Ep 88 The Secret to a Successful Speaking Business March 28

So what is the secret to public speaking? Success as a speaking business?

Speaking. The show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Okay, folks, so this show is a little more insiderish than most. This is a show that is devoted. Today's episode is devoted a little more to people who are aspiring professional speakers and speaking coaches and presentation coaches. I realize that's not most of you. I do think some of what I say today will apply to you in any field you're in. But I'm often asked, I go to Toastmasters conferences or public relations conferences, speak and train. And I'm often asked, how do you get into this field of doing presentation coaching? It seems fantastic. And media coaching? It seems so interesting and fantastic and fun. And my whole life I've been fascinated by public speech. How do I do this? I hear this from people. They ask me questions, especially at Toastmasters conferences, because there are a whole lot of people in the world who are fascinated by public speaking, find their own job kind of boring, and would love to do speaking and coaching about speaking full time. So I get asked this question a lot. What's the secret? How did you get started? How does it go? So I wanted to share some of that with you, and it may be applicable to you in other fields as well, because I think some of the skills and some of the actions are very much transferable. And first of all, let me just go. I don't make millions and millions of dollars a year, so I don't want to hold myself out as the most successful person in the world. Aren't I great? Shouldn't you worship me? But I do, in fairness, I do make a nice living and I have a lot of fun. I have an interesting client mix that takes me all over the world. Tremendous variety, intellectual freedom, and a tremendous diversity of clients that, frankly, makes getting out of bed in the morning pretty interesting and pretty easy. And I've got it pretty good compared to most people. Now, some of my success is surely on luck. I happen to have great parents who told me every. And my mother told me every day I was the most brilliant boy in the whole world, in the whole universe. And that gives you confidence. And they educated me. But let's say you're past all that. We can't change the past. You're out of school, you're an adult, and you want to enter this field. What is my advice? And I don't like to say this because it doesn't sound very sage. It's kind of hard to package this, but when I look at my own career, probably the biggest thing that differentiates between me, between other people who I've seen try to enter the public speaking, coaching and media training coaching sphere, is you've got to fail a lot. I have failed. I may have had more successes than most people who enter the deal, but I've also had hundreds, if not at this point, thousands of more failures. Now, I'm not trying to equate myself with Edison because he famously talked about how he failed more than others. I'm no Thomas Edison, folks. Let's be realistic. That's not false modesty, that's just accuracy. But I have failed. I've had some successes in publishing, but the vast majority of the books I've published on speaking and speaking of the media have not been successes, have not been financial successes. I have produced dozens, probably more than a hundred training DVDs and CDs on public speaking and media training. Most of them were not successful and didn't make money. But I did learn something from all of these and the fact that you're doing something, putting yourself out there, sometimes if it just connects with one prospect or one client, they could become an anchor client for you for years. Online training is another one. Many of you have heard me talking about online training in the last couple of years, and I am happy to note that I now have more than a hundred and students in 160 countries around the world. I have more than 100,000 enrollments from students from 160 countries and I'm not getting wildly rich, but I am making more than enough money to pay the mortgage every month from my online training. Now that sounds great. The part of the story no one wants to hear about and I don't always like to talk about is I started in the online training space in 1999, did an online course and made no money from it was a complete failure. I then created a whole bunch of comprehensive online training courses around about 2006 or so, paid a bunch of money, hired some developers, staff time. I'm sure it was well in excess of six figures. I invested in online public speaking training and media training and didn't sell it. I sold maybe three copies, so net loss six figures. Now it's doing well. But I had to risk doing it too early. I had to risk failing. And I have many, many flaws, folks. And believe me, my wife and other family and friends would love to tell you about some of my flaws. But one thing I'm not afraid of is to Try something new in the speaking arena and fail. I've tried. I once tried something called the Speaking Channel, an online website to to all aspects of speaking. We had partnerships with different people and did different shows. Again, huge failure. I hired consultants and spent 50, $60,000 this would have been maybe eight years ago, all trying to build a community around those who care about public speaking, presentations, media training. And it was frankly a huge failure. But here's the thing. Unless you're just the most incompetent person in