Need Help on starting Public Speaking or consulting business?

Definitely start a blog. Post to your blog, then repost that to facebook.
Do Youtube videos talking about your related subjects.
Create an ebook and give it away to get leads.
Offer consulting for free to a few people you know, so you can get some testimonials.

Public speaking: join some LinkedIn groups, strongly consider joining Toastmasters.

Business/life coach: choose your specialty, promote as suggested above plus Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.

Help on relevant forums.

Life coaching is incredibly competitive and social proof is one of the most important parts of becoming successful in that environment. Although there's some qualifications you can get for life coaching, it's mostly unregulated and people will generally a life coach based on the person most other people are using.

A way you can get off to a decent start is by writing blog posts. Guest blogging will especially help get you started, I believe Life Hacks accept guest bloggers.

You will need to get some video clips of you speaking to an audience to show that a) you can speak in front of an audience and b) people are coming to see you speak. Best way to get video clips when noone knows who you are is to head to a Toastmasters meeting - I'm sure the first one is free and after that you pay a fee to be a member. Take along a friend and get them to film you, having a membership isn't a bad idea if you want to get practice before you start getting paid work - it can especially help in terms of refining the speeches you are going to make.

After you've got video clips, a blog and guest blogs online you can start to add your name to speakers directories and even contact companies directly... and, obviously, have a page on your website for people who want to hire you.

It is very hard with the amount of people out there doing the same thing and it's important to have something that sets you apart from other people with it being such a competitive market.

I used similar techniques to what I described above when I was starting in stand up comedy, which is a very different environment but requires a similar amount of social proof before anyone will pay you!

Starting a Blog is a very powerful tool and will help you to build your own social proof, that will attract a large audience in the future. Just be sure to offer high quality content and become the authority in your niche.

After you have a great audience and online reputation, you can start by doing offline marketing and some free conferences to get known by your country/city audience.

I agree start a blog and the reason I say this is that this builds your confidence and generates an attraction. You could also work with some friends or family and get some experience coaching them. At the end of the day what everyone is good at is EXPERIENCE -something you can't buy but over time will continuously improve on. Once you get the ball rolling other things will dovetail with you naturally. Like anything it is a natural progression. You just really need passion in whatever you do.....the universe adores passion...similarly to love.....

Join as many business and community groups in your city or region as you can. Get a professionally designed website, put on blogs ,promote on social media, create your you tube videos and promote them.

If I were you, and assuming that you sell..

One-On-One coaching
Consulting and other stuff..

Then, I would..

Get traffic to a 'Free Report Page'
Then turn these subscribers into a 'Free Coaching session' optin page, and monetize like that

Hope this helps, Bogdan

P.S Love your niche idea,

Public speaking is an amazing way for getting a message out to the world..

If you need any help on the lead generation, and client-getting part of it, feel free to private message me

Well I decided to start a blog
My blog will track my progress as a writer and also just a general posts about how I'm trying to slowly create the life of my dreams and better myself.

It is a blog based niche. Video on youtube and blog contents and promotion of you speaking and motivating is the best way to go.

Lots of great information here. I like the idea of taking low level speaking gigs to get photos and social proof. Thanks everyone! This forum is so helpful!