A new challenge

On Thursday, I delivered a two-hour lecture on Internet Marketing for my network of small-business women.

The network's board had been looking for somebody to do a lecture on the subject, but the person who had been recommended to us was not interested. I'd been to a couple of similar lectures and figured I could do something like that myself. It's been years since I led trainings with the San Diego Tracking team, and I've never done much public speaking in Swedish, but I figured I could do it.

It's a subject that I'm interested in, and I spent quite a bit of time gathering information and putting together a PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint part took a lot longer than I thought, taking up pretty much all of my working hours for the week preceding the presentation.

I'd originally planned on practicing by giving the lecture to a friend on Wednesday. We had a hard time getting our schedules to sync, so we ended up calling it off. As it turned out, I didn't even have a complete draft of the presentation until noon on Thursday. I spent the afternoon making fine adjustments to the animation and graphics. An hour before I'd planned to leave the house, I made the final saves, and went to print out my notes. Much to my horror I discovered that there was no way to print the notes without printing them together with the slide, one per page. That would mean 74 pages! I probably didn't have time to print that many pages, and I was already getting a low ink warning on my printer, so that wasn't an option. So instead of eating dinner and fixing my hair, I copied and pasted my notes, one at a time, into Word so I could print them out on four pages. I packed my laptop, threw on my clothes and a little makeup, and I finally made it out the door 10 minutes late.

My lecture was at a school, and while our access was through the main door, it was far from obvious which door that was. I taped a flyer on the door, but there were already people wandering around. Because it was hard to find and there were people who had said they were coming who weren't there, we waited. Unfortunately there were several people who did not show up, so there were only 12 people. I'd been hoping for more, but considering turnout at out network's events over the past year, 12 wasn't bad, and it included 4 first-timers.

We started the lecture 15 minutes late. I felt like I was off to a slow start, and the first few slides felt awkward, but I soon got into the groove. The first half of the presentation took one hour, then we had a break for coffee. 20 minutes later, I started up again. People had a lot of questions, especially about Facebook, and soon we were about to get locked in when the automatic alarm came on. I had to breeze through the last 15 slides, but then we packed up and got out just in time.

The next day, I was thrilled to find e-mails and Facebook peppered with comments praising my presentation. One does not get rich delivering lectures like this, but after spending so much effort on preparation, I do hope to be able to deliver it a few more times for other groups.

Next month, I'll be giving a lecture, also for entrepreneurs, on the use of pictures in marketing. I'm also thinking about doing a photography workshop for the same demographic.