The First Thing to Do as a Professional Speaker

Hello and welcome to my speaker’s blog! Today we are going to talk about one of the most important aspects of becoming a professional speaker. It should be done before you get into the business on Day One, but sadly, most people including myself, didn’t do this until they were in the business for quite some time.

What is that? Well, it’s this. Decide what your identity is going to be. Do you want to be known as a corporate trainer? An entertaining trainer? A motivational speaker? An inspirational speaker? An informative speaker?

All of these things require different styles of marketing strategies. One strategy for one speaker is not the same strategy for another. Too often, people look in this business and at other speakers, typically the most well known ones, and think “If I just do what they did, I am going to be a lot more successful. I will be successful like them.” When in fact, the genres of their training are completely different. You can have a very good life in this business being a complete unknown.

In fact, there are some people in this industry who are relatively unknown, but extremely popular and paid very well because they found their identity and it is all they do. The first thing I’d say is this. Decide what type of a speaker you want to be. Once you decide that, you should find three people in that industry, in that genre, that are successful. Those are your people to model. Not the ones you see on TV, not the ones you see on the New York Times Best-Seller list, unless that is where you want to go.  But you have got to get super specific on your identity.

If you have any questions about professional speaking, you can either enter it here, or for an even faster response, join my Facebook page for Professional Speaking at http://www.facebook.com/professionalspeaking People who ask questions there get bumped to the front of the line on having their questions answered.