Alltop.com: A Great Resource for Public Speakers

One of the biggest frustrations my clients have when preparing a speech is finding those key stories and credible facts that make it come alive. They often reveal that they waste so much time searching for information online that they no longer have enough time for practice. If this sounds like you or someone you know, I highly recommend you try Alltop.com.

Alltop has been described as an “online magazine rack” that displays the news from top publications and blogs. It’s an incredible resource for public speakers and it’s changing the way I—and my clients—find news and relevant stories for our presentations.

Rather than a search engine, Alltop is a content aggregator. That means they collect the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a particular topic. They then group these collections—or “aggregations”—into individual web pages, where they display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Think of Alltop as an information filter to help you quickly find great material for your speech.

Here’s what typically happens for most presenters: You’re crafting a presentation and you know (because you’ve listened to my past advice) that you need an example or a story to illustrate your key point. So you log onto your favorite search engine and type in a keyword phrase that you think will bring you some good results. As you scroll through your 10 million+ results, you realize that finding an example is going to be harder and more time consuming than you thought. That’s where Alltop comes in.

Do you need to know what’s happening in China right now so you can persuade the board that entering into the Asian market is a good idea? Alltop can help. Need to know what’s happening in the commercial real estate industry so you can make solid recommendations to the executive team about acquiring new facility space? Try Alltop. Need a cute story about the loyalty of dogs to make your point about customer loyalty at the company-wide meeting? Alltop has you covered.

One of my favorite features of Alltop is the “preview.” When you place your cursor over a headline, Alltop displays part of the story so you can decide if you’d like to read it. To read the story, click on its title. To go to the home page of the site, click on its domain name. No more wasting time opening web pages only to find that the site can’t give you the information you need. Now that’s genius!

The mastermind behind this approach and one of the co-founders of Alltop is leading innovator and marketer Guy Kawasaki. You may remember Kawasaki as the chief evangelist of Apple. He is also the author of ten books, including his newest Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions (which I will be reviewing in an upcoming blog), Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. This is what sets Alltop apart from other content sources—it is powered by creativity, innovation, and marketing expertise.

So the next time you need that perfect story, example, fact, quote, or other key piece of information for your presentation, think of Alltop.com. It will source and sort the information you need, and as Kawasaki says, provide “aggregation without the aggravation.”