Marc's Musings » marketing

Thoughts on starting a speaking business

Marc A. Pitman — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:59:51 +0000

As I get ready to be the guest tonight on Michele Price’s #speakchat Twitter chat, I’ve been thinking about building a speaking career. There are lots of thoughts swirling through my mind. I hope these help encourage you at whatever step you are in the process.

Reasons to Start a Speaking Business

When I was 16, I promised myself to never be at the mercy of only one stream of income. As a verbal extrovert, speaking was right up my alley! Speaking has the benefits of

When you’re speaking, you’re getting to help a lot of people at the same time.
As a speaker, you get to travel to various locations (not that you stick around long enough to see the sites!).
The very act of speaking at conferences and to teams gets your name out to other people who might want to hire you. Groups love having speakers promote their sessions. And speakers should because it lets prospects know what you do and that you like doing it!
Speaking is well suited for other types of products.
- You can record your talks and sell them as CDs and digital downloads.
- You can get videos of your talks and sell them as DVDs or downloads.
- And you can write out your talks and seminars to create blog posts or ebooks.
Speaking is incredibly fun. You get to come into a place, share helpful ideas, remind people how great they are, and then go home. Any follow up is another type of income!

Increasing Bookings Using the “Ask Without Fear!” Strategy

In my fundraising book Ask Without Fear!, I encourage people to raise money with a four step strategy: reasearch, engage, ask, love. Let’s see how this works with speaking.

Research
First you need to know what you know. What are you good at talking about? And why you? What is your unique “point of view”? Why will people hear you?

Then you need to research where people are looking for something like this. It’s really helpful to have a specific niche. You could talk about sales training, but you will have better results if you speak to a specific type of sales. Cell phone sales in retail locations? Anything.

You know if you have a good niche if there are already associations, conferences, and events supporting that same niche.

Pigeon holing yourself to a niche is probably the hardest thing for us as speakers. We know that we can help everyone with our topic. But no one hears something pitched at “everyone.” They start listening as you target them. All my goal setting and leadership expertise wasn’t worth anything to “everyone.” But as I focused on helping nonprofit boards raise lots of money, people started hiring me.

The funniest thing to me is that once you specify a niche, people from other sectors will bring you in too! The most out-of-niche gig so far was speaking at the Bowl Expo in Las Vegas. But you know what, nonprofit fundraising has a lot to do with owning a bowling center!
Engage
Get to know the people both who’ll be hiring you and who’ll you’ll be speaking to. What are they currently talking about. What has their attention? Social media? A new gadget? See if your talk can incorporate that.
Ask
Do all you can to ask to speak. As much as I hate them, I am a sort of fan of cold calls. Really. I find the more cold calls I do, the more calls I get from people actually looking for speakers like me. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m not messing with what’s working!

One form of “cold call” I do I call a my conference rescue. If you’ve ever organized a conference, you know that speakers always drop out at the last minute. So I call or email offering to help. If they’re interested, we talk about the topic (usually you have to take what they’ve already been publicizing). Then you talk about the fee–in addition to travel expenses. I tend to offer to come down on my rate for the conference rescue folks.
Love
Thank the people that hire you, the people that listen to you, and anyone else along the way. Thank them publicly on your blog and privately in notes and emails.

One way I show love to attendees is to offer something of value to them. I usually offer to email my PowerPoint slides to them after the session if they give me their business card. That allows me to follow up with them.

Knowing How Much to Charge

One of the weirdest things is figuring out how much to get paid. Most speakers I know follow a pattern something like this:

They start out speaking at conferences they were already planning on going to.
Then they get free registrations to those conferences.
Then they get some travel reimbursement and the conference registration.
And somewhere along the way, they start naming a fee in addition to travel.

I remember the first time I named a fee. I’d been speaking at one industry conference for years. I did it for free but they comp’ed my registration. And I always landed at least one paying client from the gig.

