Recipe: Finding Places to Speak

When you are ready to get started with speaking to promote your business, you will first need to locate some speaking venues. These are the places, groups, or events where you can give free presentations to prospective clients or referral partners. “Free” doesn’t mean there is no admission charge. It means you, the speaker, are not being paid, although in some cases you may receive an honorarium. Here are some suggested venues:

Chamber of Commerce meetings and workshops

Service clubs such as Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis

Trade and professional association meetings and conferences

Lectures, classes, workshops, and conferences hosted by educational institutions, vendors, community organizations, churches, and affinity groups

Classes offered by community colleges, resource centers, and adult learning centers

Groups and clubs for people with shared interests, such as job clubs, investing clubs, or writers’ groups

Teleseminars, webinars, Web chats, podcasts, and videocasts hosted by membership organizations, educational institutions, and vendors

If some of the entries on this list look suspiciously like those on the list of suggested places to network, you have noticed something very important! Public speaking is superpowered networking. You can speak to the same groups you might otherwise just visit, and you can find them using some of the same resources mentioned for networking and referral building earlier in this chapter. But as the speaker, you will be the center of attention instead of being just another member of the audience.

As with networking, you don’t necessarily have to leave your home or office to be a speaker. In addition to the Web chat and webinar environments described in the earlier section on online networking, teleseminars, videocasts, and podcasts are an increasingly popular format for virtual speaking. Teleseminars, also known as teleclasses or teleforums, are seminars by telephone held on teleconference bridge lines. Dozens or even hundreds of participants listen live and can usually ask questions of the speaker during or after the session. Videocasts and podcasts are one-way presentations delivered over the Internet. Videocasts consist of live or recorded video, often combined with other visuals, viewed online. Podcasts are audio recordings which can be listened to online or downloaded to a portable MP3 player. Many of these virtual presentations take the form of an interview, where you as the guest expert are asked questions by the regular host.

Keep in mind that the strategy of public speaking has such a high effectiveness rating due to the perceived endorsement of the group hosting the event and the fact that the host organization invites and enrolls all the participants. Hosting your own speaking event is not a public speaking tactic; it’s a promotional event, and is much less effective. So to use the public speaking tactics described in this section, you’ll need to find groups to host you as a speaker.