public speaking

Publicity lessons from a first-place speech on farts

2/3/2012 By Joan 1 Comment

When sixth-grader Sophie Paterson of New Zealand announced that farting was the topic of her speech during a speech competition last fall, the audience snapped to attention.

With her younger brother, Ben, nearby, ready to hold up diagrams that further explained her topic, Sophie launched into her speech:

sophie paterson

Hi. Today I’m going to talk to you about farts.

Some people think farts are rude and some people think farts are funny, like me.

Farting is a fact of life. Everybody farts. I think farts are hilarious.

The Queen farts, superstars fart and I fart. We will fart until the day we die. And apparently a person can still fart after death!

You can read the entire fart speech, which was printed in her local newspaper, along with a story under the headline, “Ripper of a speech blasts competition.”

Most of the time, when friends email me things like this, I try to ignore them. But I couldn’t resist looking at this one. As I read Sophie’s speech, I struck by how many lessons it offers for authors, speakers, writers and others who want publicity. Here are the lessons I found buried in her winning speech on farting:

1. Get outside your comfort zone.

Write about, speak about, and be passionate about topics that are controversial, prickly or yucky. A sixth-grader can certainly muster a lot more enthusiasm for the topic of farting than you and I could, but she not only loves the topic, she embraces it.

2. Use visuals.

Whether you’re speaking from the platform, writing ebooks, hosting webinars, or writing press releases, visuals make words come alive. I don’t know what the diagrams looked like on the cards that Sophie’s little brother held up in front of the audience, but I’ll bet they were a scream.

3. Use lists.

Sophie’s Top 10 list of animals that fart was educational. And priceless. I love how she included “Zebras and my pony Free” in the Number 3 spot.

4. Use statistics.

Who knew that the average person farts 14 times a day, expels a half liter of gas, or that hydrogern sulphide is the compound that makes them stink?

Statistics give your topic perspective. The Internet makes it easy to obtain statistics on any topic, within seconds.

5. End with a funny poem:

A fart can be useful
It gives the body ease,
It warms the bed in winter
And suffocates the fleas.

Did you see any other lessons in her first-place speech about farts?

Filed Under: Writing Articles Tagged With: farting, farts, public speaking, sopie paterson, statistics, visuals

2 best cruise lines for beginning speakers

11/10/2010 By Joan 1 Comment

If you’re a new speaker, and you dream about doing what Daniel Hall does—trading your talents and speaking on cruise ships in exchange for traveling all over the world—you’d be smart not to even think about taking advantage of the best gig on the seven seas until you’ve bombed several times on dry land, learned from your mistakes and honed your speaking skills.

Then, and only then, are you ready to start promoting yourself to the cruise lines. (Daniel, by the way, recommends Princess Cruises and Royal Caribbean cruise lines for newer speakers.)

If you’re beyond a beginner, start promoting yourself RIGHT NOW because enrichment coordinators are reviewing marketing materials from speakers who want to be booked for cruises in 2011.

But don’t just dive in if you don’t know the step-by-step process on how to sell yourself. This is very different than marketing to meeting planners, and you don’t want the decision makers to brand you as an amateur.

Deadline Tomorrow Night

***Update on November 16: Daniel’s video is still available for viewing but will be taken down as soon as he sells 300 units of his coaching product***

Watch the replay of the webinar I hosted on Friday with Daniel Hall. It’s “Speakers Cruise Free: The Opportunity to Trade Your Talents for Luxury Cruises.”

Warning: This video is a little more than three hours long. It will only be available until 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, Nov. 11. Go there right now and watch it, or enlist someone to listen for you and take notes. Because the webinar is divided into several smaller videos, it’s easy to jump from one topic to the next.

Daniel’s special offer at the end is good only until 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. He’s only working with 300 speakers so the market for speaking on cruise lines doesn’t become more saturated that it already is. And most of those 300 speakers already have raised their hands.

Act now. You snooze, you lose.

Filed Under: Business Promotion Tagged With: cruise ships, daniel hall, princess cruises, public speaking, royal caribbean, speak on cruise ships

Speakers, publicize your speaking engagements these 9 ways

11/22/2009 By Joan 4 Comments

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.

Do you do free or paid speaking engagements? If so, what are some of the ways you publicize them?

(Shutterstock photo)

Filed Under: Advertising, Business Promotion, Facebook, LinkedIn, Magazine Publicity, Newspaper Publicity, Social networking, Special Events, Twitter Tagged With: BNI, business journals, Business Networking International, Craigslist, MeetUp.com, Michael Schatzki, professional speaking, public speaking, SpeakerNet News, speaking engagements, Toastmasters

8 ways public speaking produces multiple revenue streams

11/17/2009 By Joan 2 Comments

If you aren’t speaking about your area of expertise, you’re missing valuable opportunities and multiple revenue streams.

Here are eight ways speaking pays, even if you stay in your own community and don’t want to hassle with packed airplanes, crummy hotels and crummier road food:

Audience members have invited me to be part of their books. I’m in more than 60 books on public relations, marketing and small business.
If you do a great job on the platform, you’ll be invited to participate in joint ventures because audience members will want to team up with you on a variety of projects. (You’ll have so many offers than you can afford to be picky.) Someone who was in the audience and heard me speak at the Glazer-Kennedy Inner Circle last week in Green Bay, Wis., called me yesterday and asked I’d be willing to do joint ventures with several other well-known Internet marketers. And he’s willing to make the introductions.
People who hear you and love you will refer you to meeting planners in their trade associations.
Some of those same audience members are program chairs for groups like Rotary, Kiwanis and the local Chamber of Commerce.
Audience members who have heard me speak have hired me to do consulting.
Others have invited me to present the same program, but customized, for their magement team.
Many groups let you sell products from the back of the room.
At every speaking engagement, and if the meeting planner allows it, I collect business cards from people who want to receive my free ezine, “The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week.” Many of those readers eventually turn into customers.

James Malinchak

If you can’t speak, or you’re afraid of public speaking, that’s OK. James Malinchak has taken even the most timid experts and turned them into dynamic speakers who wow audiences from the platform.

He’ll share many of his secrets when Steve Harrison interviews him during two teleseminars on Thursday, Nov. 19, on “What You Need To Know To Make $2,500.00 A Day (Or More) As A Public Speaker Without Being Famous!”

And what if meeting planners don’t want to pay you? James will explain why you should never speak for less than $2,500, even if you’re not very well known.

Learn how to change how to change people’s lives with your message, have a lot of fun, and get paid handsomely to do it.