Your audience members are not really there to see you. They attend to gain useful information. Once you get the realization that it’s not about you, it can take a little bit of the pressure off and allow you to focus on sharing great content. Your main goal for seminars shouldn’t be to pitch people your service or product but it should be that the audience leaves the seminar with usable practical information. This is what will position you as an expert to them.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing a pull and stay at the end of the seminar, and I don’t even have an issue with your pitching something at the end as long as you’ve given valuable information throughout the session. However, too many sessions are majority pitch and little content.

If you have not built a big platform yet and aren’t well known in the area, you need to leverage off somebody else’s audience. This could be your local Chamber of Commerce, a business networking group, or any association locally. These kinds of local groups are always on the lookout for quality speakers. You won’t get paid a fee to do the sessions for the most part, but when you’re starting out your payment is exposure to your marketplace.

Locally, this is a great way to build a following but I caution you on doing many free seminars outside of your local area. When you start getting known virtually, people will start asking you to present seminars at their events. What the general audience does not know about most of these events—especially many of the Internet marketing ones—is that the speaker not only speaks for free, but is on the hook for travel, accommodations, and meal expenses. If you’ve ever gone to one of these events as an attendee and wondered why some of the speakers pitch so hard during their seminar, it’s because they are already in the hole the second they step on the stage. Three or four nights’ hotel accommodation and a return flight, among other things, can mean that the speakers you’re looking at are already down a thousand dollars, if not more, before they even open their mouths.

As the audience, remember that the conference organizer may be putting a lot of pressure on the speaker. Often, the organizer will get half the revenue from anything sold at the event. If the speaker does not sell, then he or she will not be asked back to future events. So not only would the speaker have to sell $1,000 worth of product from the stage to break even, he or she would actually have to sell $2,000 worth of product from the stage to break even.

As a speaker, if you are looking at an event that you were going to anyway and were willing to pay to attend, then being offered a speaking slot is a great way to attend the conference for free, plus you get exposure in front of your potential market. That is a winning situation that can help out your business on your own terms.

However, speaking at many seminars for no pay outside of your local market is a quick way to go broke. Not to mention that the organizer will usually book 15 to 20 speakers over three days to maximize the event’s potential revenue, so the audience is getting pitched 15 to 20 times in those three days. When audience participants are over-pitched, they become less and less interested in what you have to say and less likely to become future customers of yours.

The requirement to sell from the stage means that many conference organizers don’t necessarily pick the best content providers for seminars. They choose the best closers, the ones they’ve heard who can generate the most money from stage. And when you do not deliver sales from the stage, you will not be asked back.

This setup does not benefit the attendees. It hurts the longevity of the conference from year to year and turns off many people from seminars that are actually really good. These conferences are usually sold as low-ticket items from $97 to $497, which is usually your first indication that the event will be pitch-heavy.

In-person seminars cost a lot of money to implement. The organizers need to secure a half-decent hotel and rent rooms, organize food, and so forth. Organizing seminars is their business and they are in it to make money, not necessarily for the betterment of the industry.

Recently there has been a surge of great events such as PodCamp and BarCamp that are low cost but high value. If you want to find out which events are the best to go to as an attendee or a speaker, simply ask around on Twitter or Facebook where people are honest with their opinions.

What happens with many of the bad events is that the organizer books 20 or so speakers and allows them to be affiliates for the conference, meaning that they will be earning a percentage of the revenue for every ticket they sell to the event.¹¹⁵ The problem then is that when you get known as a speaker and begin to speak more frequently, in some of the speaker agreements with these events your contract will include that you will promote it. You will have to agree to promote their event X amount of times to your list. Event organizers are even beginning to mandate how many tweets you have to send out about it before the event. When you promote too many events, you end up exhausting your list. Your list will not want to hear about too many events and then when the events end up being heavy on pitch and light on content, you will lose your list. Think of how hard you worked to gain your following. Do you really want to lose them with forced promotions for events when you disagree with how they are organized?

One of the other reasons that organizers book such a high number of speakers is because they figure each of the 20 or so speakers can bring in 10 paid attendees who will bring in 200 people into the audience. I feel that it is the organizer’s job to bring people into the event. As a speaker, I bring my content to the event, the value of giving paying attendees something to see, hear, and learn. I do not pitch from stage. Valuable content should be your greatest sales tool when you work to position yourself in front of your market as an authority. You should be encouraged to give as much value in the hour as you have to give—not to hold back so you can sell more at the end.

I remember getting an e-mail from a conference organizer last year for an event where I was scheduled to speak. The e-mail said that as speakers we collectively needed to pull together and start promoting the heck out of the event because registrations were so low. I wrote them back to inform them that I was always happy to mention when I would be speaking at the event in their area, however, I am not a salesperson for their events. After going back and forth with a few heated e-mails I ended up removing myself from the event. It was clear that the content that speakers were bringing to the event was not valued and, therefore, it was not the kind of thing with which I wanted my company associated.

I do understand the idea of bartering your speaking skills for exposure. It is okay with me, as long as you feel you’re getting equal value back for what you’re doing. Please, just make sure that you don’t go into so much debt for the event that you feel pressured to sell from the stage. If you have to make a certain number of sales just to break even, it is going to show in your presentation. Your speaking will come off as inauthentic and pushy and ruin whatever great content you shared during the seminar.