1. Presentation – do you have something interesting, inspiring, and useful to share with audiences? Be mindful of your voice (keep it deep and low pitched), your personality and attitude (positive), your tone (soft, loud. Encouraging as needed), your style, your vocabulary.

2. Connection – how quickly do you get to the core of your audience’s problems and challenges? Skip what is between their ears and go straight to their hearts.

3. Passion – do you love what you do? Develop a niche or specialty that you truly enjoy … and are good at.

4. Network – enhance your speaking career by networking with 50 or more other speakers. They become your referral sources. Join the National Speakers Association – a 4,000 member organization that holds conferences and has local chapters to help you with your marketing skills and networking. Call 480-968-2552 (Arizona)

5. Products – write a book, booklet(s), create audio tapes, video tapes, CD/ROM. Having products will catapult your speaking career and make you more valuable to your clients. This “passive” income is like having frosting on the cake.

6. Value added – become known as a value added speaker. Provide handouts, attend the cocktail reception before your program, stay after your speech, offer follow-up teleclasses, offer your consulting services, be a facilitator.

7. Hire a Coach – The Olympic Games remind us that a world-class athlete is surrounded by a number of people whose function is to keep him/her on track. No serious athlete or professional speaker would expect to progress very far without a COACH.

1. Free Speeches to Promote Your Business

A lawyer might make a speech to a group of business persons, free of charge, about the advantages of incorporating their businesses. This could result in obtaining new clients. It could also cause existing clients to purchase additional services, such as incorporations, minute book work, income tax election filings, and so on.

2. Paid Seminars, Workshops and Teleclasses

You could charge admission fees to attend a seminar entitled “How To Incorporate Yourself Without a Lawyer”. This seminar could detail the considerations and mechanics of incorporating your own private corporation.

3. Sell Information Products

The information presented during a speech or seminar could form the basis for information products such as books, courses, special reports or folios, audios, videos, DVDs, electronic books, and so forth. For example, you could write a book entitled “How To Incorporate Yourself Without a Lawyer”.

Including such products as handouts at your seminar would increase the value for the attendees (which you could charge for). Even if you gave a free speech to a group, you could still receive back-end income from the sale of such information products.

Obviously, your public speaking skills will be especially important when producing an audio or video cassette. Your listeners and viewers will make certain judgments based on your personal appearance, poise, audience contact, use of gestures, enthusiasm, how informative the material is, and many other factors.

Your information products establish your credibility as an expert, resulting in even more business. As well, you can market those same information products through mail order, direct mail, Internet marketing, and other methods.

4. Consulting and Other Opportunities

As your reputation as an expert in your specialized field grows, you will become more in demand. Clients may seek you out for lucrative speaking engagements. You may be invited to write magazine articles, consult for large corporations, act as an expert trial witness, become a syndicated columnist, et cetera.

Therefore, whether you are a novice or an experienced public speaker, it pays to increase and utilize your public speaking skills.

==========================================================
Public Speaking is NOT Easy or Natural, But it Doesn’t Have to Be That Way

Do the following to put at ease when delivering a speech:

1. Your speech needs a beginning, middle, and end. You must grab your audience’s attention in the first minute…so begin with a starting comment, question, story, or humor. End your speech on a strong note by asking a question, providing a quote, tell a story or leave them laughing.

2. Every 5-7 minutes, back up your facts with signature (about you or others) stories. Stories are out there – everywhere. Find them in the stores, at restaurants, on the airplane, at home. People retain information better when hearing a story.

3. Practice your speech out load. Record it on to a tape recorder and/or video camera. Also do this when giving a program to a live audience. Do it every time!

4. Practice pausing before and after important points. Don’t be afraid to leave open space. The use of silence is a key requirement to becoming an effective speaker.

5. Use direct eye contact. You can focus on one person when making a point…and everyone else in the audience will think you are speaking to them also.

6. Don’t just stand behind the lectern: move around, gesture. Be animated. (Fifty-five percent of how people perceive you is by body language; 38 percent by your voice;
7 percent by your words)

7. Smile a lot. Be enthusiastic about what you are saying. And have fun.