Have you ever thought about making money as a paid speaker? If so, then do I have a book for you. Paid To Speak: Best Practices For Building A Successful Speaking Business
Today's excerpt is written by Kim Clausen, founder of Ready2Go Marketing Solutions, which helps personal development professionals more easily market their businesses by providing completely developed workshops, teleseminars, speeches, and more that they brand as their own to grow their businesses. Kim is a professionally trained coach who has more than 20 years of marketing and business development experience. She has founded several businesses and has developed a successful coaching practice of her own. To contact Kim, go to www.Ready2GoTrainingSolutions.com.
As a speaker, you have a great message to share. You are a master at your craft, delivering great value, educating, informing, and inspiring others, and impacting lives for the better. But you want more. You want to take your message beyond the podium and create additional income opportunities by developing and marketing supplemental products, services, and training programs.
What if you could extend your income stream beyond the podium? Instead of being on the treadmill of having to find speaking engagement after speaking engagement, what if you could have a thriving business that reaches more people, offers more products and services, and provides you more income?
This chapter is about taking a fresh approach to growing your speaking business using the philosophies and principles of the most successful companies. Five simple strategies that you can easily get your arms around are all it takes to build a thriving multiple-income-stream business.
The essential strategies are based on the acronym TANCS—Target, Attract, Nurture, Convert, and Serve. And implementing all five strategies using education-based communications, products, and services can attract prospects, nurture relationships, and convert more clients.
T—Target
The key to expanding your speaking business into other areas of service is to identify a target market that has a need you can serve.
Choosing a target market has many benefits. Simply stated, it allows you to focus your efforts so you can be more effective in your product development and marketing. It is too overwhelming a task to try to reach a general market with general products and messaging, but most speakers can get their arms around the idea of targeting a certain demographic of people who have specific needs they can serve.
By selecting a target market, you are better able to:
- identify where to find your prospects and how best to communicate with them;
- provide more targeted messaging so that you get noticed among all the noise;
- become known in the industry;
- become a credible source; and
- speak more specifically to your target market’s needs.
With today’s media bombardment and information overload, it is harder than ever to get noticed. General messages to general audiences are sure to get lost in the noise. Targeted messages to a targeted audience have a much higher likelihood of being seen and noticed.
It doesn’t matter how great your products and services are if you cannot get them out to your market. And the best way to attract attention, establish familiarity, build credibility, and get clients is to focus your efforts toward one specific population of people.
A—Attract
Once you identify a target market, the next step is to develop strategies to get known in that market. To compete with the multitude of other messages and voices in the marketplace, the best way to attract your prospects’ attention is to speak to them about their most relevant needs and interests.
Most of us are in a relationship-based business, and our clients want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. Therefore, we must go out to our market not to sell, but instead to first form relationships. And the only way we can effectively create relationships is to be in continuous communication that is
meaningful and relevant.
One of the most effective ways to reach your market, build familiarity and trust, and attract prospects is by providing education-based communications, which put your knowledge and information in the form of how-tos, tips, strategies, tools, and resources that solve a problem or enhance life. When used for attracting your target market, they are usually delivered for free or a low fee as articles, white papers, e-books, teleseminars, webinars, and online audios and videos.
Education-based products and services are the best way to attract your market because they provide value and are not “salesy.” And early in the relationship, your prospects do not want to be sold to; they want to check you out and get to know you before engaging with you further.
The good news for you when it comes to creating education-based communications is that you already have a message, a specialty, and an expertise. In other words, you already have content to create your products. In fact, you probably have more content than you know what to do with, and that is why you are reading this chapter—you want to make money with all the knowledge and information you have at your disposal.
N—Nurture
To nurture is to persistently and consistently make meaningful contact with your prospects once they are on your list, providing value until they are ready to engage in a client relationship with you.
Value has to be established before your prospect will make a commitment to engage in a business relationship. And it is during the nurture stage that value is conveyed and commitments are made.
This is one of the most crucial steps to building your business and the one where speakers struggle the most. Often speakers get frustrated because they are making the mistake of trying to attract and convert without nurturing first.
