13

Public Speaking: We Promise You Won’t Die

Third, we like public speaking because people pay speakers to share their wisdom and knowledge. We were staggered to learn that organizations pay someone anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars to come in and talk about stuff they do for a living. It could be giving a keynote speech at a conference or a motivational talk at a national sales meeting or leading a day-long seminar, but professional public speakers are paid well to teach their skills to other people.

Think about what you do right now. Whether you’re a purchasing agent, a marketing coordinator, a chef, or a license branch manager, you’ve probably found several shortcuts that help you do your job better, or you have some thoughts on the direction your particular industry should go. Now imagine if someone gave you a $2,000 check to talk for an hour to a group of colleagues about your ideas.

Staggering

You’ve probably thought about a number of ways you can do your job better. You likely think that if you had a chance to share this knowledge, your job, your company, or your industry would be a better and happier place. The fact that you bought this book is proof of that: You want to learn how to share knowledge, thus creating or growing your personal brand. This is where public speaking is going to help.

Should You Speak in Public?

Depends. Do you like money and being a minor celebrity in your field? Next question.

No, Seriously

Yes. Because if you’re looking to move to the next level in your career, gain a national reputation in your industry, share knowledge and information, and even earn more money—in general, growing your brand—becoming a public speaker is one of the most effective ways to do this.

But You Hate Speaking in Public

It’s okay if you hate speaking in public. Public speaking is not for everybody. We don’t expect everyone to become a public speaker. Not everyone can be an expert; not everyone wants to speak to large crowds. You can still have an outstanding career and can create a great personal brand without doing it. But note: most leaders and rock stars in their industry are asked to speak in public.

If you don’t like public speaking because you’re afraid, don’t worry. We already promised you wouldn’t die, so what’s the worst that could happen?

A lot of people are afraid of public speaking. They’re afraid of being judged. They’re afraid people won’t like them or will find out they’re frauds. They’re afraid of making mistakes and looking foolish.

One year Erik was a volunteer speechwriter for a woman running for U.S. Congress. She was scheduled to debate the incumbent at a local TV station, but she was so nervous that, before she could even give her opening statement, she tore off her headphones and walked off.

Someone from the station calmed her down and encouraged her to try it one more time. She put her headphones on, got through her opening statement, and then lost it. “I can’t do this, I just can’t do this,” she cried.

She then ran out of the door, got into her car, and drove away. Unfortunately, that was the news clip that made national news, which Erik watched while he was at a conference ten hours away.

The candidate’s explanation later was that she got stage fright and let it get the best of her. She had been giving speeches around the district for a few months, but came unglued when there were TV cameras involved.

You need to remember two important points, which Erik’s candidate forgot, when you give a speech, make a presentation, or even just toast the bride and groom at a wedding:

1. Everyone wants you to do a good job. Nobody is hoping you screw up so they can leap to their feet, point their finger, and shout “See? See, I told you she was a phony!”

2. Everyone in the room is just as nervous as you are when giving a talk, so no one’s going to be unsympathetic or judgmental about your efforts. When Erik’s candidate left her debate, even her opponent told the local news that he understood her nervousness.

Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking

If you’re afraid to speak in public, or you want to but just don’t have the experience, you’re not alone. There are organizations and opportunities to help you overcome your fear or gain valuable experience.

Toastmasters

The most popular, most useful organization for learning to speak in public is Toastmasters. You’ll learn how to speak in front of groups, organize your speeches, give impromptu talks, and even learn how to recognize what makes a good speech.

Depending on where you live, there may be one, two, or even dozens of Toastmasters clubs that meet weekly, every other week, or even once a month for 60 minutes. Each meeting has a set, regular agenda the group follows. Members give speeches to earn credit toward certifications, including the Certified Toastmaster and Advanced Toastmaster. Also, they learn to give feedback on others’ speeches, which they present like a regular speech and even have the opportunity to compete in local and regional contests.

You can find out more information by visiting the Toastmasters’ website at Toastmasters.org. Click the “Find a Club” button to, well, find a club in your area. Keep in mind that some clubs have membership requirements, like working for the company where the meeting is held. The downside to Toastmasters is that it can be a big time commitment. The upside is that the clubs are filled with people who want to learn how to speak in public. You’ll be surrounded by friendly people who want to see you succeed.

Classes at Your Local College or University

Taking college classes is another option for improving your public speaking ability. Although Toastmasters is an ongoing effort, you can give yourself a deadline by taking a course. You can take basic public speaking and even move into advanced public speaking, if you want. The downside is that a college class can be pricey compared to Toastmasters. The upside is that you can cram everything you want to learn into a single class that meets once a week, or even a few times a week, for four months, and then you’re done.

Seminars and Courses

Several organizations help people learn more effective communication skills. Whether it’s leadership training, team management, or even public speaking and storytelling, you can take one-, two-, or even three-day courses on these techniques. The upside is that you get everything you need in less than three days. The downside is that they’re often more expensive than a college course, and you don’t get the same amount of time for practice and feedback that you do in either Toastmasters or college classes.

