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FRESH THREADS
NEW! The Freenoter Podcast!
There are lots of resources out there on how to become a paid speaker or keynoter, but what if you speak to build your business, as a FREEnoter? Each week, join me and Tom Webster as we cover all the angles of how to profit from speaking for free. If you are looking to grow your business from the stage--without "selling from the stage," this is the show for you. We will cover EVERY aspect of building your business through speaking, and even share a different craft cocktail recipe every week, just because. Subscribe now!
3 Reasons a Great Positioning Statement Goes Bad
The good news? You’ve just created a shiny new positioning statement. You’ve labored over how to frame your target market. You’ve wordsmithed your competitive differentiation. You’ve detailed the how those differences make your product better. Now you’re ready for the market to respond and pay off all that hard work. The bad news? It probably […]
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How to Message Your Milestone – EP:100
When you try to message your milestone, it’s easy to mistake the milestone for the message. It’s important to realize that what’s meaningful to us internally isn’t necessarily meaningful externally. You still need to show your audience, clients, or customers that you’re helping them get a goal that they want: achieve something, solve a problem, […]
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Why You Can’t Make Change Happen – EP:099
There are two kinds of change, technical and adaptive, and you need to solve for the right one. Tamsen is working on a book about the Red Thread, and it’s been hard to get that change to happen. Michael Bungay Stanier’s advice was that she was probably solving for the wrong kind of change. Technical […]
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How to Write Descriptions for Your Talks and Presentations – EP:098
Now that you have a great title, how do you write descriptions for your talk or presentation? Again, it’s about framing the ideas for the organizer to say yes, which means using the Red Thread. If we write descriptions so the organizer gets all their questions answered, it’ll answer their attendees’ questions, too. To do […]
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How to Title a TEDx Talk – EP:097
When we’re trying to title a TEDx talk, we need to make sure it fits a format the organizer expects. If you look at the top 20 titles of TED talks, you’ll notice that none of them use the “Name: Subtitle” format. Instead, they’re always phrases like, “Do schools kill creativity?” or, “Your body language […]
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How to Title Your Keynote or Presentation – EP:096
In order to title your keynote or presentation, start by asking what the audience needs to hear. This isn’t necessarily what you yourself think is most interesting or compelling. Instead, it’s about what your audience needs to say yes to before they can engage with those ideas. Your audience wants to know how your keynote […]
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Four ways people react to messages (and how to get the one you want)
You have a message. You want to get it heard. That’s all good. (I mean, people have to hear your message to act on it, right? Right.) Except that’s not enough, is it? Nope. Because after someone hears something, they react to it, and it’s that reaction that determines what happens next. You can’t get the action […]
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How to Create the Best Messages for Long Sales Cycles – EP:095
Long sales cycles make it hard to structure your message and address the right questions. The key is to instead structure a series of messages that answer the right question at the right time. A message format that your organization probably uses is focused on how. In fact, it’s common for ALL of your messaging […]
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The Simplest Storytelling Structure – EP:094
The ABT method is just about the simplest storytelling structure, but we can make it more effective. ABT, developed by Randy Olson, stands for “And, But, Therefore.” Each of those words corresponds to an act of a story. The first act is set up so you present, with the “And,” two pieces of information that […]
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3 Books That Will Make You a Better Communicator – EP:093
This week we look at 3 books that will make you a better communicator by making the useful usable. Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, is amazing at detailing how to get your message to stick with your audience. They make that information usable with an acronym: SUCCES. A great message is […]
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