Anyone starting out in the speaking business faces the challenge of finding people willing to pay for their services.

Carolyn Millet created a successful speaking business from scratch 12 years ago when she noticed some High School graduates who lacked social graces and decided to do something about it. Her Junior Manners Cotillion now serves the San Francisco Bay Area and helps young people acquire the social skills that will make their transition into adult society an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Click on the podcast link below to hear Carolyn’s frank and humorous description about how she started out. Marvel at the commitment and determination with which she undertook the challenge of starting a successful speaking business.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:37 — 2.6MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Speaker Bureaus are an important way for Professional Speakers to market their services.

Michael Soon Lee, CSP, spoke to the Pro-Track meeting last Saturday about the advantages and disadvantages of registering with a Speaker’s Bureau. These Bureaus come in all sizes – from those that deal with the famous to those that will work with the speaker who is starting out.

Michael used to manage a Speaker Bureau. Click on the podcast below to hear him share some of his insights and experience.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:14 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

I’m pleased to report that ‘Professionally Speaking’ is available as a podcast in iTunes. Here’s how to find it:

Open iTunes and choose ‘iTunes Store’ then search for ‘Ian Griffin’ to find the Professionally Speaking podcast and hit Subscribe to receive regular updates.

I’m also listed on Podcast Alley {pca-f771c3467b53e71e4556c2edecd0844c}
(Which required me to post the claim tag above on my blog – hope it works….)

As well as on Yahoo Podcasts and Podcast Ready.

I had no idea there were so many great podcast directories out there! If, like me, you are getting more and more of your information from podcasts (which I listen to in at the gym, in the car and while walking the dog) then regular searches of these sources of info will pay off, big time. Believe me, you won’t find this many options on commercial radio or television.

My current playlist favorites include:

• Killer Innovations, HP’s irrepressible CTO, Phil McKinney shares his insights into what makes innovation happen.
• Start The Week Plummy accents and barbed wit combine in this wonderfully cultured BBC Radio 4 discussion forum.
• The Onion Radio News Doyle Redland anchors this quick dose of headline humor.
• This American Life Ira Glass’s quirky PBS radio show tells the story of real people in an unreal world.
• The Wizard of Ads Roy H. Williams works wonder with words.
• Letter to America Hipsters Jett Loe and Wayne Ordinary American take Belfast, Northern Ireland, by storm.
• Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program dishes the inside scoop from the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley.
• Polyamory Weekly Tales from the front of responsible non-monogamy from a pansexual, kink-friendly point of view.

OK, OK, so I put that last one in there to see if you were paying attention! But seriously, podcasts are a great way to keep current with special interests of EVERY kind!

Enjoy!

Associations across America spend millions on meetings and events.

Dr. Bill Wittich, incoming NSA Northern California President, shared his expertise Saturday on how professional speakers can market themselves to Associations. Bill spoke on the panel of experts at the St Patrick’s Day Pro-Track meeting.

Click on the podcast link below to hear Bill tell us why Associations are such a lucrative market and his secrets for networking your way into a speaking engagement.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:50 — 2.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Thanks to Brady for telling me about about an amusing Oddcast demo.

Oddcast does text-to-speech conversion. You can play with the nationality and sex of the speaker. Hear the same words spoken in the voice of Audrey or Charles from the UK. Then skip over to the USA and hear how Claire or Mike would say it. Next, switch to any one of a dozen other nationalities to hear Jolie or Bernard from France; Reiner or Klara from Germany or many others speak.

You could be boring predictable and type in a phrase like “You are so sexy” or more adventurous and cut and paste the text from a Robert Frost poem or the opening words of your next speech.

Beware, you can only play around a few times before the system thanks you for visiting and puts a stop to the fun.

Enjoy!

The National Speakers Association Northern California Newsletter goes out monthly to over 600 subscribers. Each month we profile one of the Pro-Track training group. This month I’m breaking new territory by including a podcast of an interview I recorded to supplement the written profile.

Pro-Track Profile: Nannette Carroll

Nannette Carroll approaches all management challenges as communication opportunities. For over 20 years, her upbeat management seminars have helped participants use their process skills to discover root causes for people problems. With this knowledge, managers can implement lasting solutions. Her background as Director of Management Development/ Training for a Fortune 100 gives her a uniquely helpful perspective on aligning process, project and people management.

Nannette sets high standards for achievement while creating a fun, supportive, collaborative environment for participants in both workshops and speaking engagements.

As well as being a member of the National Speakers Association she is active in the California Writers Club and has a book coming out soon.

Nannette and I talked in a rather noisy hotel lobby during a break in the Pro-Track Saturday training on March 17, 2007 – St. Patrick’s Day!

Podcast Note: The opening and closing royalty free music is from a track called Games by the band Sour Monkey found on the Public Music Project website.