Then one year, they wanted me to speak at a conference I wasn’t planning on going to. A free registration to a conference I didn’t want to attend had no value. And I told them so. I worked up all the gumption I could and told them my fee for that session was $500. They ended up paying it, in addition to the hotel and travel. I now get more than 10 times that amount for the same talk, but that first $500 ask was one of the scariest in my life!

For some reason, when I was starting out I found it easy to say I got $1000 a day. And people went for it. I now receive around $7500 for a keynote. But I’m not impressed with myself yet since I know some speakers get $20,000 – $25,000 for a 40 minute keynote.

Pricing is an odd thing. People really feel they get what they pay for. So there is a prestige in paying more for a speaker. A really odd thing I’ve noticed is that people tend to do the things I say if they’ve paid more to hear me. I could say the same fundraising strategy at a free Rotary talk and be completely blown off. But if I say them as a $7500 keynote, people actually act on what they hear. And when they act on what they hear, they end up seeing positive results.

The most important advice on setting a fee I can offer is this: don’t be the Walmart of your sector. Being the cheapest option is a losing proposition. It’s far easier to set a boutique price and negotiate down, than it is to set a low price and try to negotiate up.

Where to Find Speaking Gigs

Every day, people are desperately seeking speakers to fill their conferences and club meetings. How do you find them? Here are some places to find your first gigs.

Conferences I was already attending
I often knew the organizers or was an organizer myself, so I started here.
Toastmasters
I have no experience with this group but people say they’re pretty amazing.
Community Colleges
When I moved back to Maine, I noticed our local community college did a lot of trainings-in-a-box things for companies. You know, curriculum like “Fish” or Ken Blanchard stuff. So I contacted them. They asked me to create something for nonprofits. Those seminars later became the foundation for my first published book.
Service Clubs
I love talking to Rotary groups. Don’t go expecting to hard sell. That’s not why they meet. Service clubs are about the club and its goals. Speakers help make the meetings interesting and informative. So be interesting and informative. The 15-20 minutes you get will force you to be on top of your game. (And be able to give your talk without PowerPoint slides! More time is wasted at these meetings by speakers trying to get the borrowed projector to work!)
Local Professional Associations
Many communities have local associations, women in leadership groups, Christian leaders groups, all sorts of leadership groups. See if they’re interested in your topic.
Chambers of Commerce
One of my biggest encouragers is Chip Morrison, the president of the Chamber of Commerce in Lewiston, Maine. He was cheering me on when I didn’t even believe in myself. I still love testing out new material for his Chamber. (And he still doesn’t pay me!)

I’d steer clear of speaking bureaus. I’ve found speaking bureaus to be more interested in me paying them for a listing than in getting me gigs. Plus, if my listing were found on their site, they’d take a huge chunk of the fee! I decided to make my website really easy to find instead.

Getting Organizers to Call You

Making calls is an important first step. Even more important than having a snazzy brochure or direct mail campaign. But in this digital age, you can do some things to make it easier for people to call you. Here are a couple tips:

Start writing
My first gig came from an article I wrote about the way I did my work. I really didn’t think it was anything special, didn’t everyone see the world like I did? But it turns out my point-of-view was unique and something people wanted to learn more about. Viola! A seminar was born.

It used to be that you had to spend lots of time submitting writing to magazines. I’d encourage you to do that, but now you can publish your writing on a blog and start building your own platform too.
Build an Email List
People that may need you may not need you when you first meet them. So start an email list that will help you stay in front of them. I like my every other week email newsletter. Every other Tuesday was a rhythm I could keep up with. Since you already have a niche, you can offer something of value to that group. I offer a free article on some aspect of fundraising in each issue. What could you offer?
Have a Professional Looking Website
I’m not a whiz at web design, but I do know that dancing cats and confusing fonts make you look like an amateur. My fundraising training site is based on a free WordPress template. I hired a web designer to tweak that template to make it mine. Now everything looks consistant and professional.

