Presentations That Pay: How to Give a Killer Public Speech

“Nothing is more seductive than a person who knows who they truly are.”

—Michael Margolis

WHY PUBLIC SPEAKING ROCKS; OR, “HOW TO GET PAID TO TRAVEL THE WORLD”

I’ve been a nomad pretty much fulltime since 2009. As a young adult I dreamt about racy adventures in exotic lands and I lived out them all. It’s been a long and wild journey across four continents.

People often ask me for advice about how to live this kind of lifestyle. How to leave home, how to “make it,” how long it took to earn an income so that I could support my lifestyle.

When I began my life as a nomad, I had little idea what I was doing. I wasted a lot of money and made many mistakes.

One of the frustrations I experienced early on was that I didn’t have any large, wellfunded company to compensate my travel expenses. As far as airfare, hotels, and transportation — it was all an expense that I paid for out of pocket.

During a flight to Salt Lake City, I made a friend who was a corporate worker. I saw how he had a nice room in a hotel, free buffet breakfast, free taxi from the airport… all compensated by his company.

And since then, I figured I should be able to have the same.

What if I could earn money everywhere I travelled — so that my traveling paid for itself, and then some? What if I could use traveling to build the core of my own empire?

I’m pleased to say that in the past year, I’ve developed a strategy which makes traveling pay for you. I changed just *one thing* about the way I travel and it has since doubled my business.

So what’s the secret? Public speaking.

Consider this:

• Public speaking is the best way to go from a complete unknown to an established brand and respected thought leader overnight.

• It’s also one of the best ways to generate B2B leads. In the last four months of 2017, from September to the end of December, my client base has doubled. A key part of that were the dozen or so live workshops and talks I hosted across Asia.

• I strongly feel that public speaking is the best way to establish real connections with a large group of targeted prospects, establish a tribe of loyal fans, and begin a sales conversation with multiple people at once.

• Public speaking is one of, if not the least, competitive form of marketing. Everyone else is competing for a small chunk of real estate using online methods — and all of their competition is doing the same. But when you speak, your competitors are not even in the same room. Let everyone else hide behind a screen, while you get your name and face out there.

If you love to travel, then it’s even better. Speaking is the best way to earn money everywhere you travel and meet a bunch of cool, likeminded people at the same time. Everyone wins.

Eventbrite flier for my growth hacking talk at Garage Society in Hong Kong — which drew around 80 people and had people throwing their money at me afterwards (which I relunctantly accepted).

How To Begin Securing Gigs

The first time I attempted to pitch myself as a speaker, I failed. I followed a guru’s advice to the letter. I visited Meetup.com and tried to pitch the moderators of meetup groups on the website. Very few people returned my messages and I was able to schedule zero workshops.

Not a single one.

Far too often, especially as far as marketing is concerned, we make an attempt, meet with failure, and deem the entire venture a failure.

In most cases, the strategy is actually sound we just need to change one thing. Perhaps we need to change who we’re targeting. Perhaps we need to change our message to one people actually care about.

In my case, I decided to focus on a different target. Meetup groups are just hobby and interest groups and have virtually no incentive to schedule workshops, other than for fun.

So I switched up my targeting and focused on coworking spaces instead. Coworking spaces always need speakers and events to keep people coming back in through their doors. They have a direct interest in providing as much value for their members as possible, so that members feel they are getting their full money’s worth.

Here’s how you can make this happen.

Start by Googling “coworking spaces” in a given city or use coworker.com to find a handful of coworking spaces to reach out to, and offer to give a presentation on your topic of expertise. You can also contact many coworking spaces directly through their Facebook pages.

To create your slides, check out GraphicRiver.net and purchase a nice template, and then fill your slides full of good and useful information. Don’t worry about giving away your secrets. Give as much value as you can and many people will be too overwhelmed or too lazy to execute all the killer information you provide that they will simply ask if they can hire you to do it all for them.

Of course, in your closing slides, include all of your contact information and the next steps so that they can join your group, community, follow you, and so on. Then provide them with next steps and a call to action to help them further their progress after they get home (if this call to action directs them to a landing page or webinar that you have created, all the better).

You should try to mix in a workshop or two any time you visit a new city. The spaces bring interested prospects to you, and they are happy to run helpful events for their community and bring more people in the door.

I traveled all around Asia this year: Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, Bangkok,

Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Penang, and Chiang Mai… and gave one or two talks in each city I visited.

