A short YouTube live-stream segment in which TJ Walker answers whether organizing free speaking events is a good marketing strategy for speakers, authors, and experts. He gives conditional advice: such events can be lucrative (e.g., financial planners, plastic surgeons) but often fail for lesser-known presenters; his recommendation is to only run public events after you already have a sellable product or one-on-one services that sell reliably.
Chapters
Is it a good idea to organize your own free speaking gigs and speaking events to market your services as a speaker or to sell other product? This is a question I get a lot from aspiring speakers, content matter experts, authors, because they've seen other people do it and seemingly get rich. The answer is it just depends. It depends on your niche, depends on how you market yourself. Certainly for decades there have been financial planners who get a list of wealthiest people in their zip, certain zip codes, send out a mass letter, say, come for a free steak dinner at this nice hotel, get 50 people in the room, give a financial presentation. Three of those come for meetings later, two of those become clients and they've generated all off of fees in the next 10 years. Tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. So hey, generating $100,000 from one night speaking gig where you spent maybe 5,000, great. What's not to like? So it can work for people sometimes. I've seen plastic surgeons do it. Come listen to a free seminar on, you know, how to have a perfect nose. A lot of people come, most don't buy anything, but a couple people say, you know what, that's what I want. So it can work. However, I've also seen countless people trying to market their own get rich quick scheme or their own version of how to live happy, healthy, prosperity lives. Sort of a junior varsity, Anthony Robbins style thing. They're not famous, they're not well known, they market the event to the whole world. Maybe 10 people come and they end up selling nothing. So my real advice to you is before you do a free event, nothing's free. It takes your time, takes money to get a crowd. Make sure you have a product or a service that you're already able to sell to people one on one or that you're already selling well on Facebook. If you don't have that, then don't try to market mass events to the public. Before I started marketing public workshops on public speaking and speaking to the media, I had done hundreds of private trainings, one on one group trainings where people hired me for the day and I knew I had a set curriculum, I knew I had a service people liked, valued, needed before I ever started marketing my own public events. So that's my advice. It just depends. Make sure you really have a product or service people are already buying before trying to market yourself as a speaker in your own events. I'm TJ Walker. I help people speak more effectively. If you'd like to improve your own speaking skills, check out the options below.
