Episode 007 - Top Ten Ways To Make Money Speaking
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:27] Welcome to screw the commute podcast. This is episode double 0 7 I'm double 0 7 today. How do you like that. This is one of my training episodes, so you're kind of stuck with me today. Last episode was a great interview with Daniel Hall one of my former students who has created an online brand that has skyrocketed. So make sure you check out that in episode 6. Now today's sponsor is the wake him up video professional speaking system, the best selling ever pro speaker training. I'll tell you more about that later but you can check it out at Antion.com/speakervideo.htm and we'll have that in show notes. I don't want you to get scared off with today's topic which is the top 10 ways to make money speaking. I know better than anyone that most people hate public speaking.

[00:01:30] I've been training speakers since 1991 and I believe I've trained more of them than anyone living. I've trained over 100 times over the past 24 years at the prestigious National Speakers Association and their chapters in at least six countries.

[00:01:50] What this episode is going to show you is that there are many ways to make money speaking without even getting on stage. Yes, of course part of it can be getting on stage, but if you hang in there for this entire episode you'll see there are many other ways you can make money with your knowledge. In fact that's my first point. It's not just getting on stage and trying to get standing ovations. The point is to sell your knowledge in as many different ways that you can and in today's world there are many more ways to do that than ever.

[00:02:29] Now for those of you that do want to get on stage, I've gotten more speaking engagements when I quit trying to sell them and I concentrated on selling my knowledge. Now you can sell your knowledge in lots of different ways, which I'll cover in a future episode, but here's just some examples.

[00:02:49] Books ebooks CDs DVDs MP3 audio files laminated cards pamphlets online video membership sites tele classes paid newsletters both online and physical webinars consulting coaching mentorship programs all of these ways to sell your knowledge show your depth of knowledge way better than a few minute demo video. So they stimulate speaking engagements.

[00:03:21] Also there are way more people that can buy all of the above products that could ever hire you to speak, so it creates a great cash flow. There's no downside to this.

[00:03:33] In 1991 the grandmother of professional speaking told me, her name was Dawdy Walters, Tom you must become a product machine. And I listen to that and I did it and it's meant millions of dollars of product sales and many millions of dollars in speaking income. The bottom line is even if you don't want to or you're petrified of getting on stage. listen to this entire podcast anyway. There will be something for everyone here.

[00:04:06] Also I might add there will be a PDF download available that goes into more depth than I have time for on this podcast so check the show notes for that at Screwthecommute.com.

[00:04:20] OK. Now that you've got the idea that your goal is to sell your knowledge, let's get into the ways you can earn money doing it.

[00:04:29] Number one get sponsorship. I have a student Roberto Candelaria who will be on a future episode, who's going to go deep into this subject. Basically large companies can and will give you money to be in front of your audience. This is the perfect example of you not having to be on stage to get sponsored. You can get sponsored just because you have a lot of blog followers or social media presence or a podcast like this one.

[00:05:03] You can also get sponsored when you speak. Now available sponsorship money is increasing all the time because traditional forms of advertising are tanking like newspaper and TV. These companies still need to advertise so they give money to people like you to get access to your audience. And you don't have to be a celebrity either.

[00:05:27] I remember one lady got 9 non-competing companies to pay her every time she spoke on health issues. Let's say you speak to the banking industry. Maybe a mortgage or a mutual fund company would sponsor you. Maybe Bank equipment companies would. Think of anyone who would want to have exposure to your target audience and then simply make a proposal.

[00:05:53] Well who do you make the proposal to? Every company is different but start by calling the marketing department and find out who is in charge of sponsorship deals. See if you can find the name of the person, the specific department, and their contact information. Find out how they prefer to be contacted for sponsorship opportunities and many companies have preassembled kits to send you. Follow the kit's instructions and then follow up and watch for that future episode with Roberto Candelaria where we'll go much deeper into this.

[00:06:30] Okay number two. Get directly paid to speak. Now this is pretty straightforward. You speak to a corporation association civic group or anyone who would hire you and they pay you directly. You should try to get a deposit of about 50 percent upfront whenever possible. The balance should be paid either before the event or the day of the event. You'll use various methods to get hired. I have had the greatest success in my career getting hired to speak by promoting myself properly on the Internet. But prior to the Internet, and this is still effective, I utilized media marketing.

