Let’s talk about the five critical components that make up a keynote presentation. Now, keynote is a software for, generally for Macintosh.


I'm not sure if they even make Keynote for the PC. The comparable program for a PC would be PowerPoint. But in essence, what it is, is a piece of software that you can use to create a visual presentation. As a matter of fact, what you are watching right now, this very video that you're watching right now was made using Keynote. 


What I'm gonna do is walk you through the five critical things that I do with my keynote presentations to make sure that they're engaging, that they're compelling, in that basically they get my point across in a good way that people can retain the information.
Okay? So let's jump in. 


First and foremost, let's understand that using keynotes to actually convey your message is a really great way to connect with your audience because you're doing it visually as opposed to just text. You're actually animating, like the text is flying in, you're talking points and your speech, basically, the audio is the viewer at the same exact time as that text flies in. 


And it's a much more engaging way to connect with your audience than just providing them with typewritten text on a piece of paper or on a web page. So, the animated factor keeps people engaged, and just in general, people connect more with a video. 


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The cool thing about keynotes is like the one that you're watching right now. I recorded it in a video, I turned it into a video, and you can stream them for people. Nowadays, a lot of times people use Keynote or PowerPoint to do live presentations on a stage or in front of an audience, right? But you can also record them the way that I'm doing right now and play them back for people or put them up on your website. 


A lot of people use this method to create sales videos, to create training videos. It's what I do on my websites. And again, like I said, you could do this with PowerPoint or you could do this with Keynote. 






Let's talk about the five things that I mentioned earlier. First and foremost, you wanna start with a cool theme, okay? Using a cool theme. Now, that's important because the theme is literally what people are looking at, right? So this particular theme that I'm using is really simple. I made it myself in just a few minutes.


IUI started with a default theme that comes with Keynote. It's a black and white theme. I set my size for my slide, and I like to make the size of my slide fit my entire screen so that I can record my entire screen with a program like Camtasia or Keynote, or rather, screen flow, which is what I'm using now. 


But anyway, for the purpose of this video, I use a very basic black and white theme. But you can get crazy with this. I mean, keynote comes with a whole bunch of these, like, built in that already have nice colors, nice textures, and nice images, and you can choose from any one of those to start building upon. And then you fill in your own text.


Now, like I did here, you can also choose to just start with a blank slate and create your own theme, because Keynote is very flexible. So you can actually create your own background image. Let's say you have a photograph and you wanna make that photograph or that scene, the back of your entire presentation. 


Maybe you took a picture of a beach setting or a setting of your office or whatever. You can literally upload that image and turn it into the slide background, so to speak. So what you're looking at right now on your screen is a slide, and you can adjust the background of that slide itself. 


You could put your own image in there, or you could select one of the basic ones that they have already built into Keynote. Now, here's another cool thing to know. If maybe you wanna get a little bit fancier than the ones that are inside of Keynote that come with built in but you don't wanna get into the whole creating of the theme yourself and the animations and all that stuff.


You can actually purchase presentations prebuilt and they're done by web designers, and they're built by graphic designers that are really good with the colors and the whole animation thing, and they're only a couple bucks. And you can go to a site like theme forest.net, I'm sure there's tons of other sites out there. 


If you just do a search for keynote themes, I'm sure you'd find thousands and thousands of ones out there that you can buy. I'm sure you might even find some free ones that you might get the rights to use as well. But there's other themes out there that you can use. 


And again, it's a cool idea to use a cool theme because it keeps your audience engaged. Remember, this is very visual, so you want to have some cool stuff for them to look at. It's a good idea also to keep it simple at the same time. So I want you to go crazy, adding all kinds of images and doing all these crazy animations, and, you know, you're not making a feature film here, right? 


You want the message to stand out. That's what you wanna focus on. You want people to be paying attention to the message. Yeah, using some cool images are important. I'm gonna prove that to you in a minute here. But it's more important to make sure that your message is what the user retains, not just the pictures and the theme, right? 


Keep your theme slides uniform. That's why it's called the theme, right? Because every slide looks like the other slide or somehow relates to the other slide. One of the things that's so annoying to me is when I'm watching somebody's presentation, every single slide is different.


