Top 7 Ways to Succeed in the Business of Speaking

(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Loading...

By Sandra Schrift

How attractive are you as a speaker? No, your looks, but your consistent ability to provide a quality presentation, attract clients, and be irresistibly attractive to meeting planners and speaker bureaus?

Image: Scopio

Below are some useful tips that I learned while owning a national, professional speakers bureau for 13 years.

1. Presentation

Do you have something interesting, inspiring, and useful to share with audiences? Be mindful of your voice (keep it deep and low pitched), your personality and attitude (positive), your tone (soft, loud, encouraging as needed), your style, and your vocabulary.

2. Connection

How quickly do you get to the core of your audience’s problems and challenges? Skip what is between their ears and go straight to their hearts.

3. Passion

Do you love what you do? Develop a niche or specialty that you truly enjoy, and are good at.

4. Network

Enhance your speaking career by networking with 50 or more other speakers. They become your referral sources. Join the National Speakers Association, a 4000-member organization that holds conferences and has local chapters to help you with your marketing skills and networking. Call 480-968-2552 (Arizona)

5. Products

Write a book, booklet(s), create audio tapes, video tapes, CD/ROM. Having products will catapult your speaking career and make you more valuable to your clients. This “passive” income is like having frosting on the cake.

6. Value Added

Become known as a value added speaker. Provide handouts, attend the cocktail reception before your program, stay after your speech, offer follow-up tele-classes, offer your consulting services, be a facilitator.

7. Hire a Coach

The Olympic Games remind us that a world-class athlete is surrounded by a number of people whose function is to keep him/her on track. No serious athlete or professional speaker would expect to progress very far without a coach.

This article was originally published on Hillsorient.

  Sandra Schrift, president/owner of CoachSchrift and Associates, a San Diego based consulting, training and coaching firm. Since 1996, Sandra has been coaching speakers who want to become highly paid professional speakers as well as executives and business professionals who want to develop persuasive presentations.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company.