Kevin Hogan

Being a public speaker is about as good as it gets as a career. A far greater number of people, of course, use public speaking as the best way to promote their work, business and career.

The Bad News? This can be an outstanding strategy but executing something one has little skill or less experience at is no easy task.

Most people who present from the front of the room try hard, but ultimately fail to connect with their audience.

The Good News? You can find alternative ways to be paid more money to do different kinds of things in life but, for my time, this is truly a superb lifestyle.

You work hard. That is a fact.

There is pressure. No doubt about it. But…

If you learn to speak in public from the right person, you can begin to develop the skills it takes to captivate an audience.

You can learn to speak as a professional keynote speaker to leverage your learned abilities to grow your business, improve sales, or have a very, very nice additional income stream.

Regardless of how you will use your skills, one thing is always true: As a speaker you are really, at least in part, an entertainer.

You’re a deliverer of unique information.

You are remembered.

And you make a BIG difference in people’s lives.

Public Speaking is a Learned Skill

Someone once told me it was a talent. That made me smile. Nothing could be further from the truth. Presenting effectively before a small group or large audience is 100% learned.

The market for this skill is growing quickly as more and more businesses seek professionals to help motivate, inspire, teach or train employees. And as the economy goes down next year, trainers and presenters of quality information have more opportunities.

Those that have something to offer can use that knowledge to empower others. Those that don’t or those that choose not to develop expertise in a niche or field, will not find anyone interested in their services.

If you wanted to start a public speaking as a career or as a way to grow your current business, you would ultimately need to know what you have to offer and how to market your skills accordingly.

Enter: careful planning and commitment. Through the resources that you find here in this article, and one I’ll write for you next week, you can begin to structure your own speaking plan that will far outweigh your expectations and provide pleasant streams of income that might dwarf your current total personal revenue.

Learn to Sell Yourself

Your first outcome is to be able to sell yourself. You are developing a business or part of a business and the product you are selling is …you…the expression of your experience, your ability to motivate.

It’s not always an easy thing to sell yourself.

It has to be done elegantly and gracefully, along with flair!

When I look at what people remember me for, it becomes clear that people connect with you through your stories. And nothing is more intimate than the brief, well-constructed snippets from the video of your life.

When you can take advantage of everything life has thrown your way, and educate others on those experiences as far as cutting the learning curve or making it through difficulties, you can become an effective public speaker and can earn a significant income in the process.

Key Point:The key is to understand exactly what you have to offer that THEY NEED and then to market yourself effectively to THE RIGHT PEOPLE.

Developing this type of skill means examining yourself and your past. It means developing the experience of your past and your current knowledge to offer to others.

Question: What have you done or experienced that can help you to inform, educate or motivate others? What do you know that other people want to know? Or, what are you willing to be amazing at that others would like to learn from you?

You do not have to be rich and famous, though you may end up being just that after you have begun seeing growth in your business. You do not have to currently have many skills; the wonderful thing about this field is that you can learn everything you need, no matter who you are.

The only handicap that stops people is the inability to speak effectively…and I’ve watched speaker after speaker learn to overcome that problem.

This series of articles will show you how to accomplish what might be one of your dreams. Apply what you learn here to real life and within a matter of months, literally, you will have begun to forge a way into a successful and incredibly rewarding business.

By the way, there are plenty of people who have no desire to speak as a keynote speaker; but instead they want to speak as a way to generate business for their insurance, real estate, law and medical practices… among others.

And there are a lot of people who currently train or regularly present material to small groups who simply recognize they’ve never gained the experience of being captivating to an audience.

Can you be captivating? Is there really a market for your knowledge?

Is There Really A Market For Your Knowledge?

Public speaking has increased in demand all around the world.

You do not have to be famous in terms of what your name is. You do have to develop something unique or useful to offer. When this is seen by a company, organization or other group as being worth listening to, the demand for you….rises.

One of the first keys to remember about being successful in the field of public speaking is to know what the buyer of your service is looking for.

And Just What Is The Buyer Looking For?

If you were to be hired to provide a product to a client, you would need to understand what needs that client has so that you can tailor your product to meet those needs and to therefore fulfill the buyer’s demand.

In public speaking, you need to understand what the audience is looking for. Since they hire you, you have to be able to meet their goals.

In order to do this, you consider what the organization hiring you is looking for. In an interview with the organization, they are likely to want to gather facts about you.