Not only did these workshops pay for the trips, but people also lined up afterwards pleading to work with me immediately.

These events also reinforced and boosted the confidence my current clients had in me, dramatically reducing turnover.

Afterwards, you can give your slides a new life by also uploading them to Slideshare, and use it as part of your sales presentation to new prospects. You can see an example of one of one of my presentations here.

This wasn’t the only thing I did that contributed to the increase in business, and there were other strategies which also paid off quite handsomely. But it was a main driver.

If you plan to travel anyway, I highly recommend following this strategy as you go. I have a unique personal philosophy: you can attend networking events and seminars, or you can speak at them. You can read books, or you can write them.

Focus on the activities which deliver the biggest returns. If you do, the future truly is yours for the taking; the opportunities vast and limitless.

THE FOUR-STEP FORMULA TO CREATE BETTER SPEECHES

Richard C. Borden is the author of “Public Speaking as the Listeners Like It!” which was a classic gem from the 1930’s. For years, he was one of the nation’s most popular speakers and sales trainers and lectured on public speaking at New York University.

Borden has developed a four-step formula to help give a great speech. As you are preparing your speech, imagine your audience interjecting and shouting out these four outbursts:

1. “Ho hum!” Your introduction and opening sentence must grab attention and electrify the audience to pass the “ho hum” check.

2. “Why bring that up!?” Expand upon your attention-grabbing opener. Pique their interest further.

3. “For instance?” Share at least one specific, persuasive example, story, or case study to reinforce your point.

4. “So what?” What can we do with this information?

As you prepare your speech, run it through these filters. Remember that the first step is always to capture people’s attention.

I would like to recommend a simple litmus-test which I often recommend to clients which can help make your opening message stronger. It’s called “The Four AM Test.”

If you were to wake up a member of your audience (or your target prospect) up at four in the morning and deliver your opening, would they care? Would it address something of such immediate interest that they would immediately get up and demand to learn more? Or would they beg you to put them back to sleep?

Right from the very beginning, you must always electrify your audience somehow. In the book “Ultimate Sales Machine” the author Chet Holmes teaches us what he calls “The Stadium Pitch” (recommended for capturing an audience’s interest).

Chet asks us to imagine that we are selling office equipment in front of a room full of executives. You could title your talk the way most people would, such as:

“The Five Ways Our Office Equipment Can Benefit You”

…Though it’s virtually guaranteed that you would lose the interest of at least 90% of your audience, Holmes says. Ho-hum!

How much better would it be to say something like…

“The Five Ways You Are Wasting Money in Your Operations and Administration.”

Suddenly, you’ve grabbed the attention of virtually every single business executive in that room who wants to make sure they are not making any of the mistakes you’re about to inform them about.

Once you’ve hooked your audience, reel them in. Follow the next three steps in the Borden Formula and the rest will fall into place.

In his book, Borden gives us an example of a speech by Bruce Barton, a top Madison Avenue advertising executive and co-founder of the agency BBDO. In this talk Barton was urging a group of young men to make the most of their spare time, as you’ll see…

1. Ho Hum! Barton begins his talk with an intriguing observation about the potential value of spare time: “Last month a man in Chicago refused a million dollars for an invention he had evolved in his spare time.”

2.Why Bring That Up! “You are interested in this because it confronts you with the possibilities of your spare time. Did you ever stop to think that most of the world’s great men have achieved their true life work, not in the course of their needful occupations, but—in their spare time?”

3. For Instance? “A tired-out rail-splitter crouched over his tattered books by candlelight or by fire-glow, at the day’s end; preparing for his future, instead of snoring or skylarking like his co-laborers. Abraham Lincoln cut out his path to later immortality—in his spare time.”

“An underpaid and overworked telegraph clerk stole hours from sleep or from play, at night, trying to crystallize into realities certain fantastic dreams in which he had faith. Today the whole world is benefiting by what Edison did—in his spare time.

“A down-at-heel instructor in an obscure college varied the drudgery he hated by spending his evenings and holidays in tinkering with a queer device of his, at which his fellow teachers laughed. But he invented the telephone —in his spare time.”

4. So What? “Gentlemen, you, too, have spare time. The man who says: ‘I would do such and such a great thing, if only I had time!’ would do nothing if he had all the time on the calendar. There is always time—spare time—at the disposal of every human who has the energy to use it. Use it!”