Be specific with the keywords you use for SEO (search engine optimization). Every self-proclaimed SEO guru was trying to convince me to hire them to get me in the first page of results for searches on “fundraising” or “fundraising ideas.” But I knew that was a waste of time. One search on either term showed that people searching for “fundraising ideas” were looking for popcorn and gift wrap. So I decided to target searches like “fundraising training” and “fundraising webinar.” Those were things that people expected to pay more for. And people searching on those terms were much further down the sales funnel for me.

And as you collect images for use on your site, be sure to have images of the audience listening to you speak. (Like the one on this post.) Most of us fill our site with images of ourselves on stage. But a speaking coach told me that organizers want to see that their audience will enjoy you. You have to ask people to get those shots, but they’re worth it. (Web secret: You can put your chosen keywords in the title and alt tags in these images.)

Does this work? It sure does. Less than a year ago, some conference organizers in Mexico typed “fundraising training” into Google. My page came up on the first page and looked the most professional. As a result, this guy from rural Maine was flown down to give the keynote for the World Fundraising Summit in Monterrey, Mexico.

It works.

Speaking is a Fabulous Profession

I have found speaking to be incredibly rewarding. I hope this post helps give you some ideas to get you started on a speaking journey!

Please use the comments to let me know what you would add to this post!

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501 Mission Place Launches

Marc A. Pitman — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 12:58:42 +0000

I opened my email this morning to see this update in a Human Business Works note from Chris Brogan:

501 Mission Place Launches

Hi Marc –

I am so excited to report that 501 Mission Place, our HBW community to help nonprofits and charities grow, is launched! If you run a nonprofit or charity project or know someone who does, this community and learning experience was built for them. Our goal is to help people grow their capabilities in this tough economic time, when giving is drying up exactly at the same moment that people need it.

501 Mission Place started as a conversation between Rob Hatch and me. Over the summer, we went on vacation together, brought Jon Swanson and Marc Pitman along, and by the end of it, we had a lot of ideas how we could help charities do more with less. We then needed a leader to facilitate the experience. Estrella Rosenberg who runs many nonprofits including Big Love Little Hearts for congenital heart defects, was the obvious person for the role. And we added also John Haydon, a smart guy with a lot of feet-on-the-ground experience of his own.

The result is 501 Mission Place, an educational community dedicated to equipping nonprofits and charities for success.

Because this benefits the nonprofit sector, we’ve done everything we can to keep costs down. The monthly subscription rate is just a low $27 USD, about the price of a hardcover book. Annually, that’s a little bit less than the ticket cost of a conference (and you don’t have to pay airfare or hotel fees).

Our hope is that you’ll pass this on to any nonprofit or charity people you know, as they might not already be subscribed to the HBW mailing list, and if you would, we’d be grateful. We think that 501 Mission Place will be very useful to people.

As always, thank you for all that you do. I’ll have more personal development and business growth thoughts shortly.

-Chris…

I am so excited! I’ve been working with the team on this for months. Together, we’re going to help nonprofit people do amazing things!

I’ll blog more about this later (probably at FundraisingCoach.com. I’m about to get on a coaching call with a very cool client. But I’m so excited I wanted to let the world know!

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MK337 Marketing on the Internet

Marc A. Pitman — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:58:09 +0000

I just finished writing a syllabus for MK337 “Marketing on the Internet,” a course I’ll be teaching in the spring at Thomas College.

I’m very excited about these 16 weeks! One of the projects for each student will be to actually market something, a prodcut, service, membership site…just about anything!

In addition to blogs and articles on the web, the text books include:

It’s an undergraduate course, but if you want to join us, I’m sure the Thomas College registrar might be able to help.

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Not the best sales tactic

Marc A. Pitman — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:12:24 +0000

I got spammed on LinkedIn.

There wasn’t anyway to report the message. So I replied telling the sender that it was an inappropriate. My exact response was:

This type of spam is incredibly inappropriate for LinkedIn.

Please don’t ever mail me this kind of message again.

His heated response, basically telling me he was offended that I was so ungrateful for the incredible opportunity he’d offered. Check out his last paragraph:

If you’re so self-righteous that you can “do business” then feel free to remove me from your contact list. Don’t be such a priss. If you’re not interested then just archive the message, don’t snivel about it.

