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How to build your business to 7 figures. In episode 39 we talked about the mindset we needed to get to 7 figures. Then in Ep 40, I talked to Jane Atkinson about the strategies you need to get to 7 figures. In this episode I’m answering your questions on getting to 7 figures using speaking to build your business.
Benefits of listening:
* How to find your ideal listeners
* How to pick a niche
* How to ensure a speaking opportunity is worth your time
* Different incomes streams for speakers who want to get to 7 figures and beyond
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Topics Covered:
1:30 – How to shift inner stories that are keeping you stuck
5:30 – How to title your presentation to appeal to your niche
9:00 – Ways to avoid doing the wrong kind of engagement
20:30 – A one minute activity to create your 7 figure life first thing in the AM
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LINKS
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How to Get Lucrative Speaking Engagements – Free Online Masterclass
https://courses.carlarieger.com/lucrative-speaking-webinar-lp/
Speaker Prep Checklists – 2 free downloads
https://courses.carlarieger.com/speaker-prep-checklists
Checklist #1 – Should I Take the Gig?
Checklist #2 – Before and After Your Gig
VIP Private Coaching for Intermediate to Advanced Speakers – with Carla Rieger
https://courses.carlarieger.com/private-vip-coaching-for-advanced-speakers/
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Connect with Carla Rieger:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/carlarieger
Twitter – https://twitter.com/carlarieger
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlarieger/
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This is episode 41 frequently asked questions on how to become a seven figure speaker and coach or consultant. Hey, this is Carla Rieger, cofounder of the mind story coaching Academy. You’re listening to the mind story speaker podcast for influencers in business we speak to grow their income and to make a much bigger difference. So thank you so much for all your questions that you’ve been sending in based on previous podcasts. We’ve had a couple of episodes about going to seven figures as an expert who speaks, for example, as a coach or consultant. In episode 39 we talked about the huge mindset shift that helped us go from 80 K to 1 million and episode 40 we talked with Jane Atkinson who helps many speakers become wealthy. So in this podcast I thought I’d just answer some of your frequently asked questions set have been coming in. So let’s get straight into it.
Question number one, I agree that mindset is 100% of your success. When I shift my mindset, the strategies work, when I can’t shift my mindset, all the strategies in the world just don’t work. So when you talk about shifting an entire story about who you are and what you can accomplish in order to 10 X your income, how does that look specifically? Okay, great question. Now, most people confuse external reality with their thoughts. They think that their thoughts and interpretation about life are actually reality, so the minute you can separate those two, you begin the process. For example, I had a belief that with my kind of topic and my kind of expertise, I could only make max 80 K per year. That was totally wrong, but I thought it was a fact. When I worked with a coach and I was part of a group of people with similar expertise, experience and a similar focus in me making a lot more money than me, it suddenly occurred to me that my view of external reality was flawed.
I’d spent years undercharging and going after the wrong types of groups who didn’t fully value what I was offering. I changed my worldview that it was possible, but it wasn’t like a magical shift over at that point because I had to deal with all the fears of failure. The concerns about making mistakes, the doubt that I could rise to the occasion and it got very uncomfortable and I just wanted to go back to my old way of being in business because it was comfortable this time. However, I was part of a coaching group who wouldn’t let me do that. I had to face the cognitive dissonance. It’s called. That happens when the comfort of your old worldview starts to break down to make room for the new worldview. It’s very, and that’s why most people give up and go back to the old is like trying to renovate your home and live in it at the same time.
It’s loud and dirty and messy and it costs more and it takes longer than you want it to take. But on the other side of that is a whole new you, a whole new life, far more income, far more fulfillment. But our brains don’t like to change very easily. So he needs some kind of creative container, a crucible and incubator and accelerator type of environment to hold you to that possibility. So you can’t go back to the old. So if you can create that in your life somehow, that’s the best thing. Someone or a guru to be accountable to. Uh, K. number two, I know the topic I want to speak on to build my business, but I’m just not sure where to find my ideal listeners. Okay, good question. This is an area that people get very stuck on and one really important thing is that you need one entry level topic to get people interested in you as an expert in your area or in your products or services.
Many people make the mistake of trying to cram all their expertise into one speech. That is not a good way to go. It’s better to go deep in one specific tool that you offer, one specific result you can give people and actually give them an experiencial actual result during the presentation. That way it will stick with them and they’re more likely to use it in their regular life and then they think, Oh my gosh, that worked. I want more of that. How can I become their client? How can I become their customer? Again, people not doing that as often. A mindset issue. They get lost in the trees with their own expertise and they have the curse of knowledge where it’s very hard to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes you’ve never heard of you or what you offer to know how to open their minds to new ideas.
