Ep 100 How To Find An Audience if You Aren't an Entertaining, Naked or Fear-Mongering Public Speaker April 9, 16

So how do you find an audience to actually speak to in this day and age if you're not incredibly funny, entertaining, naked or a fear monger.

Speaking? The show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

This is a question I often ask myself and people, other people ask me this as well. It really is a pretty existential question for a lot of people. If you're speaking and no one hears you, did you speak at all? Now this is a question that faces solo practitioners, one and two person consultant shops, Oxbow experts, authors. But it also confronts multi billion dollar insurance companies that may have simple messages to people on how to fireproof their home and yet aren't really sure how to reach an audience. Because while there are more tools than ever before for reaching people, youtubes and Vines and Periscope, there's also more competition for attention than ever before. And fortunately or unfortunately, the vast, vast majority of attention in the world seems to go to people who are entertained. You look at the top people on YouTube and it's quite often people who are incredibly funny doing entertainment, doing skits, doing things that just. Funny or die. Will Ferrell Things that are just wildly funny and entertaining. Well, that's fine if you're an entertainer, but what if you are an insurance company? What happens if you are a solo practitioner and your expertise is negotiation.

Or.

How to do team building in a corporate environment? How do you actually find an audience to speak to? Sure, you can try to go speak to conferences, conventions, get yourself invited, pitch the local Kiwanis club. And that's frankly very time consuming. And the people at the Kiwanis may be wonderful people, might not be your target audience. So how do you reach people? Again, you look at the people who are often most successful. Just doesn't apply to us. Kim Kardashian gets to speak to an awful lot of people. And I'm not here to be a Kim Kardashian basher, but she wouldn't have that huge audience if she didn't have videos of herself naked having sex with people. Okay, let's not kid ourselves. And when you look at some of the biggest Successes, Facebook websites, YouTube, other places, it often does come down to people who are really incredibly funny, very, very talented and entertaining, are incredibly, insanely good looking and scantily clothed, or completely naked, or are peddling fear, massive, massive fear mongering. Let's kill all these people. Let's ban all these people. The world is coming to an end and let's face it, for most business people, it's not our message, it's not appealing. We don't want to go down the fear track, but we're really not able to go down any of the other tracks either. Yeah, we can occasionally put in a little humor, but no one's going to confuse us with the best clips from the Tonight show or Funny or Die or any other comedy websites. And while some of us, some of you, not me, but some of you may be better looking than average, it's going to be very hard to compete with websites YouTube channels that are just hiring 18 year old models of either sex. So how do you really gain the audience? That's what the show is about today.

For a free, no obligation online public speaking or media training course, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and start learning today.

