Before Pursuing Public Speaking, Consider These 5 Things

Paid public speaking can be a fun and rewarding job, but many public speakers fail if they aren’t prepared to take on this career. Perhaps you’ve given a few talks and realized you have a knack for public speaking. Maybe you’ve been speaking in corporate environments and you haven’t been paid much for doing so. Maybe you see public speakers on your TV or computer and you feel like you could do it too. If you are thinking these things, you might want to go for paid public speaking as a career move. If you’re a good speaker, it’s pretty exciting that you could be paid to speak in front of groups. But before you make this career shift, you may want to think about these 5 things:

• Most of the money in this industry is in corporate speaking.

If you want to get paid a solid amount for public speaking, your best bet is to go into corporate speaking. In order to do corporate speaking, you’ll need to prove that your topic in some way improve a company. Maybe your topic decreases turnover or maybe it helps employees get along better. Perhaps it helps employees be happier or more productive. If you can convince companies of this, you’ll be able to reach success in the field of public speaking.

• Competition for high paying corporate “gigs” is tough.

In order to gain engagement, you’ll need to appear to be top notch, even before you are. In this industry, window dressing is key. Your website, your content, and the way that you market yourself will have a massive effect on whether you get the chance to show anyone how effective you are on stage.

• Paid speakers have to take their jobs seriously.

For prophets and celebrities, just speaking “off the cuff” might be acceptable. But in the world of paid corporate speaking, your message needs to be well-delivered, well-toned, and properly rehearsed. If you want to do well in the industry, you have to put a lot of effort into practicing your speeches. That means rehearsing everything from the tone of your voice to your gestures.

• Before you go after the biggest venues, test your performance, your content, and your jokes.

One of the biggest reasons speakers fail is because they are not right about their content. Perhaps they think their content is better than it is, they are basing their knowledge on things they don’t know much about, they deliver content that audiences have already heard a million times, or their research is from too long ago. In order to enter the field and gain success, you need fresh content, and you need to deliver it in an engaging, entertaining way.

• “Set it and forget it” marketing doesn’t apply to speakers

If you are the product, you will need to market yourself from the beginning of your career to the end. You cannot sit and wait for the phone to ring. If you jump into things without being prepared, you will slow down your progress. You cannot build a website now and expect to ride on it for the next decade. Most speakers are always working to write new promotional materials, new speeches, and even new books. You will need to keep your name under the noses of meeting planners at all times.

Now that you know some of the challenges associated with professional speaking, you can figure out if this is the industry for you. Professional speaking is a field that can be lucrative and even glamorous. Whether speaking is your business, or you are speaking to attract customers to your core business, professional speaking can be a fascinating profession.