In this video, Tyler Wagner outlines two practical, low‑cost methods for expanding a public speaking business. First, he advises speakers to cultivate relationships with speaking bureaus by using a virtual assistant to compile detailed contact lists (websites, emails, phone numbers, forms) for roughly 1,800 bureaus he has already catalogued, then reaching out to build rapport rather than pitching. Second, he recommends directly targeting conference coordinators, again employing a virtual assistant to research niche‑relevant conferences and create outreach lists, focusing on friendship and mutual benefit. The core message is that relationship‑building, not aggressive selling, leads to steady gig acquisition and broader networking opportunities.
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All right, this one is how to grow a speaking business. So say you're a public speaker and you want to grow your business. In my opinion, there's two very easy ways to do that. Obviously, again, assuming that you're a good public speaker, you'd want to have good material and be good at it. But assuming that is the case, the two things that I would do first of all, and I actually, I help some of my clients out with my main business, Authors Unite, 'cause a lot of authors wanna be public speakers. I help them out because I actually have a list of, I think I'm at 1,800 different speaking bureaus. I don't know them all personally. I do know, I know some of 'em personally. And what I'll do sometimes for my authors is I'll connect them with speaking bureaus that I think they'd be a good fit for 'cause I've already built the relationships. But just imagine you had a virtual assistant and you had them research speaking bureaus, right? And just, you know, Excel sheet, the website, the email, maybe there's a phone number, contact form on the website, that link, and just research and start reaching out and start building relationships with these bureaus. Don't pitch them, right? But just build relationship with them. And then if it's a good fit for them to feature you and try to get you gigs, that will occur during the connection, right? But what most people do is they just go right for the pitch. What you should do is actually try to build a relationship with these people because then if it is a good fit and you have a relationship, they might try to market you more than others, right? Because you have that strong relationship with them. So yeah, speaking bureaus would be one way. Another way would be to actually just, really go direct to the source and build relationships with conference coordinators. So again, have a virtual assistant build a list or research and build a list of all these conferences that are like in your niche, right? Or conferences that could hire you to speak. So they build it all out and then you do reach outs and basically say that you just want to connect and you want to build relationship, right? With these individuals that are running these conferences. And you wanna do that, right? Regardless. So it's like in that first call, just build the relationship. Don't pitch, don't do anything like that. Just build a solid relationship with them. And then if they need a speaker on a topic that you're speaking on, they will think of you because you're their friend. So essentially what the, what the goal is, is like building these mutual beneficial relationships where it's like you now have thousands of friends that own speaking bureaus and run conferences, right? And you're a public speaker. Do you think you're going to get some gigs that way? You know what I mean? So free, no risk, just take some time and there will be other valuable things that sprout from this as well. But if you're just looking to get gigs, build relationships with those two types of individuals and gigs will come to you and you won't even have to be looking for them much longer. So hope Hopefully that was helpful, and I'll see you in the next video.