Some of those facts include these qualifications.

• Do you have a topic that is right for their audience?The company hiring you is looking for you to accomplish some goal. This could be motivating their employees or it could be an educational goal. It could be to entertain. Regardless, do you meet that goal for them?
• Do you have references to back you up?The company wants to be sure that you have references, some type of qualification to be there doing what you are doing. You may be wondering where this is going to come from. It will be something addressed later in the series. For now, realize that you have to be a proven success to the company hiring you. You will need video of yourself or a long list of testimonials and endorsements.Not many meeting planners will put their reputation or job on the line by spending a fortune hiring a screw up.
• Have you developed the best way to communicate your message?Here, they want to be sure that you can drive home a winning presentation. Most want to have public speakers that are able to provide audio and visual demonstrations and materials to really bring out their point.
• Do you offer the group an opportunity to customize your message?If you are speaking to a group of employees, will you be able to customize your message to help them? Doing so can really be an effective way to bring in the information that the company is looking for. Many companies today are hiring professionals to do just that.In most interviews, I confess I do all the asking. I want to make sure I deliver precisely what the meeting planner, the VP or the sales manager is going to want and need.I can usually get through my questions in 45 minutes, and I take incredible notes.Those notes get collated with other research I do about a company. And I rarely mention that I’ve researched a company. I’ll tell you why next week!
• Are you able to hold the attention of the audience? In short, you do have to be a bit of an entertainer in order to be successful.Organizations are looking for presenters who will stimulate thoughts and specific outcomes, but that will do it in a way that is enjoyable. Few companies are cruel enough to hire someone to bore their audience.You need to be “safe” in that you won’t say something that will get the meeting planner in trouble and you have be entertaining enough to engage the group.This is a fine line that every good speaker discusses with the planner.I’ve always enjoyed using very disarming or deadpan humor in my presentations. And that humor seems to work just as well, if not better, in Europe than the U.S.A couple of years ago I got hired by an incredible “club” of BILLIONAIRES to entertain them for 90 minutes. They didn’t need education or a lesson in leadership. These were the masters of the world. They wanted me to make them LAUGH.

  So I put together a presentation that was incredibly aggressive, as politically incorrect as I could humanly make it and I had about 2/3 of the audience laughing in minutes. Interesting: English was NOT a first language of anyone in the group.

  I had not been so nervous and frankly intimidated (yes it happens to me too!) in a decade…

What fee should you charge and what does it include?

What fee do you charge and what does it include?

The meeting planner goes to my main web site www.KevinHogan.com and then they determine whether I am right for their company.

If they like me (they can watch the videos on the page or at You Tube and find out) and think that I can help their company or at least be entertaining for their event, they send an email and invariably, one question is asked in the mail followed by one other.

• What is your fee?
• Are you available July 18?

That’s it. They’ve seen the videos and they liked them. Now they want you and they simply want to know can you do it and how much you cost?

Fee and availability.

You’ll need to determine yours and discover what the market will bear.

The bottom line for most professionals in public speaking is that they need to sell themselves to make a living. But, organizations hiring you to do so will question if the value of what you are providing is worth the cost that you are charging.

A big, well-known name brings in more money, but so does a creative approach.

Most organizations want to be sure that you are providing them with all that you can; which means appearances before and after the event to talk to guests and dignitaries, as well as an overall willingness to go above and beyond.

I try and avail myself the night before for meeting with group leaders. This can be a double-edged sword. After travel, sometimes you are wiped out and need a bed when 10 people want your wit and charm.

What happens?

You guessed it….

You go and pump out all the energy!

Organizations demand quality products and services.

They want to be provided with the best of the best. If you can meet this need, the demand for your services is going to be high.

What could you possibly have that they could want?

What Could You Possibly Have That They Could Want?

The public speaker that is most successful is one that conveys his message from experience. Passion can truly be found in these personal experiences. But, what do you have to offer?

To gauge just what it is that you can present to those looking, start by looking closely at your life. Take stock, if you will, of where you are and where you came from. This will give you the best opportunity to find that perfect niche that you will be able to communicate.

Look Into Your Past

Start by looking into your past. Most people do not have a very simple, non emotional or non tragic past in that they can not find something to share about it. You too may have something there to use.

Here are some ideas to consider in terms of what you may have accomplished or areas of experience that you may have but do not realize that you have them. Take stock of your own experiences using this reference.

