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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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 15^th 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.

Press Play to watch this tip on how to have the right mindset when closing a sale from stage:

Making A Sales Presentation: The Art of Closing From Stage

One of the most common questions I get asked from my members and subscribers is how do I make the transition from doing my talk to making my sales presentation?  So in this article I want to give you a few tips so that next time you are making an offer at the end of your talk, you feel confident to ask for the sale.

1.    Make sure your mindset is in the right place. 

The biggest reason most people get tied up in knots when it comes to moving into their offer is that they actually think about it as a separate part of their presentation. 

I hear this all the time:  “I’m fine delivering the information, but when it comes to asking them for money I go to pieces”.  The assumption is that the sales presentation is somehow different to the educational presentation.  Not so.

Think of your presentation as a whole and that the part we refer to as the “close” or the “offer” is just the last chapter of a book.  Like a book the final chapter makes no sense in isolation and the whole book would make no sense without the last chapter.

For more insight into the mindset watch this video.

2.    Have a good segue.

That said, you do need to have a segue: a graceful way of moving from the content to the offer. This should only be a few seconds long, and exists just to get permission from the audience to reveal your product.

It could be as simple as

• “As you can see the process I’m sharing with you is a simple one, but there is an even simpler and easier way to get started.  Can I share that with you now?”
• “In summary, the key is to take action.  Can I now show you what I believe is the smartest action you could take as you leave here today?”
• “During the break I had some questions about the next steps, can I share the next step with you now?”

See what I mean?  It does not have to be a big deal.  Just some way of linking what you’re saying with the offer that you’re about to make.

3.    Don’t change your energy.

The biggest mistake I see newbies and seasoned professionals alike make during this process is changing the style of their presentation between content and offer.  They may have been fun and relaxed and humorous during the content of their talk, and as soon as they get into the offer they get all weird and loud and pushy.  Why?!

Your energy and style should stay consistent from the moment you step on the stage to the moment you leave.  There should be variation throughout the whole presentation from moment to moment- but not a big shift between content and offer. If anything the only slight change should be to go a touch faster during the close, as speaking faster is a quick and easy way to build excitement.

That said…

4.    Don’t rush.

Hang on- I’ve just said speed up, now I’m saying don’t rush!?  What I mean is yes, you can speak a little faster, but that does not mean you want to leave out crucial descriptions and draw out key points in your offer.

The close is the most important part of your presentation.  If you have done a good job of your content people will want to hear what you have to say about your products, so do them the favour of taking them through it sanely, step by step and giving them the full picture of what they are about to invest in.

One of the main reasons people don’t buy is because they are confused.  So take your time to outline things exactly- you can speak quickly- but don’t jump all over the place and do a rush job.

5.    Focus on the benefits.

As you describe your product make sure you don’t focus only on the features of your product.  So the car might have ABS brakes (feature).  But what does that mean for me? Well, the benefit is “so you can rest easy knowing you and your children are safe, even in the wet” (benefit).

You get the idea?

To turn a feature into a benefit, ask: “what does this mean for my client?”  Then spell it out in terms of emotions.

6.    Don’t apologise.

Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, eeeeeever apologise for your sale.  Never assume they don’t have the money, or they don’t want to take action today.  That’s your mindset, not theirs! 

You delivered great content, you did a good job- your audience WANT to hear about the next step.  Confidently and with your normal style outline the offer, and confidently ask them to take action.  Then let them decide the best course of action for them.

The main way to get good at this is practice practice practice!  So get out there and deliver as many presentations as you can.

Do you have any other tips or experiences you would like to share? Let me know by posting a comment!

Cheers,

Press Play to Begin watching the video (this video is a sample of the content from my “Complete Seminar Marketing System: How to Fill A Room Program”).

In my line of business and a mentor and business strategist for speaking organizations, the question I am asked most often is “How do I fill A Room?”  It seems that events marketing and seminar marketing is the most widely underestimated task in a speakers career.

A copywriting mate of mine, Pete Godfrey, who is by the way a room-packing master- once said: “Never under-esteimate the difficulty of a task”.  And nowhere is that more real than when it somes to seminar marketing.

