When you speak at a conference, it’s natural to want to give your audience something to take home to help them remember you and your presentation. And one of the easiest ways to produce a handout is to print out copies of your PowerPoint slides.

But just because it’s easy to produce a handout from your PowerPoint slides, doesn’t mean you should do it. In fact, there are a few reasons it can be a bad idea:

1 – The cost of printing them isn’t trivial – especially if you have a large number of slides and a large audience

2 – Muilti-page handouts are heavy to carry or ship.

3 – If you ship the handouts they may not get to the conference location on time –or if they do, the conference staff may not know how to get the handouts to you.

4 – You could have a lot left to carry home

5 – Your audience may put them in the trash can in their hotel room so the handouts don’t weight down their baggage.

The better way:

Instead of lengthy printed handouts, put the entire presentation on your website in PDF format. Then, if the conference promoters don’t have a ban on self-promotion, create a one-page flier promoting a link to download both the presentation slides and a free report or other special offer.

Be sure your one-page handout is colorful or on a brightly colored paper so it can be easily found among other papers when your seminar attendees are sorting out conference materials to take home.

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