Marketing

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
~ Alfred North Whitehead ~

 

Marketing Yourself As A Speaker:
Money Talks by Alan Weiss.

“How to make a million as a speaker.”

 

5 Steps to choosing your market. Pg 23
1. Determine what value-added you bring to a potential client.

2. Determine what types of clients most need that value.

3. Determine where those clients are.

4. Determine how you will reach the buyers within them.

5. Reach them.

 

Myths & Mistakes In Marketing by Daniel Lok:
The Great Myths and Mistakes Most Amateur Speakers Make When They Begin Their Speaking Career And Why This Could Be The Most Important Chapter You Ever Read In Your Life!

They Don’t Know How To Market Themselves Effectively

Public speaking is a business. Marketing is the lifeblood of your business.

You could be the best speaker in the world but if no one knows about you, what good is it?

A lot of amateur or even professional speakers believe if they just keep working on their presentation skill, getting better and better on the platform, eventually success will come.

This is like saying if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.

This is non-sense. I’ve met some are fantastic speakers who are starving. I’ve also seen mediocre speakers commands high fees from Fortune 500’s grosses over a million dollars.

I don’t care how good your presentation skill is, how powerful your message is, how positive you are; unless and until you have an effective, practical and predictable system for attracting a sufficient quantity of quality prospects.

They Cold Call And Try To Get Bookings

A lot of novice speakers spend most of their time trying to get bookings. In this business, prospects pursued run away.

Remember those tele-marketers who call you out of the blue and try to sell you stuff?

Pretty ignoring, isn’t it? Well, that’s exactly how the meeting planners feel when you call them!

Personally, The hardest thing I know to do in this business is prospecting – trying to market yourself DIRECTLY to your prospects.

Make 100 phone calls – 10 would be interested – ONE will hire you for a speaking engagement!

No doubt, you might very well get some business this way. But wouldn’t be a lot better if they seek you out? Instead of doing all the “selling and telling”, the meeting planner calls YOU and you said, “Let me check my schedule!”

Bottom line: Prospecting sucks! Find out ways where you can ATTRACT qualified prospects consistently without prospecting.

 

They Think There Is Some Kind Of Ladder They Have To Climb Up
If you are brand new in the business, you can’t ask for a high fee, right?

You’ve got to gain some platform “experience” first before you can raise your fee.

Says who? John Childers makes over $100,000 in his first year in the speaking business teaching zero-down real estate strategies. And when people asked him, “how could you charge so much?” He simply said, “I asked for it!”

Listen closely. Put this in front of your computer or stick it on your wall. I am going to share with you the biggest secret to making tons of money in this business…

“The more value you deliver, the higher the fee you can command. The income you get is based on how well you target your markets and convince them of THAT value!”

It has absolutely NOTHING ~ NOTHING with how long you’ve been hanging around!

When you go to a bank and deposit your paycheck, the teller is not going to ask you, “I am sorry, we cannot accept this check because you’ve only been in the speaking business for 2 years.”

Money is money. Nobody asks. Nobody cares.

They Don’t Have A Backend

Ask any pros who are making over $100,000 a year, most of them will tell you half of their income comes from product sales or backend services.

When you are personally giving speeches, there is a definite ceiling on your income.

A product enhances your ability to deliver value in massive quantity. When you have a product to sell, there are no limits on how much you can produce and deliver, therefore no ceiling on your income!

On the hand, if you have a product line, you can make as much money part time – as when you are speaking full time. The key here is work smarter, not harder.

They Are A Lousy Businessperson

Public speaking is a business. It’s a mean to an end, not as end by itself. It’s a business that you must apply strategy to, plan for, and exploit to the greatest profits possible.

The challenge here is to be a businessperson first and a speaker second.

They Don’t Want To Or Don’t Know How To Sell On The Platform

Do you believe in your message? Do you really…really believe you have something valuable to offer to your audience?

If you really do have useful information, you are doing the audience a grave DISSERVICE if you do not do your best to motivate them to acquire the tools and products to learn and use your information.

Actually, that’s about all you can accomplish. It is outrageously egotistical to believe you can foster lasting behavioral change in people in a matter of few hours. You cannot.

So if all you do is get up there and speak, present some valuable information, get your applause, and get your check and leave.

You are literally ripping your audience off! If really want to help people, you’ll do a masterful selling job and get them to invest their time and money in using your educational materials.

They Are Jack Of All Trades, Masters Of None

“What topic can you speak on?” asked the meeting planner.

“I can speak on anything! Sales, accounting, marketing, economics, management, motivation, investing, entrepreneurship, leadership, communication, anything,” said the novice speaker.

“Well, who is your target audience?” asked the meeting planner.

“Everybody,” said the novice speaker.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? That’s actually a lot of amateur speakers do. They think by bordering their area of expertise, it’s easier to get bookings.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let’s say your niche is time management. There are probably a thousand speakers who can talk about that. But what if you specialize time management for realtors?

Time management principles are basically the same. Work on important tasks and delegate the rest. But if you specialize and focus on a niche market, you can establish yourself as an expert in the niche much quicker and faster.

As a general rule of thumb, specialists make more money and are more in demand and have to do less prospecting than generalist.

Here is a little trick: You can be perceived as a top specialist in more than one market, each aware of you one way and unaware of your other positions.

They Don’t Understand The Four Income Factors

Demand + Supply + Value + Quantity = $$$

When supply is limited, value increases. To increase your value in this business, you must increase your demand.

Why does a singer earn as much in one day as a gas station attendant earns in a whole year?

Because he or she has a rare and specialized skill that is demand. Put bluntly, there are millions of people who can pump gas, but few can sing and perform.

Remember, if you want to make money, deliver value to people.

If you want to make lots of money, deliver MASSIVE value to A LOT OF people.

Secret: Your focus is not exceptional stage presence or speaking talent or revolutionarily different material or access to letterman’s joke writers or star wars-like audio-visual act or anything like that. Your focus is getting a consistent, reliable flow of more good speaking opportunities than you need or want.

Keeping learning, get good at marketing, be the best in your field.

Apply the lessons you learn in this professional manual as if your life depended on it. Because financially it does!