How To Make Money As A Paid Speaker
People are always asking me how to get business and get more bookings as a professional speaker . They are surprised to hear that I do not do any cold calling, and haven’t for fifteen years. I have two main pipelines that fill my calendar: Internet Driven Traffic, and Word Of Mouth.
If they didn’t find me on the internet, they saw me speak, or heard about me from someone who did. For many of us professional speakers, word-of-mouth is the biggest driver of sales. Therefore, I subscribe to one important school of thought:
What others say about you, is far more valuable than what you say about you. So stop telling everybody about you, and start getting other people to do it. Nothing holds more weight than a buyer who already knows they want you.
One simple way to leverage word-of-mouth, is to find online groups who sell a different product or service, but who share a similar market, who need to provide consistent quality content for their audience. Simply reach out to them and see if they would like to share your videos or articles on their site (or in their trade publication). It’s called cross promoting, and when it happens both of you win. So instead of walking away from opportunities because you think they won’t do anything to help you – take a second look. There just might be more there than you think.
This just happened this week in my business. A company, Zip Recruiter, reached out to me. They found a YouTube video they believe to be of interest to their market. They blogged about it, and now I’m blogging about that blog. See? Win. Win. Here’s the blog – go check out how they did it: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/blog/a-day-in-the-life-of-motivational-speaker/