- First, solve a difficult problem for your audience.
- Second, catalog your knowledge and repurpose your content and collect money for it.
- Finally, you have to position yourself as the “Go To” expert on your topic.
Below is a more thorough explanation of the whole process. But before we get started, let’s recap what I covered in the last post. Don’t get hung up on the term “professional speaker.” A professional speaker is just someone who receives a fee (or a salary) when he or she stands up to speak. An elementary school teacher is a professional speaker. So is a trial attorney. So is a military officer who gives briefings.
All of these speakers give presentations. However, almost all professional speakers give their knowledge away for free. In this post, I’m going to show you a step-by-step process to help you collect income from your knowledge.
You Can Get Paid to Speak and Make a Good Income Speaking for a Living.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. In fact, I assumed the meetings would be really boring, but my dad convinced me it would be worth my while.
I was amazed when I walked into the convention center on the morning of the opening session. There were about 10,000 people in the audience, and the agenda was packed with professional speakers. At the time, I had no idea that anyone could make a living speaking for a living. So, this was a whole new world for me.
One of the speakers that day was Bob Burg. He had just released a best-selling book called Endless Referrals, and he was captivating as a speaker. He had a table set up in the foyer where he was signing books, so I stopped by and chatted with him for a moment.
I remember asking my dad at the end of the first day, “That guy, Bob Burg, who spoke about networking, what does he actually do for a living?”
My dad looked at me and said, “Well, I guess he just speaks now.”
“No, I mean, how does he make money? How does he live?”
My dad laughed, and he said, “I’m sure that he makes pretty good money off of his books and recorded seminars, but I’d bet he makes most of his income from the speaking.”
At that point, I still didn’t understand what my dad was telling me. The concept of making money speaking was just too foreign to me.
That Incident Opened Up a Whole New World to Me. Speaking Was a Great Potential Profession.
I had just graduated from college, so I knew that the best way to make a living was to get a job at a big company, work like a dog for 30 years, and then retire. Generating wealth by just standing on stage and speaking would be ridiculous.
It’s amazing how certain instances in your life can be life-changing, though. That conversation with my dad started me down a road that has allowed me to help hundreds of thousands of people eliminate public speaking fear and increase their income at the same time.
Yes, most of those professional speakers made a small fortune just speaking. However, they also made an additional fortune by selling their knowledge to audiences in different formats.
After a few decades in the speaking business, I’ve figured out a few ways to make a pretty good living as a professional speaker.
First, Solve a Difficult Problem for Your Audience.
Motivational speakers get the most media. But in all reality, very few professional speakers ever get paid just to stand up on stage and motivate people. (Some do, however.) In fact, most professional speakers are teachers.
If you have knowledge that is valuable to your profession, people will pay you to give them that knowledge. But only if that knowledge can solve a problem. And, more importantly, only as long as that knowledge continues to solve that problem.
For instance, when my wife and I bought our house, the guy we bought it from left us a checklist for the pool. Most instructions were simple weekly tasks — like empty the skimmers, sweep the steps, etc. However, one of the tasks was to clean the filter. I had no idea how to clean a pool filter. So, I did what most people would do today. I searched on Google. The top result was a video from Leslie’s Pools about how to clean the filter.
I had a problem. The teacher on Leslie’s video had my solution. As a result, I was willing to pay Leslie’s for their help in all my other pool needs. (They had set themselves up as the expert.)
If You Want to Get Paid to Speak, Spend Time Figuring Out What Problems You Audience Face.
The key thing here is that the bigger the problem you solve, the more you can collect from speaking. So spend some time putting yourself in the shoes of your audience member. What challenges do they face? What problems do they have?
These challenges and problems should be crystal clear before you start designing your speech. Otherwise, you’ll be frustrated when no one wants to pay you for a solution to a problem that no one has.
