Public Speakers: Ignore The New Rules Of Speaking At Your Peril

In 2007 the major trade association for public speakers, the National Speakers Association published a major survey about the public speaking industry.

The survey concluded that “NSA speakers are involved in many types of speaking engagements” including: Seminars, Training Events, Breakout sessions, Keynotes, Consulting

The top two audiences for a speakers work was corporations and associations.

Then the economy tanked and destroyed all of the proven success formulas in the public speaking industry. The reason for that, in my view, is that professional public speakers ignored the new rules.

What do I mean by that? Well simply put, when the economy was fine, speakers sought speaking engagements, showed up and delivered their message to whomever was in attendance. Some then offered their books or other products to the audience and others tried to position themselves for consulting or training work with the companies in attendance.

Because of the success of that model, they invested little time on building relationships with those attendees who were passionate for the topic being presented. Most speakers were focused instead on the companies in attendance and on gaining more speaking engagements. They never imagined companies or associations cutting their budgets and significantly reducing speaking opportunities causing them to need another way to sell their products and services.

Paying attention to the new rules of public speaking may have helped those speakers who have really struggled in the last year or so.

The new rules tell us that speaking is merely a way to distribute content to those people who are hungry for information on the topic we speak on. In that sense, we’re not speakers, we’re publishers.

Some great news is that through the Internet, we can find and attract a perfectly targeted audience anywhere in the world. We’re not likely to ever speak in all of countries where we have followers and fans, but they’ll read our information, buy our products and hire us to deliver our services.

Since the market for speaking engagements is significantly reduced, the time is now to realize that the hunger for information on every imaginable niche topic is stronger than ever before. As a publisher your job is to seek and build relationships with people who are passionate about your topic and offer them your unique information in multi-media formats.

The first step is to have a video of your presentation made, then re purpose the video into an audio, transcribed into a book, distributed as a series of articles, some blog posts and more. If you’d like some help getting started, let me know. My new professional speaker training program will make it easy for you to do.

Speakers marketing mentor Scott A Dennison is discussing the new rules of Professional Speaker Training at his website. You are also welcome to claim a copy of his newest report “Public Speaking is Dead!” and a series of Public Speaking Tips for free. You are welcome to reprint this article – but get your own unique content version here.

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