These seminars are great for refreshers or crash courses, but they’re not enough to build an entire speaking career. Thousands of courses and seminars are available from national groups, including National Seminars or Dale Carnegie and local ones organized by nearby groups and instructors.

Speakers Associations

There are several organizations for professional speakers, like the National Speakers Association, the American Professional Speakers Association, the World Speakers Association, and the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association. These are geared toward the advanced or professional speaker, and some may have an income-from-speaking requirement for applicants.

Many of these organizations have meetings in larger cities, where members meet and learn how to become better speakers, how to get more speaking engagements, and how to promote their speaking events.

Private or Executive Coaches

We even know a few people who provide one-on-one coaching for public speaking. These coaches not only teach you how to speak in public, they also help you reshape your image, dress for success, learn how to deal with new situations, and give you individually tailored, no-punches-pulled feedback on where you need to improve. The downside is that they can cost a few thousand dollars. The upside is that you get specific feedback, and you learn how to fix your issues from a professional.

We don’t recommend this option until you’re ready to take your speaking career to a professional level. Start with the easy, less expensive options first, and get some speeches under your belt before you look at a private coach.

Finding Your Speaking Niche

You need to discover your speaking niche. What are you good at? What is your industry or field of interest? If you’ve been following along in this book, you’ve already figured this out. If you turned straight to this chapter, just be aware that this is something you need to do. We’ll show you how.

First, this needs to be something you’re not only good at, but have some expertise in. If you just started your first job as a copywriter at a marketing agency two months ago, chances are you don’t have the knowledge to speak to a room full of other copywriters about “10 Advanced Copywriting Secrets.”

So if you want to become a speaker, you need to pick something you’ve done for a few years. That’s how you’ll be able to find your niche.

Finding your niche is critical to establish your speaking career. You can’t just select “everything” as your subject matter, any more than you can select “everyone” as your potential audience.

Even business motivational speakers only want to reach a certain group or type of people—businesspeople, salespeople, people who want to make more money, and so on. Their audience is not the general population or non-salespeople.

Start with the general picture, then drill down further. Even a specialized field may have areas of sub-specialty.

Let’s say you’re a cost reduction consultant. You help companies improve their bottom line by reducing their costs. That’s even your elevator speech when you explain what it is you do: “I help companies improve their bottom line by reducing their costs.” (We’ll ignore that this is a boring introduction to what you do.) Believe it or not, that’s not your potential audience when you’re trying to find speaking gigs. Dig deeper.

“I help small businesses—companies with fewer than 100 employees—reduce their costs.”

Better, but that’s still a lot of businesses. According to the Small Business Administration, there are 27.9 million small businesses in the United States. Get more specific.¹

“I help small manufacturing companies reduce their costs.”

That’s pretty good. We can live with that. We can actually go deeper into our specialty (think: small tool-and-die manufacturers or small tool-and-die manufacturers who work in the automotive industry), but that might be a niche to pursue for a business route, not your speaking field.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to live exclusively in your niche. You just have to focus on that one particular field, finding different conferences and trade shows to speak at. Then, when you’re comfortable there, you can branch out to a second niche. By focusing on one niche, like reducing costs for small manufacturing companies, you can successfully choose a second one—say, one- and two-partner law firms—that rarely overlaps with the first. This way, you can specialize in more than one niche without causing any conflicts of interest.

You can also have a small niche that fits within a large field. For example, we’re both social media consultants and users with deeper specialties. Kyle focuses on online lessons and courses for companies, and Erik frequently speaks on content marketing and writing (see Figure 13.1). These can easily cross into other industries. Whether it’s social media training or online marketing, companies from every industry can use our services.

Figure 13.1 Erik often speaks about content marketing and writing to PR and marketing groups, as well as humor writing and personal branding at writing conferences.

You can create your own specific niche that crosses borders, too. Whether it’s transportation safety, identity theft protection insurance, Generation Y image consulting, or executive travel coordination, you can choose such a narrow niche that you can then focus on a wide market of ideal companies, like companies that are a specific size or based in a certain region.

Again, drill down. For example, don’t just pick “small business consulting” as your niche. Even “marketing for small businesses” is too big. “International sales and marketing for small businesses” is a decent speaker’s niche. A good number of businesses do business overseas, and you can tap into all kinds of government programs, sales organizations, and even specific industries to find speaking opportunities.

After you identify your niche, you’re ready to start speaking.

How to Launch Your Speaking Career

Do this: Go to your bathroom mirror, look confidently at yourself, raise your arms over your head and shout, “I am a public speaker!”

And now you are one.

Click here to view code image

@kyleplacy: Is that seriously how you got started?
@edeckers:  Well, I didn't have a big mirror, but I…no, not
            really.
@kyleplacy: We need to write more than that. We have a page count
            we have to meet.

If you want to get started as a speaker, identify your goal as a speaker. Is it to make $5,000 in your first year as a speaker? To be a keynote speaker at your industry association’s national conference? To speak to more than 500 people at once? Some goals can be met right away; others may take a few years, with smaller goals serving as milestones along the way.

