Building rapport with your audience is essential to being a successful speaker. If not you most likely will not be a speaker very long. A few months before going to a location for your talk, you want to start doing your homework for the upcoming presentation. To begin with what is your niche? Are you qualified to give a talk for the subject at hand? Are you going to be able to talk the language, this audience will understand? You don’t want to talk over the people, yet not under them either.
If you will give great information that is targeted to this specific crowd, then you’ll come out a winner every time! You can start off by greeting every single person that comes into the auditorium. If that’s where you’re speaking at. This little trick starts building a bond with each and everyone sitting there. That way their already rooting for you, to give them a good talk!
Wikipedia: Rapport is one of the most important features or characteristics of subconscious communication. It is commonality of perspective: being “in sync” with, or being “on the same wave length” as the person with whom you are talking. There are a number of techniques that are supposed to be beneficial in building rapport such as: matching your body language (i.e., posture, gesture, etc.) maintaining eye contact and matching breathing rhythm.
See, we’re talking about some things to do long before you ever give your speaking engagement. If possible a week or two before you get to the location, if you’ll have the local radio station give a 30-second or one-minute infomercials about you. This builds curiosity and makes you a sort of celebrity. In their eyes, you must be somebody if your name is coming across on the radio station! What will sure make you a hit is if you could actually do a twenty-minute interview with the local radio station a week or so before you hit their town!
You need some credentials like a book you wrote or can your name be easily found on Google that leads too much of your information. In other words can they check-up on you? You could record something or have you done any talks with another fairly big name individual? All-in-all this builds rapport with the attendees’ coming to your talk? If not then I’ve given you some good ideas that you can start working on, towards on your next speaking engagement.