the world, and I'm not the most incompetent, if you keep trying things, some things will work. I started doing a weekly, or excuse me, a monthly newsletter on public speaking probably 15 years ago. You know what? It worked, Cost me nothing. Got me in contact, helped me stay in contact with clients and prospects, helped build awareness over the years and was great. And after doing that for a couple years, I then went to weekly. Now for a while, I was actually doing it daily. I now do the daily content in the form of this podcast you're either watching now or listening to. But creating content that relates to my expertise and actually speaking about it, not just typing, has made me better at what I do. It's also made me more well known. And in this day and age, it's not just your skill, it's not just your competency, it's not just your passion, it's not just your talent. It's also. Does the rest of the world know about you? And the reason a lot of people around the world know about me and hire me as their presentation coach is because I created all this content and I've created DVDs and videos and I created at one point more than 10,000 videos on my YouTube channel. Now, I won't bore you with all the reasons that that particular YouTube channel isn't up any longer. Complicated story involving no wrongdoing on my part that I think of, but YouTube actually took it down. So you could say that was a failure, but was it the skills I learned? Creating 10,000 videos makes it easier for me to talk to you right here today. For example, to be on video in front of a camera. For those of you watching this on YouTube or Facebook, to speak in a conversational way, to those of you listening in a podcast. More on all of this in a moment.

Speaking is brought to you by Media Training worldwide. For all of your media training and public speaking training needs, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com.

So what you just saw or heard right there@adformediatrainingworldwide.com why did I come up with that website or that name? Again, it has to do with experimentation. When I started my business as a serious, I mean, I started doing training in 1984 when I was in college more than 30 years ago. But when I really, really started this as a serious speaking business, around 2000, 2001, I just had my own name, tjwalker.com, which is a site that's still up. And I just tried everything, promoting my business. Ads in public relations, society magazine, in training magazine, PR week. Basically nothing worked and I had very little money. And I took every penny I had and reinvested it into marketing. I did stumble across a search engine optimization company that got me in the top 10 for words like media training. And that actually did make the phone call, the phone ring. So that's when I decided, let me reinvest in what's working and let's stop doing all the advertising in traditional print trade publications. So in talking to my search engine optimization company, I said, I'd like to do more. What do you recommend? They said, do more sites? Have mirror sites, have other sites? So I started sites presentation, trainingskills.com crisis communication plan.com had a bunch of sites and frankly, they were generating some waste things that were not that efficient. But one of the sites I did create, they asked my search engine optimization company asked me, what's the one word that people search for, the phrase that people search for when they're hiring you that actually generates a sale for you at the highest margin. And I said, well, that's easy. That's media training. Their suggestion to me was have a domain name that also incorporates the name of your business. Since I told them I was going to have a new name for my business and that will increase the odds that your business, your website, will show up very high ranking when people type in the phrase you want. So that's why I named my business mediatrainingworldwide.com it was basically media training plus one more word. Com. And when I did that, my rankings went from number nine, number 10, to for many years, number one. Now it's typically number two in the US and in a lot of countries around the world. But again, how did I get there? Was it locked? I mean, it was luck at some level to find the search engine optimization company that knew what it was doing. But it was also a lot of experimentation, a lot of trial and error and a lot of failure. So that's why I have to get back to it. It's A lot of failure and reinvesting in yourself. Many people don't really want to invest in their self if they want to be a presentation coach, a media trainer, or frankly anything else that is something I've been willing to do is take money from that comes in from today, or in some case money I didn't even have on credit card way back 15 years ago and investing it in trying new businesses that relate to what it is I'm trying to do and creating new audios, videos, DVDs, websites, CDs, downloads, apps, you name it, I've tried it all. Most of them don't work. But you know what? These days the cost of trying to so many new businesses, especially digital media, isn't that much. And you always have to look at it from the standpoint of what else am I going to do with my time and is there something else I could be doing more profitably? If you're doing what you love, whether it's as a speaking coach, a media trainer, or an executive of any sort, if you're doing what you love and you're already getting paid for it all day long, well then you're in