For instance, let’s say you are a good salesperson who wants to speak about increasing sales. Most pick a generic or general problem like “closing more deals” or “increase sales.” Everyone wants to close more deals, right? And everyone wants to increase sales. Those should be very valuable topics to speak about, right?
Well, not really. Those problems are too general. They don’t really have enough “pain” associated with them. Instead, ask what problems potential audience members might have about sales or closing deals.
- Sales tend to stall when I send out a proposal with a price.
- We spend a lot of money on advertising to get new customers, but don’t get enough customers to pay for the ads.
- When we innovate our process, our competitors just copy what we do.
Once you have specific problems, now we can create better topics and solutions. Topics that solve these problems might be, “Overcoming the price objection to sell higher priced items to prospects.” Or, “Cut your advertising cost and still get new customers.” Another might be, “How to differentiate your products from competitor copycats.”
Each of these topics solves a specific problem for the audience. So, the audience is more likey to pay for that solution.
Develop Your Content Based on What Your Audience Needs.
A lot of teachers and trainers develop their sessions by just focusing on what the “lesson plan” says to cover.
I remember taking Business Accounting in college. Well, I actually don’t remember much about the class. But I do remember that it was incredibly boring. I wish that my professor had made the content more in tune with what I need today to run my business.
The professor tried to teach us everything that a full-time accountant would need to know. However, he never showed us how the calculations translated in the real-world. (He never showed us the solution to a problem.)
As a business owner, now, I understand more about why many of those items were covered in the class, but back then no one ever explained to me why I needed to know each of those calculations.
For instance, when we teach about adding analogies into presentations, we usually start with a statement like, “Sooner or later, you are going to be delivering a presentation that is complex or technical. And you are going to look out at your audience and see a bunch of blank and confused faces. That is the perfect time to pull out an analogy.”
We are explaining the problem first. Getting the audience to see that they experience or may experience that problem. Then, we give them the solution. You will want to do this as well.
Second, Catalog Your Knowledge and Repurpose Your Content and Collect Money for It.
For me, I hit this wall first when I was a contract trainer for a big training company. I was a good salesperson, and I was also a good instructor. However, I had to split my time between finding new customers and teaching class for those customers.
If I had an intense teaching schedule, no one was back at the office working on developing new clients. So I’d have these huge peaks and troughs of income. Eventually, I hired a sales assistant. She was able to do a lot of the selling process while I was teaching. Within a short time, my income doubled. Then, just like before, my income plateaued again. My income increased because I was now trading my time and her time for dollars. Just like before, though, once we ran out of time, the income topped out.
The same, identical process happened to me again when I started The Leader’s Institute®. There were only so many hours that I could teach each week. So, I started bringing on instructors and training them to do what I do. The company grew like gangbusters. And then, we hit another peak.
What I had done was just added additional people on staff who could trade time for dollars. Of course, then they ran out of hours in the week as well.
I had hit another plateau — just at a higher level this time.
Create Ways to Supplement Your Speaking Fees When You Aren’t Available to Speak.
I mentioned this continuing problem to one of my speaker friends. The first thing that he asked me was, “Well, how much of your income is from product sales?”
I squirmed a little. Up to that point, almost 100% of my company’s income was from my speakers teaching in-person classes. My friend’s jaw just hung in the air as his mouth gaped open.
He said, “Your making that kind of money just speaking?”
What was funny, was, at that time, I just assumed every speaker did.
My friend said, “How many people come to your website, really want to attend one of your classes, but live in a city where you don’t have one scheduled?”
“Well, I’d guess 10’s of thousands… every month.”
He said, “Get a videographer to record one of your classes and offer an online version of the class to those people.”
Within a couple of months, we had generated an entirely new income stream. This one didn’t depend on us trading time for dollars.
Re-Purpose Your Knowledge. Find Additional Ways to Create Income from Work You Have Already Done.
That discussion changed my outlook entirely. My friend was teaching me how to re-purpose my content.
