The major trade association for public speakers, the National Speakers Association published a major survey about the public speaking industry in 2007.
One of the the things they concluded was that “NSA speakers are involved in many types of speaking engagements” including: Seminars, Training Events, Breakout sessions, Keynotes, Consulting
The top two audience types for their work was corporations and associations.
Then in a “perfect storm” of circumstances, the economy tanked and wiped out all of the reliable business models in the public speaking industry. The reason for that, in my view, is that professional public speakers ignored the new rules.
Back when the economy was strong, speakers main focus was to pursue speaking engagements, then they would show up and deliver their talk to whomever was in attendance. Some made extra income from the sale of books or other products while others offered consulting or training services to the companies in attendance.
Because of the success of that model, they invested little time on building relationships with those attendees who were passionate for the topic being presented. Most speakers were focused instead on the companies in attendance and on gaining more speaking engagements. They never imagined companies or associations cutting their budgets and significantly reducing speaking opportunities causing them to need another way to sell their products and services.
Adhering to the new rules may have been a major help to those speakers who have really struggled in the last year or so.
The new rules tell us that we’re publishers first and foremost. Speaking is just another way of distributing our content to the people that are seeking information on our topic.
Because of the power of the Internet, we can market to a targeted audience in countries all over the world. While we’re not likely to speak in all of these countries, we can still serve our followers and fans everywhere who’ll read our information, hire us to deliver our services and buy our products.
Since the market for speaking engagements is significantly reduced, the time is now to realize that the hunger for information on every imaginable niche topic is stronger than ever before. As a publisher your job is to seek and build relationships with people who are passionate about your topic and offer them your unique information in multi-media formats.
The first step is to have a video of your presentation made, then re purpose the video into an audio, transcribed into a book, distributed as a series of articles, some blog posts and more. If you’d like some help getting started, let me know. My new professional speaker training program will make it easy for you to do.
Professional Speaking Mentor Scott A Dennison is discussing the future of Professional Speaker Training at his website. You are also welcome to claim a copy of his newest report “Public Speaking is Dead!” and a series of Public Speaking Tips for free. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service