great shape. Don't bother doing all this other stuff. But if you want to go from being a full time marketing executive at a company you don't like that job and you wanted to be a full time presentation coach, then you need to start using whatever free time you have to market yourself. I would advise create content. Create a podcast, a video podcast, an audio podcast. Create an online course. Some people look at me and say, well tj, your online courses are so successful. You have students in 160 countries and you're making a lot more money than most people do with their online courses. Yeah, that's true. But I also have made more than 100 courses. Most people, certainly most aspiring presentation coaches, certainly most of my competitors have never done any online courses because they've never quite gotten around to it. And for those who are just booked and busy all day long every day, fine, don't bother. I wouldn't either. But if you're not booked solid every day, I do recommend doing online courses. So some of you have heard me talk about in other podcasts in just the last couple of months. I've had some successes with some of my courses. My core media training course, my basic or my advanced presentation skills course has done quite well. But I also have a course on how to give a retirement speech and I probably haven't made more than $30 from that course. So you could say from a business standpoint, that was a complete failure. But you know what? I've also had more than 1,000 students go into that, just signing up for free. Some of the courses I do, at least for a limited time, I make available to people at no charge. So if that helps somebody or somebody has a family member about to retire and they're able to use it and they feel a little better about me, then everybody wins because it didn't cost me much. That was a course I probably spent a total of about two hours on. From creation, production, the editing, uploading, distribution. I probably spent no more than two hours. And it further burnishes my credentials as a speaking expert, even if no one is specifically looking to hire someone to teach them how to give a retirement speech when they're retiring from their job. But it's another little piece in the puzzle. It's something else that helps build my brand. And frankly, it is another failure. Now, what do all these things have in common? Hard work. You know what I can't stand? People who go on and on and on and talk about, oh, I work harder than everyone else. I'm not lucky, I'm successful because I work harder. I don't like that. And I think that's self serving and I don't want to come across that way. But I also don't really know any other way to describe a lot of what it is that I do. And I'm not saying I certainly don't work nearly as hard as I did when I was 17 years old and I had a summer job as a mover, or when I was 18 years old and I had a job as a dishwasher and a short order cook. A lot of people in the world work really hard. What I'm talking about is working very hard within your niche when you are not being paid for it. When I'm writing books, when I am speaking, starting a podcast for the first couple of months, when I'm creating online courses, speaking, there's nobody there hiring me. There's nobody there writing me a check. There's nobody there saying, wow, tj, you're just so great. Guaranteed, here's a big pile of money. You have to do the work first. Unless you're already a famous celebrity superstar, which case, I don't know why you're listening to this. You have to do the work. And that is how you put out newsletters every week. I mean, I'm a one person shop folks. I used to have a whole team, a lot of overhead, big studio in New York and it was fun, interesting, and it does allow you to do certain things you can't do as an individual. But it also created tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars of overhead each month. I am now a one person business. So when I put out a newsletter every week and seven audio podcasts a week, and seven video podcasts a week, and do sometimes half a dozen TV and radio interviews in a week, plus do quite often several trainings and send out dozens of proposals, I have to do it all. I'm not complaining folks. And again, it's not that I work longer hours than most people, but it is about doing a lot of work, speaking every chance you get, speaking in new forums, webcasts. Half of what I've done this week is train people in different continents, different cities in the U.S. doctors and other experts, presentation training and media training through live Skype video. Most of my competitors don't do that. They like to, but they just haven't figured out the technology. And I'm no technology expert. But if you hunt and peck and fish around and bother people and ask for advice, you can figure out how to use Skype. It's not just using Skype video that's easy. If you're actually going to train someone, you have to know how to record video. That person speaking, recording the interviews or the speeches and playing it back for them. That's a little bit complicated, but I figured it out. If I figured it out, you can too. Thanks for joining me today. Again, a slightly different show, but it is a question that I get all the time. I'm hoping those of you who don't aspire to be full time public speaking experts can take some of these principles and perhaps apply them to your own niche as well. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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