[00:07:11] This is where you are visible on television heard on radio write for trade publications or maybe you're featured in an article. This is an implied endorsement that you must be real and it causes prospective clients to call you. So we'll have a link in the show notes to a place where you can get a free chapter and table of contents of the book I wrote on publicity where I've been featured on radio and TV all over the world. So number two is get directly paid.

[00:07:48] All right. Number three. Speakers bureaus. A speakers bureau is a for profit organization that locates speakers for paying clients a speakers bureau normally takes a percentage of your gross fee. The percentage is usually in the 15 to say 30 percent range with the average fee being about 25 percent.

[00:08:12] It's very difficult to start with speakers bureaus unless you are a bona fide celebrity and your fees are substantial. You must remember they get paid on straight commission. So the higher your fee the more money they make. Now unless you have a proven track record a speakers bureau will be afraid to put you in front of any of their clients because if you bomb the bureau's reputation may weaken and they could lose many more bookings from that client.

[00:08:43] You must also supply the bureau with promotional materials that are free of your contact information. So the bureau will be contacted directly and not you. Now if you're a new speaker and you don't have a high fee and established track record that I mentioned above, being picked up by a speakers bureau may be impossible. Now another question I get, related to this, is how do we get an agent. Well it's kind of the same thing. Without a track record, no one will want to waste their time on you unless you're a bonafide celebrity who they know will immediately start making money for them through commissions. Now you don't want to confuse agents. I don't want you to be discouraged here. You don't want to confuse agents and speakers bureaus with marketing people. See a marketing person is attainable by a new speaker. You simply offer them a commission and pay them a salary for their work so they can survive and pay bills until the commissions start kicking in. All right so that speakers bureaus probably not the first place you would go if you're new. That's number three.

[00:09:56] Number four is public seminars. This is a fairly simple idea but that doesn't mean it's simple to do. Basically you promote your seminar to the public and they buy tickets to attend. You could also promote at the corporations and get them to buy tickets for their employees to attend. I avoided public seminars for years because of the risk and expense involved in printing and mailing brochures but now I do lots of public seminars because I can promote them at no cost through my website and my email magazine. Now if you're starting out small you should be able to handle the setup and logistics yourself. Now this doesn't mean it's easy. I mean there are pitfalls to avoid when dealing with hotels radio stations television stations and print media. You can waste a ton of money making mistakes dealing with any of those places.

[00:10:53] Now you could greatly benefit your career by reading a book on promoting seminars. There's probably some in Amazon. If you really feel like you can put 50 or more people in a room then it's time to hire a meeting planner to handle the tremendous number of details.

[00:11:11] Now public seminars can be very lucrative but they can also be a gigantic pain in the rear if you don't know what you're doing so don't be afraid of them but get good training or assistance before you dive in. And don't forget we have a PDF that goes into more depth on all of these Ten Ways To Make Money speaking that you can get in the show notes at screwthecommute.com. So that was number 4, public seminars.

[00:11:40] OK. Here's what I promised. You folks out there that are petrified they get on stage or at least apprehensive about it. This is number 5. Telephone seminars. Now this can be a form of public seminar or it can be done for private groups. You arrange for what is called a telephone bridge line. They're very inexpensive or free or a conference call, which can be very expensive like so much so many cents per person per minute. But on a conference call you'll have a perfect line. Telephone bridge lines can be a little antsy but I'd done them for years and been able to get lots of money and lots of good seminars under my belt doing it this way.

[00:12:29] So what you do is you have participants call in and you deliver the seminar over the telephone. See this saves a tremendous amount of money on travel expenses for you along with all kinds of savings for the participants, travel time hotel. All of these things. During the call, you can request that your participants view your web page as a visual tool. These visuals can be PowerPoint slides just plain web pages with graphics or screenshots of spreadsheets graphs or anything else they need to see but they're on a Web site.

[00:13:08] At the time of this writing, bridge lines for up to a thousand people can be acquired for free. And one place I've had success with is freeconferencecallHD.com. We'll have that in the show notes for you. And you can also record these calls and a lot of these places do it for you and give you the MP3 file. Now it's not going to be super high quality but it's certainly listenable and doable, and I sold them for years like that so yes you could do that.