I'm wondering, I'm like, wait a second, are we still in the same video here? I thought we were like watching a red slide a minute ago. Now we're blue, then it's yellow, then it's green. It's like, oh my God, please. You know, the important thing is that you keep things uniform and keep it themed.


Next thing, add images. Images are cool. And, and I'm gonna show you why images are a great way to make an impression. You can totally have a slide like this and be talking about something, and then boom, you throw in the cute little puppy and all of a sudden everybody watching this is smiling, right? 


You're looking at that and you're going, oh my God, is that a puppy? What is that? How cute. So, images are powerful. They're a great way to connect with people. Come on. How could you not smile at that little puppy? But again, don't overdo it with too many images. 


You don't want your thing to turn into a collage and be so distracting that your customer's just like your customer, or your student, or your audience in general are just so distracted trying to make out the picture that they're not listening to the audio. 


Remember, a PowerPoint presentation is a combination of visual elements as well as your audio, whether you're doing it live on stage or in your office, at a staff meeting or something like that. Or if you're recording a video, kinda like what I did here, so that you could watch this either way, you're using both visual elements as well as audio because my audio is connecting with you at the same time as these bullet points are coming onto the screen.


Now, where do you get images? Well, you can find royalty free images to use online at all kinds of different sites. As a matter of fact, all you gotta do is do a search for royalty free images. I got that little puppy one there from icon archive.com. 


Now, here's the important thing to remember, okay? Just because you can copy and paste an image doesn't necessarily mean that you have permission to do that. There's specific rules to images, right? So, the artist needs to get credit for the image. And this is particularly important when you're using that particular image to make money. 


So let's say that this puppy that I was using, I was using it in a sales video on a sales page. Well, I have to purchase the rights to use that image in my sales videos. That's very, very important. You have to have the appropriate license. So don't say, I didn't warn you. Don't just copy and paste. 


People need to get credit, and they need to get paid for their work, okay? I like to use quick and simple animations when it comes to adding my images and drawing them in notice with the puppy. I just kind of had it just pop in. Even with these text animations, they're just sliding in from left to right. 


I don't have them zipping and zooming and going all around the screen, because you can get complicated with animations and with images on Keynote. There's a lot of things that you can do. But for the most part, keep in mind, you're not producing a feature film here. You're not producing a TV commercial here. All you need to do is get the message across in a clear way.


Make it engaging, make it compelling. Don't get too crazy with all the special effects, because then eventually what ends up happening, like I said earlier, you're gonna draw too much attention to the animations in the images, and you can distract people from what's important, which is the message. 


What's the next thing? This is key when it comes to the message, okay? And I wanna spend some time talking about the message when it comes to a keynote presentation, because a lot of people skip this. You know, you can buy a bunch of tutorials and watch videos on how to make a keynote on YouTube, but they talk to you about the technical aspect of it. 


They don't really teach you about a good way to deliver the message, which is what's really important. Keep your thoughts concise and organized, okay? And what I mean by keeping them concise, notice this bullet point. Keep your thoughts concise and organized. 


A very simple bullet point. You know, one of the things that's so annoying to me when I'm watching a presentation or video or some sort of a keynote from someone else, is they slide this bullet point on there, and it's this long, like a paragraph and I'm like, squinting to try to read it. 


Now I've gotta, subconsciously I gotta make a decision, okay, am I gonna concentrate on reading this text or am I gonna concentrate on listening to his audio? And for women, this is a lot easier to do than it is for men. Men, you know, we just can't do two things at the same time. So you're gonna lose half your audience right there, keep it concise and keep it organized.


So I like to just put a title at the top of each slide, like the title of this slide is the 555 Method. Then what I do within this slide is I talk about five topics. So I drag in five little bullet points, like what you're seeing here. I first write an outline, and then I create five slide titles, right? So that's the idea, is I kind of do this in my head. 