Click below to hear my interview with Nannette Carroll.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:24 — 2.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

A recent podcast of the wonderful BBC Radio 4 programme, Start The Week, featured an interview with Bamber “Your Starter For Ten” Gascoigne, host of the long-running TV quiz show University Challenge. This was a fixture on British television during my formative years. I’m still embarrassed to admit I failed the qualifying rounds at Leicester Univeristy in 1972 and so never appeared on the show along with the other scruffy undergraduates of the era.

Gascoigne is an established author and historian who has launched a fascinating Web 2.0 venture – Timesearch – an intelligent search tool that organizes results on historical time lines.

Timesearch is an invaluable tool for the professional speaker or speechwriter. Suppose, for example, you are an executive at the Hewlett-Packard Company scheduled to speak in Sydney at a Chamber of Commerce event. A simple query in Timesearch focussed on Australia in the 1930’s would show the major events that occurred at the time Bill & Dave were establishing HP:

you can immediately see that the Sydney Harbor Bridge was only seven years old when HP was started in the Palo Alto garage in 1939. Robert Menzies became Prime Minister that year. Both useful local references to build into your notes. Icons to the left and right side of each reference link to Google Images and other website search results to enable easily building your speech content on this topic. So far, so good.

But what if Timesearch allowed wiki-like user generated content to be added to the 10,000 entries Gascoigne has entered into the current database? Now that would be way cool. It would, for example, allow HP’s archivists to add the company timeline and show the intersection of HP’s history with world events. Family histories and details of individual lives and locations would enrich and extend the tool. Gascoigne revealed plans on Start the Week for this exciting option as the next stage of development for Timesearch.

For now, the tool offers a valuable source of ideas for your next speech.

Consider one more example, using fascinating historical cross-references to demonstrate cultural sensitivity. Say you were addressing a visiting delegation from Korea:

How impressed would they be to hear you quote the fact that Koreans invented bronze movable type 60 years before Gutenberg built his press in Germany?

Use Timesearch today to enrich your presentations. And check back shortly to see if it allows you to load your own data into it so your biography becomes a part of world history. Timesearch: when things happen to good people.

I went over to leafy Woodside last Saturday for a half-day NSA/NC mini-meeting featuring Mitch Gooze, an expert on direct marketing.

Mitch quickly summarized the received wisdom in the NSA – that if you have products (Books, CD’s, DVD’s, Special Reports etc) to sell both at the back of the room when you speak and from your website while you sleep you will increase your income above and beyond mere speaking fees. So far, so good.

Where Mitch went into new territory (for me anyway) was by pointing out that the heavy hitters, such as Randy Gage, make mega-bucks because they have more people to sell products to than anyone else. They’ve grown a mailing list of prospects who they then market to over the Internet. Mitch claimed Gage has over 150,000 qualified names on his list to whom he sells $80K worth of products in a weekend.

This is not spamming. It’s not multi-level marketing.

It’s capturing the names of visitors to your events and to your website and keeping in touch with them (via online newsletters, email updates and so on) so they’ll be a potential customer base for information products you develop and market to them.

The stars must have been in alignment for me that evening. Lights went off, new vistas opened. Since Saturday I’ve discovered a whole world of expertise out there which helps drive anyone with information to share (give away or sell) to the largest possible online audience.

Want to know more?

I recommend checking out Fred Gleeck (enter your name and email on his site and download his 5 massive eBooks on Selling Info Products, Publishing for Profit and more), the Internet Marketing Podcast with Mike Filsame available on iTunes and Tom Antion’s Internet Marketing Programs.

None of these guys can make you an instant millionaire. It might take a few months.

What do you think? Too good to be true? Let me know if you have tried any of these programs and if they work for you.

I can think of better ways to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon, but I had no choice but update my WordPress software on my web site today.

My ISP was no longer going to support some older software the WordPress version I installed in November 2005 uses. So I spent 2 hours backing up my blog, deleting the original version and then upgrading to the latest version.

Tedious stuff, and something people who use a blog hosting service don’t need to ever worry about.

But having the blog on my own server hopefully drives traffic (and the all important Google page rankings) to my site.

I also took advantage of the upgrade to switch my ‘Permalinks’ from a numbered entry to a title – something Google also likes.

All this has left a few things broken, my Blogrolls did not display at first, after a couple more hours experimenting they do, but without the all-important description. I will fix this soon.

The end result should be that I’ll have the ability to install some of the more recent plugins for WordPress – such as one I need to allow me to launch a podcast feature on my blog.

Let me know if you find anything ‘broken’ in my blog so that I can fix it pronto.