So that’s why working off someone else’s so important. Whether you invest in a business coach like me or a business incubator like our certification program or just work with a group of others who do the same thing, who can give you feedback, it’s so important. Another way you can test entry-level topics is to come up with a number of titles and put them out to a few people on your list who would be your ideal audience members and ask them which one appeals to them because titles are everything and they need to state the problem and the benefit if possible in the same title. So don’t try to come up with something cute or up to sir. Weird that people don’t get that has to be explained to them decently, really basic like how to get lucrative speaking engagements. Even if you don’t have a lot of time to market yourself.
So that’s a name of one of my online masterclasses, so that States the benefit at the beginning of the title and the avoidance of a problem at the end. People want speaking engagements that give them good income but they don’t want to have to spend hours and hours on computer trying to find them. But once you have that entry level topic and title that really gives people benefits where they get to know you, where maybe you tell a personal mission story about why you do what you do, where you prove your value through case studies and stories. Then this is by far the best way to build that all important like no interest factor that leads to business and referrals. Then you just hone that presentation and Polish it like a diamond to do it over and over again for different audiences. Only slightly customizing it don’t make the mistake of doing a different presentation each time you talked to a group because it takes a while to work out the kinks and to see what lands and what doesn’t and that way your presentation efforts are more likely to turn into longterm income and opportunities.
I literally have one presentation I’ve done for years and I added up all the income I’ve made from it. I’ve made over $1 million just from that one presentation. Okay. Another question. I like speaking, but given my family situation, I can’t go out in the road speaking anymore. I like to stay close to home. Any advice? Okay, good. When I first started speaking, you actually had to travel to speak to do a live presentation. Now with streaming video and webinars and podcasting and online meetings, you can speak online so easily from the comfort of your own home. In fact, in many ways this is more lucrative because you reached people all over the world and there’s often a replay that people who can’t attend live will watch it later and maybe many times over. So there’s two ways to speak online. You can produce your own event like do a Facebook live or record a webinar or record a podcast or be a guest on someone else’s online event like a podcast, gas store, a YouTube live stream, or being part of say a telesummit.
Again, heaven entry topic that your listeners are hungry for and just make sure they’re the right audience for you. If you look at all really successful thought leaders who speak their biggest fan base, often cancer people just like them, like say there are middle aged male tech speaker. Their biggest fan base consists of middle age men in detect if the person is a 30 something female self-help speaker. Her fan base consists mostly of female, 30 something people in self-help. Now this isn’t always true. I remember going to a Jack Canfield event and 80% of the room were women because the topic was personal growth and women are farmer into that topic, or at least they were when I went to see them, but they need to at least share your value system and I see many great speakers get completely dejected by putting out their well honed, beautiful value rich speech in front of a group of people who just didn’t really to them and they put that same topic in front of a totally different group, but they did match in terms of values and the person got a standing ovation. So it’s a lot of work, inner and outer work to put yourself out there in the world as a speaker making offers, make sure it’s a good fit. Find out the values, the age range, the gender, the interests of the people, and also if you don’t want to travel so far, they’re optimum. Any local events you can speak at or you can put on your own local events and draw people out that way.
Okay.
Okay. I’ve been speaking for years and I’m told I’m good at it, but it doesn’t always turn into more income. I don’t want to come across as salesy when presenting yet. I want my efforts to pay off more. Again, the whole part of turning your speaking into income is largely due to mindset. The number one culprit is not valuing your offer. It’s judging yourself as you’re talking about your offerings, making assumptions that they don’t want to hear about what you have to offer. Worried you might come across as salesy because of course where you focus on grows. The people who come across as the most salesy I find are actually worrying about that. That said, you need to understand the culture of the group you’re talking to. Are they used to hearing someone make an offer? Are there rules about that? About what you can say or not say out and find? It’s better to just tell a lot of stories in particular case studies of how you helped someone go from problem to solution to your products or services. It’s very important how you tell that story though and how you structure it. If you want to lead people into coming up to you and saying, Oh, you told that story and I have a similar situation and I want the same solution, how can I work with you or get your stuff right?
Okay.