This phase is also difficult for many speakers because they wonder, “How do I nurture? What am I going to say? What if it takes a long time? That seems like a lot of work. What if they think I am bothering them or I am too salesy?” That’s precisely the reason for education-based communications—they give value and
inform, they are welcomed, and therefore do not feel salesy.
Education-based products, on topics that improve people’s lives and show them ways to do things better and easier, allow you to touch your prospects in a meaningful way that will be welcomed and anticipated.
Here is an example of how you can turn your message into numerous communications that allow you to stay in touch and deliver value:
Let’s say your message is on helping people make permanent lifestyle changes so they can live a life of optimal health and vitality. Your keynote is broken down into three areas:
- Understanding the importance of taking care of your body and the ramifications if you don’t.
- Changing your perspective from thinking that “healthy living is a sacrifice” to ”healthy living feels good” both emotionally and physically.
- The how-tos of living healthy and feeling good about it.
From this presentation you can create products and services that nurture the prospect by delivering value, such as:
- A five-page special report on “Three Ways to Live Well for Life”
- A one-hour teleseminar on “Three Strategies for Staying Healthy and Happy”
- Three articles on each topic above that you include in your newsletter or send as a gift
- A six-part audio or video miniseries on “Are You Older Than Your Age? How to Live with Energy and Vitality”
As you can see, from just one keynote, numerous products and services can be created. These are just your free and low-fee products, and there is an entire line of products that you can create as part of your paid programs, which will be discussed later in the chapter. Also, imagine all the other wisdom, knowledge, and
content that you have at your disposal that will allow you to develop an endless supply of products and services that will serve your market.
The good news for you is that you already have your message and content. All you do is turn that into other forms of communication and use it as ways to attract, nurture, and convert new clients.
C—Convert
If you are giving value through education-based communications, you also want to be making offers for your prospect to engage with you further. Your prospect wants to be told how to engage with you next. They want to know what you do, what services you offer, and that you are available for hire. That is why it is important that you are always making an offer when providing your educationbased products and services.
Your offers can take many forms, which is to say that conversion doesn’t mean you have to be selling a product or service. Conversion can be simply leading your prospect or client to what’s next. This can be another free service or a paid one. For example, a conversion could lead the prospect from your newsletter to a telecall, or from a telecall to a video training, or from your video training to a request for a consultation.
And remember when you are making offers, some will be ready sooner than others. So, just as with the other steps, make conversion a regular and consistent part of your business activities.
S—Serve
Service is the delivery of your products, services, and programs in exchange for money. In addition to your speaking income, you also have a variety of paid programs, products, and services.
Going back to the example above, you can create paid products and programs such as:
- A six-part teleseries on each topic above—(intro, three areas, putting it into action, commitments).
- A 16-week structured group with training and education, goal setting, and accountability.
- In-home workbook with audio and a journal.
- One-on-one planning, execution, and accountability coaching.
Your presentations are the core of your business, and also the core of your product and service creation. Your business has a circular flow: Your presentations will lead to the sale of your products and services, and the sale of your products and services will lead to more presentations.
Serving is also about creating your brand. This is where you get known for who you are and what you deliver. You don’t have to be the best at what you do, but you have to be professional, and it has to show. Deliver quality products and services, and go above and beyond to make each client’s experience with you a positive and rewarding one.
In addition, providing quality products and services leads to loyal clients, more referrals, and a successful business.
Back to Basics
There are many viable strategies for building a successful business. But often, the vast amount of choice leave speakers feeling overwhelmed and too paralyzed to take action. Bring it back to the basics and model the proven, tried-and-true principles of the most successful companies.
Target, Attract, Nurture, Convert, and Serve. It is simple, it is replicable, and it is a science. This simple step-by-step formula can help you achieve observable results. By taking your message and creating a variety of education-based communication, you can reach out to your market, get noticed, attract prospects to you, establish credibility, create goodwill, build familiarity and trust, and grow your business.
TANCS will indeed take the mystery out of marketing and give you a powerful and effective way to expand your speaking business into many other income opportunities.
Here’s to your greatest success!
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