Creating a Bestseller and a Bestselling Career: 101 strategies and tactics

Over 100 NSA/NC members and guests enjoyed a morning with the “NSA power couple� Karyn Buxman-Godek, CSP, CPAE, and Greg Godek, ABC, RSVP. One of NSA’s most romantic and successful couples shared their secrets for creating a “best-selling career� – combining public speaking and writing books. They promised to deliver the goods on how to:

• Write books quickly
• Create killer keynotes
• Employ humor secrets from comedians and storytellers
• Successfully and effectively market like a maniac
• Generate speaking opportunities
• Harness your creativity

Karyn has been a fulltime keynote speaker for 20 years. As humorist, she founded The HumorLab, an organization that researches the art and science of humor. Greg is best known for his 2.5-million-copy self-published book, 1001 Ways to Be Romantic. Around NSA he is known as the editor of the Writers PEG e-zine, and as a marketing maniac willing to brainstorm with anyone.

Karyn and Greg built best selling careers as information brokers by combining the best of both worlds. She’s a speaker who writes; he’s a writer who speaks. Between them, they cover a lot of territory. It is summarized in their list of 101 Strategies and Tactics for success — no matter if you are more comfortable holding the pen or walking the podium. In the hope that I won’t contravene the Fair Use copyright laws I’ll list those that impressed me – to get the full list you would’ve had to have paid your $70 fee to attend the event.

Jump off the cliff

Take risks with your business. Avoid paralysis by analysis. Mimic the software industry — release version 1.0 and then refine and re-release. Version 1.0 of a your book may be 3 pages each of 12 chapters that will expand and grow as you gather feedback from people you share ‘pre-publication’ copies with in exchange for proofreading and their suggestions about what to add. (NOTE: Some use a blog in the same way – as a test market for your ideas and a forum to gather feedback.)

Write a great title

Books like Who Moved My Cheese? and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus are mega-hits because of their title. Likewise, those that people ask for in Barnes & Noble as that seven habits book or the Prophecy thing sell as much by virtue of their title as their content.

To test-market a title share the idea with your favorite Starbucks barista then casually ask the next time you are in there if they remember the title. If a couple of dozen strangers can recall it then you have a winner.

Invest in designing the book cover

People do judge a book by its cover. So invest in the services of a pro designer to create your cover. Avoid covers that scream ‘Self Published’ to the world. Greg finds it useful to ask his designer for three concepts:

1. The cover you want
2. The cover Random House would create
3. A wild and crazy cover — within reason

Select the best font and images from these three and the result will be a killer book cover. The cover must address the audience. Be wary of putting your picture on it unless it’s a souvenir book (to sell from the Back of Room after speaking when the audience is fired up and wants a piece of you.)

Writing the book is the easy part

It’s all about marketing, positioning and branding. Publishing is a detail. Publishers are not really interested in selling books. They look first to grow their catalog with new titles. It’s your job to push product. Greg recommends negotiating long and hard to get a couple of thousand extra copies at cost + 10% (NOT wholesale – that’s one way the publisher rips off authors!). Use these books to power your publicity machine. Send a dozen at a time to local radio stations that will interview you and then give away copies to listeners who call in. Run a coordinated and relentless publicity campaign. Use the book to build your reputation and career. Professional speakers use their book to secure speaking engagements. Reach media people via the Radio-TV Interview Report. Use the book to generate articles about you. Tie into topics people are interested in. Coordinate with the annual cycle of news coverage (Valentines, Christmas etc.)

Speaking tips

As much as Greg told us about being successful in the publicity and publishing worlds, Karyn shared more about what makes a successful speaker. Writing might net you $1 a copy, speakers can command fees of $3-10K a speech. So you wanna make $100K a year? Do the math.

Look for humor in real life

Use stories instead of jokes. Funny means money. You don’t have to make stuff up – real life is full of humor. Audiences appreciate humor that makes you the fall guy. Most adult humor comes from pain. Triples are funny (A-one, A-Two, A-Three). Use funny words: “Chihuahua” beats “a dog”. Keep a humor file. Keep a file of ‘saver’ moments (for when things go wrong on the podium – lights fail, mike cuts out, PowerPoint goes black, you trip over). Get Jeanne Robertson’s book Don’t let the Funny Stuff Get Away and Terry Paulson’s book Making Humor Work.

Look for sponsors

If an event can’t afford your fees, get a sponsor. Local and regional sponsorships from major corporations are easier to come by than a national contract. Approach sponsors who want access to your audience. Tie the benefits of your speech back to product they wish to sell. Check out Aldonna Ambler’s talk from the 2oo4 NSA Convention on Corporate Sponsorship on the NSA website.

Look to improve

Invest in annual coaching. Invite other speakers to come see you. Join a Mastermind group. Always over-deliver. Stay active in the NSA. Read in your field and keep a clipping file. Study your competition. Use Mind Mapping to develop ideas. Show up to the conference early and attend other sessions. Track your topic with Google Alerts. Invest in an audio recorder and keep it with you.