Some people don’t like to go to seminars, so give them an online version of the class.
Some people don’t like to sit at a computer and learn, so create a podcast with the audio of the class. That way, the person can listen while exercising or doing housework.
When we write blogs, now, we also look for ways to create YouTube videos of the content. Then we export the audio from that video and create a podcast.
In addition, instead of just putting text in the blog, we now use the content to create infographics.
The point is that the knowledge that you have in your head is valuable.
Find ways to share that content with people who need it, and then find ways to re-purpose the content to reach a bigger audience.
Finally, You Have to Position Yourself as the “Go To” Expert on Your Topic.
This was still early in my speaking career, so the offer was tempting. He wanted to hold big financial planning seminars and have me as the main speaker. His thought was that I could build rapport with his potential clients. Then, he could have his salespeople close the deal with each audience member.
I explained to him that, although I was honored by the offer, I didn’t think that his plan would actually work.
First, the topics that I speak on are those topics that I am an expert on. The reason why people have me speak on public speaking fear, leadership development, and building team culture is that I have both studied those topics in-depth and have years of first-hand, real-world experience in these areas. I knew nothing about financial planning.
The second was more important, though. If I become an expert at financial planning and presented those ideas effectively, the audience would see me as the expert. The moment we sent other salespeople to follow up with the audience members, there would be a dramatic disconnect. He didn’t feel comfortable enough to have any of his salespeople conduct the seminar. So, why on Earth would he be comfortable with them speaking to the potential clients?
I suggested that he have me train his salespeople. That way, anyone of them could lead the seminar.
How Do I get Paid to Speak If My Industry Is Boring?.
The knowledge that you have about your current industry is more valuable to the marketplace than a motivational speech. Industry experts are in high demand. Almost all of them get paid more than even the best motivational speaker.
I did a session with a corrugated box company here in Ft Worth years ago. They wanted to revise their mission statement, because of changes in their marketplace.
Their original mission statement had something to do with being the best corrugated box company in the world.
The problem, though, was that their market was shrinking considerably. The more that they thought of themselves as a corrugated box company, the less growth they experienced.
In the meeting with their executives, I asked them what they really did.
They answered with, “We make boxes.”
I asked again, “No, what do you really help your customers do? What problem do you solve for your customers?”
They answered with “Use boxes.”
I think I asked the question about seven times before it dawned on one of the executives what I was really asking.
The breakthrough didn’t come until we started thinking about a specific client. Their main customer was Levi’s. So, I asked, “Why does Levi’s buy boxes from you? What do your boxes (any boxes) allow Levi’s to do more easily?”
What Is Common to You Is Uncommon to Most People.
The penny dropped. They realized for the first time that they were in the transportation and logistics business. The corrugated boxes were just one way for them to provide these services to their customers.
Once we came to this conclusion, the mission statement changed significantly. If all the company does is “sell boxes,” and the number of companies buying boxes shrinks, we automatically lose. However, if we solve “logistics and transportation challenges for clients,” we can now solve additional challenges for clients that we never anticipated before.
The salespeople began to change their questions to clients and potential clients.
Instead of “Do you want to buy any corrugated boxes? We can help you save money… Maybe.” they began to ask questions like, “When you ship your products, what are some of the most important challenges that you are dealing with?”
These salespeople moved from being box peddlers to trusted consultants.
The knowledge that these consultants acquired in a short period of time became very valuable. The more they cataloged this expertise (in white papers, videos, and how-to seminars,) the more income they and the company made.
So If You Want to Get Paid to Speak, Follow These Three Simple Steps.
Solve a problem for the marketplace. Catalog your expertise into blog posts, books, videos, and podcasts. Then, position yourself as the expert in the industry. Once you do, you’ll be able to charge a premium fee for your solutions.
Before you set off to become the next Zig Zigler or Anthony Robbins, think about becoming a speaker about what you already know inside and out – your current industry.