Sometimes I don't even bother writing it down. But if you're planning on doing this presentation, creating a video, I recommend it. You just grab a piece of paper and a pen and just write down five main things that you wanna talk about. And those are gonna be the title slides. This particular slide that you're looking at right now is titled the 555 Method, right?
Now what you wanna do is within each one of those slides, you're gonna add five brief talking points. Have you been noticing that so far? Every single slide that I've been putting on the screen here has had five little bullet points, right? 


That little arrow image that I got from Icon Archive, and then some texts, some slides, you know, they are being animated in as I click the little button on my keyboard. They come in, but they're brief talking points. I'm not reading them word for word, which is another important thing. 


I basically create five slides like this one, and each one of those slides has five simple, concise bullet points. Then what I do is I talk for about five minutes on each one of my slides. This is why I call it the 555 Method.


I make five slides, one title on each slide, right? So that's five. Now I have five bullet points on each one of my slides. That's the second five. Then I talk for five minutes on each slide. So if you do that, you're gonna end up with a 25 minute presentation, which is just the sweet spot. 


It's not too short, it's not too long. You'll keep the person's attention while they're watching or while you won't lose them as long as you don't go crazy with too much animation or too distracting stuff. The 555 method has served me very, very well. 


I try to talk about each bullet for about a minute, and hey, it doesn't have to be exact. Like, I don't hold a stopwatch next to me. I just try to keep it in the back of my mind that I don't wanna, you know, I don't wanna talk for too long on any one particular thing. I use the 555 Method to create engaging 25 minute presentations. 


I've been using this for a long time, and like I said, sometimes, I'll add a slide here and there. Sometimes it'll be six slides. Sometimes, I'll realize, oh, man, I did my five, but I forgot to talk about some and I'll add an extra. Again, it's not, you know, written in stone. It's just a guideline. It's a way to get you started. 


I know when I first started creating keynotes, I would open up the program and I'd just be staring at it like, oh my God, where do I start? What should I do? So, if that's ever happened to you, remember the 555 method. Just write down five titles. Those will be your slides. Then five bullets for each slide, and then talk for each slide, talk for five minutes on each slide.
Let's talk a little bit about animation. Now, I like to use transitions to move from one slide to the next. The ones that I'm using in this presentation are very, very simple. They're called Object Push, and it's just moving the slide. 


Everything on the slide, all the text is going from left to right, from left to right. Now, the individual bullet points are also animated, okay? So what I actually do is, I use the animation feature inside of the inspector. There's a little window that you can open up inside of Keynote, and that's where you kind of control everything. That's where you can add certain characteristics to each of your elements. 


And your slide is made up of various elements, like what you're looking at right now on the screen, you're looking at text plus, there's also two little images on this slide. There's those two little arrows in circles on the left hand side, right? My little bullets, right? Well, those are elements, I've got my text in each sentence, that's an element within a box, and then each one of those little circles, that's an element, and I can animate those independently of one another. 


So what I'm doing for these bullets, if you notice when I click the button here, you're gonna see the little arrows gonna come in from the left, and you're gonna see the text is gonna come in from the right. See that? So I can actually animate those individually. I can make them come in from top to bottom, left to right, and those are little independent animations for the text, for the actual elements. 


You can also create unique transitions for your slides. I can make each slide when after this entire slide is complete, and all my five bullets are displayed before the new slide moves in, I can have all the texts fall apart. I can have it fly off the screen, I can have it do all kinds of crazy stuff, but I like to keep it simple. 


You can experiment with this as you start getting better and better with Keynote. In the beginning though, you should keep it simple. And what I've found is I went through my phase where I used sound effects and visual effects, and I found at the end of the day, it really comes down to just keeping it simple, using very basic animations so that you don't distract people from the message. 


Remember, you can animate all the elements, including the images, as well as the text elements, and you can move them on the screen. Like, you can literally program, like, for example, I could probably program the word animate to literally move around at the keystroke that I choose. And that's a little bit more of an advanced thing. You can create presets, you know, you can assign preset motion patterns and say, okay, well, I want this word to go from left to right and stop here, and then turn around and spin and come. 


