From Free Stages to Paid Keynotes: How to Build Your Speaking Career

And it's because lately I've heard a lot of shit that's pissed me off as it pertains to paid speaking specifically.

Because one thing that the online space, the coaching industry loves to do is convince us that there's only one way of doing things.

And if you listened to my episode last week all about sales and uncovering my own sales process, I think it's really important to talk about the fact that when it comes to building a speaking career, what is typical in, like, the online space, very niche coaching industry, is not really what's common in the rest of the world.

[laughs] M- and I'm talking about, like, the business world across industries.

And one of the things that comes up a lot is this topic of, like, getting paid to speak.

And one of the reasons why we think that we need, like, some sort of secret sauce, some sort of, like, glamorous sizzle reel or all these, like, really special pieces, years of experience to be able to get paid to speak is because the coaching industry has kind of ruined it for all of us.

And I say this because in the female entrepreneur space, and I can say this because I host a female entrepreneur event where my speakers at this point in time are not paid.

Okay? I do this because I built my career on unpaid speaking and made a lot of money from it.

I have made upwards of $20,000 on the back end of speaking at different events.

So there is power to being on the right stage in front of the right audience who are your ideal clients and being able to motivate them to work with you.

That's something I think every personal brand needs to be capable of.

And I think, just to clarify, when I talk about personal brands, I'm not, not talking about you as an influencer.

I'm talking about you as a professional with a business where you do consulting or coaching or you have different services that people would want to buy after seeing you speak about your expertise.

And let's be real here.

The female entrepreneur events, the budgets, they're a little bit slim, and I know people don't like this.

And I'm just here to say, like, I think free speaking isn't a bad thing.

I built a career doing it.

But I also think that at some point, especially if you're starting to speak to more established audiences or large organizations or very, very large conferences, you can start to ask to get paid to receive money for speaking at those events or whenever you really want to, right? But it's a choice.

And this is the mistake that I see a lot of business owners make when they do wanna start using their personal brand to get paid for more speaking engagements.

They think they're either, like, not ready, not qualified yet, or they need something, like, really, really specific to be able to, like, land paid speaking opportunities when the reality is at some point in your career You don't need to have, like, some sort of secret sauce or anything like that.

You just need to have the willingness to ask for payment.

Because here's the crazy thing.

Uh, today I'm gonna dive into, like, you know, where you can start to find different paid speaking engagements and what to look for and what you really need to have in place.

But the thing that I want everybody to remember is, like, at some point, you can just ask for payment.

So, if someone asks you to speak at an event, I don't care, like, what event it is, if someone asks you to speak at an event and you wanna get paid for that speaking engagement, you can simply say to them, "I would love to speak at your event.