For the purposes of this chapter, we assume you want to get paid as a speaker, whether you’re giving talks as part of your regular job and you receive an honorarium or you want to become a professional speaker whose full-time job is to travel around and give talks. These other steps we just mentioned will be milestones along the way.

Here’s the problem: Most of your speaking gigs are going to be for free, especially in the first year. That’s because you don’t have credibility as a speaker, even if you just finished your third year in Toastmasters. You’re still an untried, unknown quantity, and you’re not going to get the same respect as the industry experts who have been doing it for several years. (And if you’ve spent three years in Toastmasters without speaking outside, you need to move out of your safety zone.)

Don’t get hung up that you’re speaking for free; learn to appreciate the opportunities. Think about all the stage time you’re getting. You’re honing your skills, developing your stage presence, and learning what works for you. This will help you achieve the speaking goals you have set for yourself.

Plus, speaking for free can sometimes produce the same results as speaking for money—getting more business, getting other speaking gigs, generating traffic for your blog, and finding a new job.

Stand-up comics work like this when they start out, building stage time, trying to get as much as they can, as often as they can. They work up just five minutes of material and perform it over and over—for free—at open mic nights. Then they move up to showcases, expanding their set into seven minutes, and then ten minutes. They hone that ten minutes until it’s perfect, and they keep performing it as many times as they can, usually for free.

A lot of these new comics drive for two hours just for the chance to do seven minutes onstage. Any successful comic talks about how he just did the same short set over and over, for free or little pay, until he started making it to bigger venues.

That’s because one club owner will see that perfect ten minutes and offer the comic a chance to do an industry showcase for $50. Then, all the other club owners assume that if the comic did an industry showcase, he’s good enough to do their industry showcases for $50. Then, the comic is good enough to do another showcase, after which another owner asks the comic to open for a headliner in her club, and bada-bing, bada-boom! One day, the comic is a headliner. And it’s all because he was willing to drive two hours to do a free ten-minute set a few years earlier.

But the comics who do only two sets and then give up because they don’t get a paying gig will be unknown, out-of-work comics who slowly grind their way to anonymous retirement at their data analyst’s job in their tiny cubicle that’s slowly killing them. (Oh, but we’re sure it’s different for you. Seriously, that won’t happen to you.)

The lesson is the same for speaking. You need to speak for free for a while. That’s the way these things work. But you won’t always do that. Because in the meantime, you’re still blogging about your industry, you’re still growing your network, and you’re communicating to your network about all the talks you’re giving, which is helping grow your personal brand.

As you give more talks, more people will see you. Specifically, more people who make decisions about getting speakers will see you. There are almost always decision makers or influencers at conferences. And they’ll assume that if you are good enough to speak at this conference, you’re good enough to speak at their conference.

We can’t count the number of speaking opportunities we’ve had because someone saw one or both of us speak at an event, only to be invited to their event a few months later. So while we’re both out of the speaking-for-free part of our careers, we recognize that it was an important part of our growth.

Identify Speaking Opportunities

You’ll start your speaking career by giving basic talks about your niche. They’ll be to small audiences, local, and most likely free. That’s because you’re going to talk to local business groups, local fraternal organizations, and even small seminars for your local Chamber of Commerce; plan to give them a basic overview of what you know.

You need to be greedy about these small, free opportunities. Get your name and your face in front of as many people as you can by calling business groups, attending their meetings, and asking for speaking opportunities.

As you become involved with the business groups and Chambers of Commerce, you’re bound to catch someone’s attention in an area, like a member of the board of a trade group or industry association, nonprofit or a conference organizer.

When you meet this person, pursue your own opportunities; don’t wait for them to come to you. Ask the organizers and board members if they have any speaking opportunities—you can find a lot of speaking gigs this way.

Many of these people need to find speakers for their upcoming events. They may need someone to talk about your particular topic, or they may just need a speaker to fill a slot in three months. But they know that they are going to need to fill that spot, and that means asking their friends and colleagues for recommendations, putting the word out to group members, and working their contact list until they find the right speaker.

And then here you come, charging in on your white horse, shouting, “I’ll save the day! I’ll be your speaker for your next event.”

Click here to view code image

@kyleplacy: What is it with you and shouting today?
@edeckers:  WHY, DOES IT BOTHER YOU?!

By offering to fill the speaking slot, you’re helping the organizer solve a big problem. Also, you’ll both get the speaking slot and make a memorable impression on the organizer. When the organizer is asked by her contacts if she knows any good speakers, she’ll recommend you, because you bailed her out of a jam several months ago by approaching her first.

Industry Groups

Industry groups provide great speaking opportunities because you can focus your niche to laser-like specificity. We have been to conferences in which the presentations and sessions have been so esoteric, so far out, we were surprised people even came up with the ideas, let alone found a roomful of people interested enough to sit through it for an hour. But, that’s the great thing about social media and the Internet: You can find a group or community that interests you and then find other like-minded people.

Whether it’s a trade association, a collection of professionals, or even a group of companies that focus on a particular issue, some industry groups are national, while many others are local. Figure out your chosen specialty area and see if a group in your area focuses on it. It could be technical writers, visual artists, corporate travel planners, heating and cooling contractors, or left-handed actuarial scientists.