You can do all kinds of crazy stuff like that by assigning motion patterns. Again, don't get crazy with it. Just keep in mind that the important thing to remember here is that your animations can be triggered one of two ways. They can be triggered by a stroke on your keyboard and what I mean by a stroke is by you literally pressing like the space bar or the arrow button or something like that, or automatically. So you can literally program these to happen at a certain amount of time.


So after a certain amount of milliseconds goes by, I could say, okay, I want the bullet to come in, and then I want two seconds after that for the words to come in. And it's not gonna wait for me to push the keyboard. It literally is gonna do that the way that I've presented it using my inspector window. 


Again, like I said, there's a lot of little features. Keynote is a very powerful software, so is PowerPoint but you shouldn't go crazy with this stuff. It's very easy to create a simple presentation. But then again, it's also very easy to get carried away. Don't get carried away. Engage your audience. 


Now, you can actually record your presentation once your slides are done and you sample it and you literally press play, you can record. There's a record button in both Keynote and PowerPoint. So whether you're using a Mac or you're using a pc, once your presentation is done, you can click record. 


What happens is the program records what's on your screen and what's coming in through your microphone at the same time. So you can narrate the slides, which is exactly what I did while I was recording this video for you. I clicked the record button, I pressed play on the slides, and then I read the bullet points, but I didn't read them word for word. I used them as talking points right? 


Now, you wanna be entertaining, that's important while you're making your presentation, whether it's in person or it's, you know, and this might be something that you rehearse. This might be something that you practice. Practice makes perfect. The key is don't be boring. And when you read things word for word, you're boring.
Don't be boring. Use the three 3 E principles. Engage, entertain, and educate. Like, it really doesn't matter what type of video or what type of presentation you're doing. You could be talking about health and fitness. You could be talking about technology. You could be talking about anything. 


If you entertain them while you're educating them, they're gonna be engaged, they're gonna be paying attention. So those are the 3 E principles that really hold through to just about any niche and any type of presentation. You know, I think we've all been victims of a presentation, maybe in a classroom setting where the presenter was talking like this, and he was reading the slide word for word. 


When recording your presentation, make it entertaining. Don't be boring. Use the 3 E principle, engage, entertain, educate, and it's like, oh God, please stop. You fall asleep, right? You're like, oh, when's this guy gonna be done? Don't be that guy. You know, you wanna engage them. You wanna entertain them, be yourself. That's another thing. 


Don't pretend to be somebody else. I, whenever I am talking on the microphone, I don't try to be perfect. I don't try to sound like someone else. I'm just myself. And if I make a mistake, I just push through it. And it actually helps me connect more with people because they realize, oh, wow, he's human. 


He actually just made it, did he just say that? Oh, yeah, he did. Oh, okay. So he's human just like me. And it helps you connect more, you know? And don't worry if you do something really bad, like you cough or something like, you know, that you need to fix, you can always edit it later, right?


Because you're recording this and you can let you know. So just repeat the section that you messed up, and then you can just go later and edit it with Camtasia or Screen Flow or whatever recording software you're using to record the video right now. Just make sure that you don't read word for word. 


Be yourself and use the slides as talking points or just as cues. The way that I'm doing here, I'm not reading, I skim through it. I read the basic parts of each bullet point, but then I just go ahead and add to it. I ad lib, and that's an important part of engaging people. Avoid reading word for word off the screen. Nobody likes that. That's boring at the same time, and this is one that I'm guilty of, don't ramble.
Get to the point and end your presentation with a call to action. Sometimes I've been known to ramble, can you believe it? I've been known to ramble. Yeah, it's been said. Look, use Keynote to create engaging presentations and videos for your market. It doesn't matter what niche you're in, it really doesn't. You can use Keynote or PowerPoint for my PC friends out there. 


You can use them both to create engaging messages, whether to train, to sell, just to have fun, it doesn't matter. Use Keynote to create cool presentations. You can use the preset themes, or you can buy a theme or you can make your own, like I did here. 


It doesn't have to be fancy schmanzy, as you notice, this is just a simple black and white one. But it just needs to get your point across. So I hope you start using Keynote to connect with your audience