Wise Offline Marketers, help welcome!

Congratulations

Few things that came to mind reading this.

1. If you love teaching and have systems in place you need to expand the business you have. Hire and teach people the different parts of the system. I'd rather make $10/hr from each of my employees vs. $200/hr from my own work. You can even hire managers. In time you will be doing little more then training and surpervising while others are running the business. This becomes passive income in many ways.

2. This business you build will translate into other forms of consulting and marketing for you. The sales staff can sell your speaking as well as your other products.

3. Have you done much speaking? Written books? etc? Aka why would a company or organization want to hire you to speak? There are steps along the path to speaking riches. Once again having an organization on auto pilot that provides incomes allows you the time to do these steps.

You can build yourself into a brand. We all know famous people who have. The path they followed can be followed by others (including you) who want to. But you are unlikely to jump from step 3 to step 17. Too often we see what we want to do and try to get there "now" vs building towards that goal.

People fail because they sell the goal but don't see the steps. Each step is a goal in and of itself.

You know where you want to be. Find someone else who is there now and look back at the steps they took. What worked? What didn't? You can look not only from their successes but from their mistakes. Using this research now build your goal ladder. How many steps is it? What can you do today to get to the next step? How long will it take to get to the next step? And the next?

Aaron Doud gave you some good advice.

Do you want to teach or sell from the front of the room? They are two very different skill sets.

Get a directory of trade organizations. You can get a used one for a few dollars on E-Bay. Call them yourself. Jason Kanigan has a good script that can easily be adapted to getting speaking gigs.

Direct mail, e-mails, FAXs will be ignored. Phone calls won't. Some trade orgainizations are begging for speakers. Not Keynotes, but breakout sessions. You won't get paid, but you can sell your little heart out.

Now, if you are thinking of getting paid gigs, where you get thousands of dollars for a speech...and then collect your check and go home....you need a book, a list of grateful organizations you have spoken for, articles, a CD you can send (they won't listen to it, or read your book, but it makes an impression). By the way, seeking out these high paid gigs is about as profitable for a new person as panning for gold.

I've made far more money from the free gigs where I sold from the front of the room. Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy, and Tony Robbins are salesmen, not teachers. They have huge product packages, and make the vast majority of their money from sales during their talk.

To start out, speak for the Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, and local referral groups. That way, you'll get good at it, and you can sell (maybe only a book) too.


Good luck.