Professional Speaking: Jobs and Income
One of the first steps as you launch your professional speaking career is to get good at what you do. You’ll find that you’ll need to speak for free. Gain experience and build your client database. In doing so, you’ll be able to go after higher paying jobs as you can demonstrate your professionalism, credibility as a speaker and your ability to draw large crowds.
You can do an online search for the keyword term “calls for speakers” or “speakers wanted”. You’ll obtain a listing of organizations and meetings that are requesting professional speakers.
Research the meeting planner’s directory. The Directory of Association Meeting Planners costs $550 and is available every March in a CD format. There is another directory called the Directory of Corporate Meeting Planners. This second directory costs approximately $450 and is available every March in a hard copy format.
These are places where you can find jobs. However, you will need to also put together a promotional kit. Start with a simple letter and build your promotional kit up. You’ll also have to develop a marketing strategy to build and maintain a potential client listing. Using this listing, you can use direct mail or make phone calls to promote yourself as a professional speaker for hire. Now that you know where to look, you’ll be able to start going after speaking engagements and gaining experience!
Sources of income
Sell your knowledge via books and articles. You can self-publish for maximum profit or you can seek out a publisher and get paid royalties. Your articles can be highly sought after by trade publications especially if you are a well-noted person in the industry.
Get paid as a speaker. As simplistic as this sounds, at some point in your career, you’ve got to get out and make an attempt to get higher paying gigs. Don’t lose the “free” aspect of your career because they do go a long way. The more famous you get, doing good Samaritan efforts such as speaking for free make great news items for press releases.
Get paid for telephone seminars. Many people are doing live seminars or telephone seminars in their businesses. Make contacts with people in the businesses that do them. It’s the same thing as doing a speech except that it’s on the telephone.
Get paid via your website. Add complementary affiliate programs as well as Google AdSense to your website or blog.
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