Your goal in speaking to these local groups is twofold: 1) To find new clients. Remember, if you show people how smart you are, they’ll hire you to work for them. 2) To find new, bigger speaking engagements. Small speaking gigs lead to larger ones, so speak to industry groups on a local level because they can lead to national speaking opportunities down the road.

After you make your name on the local scene in your specialty, take the leap into the national scene. Go for a speaking slot at the national conference. Check out the conference’s website, find the “Call For Speakers” section, and submit a proposal.

You don’t have to limit yourself to just speaking to your own industry groups. If your topic fits other industry trends, go for it. Just make sure your chosen subject will somehow fit within what that group is already thinking about, even if it’s a cross-over topic.

Actually, a cross-over topic can sometimes be a bigger draw than the traditional topics you usually find at an industry conference. For example, HR professionals are probably sick to death of hearing about the latest equal opportunity hiring requirements, but would love to hear a seminar on how to use Facebook for recruiting and hiring.

Table 13.1 lists a few cross-over ideas:

Table 13.1 Possible Cross-Over Groups and Topics

Your Specialty	Cross-Over Industry Group	Cross-Over Topic
Tax law	Chamber of Commerce	Doing taxes for small businesses
Trade show displays	American Marketing Association	Doing pre-trade show promotion
Technical writing	Startup companies	Documentation software properly
Web design	High school teachers	Creating a class website
Marketing	Visual artists	Marketing artwork
Direct mail	Nonprofits	Saving money on fundraising
Financial planning	High school business teachers	Financial planning for teens
Cost reduction analysis	Office managers	Cutting office expenditures
Health insurance	Human resources pros	Saving employee benefit costs

If there’s not a particular industry group in your area, find one that’s within driving distance and make the trip.

Remember, if stand-up comics are willing to drive two hours just for a five-minute set, you should be willing to drive at least three hours to deliver a one-hour talk. Although it’s good to get paid, don’t expect to make big money when you’re starting out. But it doesn’t hurt to ask for travel expenses for those multi-hour trips.

Civic Groups

If you think of industry groups as a B2B (business-to-business) audience, civic groups are a B2C (business-to-consumer) audience. You’re not going to get as in depth with a topic with civic groups as you would with industry groups. For example, instead of talking about tax law for small businesses, you may end up talking to a group of Shriners about the personal tax implications of using those little cars and scooters for parades. Or instead of talking about financial planning for young professionals, you may end up talking to a fraternity’s national conference about how to pay off college debt in five years.

The best place to find civic groups are online. Do a Google search for the civic groups you’re interested in talking to or just do a generic search for “civic groups” in your area, then check their website to see if they have any lunches or special events where you can address the members. Send them an introductory email and see what happens.

Conferences, Trade Shows, and Expos

This is where both of us got our start on the speaking circuit. We scoured conference websites for the industries we want to be known in and checked for speaking opportunities. We also began subscribing to newsletters that have different speaking opportunity lists, like SpeakerHub.com.

You can find different trade shows and conferences with a little detective work and your favorite search engine. First, check for trade associations or groups for your chosen industry or profession. Many trade associations have a national conference, and you can usually find that information on their website. Some will even have regional conferences or local chapters, and you might find opportunities there, too. If you live in a city with a big conference center, look at their calendar for the conferences coming to your city and check out the conference websites.

Submit speaking proposals during the posted application period. Next, look for the conferences of any allied, related, or even competing trade associations. Finally, blog about the issues the association members are facing in case they check out your website. Then make sure the conference organizers are in your social networks, especially Twitter and LinkedIn, and that they receive notifications about your blog posts.

When you find a trade show or conference that looks interesting, visit the submission page to see what kinds of speakers they’re looking for. You could make one of four main types of presentations:

• Poster session: You usually find these at educational conferences. A poster session is a series of 6-foot folding tables with pop-up displays and pages of your latest research taped to them. You stand around and hope that people ask you questions, but they don’t. They’re only there for the free hors d’oeuvres used to lure disinterested attendees into the poster session. (Not that we’re bitter or anything.)

Maybe we’re biased, but we don’t consider these real speaking sessions. Don’t waste your time with them. In many cases, poster presenters won’t even get a discounted admission to the conference, which tells you how highly they’re regarded. (Hint: They’re not.)

• Round table: Imagine putting 75 people in one room with seven different tables, and presenters sit at each, talking about a different topic. The attendees split up and sit at different tables. Talks may take 15 minutes or an hour.

You may not get the same benefit as speaking to your own room, but at least it’s not a poster session. Sometimes this may be your foot in the door for a future speaking slot at the next year’s conference. When you’ve been a speaker for a while, avoid doing round tables unless you also get to do a breakout session. You don’t get enough time to get into the meat of your topic, and the room is often too loud to be heard properly. You’ll get to make personal connections though, which can be important later on. (Reread “Chapter 12, How to Network: ‘Hello, My Name Is… ’”)

• Breakout speaking session: These are the standard speaking sessions. Most breakout sessions are scheduled as one of several going on during an hour, and the attendees have to choose which one they want to go to. You speak at your session for an hour and don’t need to worry about competing tables, posters, or people showing up for free hors d’oeuvres.

