How attractive are you as a speaker? No, your looks, but your consistent ability to provide a quality presentation, attract clients, and be irresistibly attractive to meeting planners and speaker bureaus? Below are some useful tips that I learned while owning a national, professional speakers bureau for 13 years. 1. Presentation do you have something interesting, inspiring, and useful to share with audiences? Be mindful of your voice (keep it deep and low pitched), your personality and attitude (positive), your tone (soft, loud. Encouraging as needed), your style, your vocabulary. 2. Connection how quickly do you get to the core of your audiences problems and challenges? Skip what is between their ears and go straight to their hearts. 3. Passion do you love what you do? Develop a niche or specialty that you truly enjoy and are good at. 4. Network enhance your speaking career by networking with 50 or more other speakers. They become your referral sources. Join the National Speakers Association a 4,000 member organization that holds conferences and has local chapters to help you with your marketing skills and networking. Call 480-968-2552 (Arizona) 5. Products write a book, booklet(s), create audio tapes, video tapes, CD/ROM. Having products will catapult your speaking career and make you more valuable to your clients. This passive income is like having frosting on the cake. 6. Value added become known as a value added speaker. Provide handouts, attend the cocktail reception before your program, stay after your speech, offer follow-up teleclasses, offer your consulting services, be a facilitator. 7. Hire a Coach The Olympic Games remind us that a world-class athlete is surrounded by a number of people whose function is to keep him/her on track. No serious athlete or professional speaker would expect to progress very far without a COACH. 2004 by Sandra Schrift. All rights reserved Publishing Guidelines: You are welcome to publish this article in its entirety, electronically, or in print fre*e of charge, as long as you include my full signature file for ezines, and my Web site address (http://www.schrift.com) in hyperlink for other sites. Please send a courtesy link or email where you publish to sandra@schrift.com Thank you. |
