How to Promote Yourself as a Professional Speaker

We just finished a five-part series about How to Start a Public Speaking Career. If you haven’t had a chance to read (or listen to) that series, it will help you understand the concepts that we talk about here, much more clearly.

In this session, we are going to cover how to promote yourself as a professional public speaker. In the earlier sessions, we talked about how to get experience speaking within your current industry. Some of the ideas were to start out as a trainer in your current industry and to speak to associations within your industry. This helps you practice your craft, but, more importantly, it helps you get a video of yourself in front of actual audiences. In the last session, we talked about how to create content like blog posts, videos, and books that you will be able to use to market yourself as a professional speaker.

So, we are going to assume, that you have followed the guidelines in the previous session, and you have the minimum number of podcasts, blogs, etc. (If you don’t have these yet, make sure to follow the guidelines in Start Your Own Public Speaking Company from Scratch.) Keep in mind that you don’t have to have ALL of these things. But the more content that you have, the more professional you will appear to a potential client/customer. We are also going to assume that the content that you have created is in a specific niche within a defined market. Continuing to assume that this particular market needs your content.

5 Ways to Promote Yourself as a Professional Speaker.

1) Create Content that Gets Your Target Audience to Come to You.

It is much, much, much, much, much easier to get speaking jobs if the potential client/customer comes to you versus you going to them. When I first started The Leader’s Institute ®, I was clueless. I knew that I needed customers, but the first customer was the hardest to attract. So, I bought a mailing list of 3000 decision-makers in my area. I spent additional money on brochures, and I sent out these brochures to everyone on the list. (Keep in mind, this was back in the early days of the internet.) In addition, I called everyone on the list, at least three times. (That is about 9000 phone calls.)

All total, I spent about $10,000 to get 24 people to pay me $600 to come to my first class. It took me three months to find these 24 people. You can do the math, but I spent $10K to create a gross revenue of about $14K. I spent a couple of thousand dollars on expenses to hold the class as well. If I wanted to do it again, the small profit that I made on that first class would have to last me another three months just to stay afloat.

My point is, DON’T DO THIS!

Your Content has Value. Bring THEM to You.

Today, though, over 50% of the people who request information about the Fearless Presentations ® classes end up attending one of our classes. We do almost no paid advertising. We also make no cold calls. The difference between those early years and today is the marketing that we do. The Fearless Presentations ® website has millions of people coming to it every year for information. We give a ton of our content away for free in blog posts, podcasts, and videos.

Basically, if we are giving away this content for free, just think about how much more valuable the content is that we charge for! Our website is the most powerful tool we have in gaining potential clients. Instead of sifting through twenty-or-so posts, they turn the easy route and register for a class.

Your website, your blog posts, your podcasts, your articles, your videos, and your books are all ways for potential customers to get to know you and trust you. You will create much better relationships with your customers if they come to you versus you pushing marketing onto them.

2) Your Blog/Website is Your Office. It Should be the Focus of Everything that You Do.

Step one (I know it is number two in the list, but it is the first “To Do”) is to create a fantastic website/blog. I like to consider myself somewhat of an expert on website development. I have a knack for being able to get my websites to the top spots on Google and other search engines. Let me give you a simple crash course on Search Engine Optimization (SEO — how to get your website to the top of search engine results).

Content is Good. Code is Bad.

There are a bunch of really pretty websites out there. They never break into the top 100 pages for search results though. Most often, this is because of how they are designed. One of the big website development platforms, right now, is Wix.com. The big problem with these drag-and-drop platforms, though, is that they leave a bunch of code for every morsel of content. The websites look pretty, but to a search engine, they are messy. I recommend using a WordPress blog as your website. There is an excellent article about the difference between the two at Wix vs. WordPress SEO. It’s a great place to compare the two and make the right decision for your own blog.

Visit Duration is Important.

Google has gotten really good at finding ways to judge the value of the content on a website. One of the ways that Google does this is to measure the time that a person spends on a particular website before returning to Google for another option. It is not as intrusive as it sounds, though.

Basically, when you do a search on Google, and you click a link from Google to a website in your search result, a timer starts. If you quickly hit the back button, Google assumes that the result that you received wasn’t what you were looking for. If you stay on that website for a long period of time, it judges that the result was accurate. So, the longer that people stay on your website when searching through a search engine, the high the website moves in the search results.

If you recall, I suggested in the last post that you create blog posts with a minimum of 1000 words. If you have good, detailed content, visitors will stay longer. In addition, if you put links to other posts on your website within your current content, you can increase the length of time even more. It may seem like a lot of work, and it is, but worth your time in the value it brings.

Good Back Links Are One of the Most Important Things for SEO.

Google in some ways, does your due diligence, for you. In the early days of the internet and Google, the most important thing to do was to get quality “backlinks.” These are links from other websites to your website. At the time, Google assumed that if another website linked to your website, that was a “vote” as to how good the content on your website was. Websites that had the most backlinks got the highest rankings. However, bad actors manipulated these results. “Link Farms” were created where the only purpose of the website was to provide links to other websites.