Sometimes you may be asked to give your session more than once because there aren’t enough speakers. Other times, there are so many submissions, the conference can only accept a fraction of them. There is a varying degree of skill and energy among the speakers, so this is a great way to stand out from the others. If you can do a great job compared to the other speakers, you look like a brilliant orator. Sometimes these are paid slots, but most often they’re not. Speakers often get free admission to the conference.

• Keynote address: This is the granddaddy of all speaking sessions. While a breakout session only lets a speaker reach a fraction of conference attendees, the keynote speaker not only addresses all the attendees at once, he or she often kicks off the entire conference. Some conferences will even have one keynote speaker per day, which means there’s more than one opportunity for you. Plus, this is usually a paid speaking opportunity. Never agree to give a keynote session for free!

Introducing Yourself

After you identify the groups you want to speak to, write an email that explains what you want to talk about, your area of expertise, how long you’ve been doing it, and where you’ve done it in the past. Make sure that your grammar, spelling, and punctuation are perfect. Write each email as an individual pitch to that group. Explain why you and your session would be a good fit for their audiences. Direct the groups to your blog. (You do have a blog, right? Check out Chapter 3, “Blogging: Telling Your Story,” if you don’t.)

Dear Ms. Havisham,

I am interested in speaking to an upcoming luncheon of the Wedding Planning Professionals of Orlando. I am a direct mail planner and would like to speak to your members about how using direct mail postcards can help brides and their families save money on invitation costs.

I have been in direct mail sales for 10 years and have been speaking to wedding planning professionals and other party planners for three years. I recently gave a talk at the National Wedding Planning Professionals Association conference about this same topic. It was well received, ranking as one of the top five sessions of the entire conference.

You can read more about me at my blog, http://BobScrumrunner.blogspot.com, as well as see some videos of my past talks. My usual speaking fee is $500, plus travel expenses. I will follow up with you via phone in five days. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Philip Pirrip

Follow up your emails with phone calls a few days later as you promised, to see if the groups received your email and if they have any opportunities for you.

(And give yourself 10 bonus cool points if you said, “Hey, that’s Great Expectations!” when you read the letter.)

Promoting Your Talk

You’ve got your first speaking session arranged. Now you need to make sure people actually show up. You can always hope the organizer is going to do some promotion, but much of it should fall on your shoulders. After all, you have access to people that your organizers may not: your blog readers and your Twitter and LinkedIn networks. Not only will you invite people from your network to your own talk, but you may end up introducing those people to the entire event, which is an added bonus for the organizer, and makes you look like a star. (Some conferences even offer affiliate payments if you bring in attendees.)

What are the best ways to invite people to your talk? In this section, we’re going to help you:

• Learn five ways to attract an audience to your presentation

• Discover three secrets every professional speaker uses to increase audience participation.

Do you see what we did there? Your brain probably fired a few extra neurons, and your metaphorical ears perked up a little bit. We attracted your attention by promising a finite number of ways to attract attention and three secrets that the real pros use.

This is a common technique used by professional copywriters to get people to read their sales material and to buy their products. If these techniques work in a sales letter, then you should use them too.

Something about a numbered list in a headline or copy makes people take notice. It’s like brain candy for humans, because our minds see that information and say, “Hey, that’s something I can easily understand. I want to read that!” Umberto Eco even told German news magazine, Der Spiegel, in 1999 that people like lists because they establish order out of chaos.²

So take advantage of that little psychological quirk and use it to promote your talks. You can also do this when writing a blog article or email.

First, write captivating copy. (Don’t write the headline first. The headline is going to come from the copy.) Use a numbered list and come up with three big ideas the audience is going to learn. But then give each of those items its own list. For example:

1. Learn five ways to attract an audience to your presentation.

2. Discover three secrets every professional speaker uses to boost attendance.

3. Learn the five free social media tools you can use to promote your next talk.

Once you have written all the text, write the headline. Create a headline that covers one of the big issues your audience wants to hear about. You can find this out by asking the event organizer what hot-button issues their members are facing. Then, design your presentation and write the headline based on that.

For example, if Facebook is a big issue among human resources professionals, write a headline like “Five Ways to Use Facebook to Streamline Your Recruiting.”

With this headline, we have hit three hotspots for HR professionals:

1. We have a finite numbered list. It’s more than just how they can use Facebook, but an actual number of items they can use.

2. Facebook has become an important recruiting tool for a lot of hiring managers.

3. In 2015, 98 percent of recruiters used Facebook and LinkedIn to find job candidates.³ (Mostly LinkedIn, but 55 percent also use Facebook.)

4. We’re trying to make their jobs easier. Everyone has things they don’t like about their jobs. Recruiting is one of those things for HR professionals, so by offering to help streamline recruiting, you’re telling them you can help simplify that part of their job.

