Evan Carmichael advises starting with unpaid speaking gigs at charities and student groups to build your track record, then moving to paid work. Create video content on YouTube to attract potential clients, and build an "About Me" page showcasing your workshops and media appearances.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and in today's video I wanted to answer a question from one of my readers, Christopher, who is a budding speaker in leadership and business and wanted to get my opinions on how he could get more well-known as a speaker. So Christopher, I would advise you to start at the start. So look for any opportunities you can find to speak, even if you're not getting paid for it. So look for charity groups, look for student groups, look for business groups. Let them know what you're about and try to get more practice speaking. It'll do two things for you. One, it'll start building momentum, so you'll see that there's a track record building. You can say you've spoken at all these different events. And second, it'll help you become a better speaker. It'll help you hone your message. You'll be able to find out what you're really good at and what parts of your message resonate really well with your audience, so it will make your presentation a lot better. So when you go after paid gigs, you have a better product to go out and pitch them. The next thing I would advise you to do is get on YouTube. If you're really good at speaking and you can touch an audience, you're covering a really popular topic in leadership, get on YouTube and start spreading your message. So create these videos. It could be through a question and answer format like I'm doing right now, Or it could just be you on screen speaking away, talking about whatever topic you're really passionate about. But if you get on YouTube, opportunities will start to open up for you as people can see you. You basically want to try to get as much exposure as possible. If somebody finds your video and really likes it, they're likely to email you or pick up the phone and call you if you leave your phone number. And so opportunities will come if you have really good content. To share a little bit about what I did, my story, when I was first starting speaking, I partnered up with a nonprofit group and they were targeting entrepreneurs, and I offered for free to come and do a couple of workshops. And the first one I did, I think we had 4 people come out to, so not a great turnout. But then the next one we had 6, and then 10, and then 20, and pretty soon we were filling rooms. And you have people coming back and they're telling their friends, and you have a series going, and you start to generate a lot of excitement. We were able to make partnerships with major corporations and banks, were able to get part of it and help sponsor it. So that all led from a tiny little workshop series that I started with a nonprofit and it grew from there. So get started, that's the core message. One final thing that you will probably want to do is create a really good About Me page. So hopefully you have a website. On there you want to showcase all the stuff that you've done. You can put your YouTube videos, you can put all the different workshops that you've done for different organizations. If you've been in the media, you put all that stuff there as well. So that if a potential customer lands on your site and they have an opportunity, they see that, hey, this guy has done a lot of great stuff, I want to get in touch with him. So you want to make it really easy for somebody to say, yes, I want to hire Christopher. So I hope that helped. Please give the video a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video, and I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment below. And stay tuned for the next episode.
