Radio presenting is not an easy job and it is very important for your radio station. It is therefore essential that you try to improve your radio presenting skills as much as you can if you have your own radio station. In this article, we will give you some tips that hopefully help you to become the best at radio presenting.

Good preparation

“A good beginning is half the task” is truly applicable to this situation. Good preparation can make the difference between a hit or a miss in your performance as a presenter. Especially when you want to present larger chunks of text, it is very hard to improvise everything without preparation. Therefore, it can really help if you think about it beforehand and write down the main points you want to say. This helps you remembering and will make your story more consistent and structured. People who have the tendency to ramble, really benefit from a script. If you present something informational that involves facts or data, you should always do your research as best as you can. You do not want to claim things on live radio which are not true, because this harms your credibility and the trust that exists between you and the listeners. You should know what you are talking about, so doing research about your topic is crucial.

Stress control

A quality which is very helpful to have is handling well in stressful situations. During a live broadcast, everything can happen. Even if you prepared everything perfectly, things can and will go differently than you planned, especially if you have live contact with one of your listeners or someone you interview. You can prepare for your part, but you will never know what the other person is going to say. You will definitely experience situations when things do not go as expected and you have to fix it on the spot. The way to train this, if you do not have this quality naturally, is work experience. If you present radio every day, eventually you will become more comfortable improvising when things go wrong.

Be kind and confident

If you interview other people on your radio station, you have to have confidence in your interviewing skills. No one wants to listen to a silent and awkward interview, so you have to be confident in the conversation and fill the silence when it happens. Also, you should always be kind to your guests on the show and to the listeners. If you are shy and you want to practice interviewing, start with just normal daily conversations that you have. When you have a conversation with a friend or a family member, look at your conversation skills. Can you keep the conversation going? Do you ask relevant questions? Do you really listen to the other? These are things you can practice all day every day until it feels more natural, so you can also do it live on radio.

Know your audience

To find the right tone of voice and topics to speak about, you should get to know your audience. Find out what kind of people they are and what they are interested in to hear. You approach a very young audience very differently than you would approach an older audience. Try to find your own style and match that with what your listeners like to hear. Are you a more serious presenter or do you like to include some comedy? Do you talk a lot on your show or do you keep it short? All important things to figure out for yourself.

Timing

Timing is very crucial in the radio business. If you need to fill up the silence between two songs, you need to know how to do the timing just right, so that you are done talking when the new song starts. Also, you should know for how long you can keep your listeners engaged with a topic before you play the next song or start talking about something else.

Stay open to improvement

The final tip, which is not only relevant in radio presenting skills, but really in life in general, is to stay open to improvement. No one presents radio perfectly, you will always make little mistakes. So be critical of yourself and allow others to give some constructive critique on your presenting skills. It is never too late to learn something. Try to always have something that you are working on to improve. This will not only make your radio station more successful, but it will make presenting more interesting for yourself, because you are trying new things and seeing if they work for you.

These were some tips to improve your radio presenting skills. If you want to improve some more, you might be interested to learn how to improve your listener’s experience, which you can read here.