One of the places that speakers routinely fall down when endeavouring to make their speaking career profitable is understanding marketing.
There are very few people who are able to build a speaking career based on getting paid, regular gigs. Those that do have a career like this are more often than not celebrities who are sought after, and then find themselves making decent money from getting “paid to speak”.
So how do us mere mortals turn a passion for speaking into a profitable “speaking career”?
There are hundreds of tiny strategies that we need to employ to get the result, but I want to focus on one in this article today, and that is “building a list”.
Why Building a List is Essential to a Profitable Speaking Career
(This article comes from my soon to be released “Presentations Profits Blueprint”).
The value of your speaking business is in the community of subscribers and raving fans that you build. It is not in the trainings you design, or the talks that you give or even the products that you sell. It is in the community of people who care about you and your information.
This is why youtube- which makes no money of it’s own was bought by google for $1.65 billion. It was the list of subscribers that gave it so much value.
The top three reasons why you need to build a list to enhance your speaking career are:
- To make sales: The lifeblood of a business is sales, and in a speaking business it is much easier to sell a product or service to someone who has a relationship with you and is on your list.
- To market your events: Similarly people who are familiar with you are much more likely to buy a ticket to your training or workshop if they are familiar with you and your information.
- To make affiliate sales: Once you have built a list and have a great relationship with those subscribers, you can make additional income to contribute to your speaking income by promoting or recommending other people’s products.
So What Makes a Good Community?
There is a difference between a “building a list” or a “building a database” and a community. I strive to build a community. Not build a list.
For a successful speaking career, you must have a relationship with your subscribers– not just their name and email address.
Focus on building up your numbers, yes,
but always work on the relationship too.
So how do you build a list?
Here are 3 simple things you can implement immediately to start building your list. The added advantage is that as you do these you will also increase your profile, which will ensure that you get offered more speaking opportunties, and therefore build a successful speaking career that way too.
Key 1 – Speaking.
Ask the people in the room to hand in their business cards to receive a gift or win a prize. Make sure the gift is valuable to your audience and that you send it as soon as the gig is over. It could be something simple like an audio, or a DVD. Do this at every talk you do (with the event organisers permission of course) and you will soon have your own instant list!
Key 2 – Newsletter
We noticed our list started to boom when we commenced a regular weekly newsletter. It’s great for building a list because people get value from it and if you’ve got good quality content in it – people will be hooked. What’s more, they tend to share it with their friends too, so things go viral. You can include articles, a video and all sorts of material to keep your community interested and growing.
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Key 3 – Blog
Start a blog using wordpress.org It’s a good idea to have it hosted on your own domain name- and I recommend using your name as the web address as people will search for your name frequently. (like my personal blog: www.joannamartin.com.au) Make sure you have an optin box on the blog- perhaps for your newsletter.
Focus on One Piece At A Time Or You May Get Overwhelmed.
It has taken us over 12 months to develop our current level of awareness in the market place, and it is growing all the time. Do not expect it to happen over night, but if you release regular content online (a couple of times a week) and you speak regularly, you should have a solid community and burgeoning speaking career within 6 months.
The good part is that as you build your list and therefore propagate your message- you become front of mind for promoters and event planners who are looking for speakers. So everything feeds each other.
For more strategies on how to build your list, and enhance your speaking career, make sure you get a copy of my “Presentation profits Blueprint”. It will be released on Wednesday the 15th of July at 7am GMT at this website:
www.ShiftSpeakerTraining.com/blueprint
It will be available for free for a limited time only, in order to get feedback and testimonials from you guys. After this time we will be selling it for $57- so make sure you grab a copy on Wednesday.
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