• What goals have you set for yourself in the past? Have you achieved them and if not, why not? Why did you set those goals? What helped you to honor them? What did having those goals do for you in the long run?Both failures and successes might make great stories (or they might bore the audience, you’ll have to figure that out!)
• What have you achieved? Did you graduate from college? Perhaps you have honors from military experience. What was it like to get that first job that was successful? Perhaps your achievements lie in the family unit such as getting married and having children. Perhaps you made your first million before the age of 30. What aspects of your life do you consider achievements? Were you a high school dropout who went on to accomplish?
• What are you passionate about in your past? For example, perhaps you were passionate about your child’s education and it paid off. Perhaps your religion is the founding of principles you have used in your business. Perhaps your business itself has been your passion for years and taught you something. Looking back over the last ten years, what aspects of your life were you passionate about? Why?
• What did you learn from your past experiences? For example, what did you learn about raising your children? What did you learn when you failed miserably at your first business plan? What did you learn about yourself over the years? Most often, people do not realize just how powerful their past was in shaping the future. Has this happened for you? How so?
• What failures did you have? Sometimes the most prominent memories are of those negative aspects in our past. Yet, they are also the most likely to shape your future. What negative or failure type situations were you in? How did that change you? Why did it happen and would you even avoid it if you could today? Where are you today beyond this point?
• Perhaps the very best experiences are those that come from the big things. For example, if you started your first company at the age of 20 and made a million by 25, you definitely did something big and that should be great material to develop. If you do have something big like this in your past, draw from it as this often helps push the success even farther.
• Yet, you do not have to have something amazing behind you in your past or present that is big and glorious. The fact is that even average experiences in your lifetime can give you enough material, information and experience to provide for your speeches. It is not necessarily the actual experience but the way that you perceive it; deal with it as well as overcome it that matters.

Why does it matter?

Why Does It Matter?

How can ordinary, boring life events help you to become a public speaker? It may seem like a stretch but the fact is that people love to hear about other people’s successes and failures….and as long as the story ultimately ends in success….they love the failure part!!

They use this information to help define their own abilities both positively and negatively.

They need to know that an average person just like them can ultimately accomplish great things.

For example, perhaps tragedy struck your family when your father lost his job. Your family did not have the funds for anything. The way that this situation is handled by you defines who you are and that’s what you want to get at later in your speeches.

You could approach the subject about how this taught you humility and defined the person that you are today, for example. Perhaps it helped you to be so frugal in your business that you managed to be more successful than the next guy because of it.

Simply define for yourself what it was like to overcome life and it’s most difficult of situations. Things like the loss of a loved one, dealing with fear, dealing with financial ruin and even dealing with rejection are all basic levels of emotions that many people go through in their lifetime.

Not only does this give you a tool by which to work from, but it helps you to gain the necessary resources to truly inspire others with through a connection. If you struggled with fear, they can bond with you on that level because they have done so at some time. This can ultimately be one of the best ways to communicate with those that you are speaking with.

When you are looking back into your past, ask yourself what it means to be a motivational or other type of public speaker. You need to have material that will help you to get your message out there. Some public speakers gather facts and figures from the world to use.

You are not doing therapy with yourself on stage.

You are ever present with your audience, looking into their hearts, their minds, their pain, their love.

That might sound …different, but it is what you are there to do.

If you don’t get carried away, you can use SNIPPETS from your life to fuel your presentations. They do this because it is one of the most powerful ways to communicate with those you are speaking to. It allows you to show that you have the same experiences as they have had. Now, you can show them the right way to deal with those experiences.

REALLY IMPORTANT: What Can You Offer To The Masses?

Now that you have taken some time to really define who you are, you need to find a way to provide others with something useful from those experiences.

One thing to remember here is this. No matter how successful you think you are, chances are that no one is going to pay you to talk about your past life experiences.

Sure, this can be part of your material to use, but some underlying benefit must come through. It is up to you to determine what that ultimately should be, though.

How can you take your life experiences and make them into something that is wanted and needed by your audience members?

I mentioned the processes of working with connections where you are able to use your own personal experiences to draw a connection to the other person listening to you speak. This is important because you want them to know that you do have some experience and know what you are talking about.

But, moving to the next step is more challenging. Now, you must take your experiences and convey your personal feelings with them.

