to stern -- often complex concepts that may not lend themselves to easy explanation on a PowerPoint slide.

You can't see their faces while you speak, you have no idea if you're making sense to the audience, so you have to be as thorough and clear as you possibly can be. Instead of tossing in a few screenshots to liven things up, you probably need to develop at least a few flow-charts or specialized illustrations to clarify things.

Also, since you're not promoting an existing book or site, you can't crib any content from the original -- this is the original!

Lastly, just because you don't put much text on a PowerPoint slide (because great presentations are light on written content) doesn't mean your writing time is decreased. It's increased. If you can only use a tiny handful of words to describe something, it's much tougher than typing away merrily on a book chapter.

Since I've started producing online tutorials and training webinars this summer for Subscription Site Insider, I've felt as though I'm learning an entirely new communication skill. Perhaps it will be quicker someday. But, I suspect never as fast as I'd once thought it would be. You can't be glib in online training. It's a painstaking business.

How Marketing Your Own Offering is Like Cleaning Your Own Kitchen

After nearly 25 years of a/b tests, research data, and experience, it's a no-brainer to fix anyone's marketing. Anyone's but my own.

Why is that? Does it happen to other people? I hope so (because otherwise I'll really feel like an idiot.)

I can look at your site (or your marketing) and tell you precisely where you are missing the mark. It's so easy. Change this headline, move that form, alter that price, and here's your main benefit baby!

But now, here I am with a site launch of my own and it's absolutely agonizing. I do my best. Then we go live. My friends and colleagues start emailing me in response. What about this? How about that? OMG, now I see how to fix it! Call the web team, get them back to work pronto! No weekends off for anybody.

For my own products, my marketing eyesight is a little off... like I'm farsighted and squinting to see something that's way too close to me. It's awkward. Part of it's humility. I'm embarrassed bragging about my own stuff, it even feels a bit distasteful. (I think it's easier for men - at least based on the men in my field.) Part of it is I'm crap at pricing. (It's a joke among my advisory board - take Anne's price and double it and that's maybe where it should be.)

The weird thing is, during all this awkwardness, when I'm realizing how bad I am at marketing my own stuff, I'm doing favors, helping other friends and colleagues with their sites. And that's so EASY. I'm swift, deft, and authoritative. It's all based on research data -- my marketing brain's been percolated in research for so many years that I probably don't have a thought there's not a study to support. It's all rock solid. They change things based on my advice, they make more money. Duh.

Just ask me to do it for myself. OMG.

There's this saying that my girlfriends and I have -- it's a million times easier to clean another woman's kitchen than your own.

I think it's true for marketing too.