10 Tips to Improve Your Speaking Voice

One of the most important components of public speaking is the sound of your voice. It influences the impact of your message, and might even make or break the success of your speech. Fortunately, for many people, good voice quality can be learned.

Instructions :

1. Breathe from your diaphragm - Practice long and controlled exhales. When you speak, use breath to punctuate your point. For example, take a breath at the end of each phrase whether you need to or not. Use that opportunity to pause and let the listeners absorb what you say.
2. Use pitch - Lower pitches generally are more soothing to hear. However, modulating your pitch for emphasis will keep your listeners engaged. Develop your pitch by practicing humming.
3.  Moderate your volume - Find out if you speak too loudly or too softly. When you begin speaking, ask your audience how your volume is (each situation is different). Try to stay at the appropriate volume throughout your speech.
4. Moderate your pace - This one is also closely related to breath. If you speak too quickly, people can’t keep up. If you speak too slowly, people will lose interest. Record your speech to determine if you need to change your pace. Get feedback from others.
5. Articulate - Try exaggerating your lip movement to reduce mumbling. Practice articulating tongue twisters and extending and exaggerating vowel sounds. Become an expert at articulating tongue twisters as quickly and crisply as possible. Focus on the ones you find difficult.
6. Practice your speech in advance and determine where you want to pause for a breath. For more emphasis, pause for more than one breath. Mark your breathing points in your notes.
7. Loosen up before you begin. Look side to side. Roll your head in half-circles and roll your shoulders back. Shift your rib cage from side to side. Yawn. Stretch. Touch your toes while completely relaxing your upper body, then slowly stand up, one vertebra at a time, raising your head last. Repeat as needed.
8. Posture - Stand up straight and tall to allow full lung capacity and airflow.
9. Record your voice repeatedly using different ways of speaking. Determine which one is most pleasing.
10. Practice breath control - Take a deep breath, and while you exhale, count to 10 (or recite the months or days of the week). Try gradually increasing your volume as you count, using your abdominal muscles—not your throat—for volume. Don’t let your larynx tense up.

 

How to Make Money Speaking

Imagine if you could make good money talking about something you love. Well, it is definitely possible! Almost any subject can be a good foundation for building a speaking business. And, you can do it even if you have little or no capital or experience.

The following tips should put you on the right path!

• Starting Small - You can start public speaking as a part time thing at the start and later as you gain recognition, lots of big offers and opportunities will crop up automatically!
• Choosing Subject - Choose a subject to speak about. Whatever area of expertise you have, it’s likely that there are people who would like to hear you speak. Make sure that, whatever subject you choose, you know enough to sustain an intelligent, useful presentation and to answer any questions your audience might have. You’ll also want to choose a subject you love – neither you nor your audience will enjoy your speech on photography if you hate snapping pictures.
• Create your Marketing Plan - There are many different options as far as earning money as a speaker is concerned. You can directly market yourself to organizations that might hire you. You could approach companies that have employees that could benefit from your knowledge. These days many companies are looking for motivational speakers on various topics like improving employee morals and even talks on improving their employees public speaking skills! There is always a great demand for good speakers.
• Hold your own seminars - While this can be done on a national basis, the easiest place to start is locally. You either rent use of a facility to hold the seminar or perhaps partner with an entity with a facility and then promote the event. You can use traditional advertising methods like newspapers and radio or if you have a target audience that is identifiable, you may want to use direct mail. Have you ever been to a seminar on something like wealth building that was promoted in the newspaper? These are always been packed with hundreds of people.
• Use a bureau -Additionally, there are speakers’ bureaus that work as an agency who can procure speaking engagements for you. While many of these bureaus specialize in celebrity speakers, there are others that book speakers for less prominent events where a speaker only needs to be well qualified to do the presentation. A search on a major Internet search engine with a key term like “speaker’s bureau” is a good place to start.

If you have an existing product/service that you would like to promote, then effective public speaking can also help you attract a lot more client -

• Showcases your Knowledge - Speaking is effective because it showcases your knowledge before groups of people who eagerly show up to hear it. Your prospects may tune out advertising, but they’ll pay attention to your talk because it presents your knowledge in polished form to people who think it will help them.
• Visibility - Speaking gives you tremendous visibility and credibility that increases over time. Whenever you are in the front of a room, you get noticed. People will remember who you are and what your business does. The more people see you speak and see your business name, the more successful people think you are.
• Marketing Reach - Speaking is a marketing strategy you can immediately embrace to get in front of potential customers. Speaking puts you within handshaking distance of your best prospects, many times helping you close sales before you leave the room. Speaking can help you reach dozens, and sometimes hundreds of your best prospects every time. Speakers report that speaking regularly continuously fills their prospect pipelines, ensuring a steady stream of new clients and customers.