Email the description of your talk to the show organizer, who will put it in the conference directory. Then post an article on your blog to promote that blog post via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other social networks you belong to. Seek out and connect with people who will attend the conference (search for the conference hashtag on Twitter).

Promote your talk frequently, about two to four times per week. Don’t just send a notice out once and hope people show up. It’s going to take several different messages on your various networks and blog to get people to notice that you’re going to speak somewhere, and then a few more to get them interested in coming.

When you’re at a conference, don’t be afraid to invite people to your session. We know, we know: You don’t want to feel needy, but you’re speaking in public because you crave the attention, so that ship has already sailed. Swallow the last of your pride and start inviting people.

Several years ago, Erik was attending BarCamp Nashville, a social media “unconference.” He was already on the schedule to speak, so he started connecting with other Nashville area social media pros who were attending. He would tweet them and say things like “I’m speaking at #BCN10 in a couple weeks. Stop by and say hi.” With more than 200 people in attendance that year, Erik had more than two-thirds of them at his session.

Remember, the fuller your rooms are, the more you can spread your personal brand and earn new opportunities or gain new clients. Visit other sessions during the day and invite people to your session afterward, especially if the two topics are related. You can also invite the other speakers, and as a form of professional courtesy, give them some love during your talk. (That’s what the cool kids say for “mention them.”)

Your goal is to get as many people in your session as you can, which unfortunately means other speakers may have fewer attendees at their session. Don’t feel bad; it just means they should have promoted their talk better. Buy them a copy of this book.

Giving Your Talk

When it comes to giving speeches, you can read many books, newsletters, and blogs, as well as take classes. We assume you know how to take the steps to prepare for your talk, like outlining your presentation beforehand, rehearsing, dressing appropriately, and using language effectively. But we offer these seven ideas for organizing your talk:

• Write brief copy: Our preference is to put no more than five words on a single slide in 144-point size or bigger. Use photos and graphics instead. This way, you can speed up or slow down your talk as needed. You can skip slides, spend only a few seconds on them, or even tell a five-minute story about that particular slide. And people in the back won’t burst a blood vessel trying to read the tiny print on the screen.

• Show up early: Scope out the room. If you can go a few days early to check it out, do it. You want to get a feel for the room, see where the projector is, how the room is laid out, how much room you have to walk around, and generally get comfortable.

But if you’re speaking at a conference, you may not have that chance. Then you have to assume the conference organizers know what they’re doing and be fairly flexible on your requirements and adaptability. Still, it doesn’t hurt to plan for the worst, in case the organizers aren’t too adept at managing technology. (See the section titled “Important Technology Tips for Presenters.”)

• Make sure the lighting is appropriate: Under no circumstances should you allow the lights to be turned down low so people can see the screen better. They are there to see you, not your images. You can give your presentation without PowerPoint/Keynote; your slide deck can’t do squat without you. Lights need to stay up at a normal level. Let the people see your smiling, beautiful face.

• Treat talks like theater: You’re not relaying information; you’re acting! You should consider yourself a performer, and it’s okay to act like one. Actors often use the phrase “playing to the back row.” This means their gestures are meant to be bigger so they’re seen by the back row (it helps if you’re on a stage, like Kyle in Figure 13.2). Although you don’t have to bellow and make large sweeping gestures, don’t have conversations with the front row. Make eye contact with the people in the back, so they feel included. Also, new speakers often have a tendency to speak faster than they think they do. Make sure you speak at a normal rate of speed.

Figure 13.2 Kyle has given over 200 talks since 2012 in different parts of the globe. He’s learned how to speak to even the largest crowds and connect with them.

• Mention other people, especially other speakers, during your talk: This gives you more credibility, plus you come off as gracious, sharing, and noncompetitive. Speakers who do this tend to be recognized and appreciated when it comes to future, more lucrative opportunities. (At which point, you can totally crush those other speakers and grind their noses into the dirt.)

Click here to view code image

@kyleplacy: Man, that's pretty dark.
@edeckers:  They made fun of my Hello Kitty backpack!

• Have a soundtrack you sing to yourself as you’re being introduced and walk on stage: If you have time beforehand, listen to music that puts you in a good mood and leaves you feeling confident. One public speaking trainer once suggested humming the opening bars of the Rocky theme song to ourselves as we walked across the stage to begin our talks.

• Record your talks and study them afterward: You will be your own harshest critic, so watch and listen to recordings of yourself speaking. Take notes on what you need to fix, then fix them. Stand-up comics record themselves and then listen to the audio playback to see what parts of their set need to be fixed. You can do that too.

Important Technology Tips for Presenters

We both love using our computers for our talks, and we’re particular about what we use. We’re both rabid Apple fans and use our MacBooks for everything. We love Apple Keynote because it’s stable and not prone to crashing. However, we recognize that PowerPoint is widely used, and it’s easier to transfer a slide deck to someone else’s computer. (Keynote can also export slide decks to the PowerPoint format.)

