Secrets to Building a Successful Speaking Business

"The job is not doing the speech. It is getting the speech" - Shep Hyken The National President of the NSA, Shep Hyken, CSP, CPAE spoke to members of the NSA Northern California Chapter on Saturday. Shep is a customer service expert, professional speaker and author who works with companies who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His talk to the 80+ Chapter members and guests was a compendium of best practices he's gathered over the 32 years he's been a professional speaker. He shared the tips and techniques that he has used to build his own successful speaking business. His ideas ranged from the value of writing articles that will establish you as an expert in your field to how blogging, books, a website and social media are all part of a coordinated program to build momentum in the market. Among the points I noted: Consider using college interns for marketing tasks. Post openings at the business school. Ask candidates to review your website, suggest what they can do to help, how many hours they can work and what they need to be paid. Shep has been amazed by the creativity students bring to his office and the value they've added. Re-purpose the content of your articles, blog postings and newsletters into a book. Start by listing titles onto index cards, shuffling them and seeing if there's a structure for a book in there. Transform articles into videos. Drop the text into telepromt+ so it scrolls by on the screen as you record the video on your webcam. Works best if you write as you speak. Take this formula for green screen paint to Home Depot and have a gallon mixed up. Paint the wall of a spare room and put in a Sony videocam with external mic jack, some studio lights and you are set to record. Use an older version of the Sony Vegas software to edit, or the built-in software on a Mac. Shep's talk covered many more topics including the secrets of low-cost book publishing in hard cover; scripting your calls to prospective clients when using the phone to build your business; generating passive income from products, and more. To hear Shep in action, click on the podcast icon below. These two brief extracts of the his talk cover the ways he cultivates the ideal client and as his incredible 5-day social media publishing schedule that is a key part of his active marketing.