If you need to publicly speak, preparation is key. If you are totally prepared then you have researched the audience, you know your topic thoroughly, your visual aids are clear and simple, and you have rehearsed and rehearsed again.

Hot tips: 1.

Know the room. Be familiar with where you will speak. Arrive early, walk around the speaking area and practice using the microphone and any visual aids.

2.

Know the audience. Greet some of them as they arrive. It's easier to speak to a group of friends than to a group of strangers.

3.

Know your material. If you're not familiar or are uncomfortable with it, your nervousness will increase. Practice your speech and revise it if necessary.

4.

Relax. Ease tension by doing exercises.

5.

Visualise yourself giving your speech. Imagine yourself speaking, your voice loud, clear, and assured. When you visualize yourself as successful, you will be successful.

6.

Realise that people want you to succeed. Audiences want you to be interesting, stimulating, informative, and entertaining. They don't want you to fail.

7.

Don't apologise. If you mention your nervousness or apologise for any problems you think you have with your speech, you may be calling the audience's attention to something they hadn't noticed.

8.

Turn nervousness into positive energy. Harness your nervous energy and transform it into vitality and enthusiasm.

9.

Gain experience. Experience builds confidence, which is the key to effective speaking.

PowerPoint ideas : Visual aids – such as videos and PowerPoint slides – are a good way of keeping the audience focused on your message and they’re essential for longer presentations or speeches. But there are traps for the unwary. The most obvious is when the equipment refuses to work and your entire speech is built around audiovisual elements.

When it comes to designing a PowerPoint presentation, Adam Griffiths, Interactive Communications Manager at Aon Consulting recommends keeping the message on each slide simple. “Variety is important too – using images not just words. One of the worst techniques is to have 20 slides with an essay.”

Adam suggests charts, graphs, and photos to spice it up. And for the more adventurous, it’s possible to embed digitised videos in PowerPoint.

But don’t go overboard with bells and whistles just because you can. Keep to one or two fonts, one or two colours and a single, simple image per slide.

“I’d say to people, think of the top three to five points you want to make and make sure those are made consistently and simply,” he says. “It’s often useful to come up with a theme for the presentation – say, for example, ‘Reach for the stars’, and then use a rocket labelled with your five key points or other visual metaphor and come back the image at the end to tie the message to your theme.”

“Definitely try to avoid using only text,” Adam continues. “Imagine you’re pitching to prospective clients who have to sit through five different presentations in a day. If you don’t do anything different, at the end of the day the words merge into each other. If it’s a really important presentation, have a consultant work with you. You wouldn’t design a brochure on your own, so don’t assume you should design your own presentation.”

The next thing is to integrate your slides with the message. “You can do a lot with PowerPoint in terms of building messages on a slide,” Adam notes. “You can build images, charts and graphs dynamically, but don’t over-use them. Don’t have text flying in from the side, the bottom and the top, all in different fonts. That’s an obvious mistake people make when they first get into the technology.”

Be critical during your rehearsal, says Bob Hughes. Read the presentation out loud, accompanied by your visual aids. “You have to think 'what can I cut? What do I really need to say and what don’t I need to say? How tight can I keep this?',” he says.