Some of this is going to sound like humble brag or just plain old bragging, but I am going to walk you through how I try to solve this problem because I think I'm a good presenter, a good communicator, but no one says wow, that's the funniest 10 minutes I ever heard on a podcast or the most hilarious laugh filled YouTube video I've ever seen. That's just not the response I get because that's not what I'm trying to do. Obviously I'm not here. For those of you watching on video, I'm certainly not here naked. And while I don't think I am ugly, I'm certainly not the best looking person in the world. No one's going to watch this video or come to my websites because of my looks. Let's be candid here, a little self awareness. Nor do I think I'm driving people away or repulsing people with my looks. Either way, what I'm trying to do is put a spotlight on my expertise which happens to be public speaking, media training, crisis communications. And yet I don't fit any of those categories of being entertaining, naked, funny or fear mongering. How do I do it and how can you do it? My advice is you really have to look at where do your customers, prospects, the people you care about go sometimes. That's highly specific. If you're going after 14 year olds, then maybe you want to spend a lot of time on Snapchat. But sometimes there are some universals. I don't care who you are. It's generally a pretty good idea to have people be able to find you. If they go to google.com or google in their country, type in a keyword that relates to what you want to do. So that's the starting point. I know this sounds like just basic information. Bear with me. I'm going to walk you through a lot of different places and talk about the nuances. But certainly Google is the starting point. You need to figure out for people who've never heard of you and never heard you speak, how can they find you if they just went to Google and really isolated? So in my own situation, I do public speaking training. I also do media training. With public speaking training, there's a billion more sites. With competition, there's a lot more competitors. It's much harder for me to ever crack that top 10. But when it comes to media training, most of the time I am the second ranked company in Google. And this is sometimes with 500 million websites that show up, someone goes to that site, boom, they're going to see a video of me speaking, talking about what I do. Now, would I love to be number one if someone types in public speaking? Sure. And if this show continues to grow, maybe that will help. But that's your first step. You've got to figure out if someone is lazy and they don't belong to any social media, they just go to Google, type something in, how can they find you and actually see you speaking. So that's why I don't bury my videos on my own site. Someone types in media training, boom, they're going to see me on the first page, typically the second ranked one. For many years it was number one, hope to be number one again. But number two is frankly about as good as number one. And it's typically on the top page or the first page in any country in the world if you do go to Google and then making it easy for people to see videos. So that's certainly one angle. Now, as a speaker looking for someone for a speaking audience, I do think you have to take YouTube very seriously. It's not the youngest, hippest platform around, but it's still the granddaddy of all online video destinations. It still has far and away the hugest audience. And that's why I think you need to have video of yourself speaking on YouTube. Now, my videos do not have any. One video does not have millions and millions of views. I have had collectively millions of views to my various YouTube videos, but any one video might have 52 views. That's not that impressive. But collectively over time it is a much bigger audience. I will have reached a lot more people. I have reached a lot more people through YouTube than will have ever seen Me live in the same room. And that's the beauty of consistency. It's not that my videos, as I mentioned, have entertainment nakedness, thank goodness, or appeals to demagoguery or that funny. It's that I have a lot of content and I consistently put it out there. I do think that is the number one problem most people have is they're simply not willing to speak on a regular basis because they do a couple of videos and they say, oh, it didn't go viral, I didn't get 10 million views. YouTube video doesn't work and they give up. That cannot be the attitude. Again, you go for certain niches if you type in Public Speaking in YouTube, I certainly have a few in the top couple hundred videos, but I don't dominate it because it's very competitive. But if you fish around, you'll certainly find a number of my videos there. But if you type in media training or crisis communications training, typically I'm number one in YouTube. So are you starting to see a theme here? Go to Google. I am number one in some things. But number two for my phrase of media training, go to YouTube, which is also owned by Google and it's the second largest search engine. You will find me number one if you type in media. And this could change by the time you hear this show or watch this show, but probably not because I'm adding new videos every single day. And again, it's not that any one video has a huge audience, but at the end of a month I can certainly look down at my analytics on YouTube and say, okay, it was a bad month, but I still had 6,000 views on my YouTube channel. That's a lot more than some of the most successful public speakers in the world as far as audience members, they they have in a live arena. So you've got to make YouTube important to you by putting content out there. Doesn't have to be sexy, doesn't have to be funny, doesn't have to be demagogic. Simply putting speaking content on your area of expertise on a regular basis. If it's good content, meaning useful information, not wildly entertaining, you will find an audience. If you put it out regularly. You might not want to do it seven days a week as I do, but at least make it once a week. Something simple spoken. It doesn't