How to Make Big Money Speaking

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Imagine if you could make good money talking about something that you love. Well, you can! Almost any subject can be a good foundation for building a speaking business. And, you can do it even if you have little or no experience or capital.

Steps

1. Choose a subject to speak about. Whatever area of expertise you have, it’s likely that there are people who would like to hear you speak. If you’re a relationship expert, you’re sure to find women’s groups who want to hear about how to improve their marriages. If you’re a gourmet chef, you could find cooking classes who’d love to hear your secrets for making high-class meals in a hurry.
   
2. Decide how long your seminars will be.Whatever the length of your presentation, you’ll want to divide it into three parts: A beginning, a middle, and an end. Your beginning will be your introduction – which is your opportunity to hook your listeners’ attention. Your middle will contain the substantial information that you’ll share. And finally, you’ll have an ending where you’ll sum up what you presented. If you do wish to market additional “back-end” products, this is the time to do so.
   
3. Create your Marketing Plan. There are many different options as far as earning money as a speaker is concerned. You can directly market yourself to organizations that might hire you. For example, if you have a wealth of knowledge about fishing, there are many fishing clubs that might want you to speak at one of their events. In addition to recreational activities, virtually all business trade groups present speakers to their members. And, you could even approach companies that have employees that could benefit from your knowledge.
   
4. Use a bureau. Additionally, there are speakers’ bureaus that work as an agency who can procure speaking engagements for you. While many of these bureaus specialize in celebrity speakers, there are others that book speakers for less prominent events where a speaker only needs to be well qualified to do the presentation. A search on a major Internet search engine with a key term like “speaker’s bureau” is a good place to start.
   
5. Hold your own seminars where you will market the event directly to the public. While this can be done on a national basis, the easiest place to start is locally. You either rent use of a facility to hold the seminar or perhaps partner with an entity with a facility and then promote the event. You can use traditional advertising methods like newspapers and radio or if you have a target audience that is identifiable, you may want to use direct mail. Have you ever been to a seminar on something like wealth building that was promoted in the newspaper? These are always been packed with hundreds of people.
   

Tips

• Make sure that, whatever subject you choose, you know enough to sustain an intelligent, useful presentation and to answer any questions your audience might have. You’ll also want to choose a subject you love – neither you nor your audience will enjoy your speech on photography if you hate snapping pictures.
  

Warnings

• If you haven't done much public speaking before then you should practice a lot in front of friends and relatives so you can feel confident that you'll be fine.
  
• Make sure that you're ready with answers for the questions you'll likely get asked.
  

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Sources and Citations

• Speaking by Paul Lawrence Original source of article; shared with permission.
  

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