[00:13:39] Now you might want to take the file and edit it a little bit if there are screw ups or some clicking or noise on the line. And I happen to use Sony Sound Forge. Well it's now sold by magic but I just remember for years that was Sony Sound Forge. You could use Audacity which is free. You've got a garage band which is already on Mac computers so there's lots of ways to do this and with tutorials you can do simple editing. That doesn't mean you're going to be a pro audio editor but you can certainly do it.

[00:14:14] Now, here's the thing you might think wow that's kind of primitive Tom. Well the thing is you have younger audiences and older audiences and younger audiences tend to not be willing to sit down and do things unless they can be on the run. And so telephone seminars are great because they can put them on their phones or iPods or anything, MP3 players and listen online while they're doing something else. So these are certainly still very powerful. I mean you're listening to this podcast right now. Podcast is technically just a way to deliver an audio file. So these are still very popular and it's the only medium where people can learn while they're doing something else. So this is a way you can sell these or give them away for free to lead people to buy other stuff. So that's number five telephone seminars. And you don't have to have a good hair day or be on stage to deliver.

[00:15:21] All right. Number six is a step up from this and by the way this is called webinars. But I want you to pay attention to Episode 21 where Geoff Ronning was interviewed and he runs one of the best webinar replay services on Earth. That's the one I use. You can hear him on Episode 21.

[00:15:44] Anyway this is similar to a telephone seminar except you're using the Internet instead of a telephone to hold the seminar. In the past I avoided webinars because anytime a person had to download or install something on their computer you're asking for trouble. Now unless of course the computer savvy audience. But you can't depend on that now. Not once in all these years have I've been doing teleseminars that somebody asked me how to dial telephone.

[00:16:16] But nowadays services like gotoWebinar are available and people just have to click boom and now they're on your webinars so it's much more easy to do for the attendees to participate. They're also more interactive in that attendees can submit questions and give feedback during a live event. Most good services record and will give you a replay link and this allows registrants that couldn't attend the live Webinar the opportunity to experience the meeting later at their convenience. People are selling these custom webinars to corporations for sometimes 20 and 30 thousand dollars. So this can be very lucrative and a way to get paid. And again for those people who are afraid to get on stage again you don't have to have a good hair day to do webinars.

[00:17:11] Now one of the benefits of webinars is there's no long distance charges for participants to call in like there might be on a teleseminar. Now there's fancier teleseminars that go through the Web also but just keep in mind webinars are very visual. You use your PowerPoint slides and people can see videos and they can see you if you want them to but most webinars that I do they never see me. They might see my picture once and that's it. Now I have a bunch of complimentary webinars at TomAntionwebinars.com. So please check that out. Like the page at the top and comment at the bottom and I'll respond to you personally.

[00:17:53] Now I kind of invented a term called hybrid webinars because one of the ways you make a lot of money with webinars is not just on the initial recording and playing of it live it's the replays. So you need a really good replay service. But I saw a lot of younger people that were kind of lazy just replaying the webinars and that was it. And they're sitting at the beach hoping to get rich. So I thought you know what if I could interact with the people while the webinar is playing it's a lot less work for me. And also webinars can go down in the middle of them and you know create a lot of hassle. So when you're replaying it you don't have that hassle and you don't have the pressure of everything going perfectly. You're just replaying something that's already recorded. So I thought I'm going to also be there live to answer questions while I'm talking on the webinar replay. I said this is kind of a hybrid between live and recorded. So I called it hybrid webinars so check out hybridwebinars.com and that'll lead you to the replay service that I use. All right so that's webinars very lucrative especially the replays can run 24/7 on your behalf.

[00:19:13] OK number seven is training companies. Now in this case a company hires you to deliver their programs to public seminar participants or participants that they've sold the seminar to a private company. Some examples are career track skill path. These are companies that hire seminar leaders. In some cases you can develop programs for the seminar company and get a higher fee when you deliver your own program and then you still get paid even if some other seminar leader is delivering your program. So there's opportunities for that there.