Remember, although there are many professionals out there looking forward to a career in professional speaking, it is also important to note that no one wants to sit and hear your story without some meaning.

How many people have you had to sit through listening to them talk to you about their life? Most people will do this without costing the listener a penny!

What can your presentations DO?

What Can Your Presentations Do?

The bottom line is this. Your presentations must do something for the listener. This could be as simple as motivating them or it could be teaching them a lesson.

The goal is that you must first connect with the audience. Then you deliver a message to them.

The Professional Speaker Online E-Course is the most rapid and elegant method of accomplishing this.

Developing that message is very important, but often times difficult to do. The first step is to analyze your own information in terms of what it has done for you and others you’ve shared it with.

Here’s an example of what you can do. Let’s say that your family did get into a tight financial situation as you were aging. At that time in your life, it was up to you, the oldest male, to get out and find a job even though you were only 13 to help support your family. (EH HM….)

This was difficult and trying for you but you were able to be successful and founded your first business by the time that you were just 14.

What did that experience teach you about life? What characteristics did you have to have to excel in that tough time? All of those situations are what define the message that you can provide to those around you listening to your speech.

Many presentations will have one of several goals:

• They will help to solve the problems of the listener.
• They will help to listener to set and achieve goals that they set.
• They will help the listen to improve their lives in some way.
• They will help to motivate.
• They will help to teach a lesson.

Sometimes, it will become necessary for you to actually take your speech and morph it into one or more of these above goals. For example, at one organization you may be working with goal-setting where as with another it may be talking about leadership. It is up to you to determine how to make such a change and why to make that the case.

This can be challenging to some people that have not taken the time to really define their abilities.

That is something that you can do. You must define what your past experiences have taught you that you can convey to others that will in some way improve their lives on a big or small scale.

Developing your niche…

Developing Your Niche

For those that know anything about Internet marketing, the key to being successful is finding your niche, or that place where you will share what information and resources you can with those around you.

Success in that field requires that you specialize your marketing so that you are putting as much effort (and money) towards that one goal as possible, thus giving you more resources behind one goal instead of many resources behind many goals spreading it too thin for success.

In the world of public speaking, you too must develop a niche from which you will work with. This is up to you to determine in terms what it is based on your experiences that we have talked about.

THINK ABOUT THIS:

Realize that most people that walk in to the building, sit down and wait to hear you speak are more skeptical of you than you are of them. In that comes the fact that they will want to prove you wrong before believing that you are right.

One of the biggest ways to turn someone off from you is to promise them that what you are about to tell them is going to solve all of the problems that they experience in their life. The larger and more all encompassing your promise is, the more unlikely you are to be believed.

For example, let’s say that you want to talk to a group of people through a local organization. But, you just want to have an overall motivational speech without a direct topic to speak about. So, you walk in and you see all types of people in your audience.

When your presentation begins, you begin to play to all of their needs. “What I have to say will help you to lose weight, cure cancer, live a longer life and to solve all of your financial problems.”

This is not believable and from that moment on, they are distrusting (and SHOULD BE) of what you have to say.

What should you NEVER do?

NEVER B.S. ANYONE.

And if YOU BELIEVE you can cure cancer and solve all the world’s ills, don’t get on a platform anywhere.

Instead of doing this, what you must do is focus your speech on the topics that are the most important for your group.

Develop your niche, your target area of focus that all other materials you have will point to.

One of the most common and best examples is that of helping people to be leaders. If leadership is your niche, then you can talk to all types of people with the same topic.

Does that mean you can’t talk about those other topics? Of course, not! But it means that you are developing a specific field that your speeches will revolve around.

Why does it matter so much if you have a select area in which you will be talking about in all of your speeches?

It helps to define you as an expert in the field. People enjoy talking with experts and they are much more likely to believe you if you say that that is what you are.

If you know “everything”, people might see you as knowing “nothing.”

When you have selected your niche, you will develop your speeches and all of your talks about that one topic. The topic is up to you, and it should be something you are passionate about and something that comes directly from your personal experiences.

Choosing a niche is the best way for you to concentrate your efforts and become a known leader in that field. If you are an expert at team building, an expert at sales building or even an expert at being positive, that is the field that people will come to you seeking help from.

Consider the fact. If you were to spend your company’s money to bring someone in to talk, do you want an expert in the field to be the one to talk?

What is the process you should follow?