Both systems have their pros and cons, but regardless of who’s right (us—we’re right), you should know these several technology tips before giving a talk:

• Make sure your computer is focused: Shut down every program, hide all the files on your desktop in another folder, and clear out your browser history and disk cache. We’ve all heard stories about presenters who clicked the wrong button on their computer and had some embarrassing photos pop up on the screen for everyone to see. While the safest bet is to never look at those kind of not-safe-for-work things to begin with, at least make sure they’re not easily accessible or accidentally switched on. So clear your history and cache, hide any personal photos and documents in a safe place, and make sure all programs except your presentation software are off. You should even turn off your wifi unless you need it for your presentation.

• Use big photos and (almost) no text: PowerPoint and Keynote can be used effectively if they’re used correctly. When we do slide decks, we get Creative Commons photos for slide images and put no more than five words on a slide.

Remember, you are the focus of the room, not the slides. The slides are there for visual support and perhaps a little comedy. They should not contain the important information; you should.

If you do use text, make the point size at least 144 (two inches), so people in the back of the room can see it. If they’re straining to see from the back, your projector isn’t big enough.

Hopefully you scoped out the room ahead of time, saw how huge it is, and noticed that the projector was about as effective as holding up slides and a flashlight.

But if you don’t get that chance, always assume the worst when it comes to available technology. If you stick with photos and huge text, you’ll be fine. If you only use photos to support your points, you’re not lost if the projector fails or is too small, or your presentation software crashes. You can still speak without these props.

• Use your computer for presentations: A lot of well-meaning people will offer you the chance to use their computers for your presentations, but that is sometimes more trouble than it’s worth. They may have an older version of PowerPoint, Keynote won’t run on a PC, or the right monitor cable for their laptop is missing. You’ve already tweaked your computer to perform the way you want it to, and it’s hard to learn someone else’s setup, especially if you’re preparing your presentation five minutes before you start.

If you use someone else’s system, you’re at their mercy. Rather than putting yourself in a situation in which your entire presentation hinges on the quality of someone else’s system, insist that you use your own computer. If you can’t, be gracious about it, find a way to make it work, and hope it goes well. (If it doesn’t, don’t apologize to your audience for not having a slide deck. There’s no point in embarrassing the organizers; that will get you blackballed from speaking at future events. Instead, use your computer as personal cue cards, and speak without a deck. That’s why the point about using big photos and almost no text is so important.)

• Get a separate presentation computer, preferably a MacBook: If you want to make a living giving presentations, you need a computer that’s not prone to virus attacks, crashes, and glitches that can pop up in the middle of a presentation.

For stability, ease of use, and graphics capability, you can’t go wrong with a MacBook. And yes, there’s Windows 10, which is much easier to use and more stable than all the other versions that came before it, and yes, Macs aren’t immune to viruses. But a Mac is less likely to suffer these things and is less likely to crash in the middle of a presentation. And if you have the budget, get a decent LCD projector. Don’t cheap out and get the smallest, least expensive one you can find. Get a good one that can brightly fill up a screen from 25 feet away.

• Upload your slide deck to SlideShare.net before you give your presentation: We’ve been in rooms where everything was hard-wired and bolted in place, including the computer, and we were forced to use their system instead of our own. Although it’s possible to export a Keynote deck to a PowerPoint version, this really screws up the formatting and fonts, and it looks bad. There’s nothing worse than seeing weird fonts and screwed-up slides as you’re giving your talk and having no possible way to fix it.

Instead, upload your deck to SlideShare the day before your presentation (see Figure 13.3). Then, before your talk, log on to SlideShare and pull up the deck in full presentation mode. It may mean you have to stand next to the keyboard to change the slides instead of using a remote (which is wicked cool and makes you feel like a big shot). But at least you don’t have to mess around with putting your presentation on a thumb drive and hoping your presentation software isn’t newer than theirs, or exporting your deck to their software and hoping the formatting isn’t messed up. We’ve done all these things, and they can really mess up a presentation.

We also recommend paying for the premium membership for SlideShare. It’s worth it.

Figure 13.3 One of Erik’s presentations that’s available on SlideShare, which is now owned by LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft. Note the clever use of a numbered list in the presentation title.

Finally, by having the SlideShare URL, you can give people the link to your deck rather than printing 50 copies of handouts and giving them out to the 20 people who showed up.

You can also shorten the URL at a shortening service like bit.ly. A bit.ly-shortened URL is 20 characters, so it’s easier for audience members to write down. You can also ask people to email you so you can send them the URL. This helps you add to your list of contacts as well, and you can communicate with them in the future, like when you’re speaking again or have a book for sale.

• Always carry a monitor cord and extension cord: Most places already have a projector available, but they don’t always have a monitor cord. Carry a monitor cord (and a Mac-to-RGB adapter if you took our earlier advice and got a MacBook) to be safe. Also, get a 12-foot 3-to-1 extension cord. Then you can plug in a laptop and the projector and reach the plug across the room. You may even find it helpful to carry a presenter’s bag with the cords, colored markers, notepads, index cards, duct tape for cords, and any props you may use in your talks. Leave it in the trunk of your car when you’re not using it, so you don’t forget it if you drive to your presentations.

