From Associate Member to Professional Member to CSP Top Do's and Don’ts in Building Your Speaking Business

Roundtable with Nishant Kasibhatla CSP 2011

Reviewed by Christopher How

Visibility
It is important to maintain visibility with your target audience. Traditional media is still very much alive when it comes to branding. Getting on radio, television interviews, and writing newspaper articles has scored Nishant many paid speaking engagements. As for online media, maintain a website and regular newsletter to keep your clients updated about your activities.
Consider submitting articles to high-ranking article directories such EzineArticles. This will also create more backlinks to your website to improve search engine optimisation and help to generate more buzz about you when readers find your articles in these directories.

Motivation
Starting your own speaking business can be daunting because most speakers work from home and it can be difficult to keep yourself motivated and grow the business facing the four walls in your room with no one to talk to.
Here are some of the tips Nishant shared based on his own experience.

1. Identify the top 5 goals that you want to achieve in your life. Pen them down on a piece of paper and place it on your desk so that you will see it everyday.
2. Dedicate a minimum of 4 hours of work each day. Nishant recommends spending 60% of the time on marketing, 30% of the time on product development, and 10% of the time on administrative matters. This way, you are spending less time working than an employee and will put in more effort in those few hours.
3. Invite fellow speakers to hear you speak and critic your presentation so that you can improve.

Products
It’s not as difficult as you thought to create your first product. For example, if you maintain a blog, you can make use of a top 10 tip article that you may have written previously as the foundation of your product, and then elaborate on it.

Sales
For a new speaker, Nishant recommends to start free. Just speak as much as possible to gain experience and improve. While it is important to please the audience and the person who hired you for the speaking engagement, it is even more important to impress the boss of the person who hired you. That increases the chances of getting speaking engagements in future.
After each speaking engagement, always ask for testimonials. While not all clients will be willing, it never hurts to ask. You should also log your speaking engagements. Once you have at least 1-2 years of log, you will then be able to gauge if you are doing better for a specific month as compared to the same month a year ago. This will also help when you apply for Professional Membership or Certified Speaking Professional.

A quick tip from Nishant
Nishant shared a tip about prospecting. Most people will start planning for their holidays in November and December. But these are the best months to prospect your existing clients because these are the months where department heads want to finish their excess budget for the year. A training workshop will be just nice to help balance the budget. Even if the budget for the year has been used up, it’s great to prospect to keep you at your clients’ top of mind so they can try to set some budget aside for the following year for some of your training sessions.