My email may have been out of line. I might have been better saying something like “I’m am confused by this use of LinkedIn. Please don’t include me on this list.”

But the way to win over me if I screw up is not by calling me names. (I’m not even sure what he means by “do business.”)

Have any of you received blind, spam-like email on LinkedIn?

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Amazon’s new pricing strategy?

Marc A. Pitman — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:46:19 +0000

A colleague recommended a particular book this morning, so I went to Amazon to check it out.

Here’s what I saw on the home page:

Take a look at this close up:

Do you see the book on the right? It used to cost $10 but now Amazon buyers can get it for only $14.04?

I wonder if Amazon’s experimenting with a new pricing structure. Pretty bold in a down economy.

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Jim Collins on thriving in 2009

Marc A. Pitman — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:42:50 +0000

I finally read the Jim Collins interview from Inc. magazine called “How to Thrive in 2009.”

I’m a fan of his books Built to Last and Good to Great so the fact that I loved this article is no big surprise.

Here are some tidbits:

How do you define entrepreneurship?

I take a broad view of it. The traditional definition — founding an entity designed to make money — is too narrow for me. I see entrepreneurship as more of a life concept. We all make choices about how we live our lives. You can take a paint-by-numbers approach, or you can start with a blank canvas. When you paint by numbers, the end result is guaranteed. You know what it’s going to be, and it might be good, but it will never be a masterpiece. Starting with a blank canvas is the only way to get a masterpiece, but you could also blow up. So, are you going to pick the paint-by-numbers kit or the blank canvas? That’s a life question, not a business question.

I like paint-by-numbers. It’s a great feeling as a first born to “get it right.” But, personally, I’d really prefer to create a masterpiece.

Here’s another one:

It has to do with your ability to handle risk, no?

Not risk. Ambiguity. People confuse the two. My students used to come to me at Stanford and say, “I’d really like to do something on my own, but I’m just not ready to take that much risk. So I took the job with IBM.” And I would say, “You’re not ready for risk? What’s the first thing you learn about investing? Never put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve just put all your eggs in one basket that is held by somebody else.” As an entrepreneur, you know what the risks are. You see them. You understand them. You manage them. If you join someone else’s company, you may not know those risks, and not because they don’t exist. You just can’t see them, and so you can’t manage them. That’s a much more exposed position than the entrepreneur faces. But there’s lower ambiguity on the paint-by-numbers path: very clear but more risky. The entrepreneurial path: very ambiguous but less risk. Of course, the truth is that it’s all ambiguous, anyway. If you think you can predict the future, you’re crazy.

Isn’t the difference between ambiguity and risk a helpful distinction?! Those of us who’ve grown up seeing companies layoff employees know that cradle-to-grave security left the social contract decades ago. Having all your eggs in the “job” basket is indeed risky.

Check out the rest of the interview on Inc’s site. Hopefully it’ll spur your thinking as it has mine!

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What if Starbucks acted like we do at church?

Marc A. Pitman — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:02:47 +0000

This is an insightful video that hits a bit too close to home for anyone that’s planted a church. And I’m sure for many others too!

Grab a cup of joe, hit the play button, and enjoy.

And remember: J.O.Y. is Java, Others, and You.

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Interesting Twitter newstory

Marc A. Pitman — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:25:38 +0000

online casinoCATV

Here’s an interesting newstory on Twitter done by @karamat done at a recent Tweetup in Portland, Maine.

For more on using Twitter for Nonprofits and Fundraising go to: FundraisingCoach.com/articles.

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Storytelling, Journalism, and a Brave New World

Marc A. Pitman — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:28:30 +0000

Guy Kawasaki justed tweeted about a “must read speech on the new journalism career.”

Guess what? It’s not just about journalism.

Here are some of the thoughts that struck me:

“I don’t think the communications revolution that we are going through is about some reinvention of storytelling or journalistic creed.