[00:19:56] Also you can get a percentage of the products you sell at the back of the room which are usually provided by the company. Now these companies can keep you on the road quite a bit so you better be ready to travel and you don't think each event's going to be in the Bahamas. Your events are more likely to be in places like Toledo or Cleveland or Columbus. Who knows. I've known many people who started their careers with seminar companies. It's a really tough life but it's a great training ground for newcomers to the business. These seminar companies put you in very difficult situations and force you to become a better presenter.

[00:20:42] Now I don't particularly care for this kind of work. I teach speakers to make higher fees because I mean you might make a couple of hundred dollars a day if you're good at these training companies but I break people in not less than fifteen hundred dollars for a keynote speech. Maybe 45 minutes to an hour and a half. So that's what you learn in the wake him up video professional speaking system which you can check out at Antion.com/speakervideo.htm. It's probably a good time to talk about that as a sponsor.

[00:21:18] This is the best selling ever pro speaking system. There are two major sections to the system. One is how to be great on stage and the other is the business of speaking. And when I say great on stage I'm talking about being great on stage professional level great. I get people all the time telling me they spoke at church and everybody loved me. Well people at church don't eat their young, at least while they're at church anyway. And then I watch their demo video and they're telling me how great they are and I'm like thinking compared to what. This is terrible. You'll be run off the stage at many professional settings so I don't want that for you.

[00:22:05] I want you to be so great that you could be the last speaker before the golf course at a sales rally in Las Vegas where they do eat their young and people would still listen to you. Also being great on stage is related to the business of speaking. See if I teach you how to get the speaking engagement do the engagement increase your income and fees and all the techniques of getting jobs and making money even if the group doesn't have a budget. See I could teach you all that but if you do the job and you stink, the word's going to spread faster than if you were great and it will kill your speaking income and business so you have to learn both how to be consistently great on stage and the business of speaking or how to get on stage in the first place. So that's what my system does.

[00:23:00] It's got over a thousand things in it that you need to know as a pro speaker that every time no matter what the circumstances you can give a grand slam presentation. See amateurs can hit a home run once in a while. Pros bat a hundred. Plus I include consultations to help you pick topics that are both right for you and will sell in the marketplace.

[00:23:27] So check it out at Antion.com/speakervideo.htm. I've got an old video where I'm fatter than I am now there to tell you the details.

[00:23:40] All right let's go to number 8. Speak to promote your business. Many professionals give free public seminars to help get clients. Attorneys doctors dentists accountants real estate agents lawyers home builders and many other people from a wide variety of professions, give seminars to promote their business and to gain clients directly from the seminars.

[00:24:08] Now to do this effectively, you can't spend the entire seminar just promoting yourself. You must give the participants good information with the idea of establishing yourself or your company as the expert. There's certainly nothing wrong with showing people how complicated things are and even though they could do it themselves well maybe they could save money in the long run by utilizing an expert, maybe like you. For instance you can be a plumber giving a seminar at home depot or somewhere on how to remodel your bathroom. So you tell the participants every little detail of how to do it and also tell them the perils if they do it wrong. Nobody is going to complain that you are just giving a sales pitch but they're going to think to themselves. Maybe this is too much to tackle by myself. Maybe I should hire this person to either help me or do it for me. See how that work. So speak to promote your business is number eight.

[00:25:16] All right let's look at number nine which is a great exit strategy. It's called speak as part of your job. Many people on this podcast have said their advice to people that are in the cubicle and they want to get out of the commute and they want to start their own business to use what they're doing now to pay the bills and then they plan for their exit.

[00:25:44] Well this is double whammy here is not only can you keep the bills paid if you speak as part of your job but you can get practice speaking. This is awesome. See many companies have their own Speakers Bureau. Normally the only reason they exist is like a public relations tool to provide a good image of their company to the community. Now one of the ways you can speak for pay in your company is to volunteer to be in that Speakers Bureau. As long as you're on company time when you're speaking you are indirectly getting paid to speak.

[00:26:23] Another way to get paid to speak in your job is to join the training staff of your company or you can even start a training department if it doesn't exist. You can simply target a problem the company is having and work up a program to train others in the company on how to solve the problem. You could suggest a few sessions to your boss and see how it goes. So if you get positive results chances are they will want you to do the same program for others in the company and as you improve your skills as the speaker more and more people will notice which could result in you being first in line for a promotion or you being offered lucrative speaking engagements outside of work. So if you do enough of them at high fees soon you'll you'll wonder why you're going to work in the first place which is what our podcast is all about. So number nine is speak as part of your job.