• Create screen shots of websites you want to use: It’s nice to pull up a live website and show it off to a room full of people. But too often, you don’t have access to the conference’s private wifi, or the wifi is public wifi and everyone is on it, so it’s slower than a turtle with a limp. Don’t depend on having wifi access. Create screen shots of every website you need and keep them handy. Better yet, incorporate the screen shots into your slide deck, so you don’t have to jump between applications.

If you do have wifi access, open all the websites you’re going to need ahead of time. Consider using a browser like Firefox or Google Chrome for additional stability and speed.

How Does Public Speaking Apply to Our Four Heroes?

Although people generally speak for the same reasons—they desperately crave attention and want to make some money at the same time (Don’t lie! We all know the truth!)—the path they take to get there may be a little different. So how will our four heroes use public speaking to advance in their career path or find a new job?

• Allen (influencer) spent 14 years as an account manager and has a lot of expertise in account management, marketing campaigns, ad creation, and the like. He would be a valuable resource to new marketing managers and coordinators, so speaking about a niche within marketing management would be a good one to pursue.

Topics like marketing analytics and ROI measurement would be good subjects to present to his local chapter of the American Marketing Association. Not only can he share his knowledge, he might make good connections with potential employers there.

• Beth (climber) wants to move up the career ladder to a chief marketing officer position in the insurance industry, so she could pursue a speaking plan in one of two directions: she can either speak to marketing people, or she can speak to insurance people.

She can even do it with the same presentation: “Marketing Tactics in a Heavily Regulated Industry.” The talk can be geared toward any regulated industry, like finance, health care, or pharmacy. Or she can gear it back toward her own industry and retitle it “Proven Marketing Tactics in the Insurance Industry.”

• Carla (neophyte) wants to change careers from pharmaceutical sales to nonprofits, so she is better off focusing on nonprofit issues rather than pharmaceutical ones. Although it would be easy to focus on a pharmaceutical audience, those aren’t the people she wants to work for. Because a lot of nonprofit professionals don’t think of themselves as businesspeople, business topics geared toward nonprofits tend to gather big audiences.

Carla should focus on speaking to nonprofit professional organizations, such as the Kentucky Fundraising Professionals Organization or Planned Giving Professionals of Ohio, and teaching people how to take a sales approach to fundraising. This will not only show her business expertise, it will put her in front of people who either hire fundraisers or know about fund-raising positions.

• Darrin (free agent) is a commodity as an IT professional because he “fixes computers.” (Sorry, IT folks, that’s the way we non-IT folks see it.) Darrin wants to start public speaking to enhance his career and job growth possibilities, so he has two choices. He can try to impress the IT hiring managers by giving presentations about a particular growing field, like “Walking the Fine Line Between Network Security and Social Media.” Or he can do basic presentations to reach C-level (CEO, COO, CIO, and so on) hiring managers, like “Basic Computer Security for Office Staff.”

Either way, Darrin’s talks should be geared specifically toward the right audience. Because Darrin usually only transfers laterally based on salary, giving the right kind of talk to the right kind of audience might also get him a bump up the career ladder.

Speaking Tips in 140 Characters

• You’re on the minute you walk into the building. The person you’re gruff or abrupt with could be the person who gives your introduction. —@edeckers

• “Winging it” disrespects the audience. If you couldn’t bother to take the time to prepare, why should they bother to pay attention? —@LisaBraithwaite

• At a conference, be friendly and helpful to everyone before/after your session. They’ll remember that as much as they remember your talk. —@edeckers

• Ask people to email you for a copy of the slide deck. It’s a great way to track the number of people interested in your topic. —@kyleplacy

• Asking people for their email is also a great way to gather names for your newsletter. Just be sure you ask if you can send it first. —@kyleplacy

• Practice vocal variety by reading aloud. Children’s books, newspapers, poetry, and comedy dialogue help you work on pitch, pace, tone, and volume. —@LisaBraithwaite

• Have a central idea to come back to if you get on a tangent. It should be something to make it seamless while you find your thoughts. —@that_girl_lola

• Start fast, especially online (e.g., webinar). Attention spans are shorter than ever. —@1080group

• Don’t give a speech. Talk to your audience and add at least some element of discussion to it. —@GloriaBell

• We all have butterflies before we speak. Train yours to fly in formation, so the energy expends with purpose. —@IkePigott

• Before you start, drink something that gives you something in your stomach. —@CoxyMoney

• Make a friend (or four) in the audience by using them as repeated points of eye contact. Smile within the first 30 seconds. —@GrindTheMusical

• Keep your visual aids as free of words as possible. Use blank slides between photo slides often, so they’re looking at you, not the screen. —@GrindTheMusical

• All the books, blogs, and trainings in the world don’t mean a thing if you don’t apply your learning. Make opportunities—get out and speak! —@LisaBraithwaite

• Q&A your ass off. —@CoxyMoney

• Put your closing after the Q&A. The last thing the audience will hear is your final message, not a random or irrelevant question from the crowd. —@LisaBraithwaite

1. https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/manage/manage-your-finances-business-credit

2. www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,659577,00.html.

3. https://www.eremedia.com/ere/how-to-recruit-on-facebook/