The way we tell stories has evolved over the years, but beginning, middle and end still works. Ethical and accurate information will still rule.

I think the revolution is happening because of access. Access to powerful tools and access to global distribution in an increasingly connected planet.”

“As old business models fail, I expect to see an influx of independent, purpose-driven collaborations. Small teams with passionate experts operating for the public good. The new world of open access makes this possible.”

“Marc Andreessen sent an email in the Fall of 1993 to only 12 people. Mosaic, the first web browser, spread virally and changed how we communicate with each other.

Connectivity is the new killer app.”

“It’s true that less people care about Congo than Britney’s belly button. For me, it’s not about reaching the largest possible audience; pandering to the lowest common denominator. It’s about reaching the right audience with a relevant message.

Today, there is a robust infrastructure in place to reach these specific audiences and to create real change.”

I firmly believe this is one of the most exciting times to be alive. We live far more connected than ever before, so our stories can have a far bigger positive impact than ever before.

Especially if they’re told well.

How will you be telling your story in 2009?

[Warning- the following is a shameless plug: If you work in a nonprofit, check out my fundraising seminar on nonprofit storytelling. It covers the basics of crafting effective stories, how to categorize stories to make collecting them easier, and how to help your board members and volunteers tell the stories you are. Good stuff! The shameless plug is over.]

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Getting started on Twitter

Marc A. Pitman — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:32:36 +0000

I’ve been having a lot of fun learning to use Twitter for nonprofits and fundraising.

And I’m pleased that some folks from my local Rotary Club are getting into the game! Well this morning, one of those guys tweeted “I need a Twitter tutor!” I passed that on to some twitter stream. Here are some of the responses I got:

SCATJ @marcapitman for your friend @chrisgaunce: follow others for a while and jump in when you see something that strikes a chord with you

Bobbiec @marcapitman for your friend, http://tinyurl.com/6a5exs. Don’t judge, whole site not done yet

seanbohan @marcapitman start w/ tweetdeck – dashboard view of all/replies/directs & has search, can make groups, etc. .. and write 1 tweet/day minimum

Great advice!

Over a year ago, Chris Brogan wrote Newbies Guide to Twitter.

One of the most important things I learned from Chris Brogan is to use the same “identity” across platforms. For me, that meant I started using “marcapitman” for

…well you get the picture.

I even use “marcapitman” for fun sites like: Wordle and MustLoveBeer.com!

Personally, I think one of the best ways to get started on Twitter is to follow alot of people and see how they’re using it. Twitter user Mark Hayward has a great list of 97 suggestions in his blog post 97 Remarkable Ways to Diversify Your Network in a Down Economy.

And you can use tools like search.twitter.com and Twellow. They’ll let you see who’s tweeting on topics of interest to you. Or find people in particular careers or in specific of the world.

I’m finding Twitter is

helping me as a development professional at the Inland Foundation
- it’s much less expensive than actually going to some of the conferences people tweet from!
- I get real-time feedback from people just like my hospital’s donors
- I get alerted to the latest fundraising blogs and podcasts
- I’m getting to meet hundreds of folks doing the same thing I’m doing and get real-time help
- I’ve even received help doing database work and cost-to-raise-a-dollar analysis!
helping me sell my fundraising book
- I’m getting to connect with readers one-to-one
- and tools like TweetLater help me automate some Twitter actions so I can focus on those in the evening. (I also write my blog posts in the evening but publish them so they get tweeted during the day.)
helping me connect with really cool people in the media and other professions, and
even helped me do goofy things like name my beers.

Twitter is really helping me expand my network from right here in Waterville, Maine USA. I now am in regular communication with people all over the world. I was already talking to people around the world with my fundraising ezine. But now they get to talk back to me. During the Olympics I was even tweeting with the NBC folks in China! Sure made the games seem a lot closer?

I’m going to pass this on to Chris. I’m not exactly sure it’s the “Twitter tutor” he was hoping for, but it’s a start!

What would you recommend he do if you were his Twitter tutor?

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