professional speaking

Speakers, tweak your topic for recession-proof college market

Many professional speakers who charge a fee for their programs are giving far fewer presentations than they gave a few years ago because corporations, nonprofits and government agencies have cut travel and training budgets.

One way for speakers to rebound is to tweak their topic for the college market.

James Malinchak, “King of the College Speaking Circuit,” says colleges have a huge pot of money otherwise known as student activity fees, and it’s used to pay speakers. James will be my guest during a free teleseminar called “Discover the Secrets to Speaking in The Recession-Proof College Market.” It will be at 2 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, April 14, and you can register here.

He’ll discuss more than a dozen topics that are in demand at two- and four-year colleges, universities and technical schools. Here are four of them, and ways speakers can tweak those topics for campus audiences:

A speaker who trains corporate executives on leadership can take the fundamental points of the presentation and teach college students how to be leaders, whether it’s within their fraternities or sororities, student government or special-interest groups on campus.
An expert on corporate recruiting and retention can teach college fraternities and sororities how to recruit and retain members. Greeks, by the way, have their own budgets for hiring speakers, yet another recession-proof pot of money.
Speakers who specialize in motivating corporate audiences as convention keynoters can take their message to college campuses, where motivational speakers are in high demand.
Diversity trainers who target corporate America can teach college faculty, staff and students about diversity. At a four-year college, a kid from the inner city and a farm kid from Kansas can suddenly find themselves roommates, with all kinds of potential problems.

I’ll also ask James how speakers can benefit from all the PR and publicity that will come their way when they start speaking at colleges. Lucky for them, the school’s PR department does most of the work.

Hope to see you on Wednesday’s call.

Speakers, publicize your speaking engagements these 9 ways

If you do free or paid speaking engagements, there are opportunities galore to get in front of audiences that need to hear whay you have to say.

But some Publicity Hounds don’t quite know where to begin. In Friday’s issue of the SpeakerNet News ezine, Michael Schatzki said he wants to give a new hour-long speech he has created at least 20 times so he can polish it before charging a fee.

His target audience is people in their late 30s to early 60s, business people or a general audience. His topic is on how to motivate people to fitness. Micheal asked for tips on how to let groups know that he speaks for free. He’s compiling all the results for the SpeakNet News archives.

I responded and offered these nine ways to publicize free or paid speaking engagements:

Contact local chambers of commerce, Rotary, Kiwanis, Business Networking International, and any other business networking groups.
Consider joining Toastmasters. You’ll get instant feedback. And Toastmasters know which groups in town welcome speakers.
Go to MeetUp.com and see what business groups are meeting near you. I belong to a MeetUp group for Internet marketers in Wisconsin, and at our last meeting, we discussed which speakers we could invite to speak for free.
Go to Craigslist and check out the community category. You’ll find sub-categories for classes, events and small business. Post a note in the best category offering your services. Make sure you don’t post the same item to more than one category. See How to Use Craigslist as a Global Publicity Tool.
Get a local business journal, daily or weekly newspaper or business magazine and check the section of the paper that announces local business events and who is speaking. You’ll find many groups you probably never knew existed. There’s usually a phone number to call for registration. Call that number and ask for the meeting planner.
If you’re Twittering (you should be), let your followers know about your topic and ask them for suggestions. If you’re speaking in a specific geographic area, use a hashtag (#) with the name of a city in your tweet, like this—#Chicgo— so people who are searching for information on that city will find your tweet. Learn more about how to use hashtags for publicity.
If you’re on LinkedIn (you should be), post the question in their Q&A section and you’ll probably get many responses from people who do business near you.
If you’re on Facebook, ask your friends to spread the word. See 11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook.
You probably won’t have to resort to paid ads. But if you do, you can target people in specific geographic locations with fairly cheap ads on Facebook and LinkedIn.