[00:27:21] All right. Number 10 and this is my favorite. This is the way that I start out everybody that wants to be a speaker. It's called speaking at fundraisers. So let's say a local service club wants to raise funds to help build a playground in a local park. All right that's our premise. You propose the seminar on let's say how to build lasting relationships, which they will promote to all their members. The service club members who already love the service club they may have never heard of you but they love the service club so they buy tickets to the fundraiser. And they want to help build a playground.

[00:28:05] Well you make up a flyer for the event and you get a community center or church to donate a room to hold a seminar you might be able to get a hotel to do it but that's a little bit tougher. The group sells tickets to the event to their members and you split the proceeds. Half of them in half to you. You can also sell your products at the event and give them, let's say 10 percent of the gross sales. I had done this over 100 times in my career. Every single time I've made money for the group and far more money than they could have normally raised on their own for an event. I mean some of these places will do a bake sale for two weeks to make 50 bucks. So they can make several thousand in a couple hours by doing this. And that's going to be your biggest hurdle as a lot of these groups can't believe it sounds too good to be true that they could make that much money by doing this.

[00:29:04] The good side is you don't have any competition. Most professional speakers don't know this technique and don't do it regularly. So once you can get a couple of them under your belt people will be knocking on your door down because whenever you make money for an organization instead of costing them money they make money every time you appear. So they'll be begging you to come back and do it again. And word will spread. Other organizations will want you. And another great thing about this is you can do topics that would never sell in a million years in the corporate world.

[00:29:40] Two things I have a great webinar for this go to Tomantionwebinars.com and the webinar is called How to make a fortune Speaking at fundraisers. So it will give you way more details than I could possibly give you in this one brief thing on our episode here. And then I've got a whole course on this that includes the forums the agreements. I mean it gives you a rough out of the agreement because I'm not a lawyer. I can't really give you legal advice but I gave you the agreement and ideas of what should be in the agreement I give you a checklist for marketing event because a lot of these people aren't great marketers or they'd have thought of this before. So you teach them how to market it so that there's more people buy tickets. So all this stuff that's all in the course at greatInternetMarketing.com/fundraiserdeal. But you can watch the free webinar at Tomantionwebinars.com it's called How to make a fortune Speaking at fundraisers and all of this will be in the show notes that screwthecommute.com.

[00:30:55] OK so there's your top 10 ways to make money speaking and for those of you that have bad hair days I gave you several that you don't even have to be on stage. You can make products. You can speak on audios like I'm doing now. You can even do videos.

[00:31:13] Throw this in as a sidebar you can even do videos where your face is not on the screen. They're called Screen capture videos. And I do tons of these where I might demonstrate a piece of software where they hear my voice but they don't see me. They see the software and they see where I'm clicking so there's all kinds of ways to sell your knowledge and make money speaking. Go back and listen to this read the show notes and if you put these thing into play you will start making money speaking.

[00:31:43] So yeah I want you to be a professional speaker. I love that. But no I don't want you out there claiming to be a professional speaker without proper training. Makes the real pros look bad. I mean just because you got a pat on the back at your local church or God forbid Toastmasters. And by the way I have a love hate relationship with Toastmasters they are great in some ways but they don't cover the business of speaking and all these things that you have to know when there's money involved. So you need to know things to be a consistently great high fee pro speaker.

[00:32:22] I got another webinar I haven't mentioned yet that you really want to check out if this topic interests you. It's also at Tomantionwebinars.com. It's called How to maximize the value of any speaking engagement. So it tells you besides whether you get paid to speak or not. All these other things that you can do to increase the value of that trip to that speaking engagement and it can double triple the value of it in many cases. So that's all at how to maximize the value of any speaking engagement. Of course it will be in the show notes.

[00:32:59] So that was episode double 0 7. I was double 0 7. I never thought I'd be double 0 7 but today I am. So check out all our other episodes and we've got a lot of great interviews coming up. You don't want to miss them. Please stop at Screwthecommute.com. Subscribe. Leave us a great review. We really appreciate it. Helps me bring you all this great information and I might just see you speaking somewhere. That would be great. Catch ya later.

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