have to be a 20 minute podcast or show as many of mine are. It could be two minutes if it's good content, because YouTube is absolutely huge. It is, depending on how you rate things, the second or third largest search engine. So you want to be there. Amazon is the number one place people buy books in the world. You need to have a book there. You might not be the best writer in the world. I don't consider myself the best writer in the world. But you go to Amazon and type in media training, and you're going to find at least one of my books on the first page. And you're likely going to find several of my books. If you fish around for that phrase type in public speaking or presentation training, you will find my books. Sad to say, it's not on the first page, but you will find my books. Is Amazon a way I get a lot of customers? No. But I simply do not want to ignore that audience. And in every book I have, I have links to videos so people can see me speaking. And the messages in my books are messages that started off from things I spoke about in trainings and in workshops and in talking to actual clients. So it is still my spoken message. So that's Amazon. And these days, if you don't consider yourself a great writer, do your speech, record your speech, hire someone to transcribe it, and then find a writer, whether it's Fiverr or Upwork or one of the many sites and spend a few hundred bucks and ask someone to turn your speech or your transcript into a simple ebook. You don't have to be a best seller. You don't have to be on the New York Times best seller list, but you do need to have some kind of a book on Amazon. I think, because it is such an important place. People are searching when they're looking for expertise. Where else? Apple is obviously a huge, significant tech company. That's why, first and foremost, when it comes to the audio version of this show, the podcast, everything I do is about making it easy and friendly and usable for Apple in the itunes store so that people can find it easily. Now I'm on Stitcher and a lot of other places. There's like 20 other podcasting services. But everything I do from the audio version is really about making it easy for Apple to put me into itunes so that if someone here is good news, there's a lot less competition on itunes. If you go to itunes and type in public speaking, you're going to see right along the top, a little logo and an app. Speaking with TJ Walker. So if you're interested in a public speaking podcast, you're going to have a really hard time not finding me, even if you've never heard of me, just by typing that in. Now, if you type in Media training or crisis communications training, you're typically going to see me number one, two or three. That makes it even easier. What about people who like Apple, like itunes, but only like to do things through apps? Well, as of this week, I have a speaking with TJ Walker show app. So if you don't want to mess with itunes and your little podcast directory app on your phone, you can just download at no charge the app for this show. Do I think I'm going to get rich and famous and billions of people are going to listen to me speaking through this app? No. I'm not deluding myself, but it's very, very inexpensive to have the app built put in the store. You just have to all the paperwork and there's some very minor expenses and it's simply too big of a platform to be ignored. So that's why I want to focus on that. Now, of course, I'm on Facebook. I have a personal page and a business page, too, and I am putting content there every day. Is that a huge audience? Do I have tremendous engagement? No. But I do have some. There are some people who only like to interact with me. Blind post comments on Facebook, LinkedIn. Since I'm a business person and I'm dealing with business people, I have a LinkedIn page. I have some audience members, some customers, clients who only listen to my podcast by clicking on the link when they see it pop up in their LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn may be totally unimportant to you and your business, but the point is you've got to create content on a regular basis, and then you've got to distribute it to the places that you care about, where your audience is, and you've got to sometimes change your format. I like to do videos, but what I have found is a lot of people prefer audio because they can do it on their phone, they can do it during their morning walk, they can listen to it while they're commuting or driving. They're not going to watch a video then. So I have to switch. I have to pull the audio from my video and make the audio available. It's a lot easier for me to do videos than to write a book. But every so often, I have to buckle down and write a book. That's the only way I can speak to a larger audience. And that's my challenge to you, is to figure out what are the points that are most important to you. The websites, the places where people can find you and hear you speak and then create content. Maybe it's not daily, like me, I would hope it's at least once a week, but certainly once or twice a month. You've got to create content and you got to spend a little time pushing it out there so that at the end of a month you will have spoken to a lot of people. Maybe not Blockbuster millions, but sometimes it's better to speak to the right two people in a month than the wrong 2 million people, especially if it's for the wrong reasons. So that's really my final tip for you. Create content on a regular basis and then you've got to make yourself available. Of all the major platforms collectively, you will find an audience. Even though individually you might not have any viral successes. It won't matter if you're consistently putting out quality content and you have a clear cut audience in mind. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

Speaking with TJ Walker is the number one daily streaming TV and radio show devoted to all aspects of speaking and communication. If you received value from this show, then please subscribe to it@mediatrainingworldwide.com Please review the show, leave comments, and share it with your friends and colleagues. Today.