In this video I have packed in as many tips as I can about how to get this right, as believe me, most people get this wrong.  I have worked with international companies who should know better, and they still get ths wrong.  People who spend $50,000 to secure a celebrity speaker, who get this wrong.  So if it is so easy to get it wrong, how do we get it right.

I’m telling you now, if you run events, or are even thinking about running an event EVER in the future, do yourself (and all of your potential participants a favour and watch this video on seminar marketing.  Events marketing is a different beast to many other types of marketing as there is a delay between purchase (or registration in the case of free events) and attendance.  So find out how to address this in the video.

Also you’ll find:

• The mistakes people make when trying to market their seminars
• How much time is enough to fill a room, and how to make sure you give yourself enough to AVOID STRESS
• The 3 phases of attraction for an event or seminar and how to apply them for a room full of happy attendees
• The secrets to getting the right people in a room. Discover how we make routinely well over $500k (sometimes up to a million) in a weekend with only around 60-70 people in the room.
• A great free program you can use to design a website to sell your event tickets… even I can use it and it took me 10 minutes to set up a site. 

That site is called eventbrite and I really encourage you to go to check it out.  It’s free to have a play around with and it really is a solid tool for when you’re just getting started with events.
www.ShiftSpeakerTraining.com/eventbrite

Do you want an insiders edge?

This video is a sample of the kind of content I go into detail with in my newest Training Program: “The Complete Seminar Marketing System: How to Fill A Room”

In that program I go step by step, and hold your hand as you create all the materials you need to market your event professionally, and more importantly profitably.  This program has only ever been released to a handful of my top clients (only 14 in total so far) and I have been keeping it very much under wraps – until now. 

On July the 22nd it will be available as one of the goodies when we open the doors on a very special launch offer of our Silver Mentoring Program. 

You should make sure you put this date in your diary if:

• You are a public speaker, coach, consultant or trainer who knows that standing in front of an audience is the quickest way to increase your profile and make more money.
• You are a business owner looking for a new and accelerated way to grow your business without all the hassle.
• You have been to a seminar in the past and thought “I wonder if I could do that!”
• You are an event promoter who knows that filling a room is not as easy as it looks
• You are a teleseminar host or you sell your products or services over the phone and want to make more sales more often.
• You are an author and you want to sell more books. But not just that- you’re smart enough to see the book alone won’t make you rich, and you want to build an Elegant Business Model into your business to make you massive, passive income from your efforts.
•  You are an information or internet marketer who really wants to put your current business on steroids and prepare for a “Big Pay Day”
• You want to seriously improve your communication and presentation skills so that every time you open your mouth you make a lot of money!

You’ll be able to register for the program on the 22nd of July for 7 days only.  I promise I’ll let you know the website address closer to the day.  Don’t even go looking for it.  It doesn’t exist yet!

Til then enjoy the video.

Cheers,

Hi!

Welcome to the blog and what I’m sure is going to become one of the liveliest online spots for speakers to come and share news on what they’re learning and what their using to build their speaking business.

I’m going to get the ball rolling today by sharing with you some vital concepts when it comes to building your business through speaking.  It doesn’t matter if you’re already a public speaker, or whether you’re terrified of speaking in public- today’s video is a great overview of how you can experience accelerated business growth through effective presentations.

In this video I cover:

* The 5 Advantages Speaking has over any type of marketing and how to apply them

* The 3 big mistakes people make when speaking

* The 3 phases of growth of a speaking, coaching or consulting business and why you MUST go through them in the RIGHT order or risk being broke and unhappy; or even embarrassed.

This is the first in a LOAD of training that I have never before released to the general public for free. Until now a lot of this information has been only available to my clients who are paying me up to $100,000 per year!  So, trust me when I say- if there is even one drop of desire in your heart to make big money from your passion through speaking- Sit down, grab a notebook and take the time to go through this training right now.

Let me know exactly what you think in the comments section below too.  Tell me what you like, what you don’t.  What do you want more of? If you let me know, I promise you I’ll make it happen.  That’s what it is all about!

Enjoy the video

Cheers,