As a result, Google changed the way that they measured the quality of a link. To be brief, today, the quality of a backlink is way more valuable than the quantity. In fact, if you have a high number of low-quality backlinks, you can be penalized by Google.

There is no shortcut for getting quality links. However, there are a few smart ways. For instance, in an earlier episode, I suggested that you give speeches within industry associations. When a high-quality association links to your website, that is backlink gold. If you are a guest on a podcast or a source for a reporter, you will also get a high-quality backlink. These take time, but they are the best way to promote your website.

Metadata is Critical.

Metadata is a fancy term for things other than text that search engines use to figure out what your website is about. This information includes the title, URL, description, keyword, image/video data, and schema. Although search engines don’t give a lot of weight to “keywords” listed in your website header anymore, it is important to pick a single keyword (key phrase) to build each page of your website around.

You also want to only use each keyword/keyphrase once. For instance, if you make wedding cakes in Dallas, don’t just put “Dallas wedding cakes” on every website page. None of your pages will likely rank very well. Instead, highlight this phrase on one single page.

Be Picky in the Metadata you choose.

However, if you use that phrase on the “Location” page of the website, it will do better. Once you have identified what word/phrase you are targeting on a page, do a few things with it. First, make sure that this phrase is prominent in the page title and in the URL. Then, add it in the description. Next add it in as an alt tag on at least one image on the page. (Two or three is better, though.) Finally, add the phrase into the schema for the page.

(The schema is a whole different animal. If you are unfamiliar with this code, you will get great value out of investigating the topic a little more.)

For instance, if you type “Houston texas public speaking class” into Google, you will get https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/houston-texas-public-speaking-class/ as your top result. If you look at the listing on Google, you will see that phrase in the title and description. You will also see a five-start schema rating as well as a list of our upcoming events in Houston. If you click the link, you will see that there is a photo of our office with the phrase as the alt tag, etc. Think like your prospective clients, pick key phrases that they would search in order to find you.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that you need to have a professional place for people who want to hire you to go to. Your website is vital. Spend some time and money to make it fantastic! Your website is like your right-hand man and one of the great tools to utilize to grab attention.

3) Speak to Promote Yourself as a Speaker.

Recall that in the post, Use Public Speaking as Marketing, I gave you a number of great ways to promote yourself by speaking. Once you get your website up and running, make sure to review that post and podcast. You can speak at seminars and conferences, on webinars, or as a guest on podcasts.

These are all great places to get a bunch of free advertising for your new business.

In addition, don’t underestimate social media channels! They provide the perfect opportunity to provide your unique perspective to your potential audience. If you can get followers to interact with your content, you can build a loyal following. Although social media links are not valuable for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it is extremely valuable for increasing pageviews and visit duration.

For instance, you could post a30 second clip of your content on social media with a length to the main post. Then, on the post, put either a video feed or podcast feed of a recording of the entire content. You also have the full text on the same page. So, whether the person watches the video, listens to the audio, or reads the text, they stay on the page longer. Google ranks the page higher as a result.

4) Create Your Call to Action.

The last step before the promotion blitz starts is to identify a specific call-to-action that you want to center your marketing effort around. For most new speakers, it might be a good idea to make building your “list” the major call to action. Your list is just a database of potential customers/clients. If this is your focus, you will want to be able to collect a person’s name and email address in exchange for something of value that you are providing them.

For instance, since you have a published book, you can offer to give visitors an electronic copy of your book in PDF form in exchange for their contact information. Alternatively, you can give them access to a video series that you created or a handout with a summary of your podcast episode. I’ve heard that every 10,000 people that you have on your list is worth about $1 million in annual sales. Other calls to action might be to attend a webinar, to purchase a product or service, or subscribe to your podcast/YouTube channel. Maybe just to hire you as a speaker. Be clear on your call-to-action, though. It will help you exponentially.

For additional details, see Sales Presentation Examples.

5) Start Releasing Your Content.

Now it is time to start releasing your content. Write a new blog post every week. Record a new podcast episode every week. Then, record a couple of videos to social media every week.

Consistency is critical here. That consistency is a good way to give your audience a “quick reminder.” “We interrupt your life to draw attention to [fill in the blank] via [fill in the blank].” For instance, release your podcast episode on the same day and at the same time each week. This is a building process.

Initially, you won’t have a huge following. However, as you start to build your list of followers, you build momentum. You can send out, via email, a summary of this week’s blog post along with a link to access the podcast audio. As more people start to access your blog, your search engine results improve. As more people download your podcast, the episodes show up higher in iTunes searches. It takes time, but it is like a snowball. The number of audience members you have will increase just like a snowball grows bigger. It starts small but gets bigger and bigger with each roll!

Constant and consistent action will do wonders for your speaking career. Put in the hard work and keep creating solid content. Promote your content a little at a time. The right people will find you. In addition, you want to have clear calls to action along the way. They’ll lead your audience to the activity that will be most helpful to both you and them. If you do these things, your speaking career will skyrocket!