Now I have another link in the show notes called the speaker prep checklists. So one of the checklists helps you analyze a speaking engagement to make sure it’s a good use of your time and so that you know what to promote and how to promote it. Like I had a client who got invited to speak in another city to a group of people she hoped would be ideal clients. She wasn’t getting paid to speak and she wasn’t allowed to promote herself and they put her first thing Monday morning knowing that the night before there would be this huge party. So of course like 13 people attended her presentation in a room that held a hundred and most of them were hung over. It costs her $500 to get out there and attend and it didn’t turn into any business for her. If she’d come to me first, I could have warned her about taking that engagement or at least tried to make it work better for her by say, getting a different time slot and filling her presentation with case studies rather than just put her website up on a slide at the end and hope everyone goes there and becomes her client.
Literally. That almost never happens to even the best speaker on the planet, so it’s like the minute somebody walks out of your presentation or switches off the screen of it’s an online presentation, their mind is filled with something else. You have to give people a really easy way to take advantage of some kind of offering to capture their email address or give them a special deal if they act right away. It’s just the psychology of how people move past natural inner resistance to getting the solutions they need. You need to learn that kind of thing and employ it in the right way if you want to turn speaking into more business.
Next question. I’m a coach and the last time I spoke I got six new clients. I was impressed. I want to speak more but I don’t know how to get consistent bookings. So of course at our company, mine story coaching Academy where we certify coaches and speakers, we think the combination of speaking as your main marketing method to build a coaching practice is by far the best and easiest way. And I know a lot of people listening are either are certified coaches or other kinds of coaches or consultants, so that is the best way to get profitable really quickly. Anyone willing to learn speaking or they’re already going to speaking is way out of the game when it comes to marketing themselves as an expert in their field. So I’m not surprised you got six new clients because you get seen as a leader when you speak, it builds your credibility.
It’s like you’re doing a free strategy session to an entire room full of people and there’s always going to be a certain percentage who say yes who want to become clients. It’s a huge time saver. That said like any marketing method, it’s very important to have a specific marketing strategy based on the goals you say you want to reach. And that works with your personality style, your learning style, so that you’ll be able to rinse and repeat and do it on a regular basis. So keeping it simple, something you love to do, something that you can become very good at over the years is the best thing. Now most people try to do many types of marketing and kind of just get this basic level of proficiency and then wonder why they don’t enjoy it and don’t get good results. That’s why if you can become good at speaking, many people use that, as I said, is their only marketing tool.
So the way to get consistent bookings is to schedule a chunk of time every week where you research ideal events, reach out to the organizers, send emails, give them phone calls, ask for referrals, like when you speak as for referrals from people who know your work and then it’s a numbers game. Eventually some people will say yes and the best way to get more consistent speaking opportunities is also to speak as often as you can. Take anything that comes along as long as it’s a good fit in terms of values. And topic and an audience because the more you speak, the more you speak, your speaking becomes the marketing for more speaking opportunities. People in the audience hear you and then you say something at the end, a specific thing which I’ll tell you about in a moment that makes them think to refer you to another speaking engagement.
Okay. Next question. I’ve been wanting to grow to the next level for a long time and keep not doing it. Is it fear of failure? Fear of success? I’m not totally sure. Any tips for breaking free of that? Yes. That happens with everyone, whether you’re new to speaking or at the top of your game. As we work with a lot of top performers who at a certain point, you know they’ve had this massive success and then they get bored, they’re dialing it in, they feel stuck and they want to do something new and they’re terrified. They’re often more terrified than a new person because that means letting go of something that’s been really working for them. They got the good income going on, but if you stay stock, eventually it all starts to fall apart anyways. So if you’re feeling the need to break free to something new and reinvent yourself, it’s better to take action then having life force you to do it, which has certainly happened to me and may of my clients.
So as soon as you feel the need to go to the next level, of course there’s a backlash and inner self sabotage that wants to keep you stuck, to keep you safe, to keep you comfortable. That’s why we are firm believers in hiring coaches ourselves. We always had a coach. My partner and I and all the top people have coaches. It’s probably the biggest differentiating factor between successful people and non-successful people as they invest in getting that kind of mindset, performance and strategy coaching. Because without it, the old programs will surely when in fact when I first started helping people build their business as a coach, speaker, consultant, I just help people with the strategy part of building their business, but then notice people weren’t implementing anything or hardly anything because they had all this procrastination, this self doubt, this imposter syndrome, this fear of asking for money, getting past fears of failure, getting past fears of success and all those inner game issues.
And again, it wasn’t just the new people who highly successful people had these issues. It’s just part of the human game of growing your influence in the world. Now of course is a huge part of what I do with clients because it gets exponentially more results. And when you think about it, pro athletes have performance coaches to keep their head in the game. So anyone in a high pressure career needs the same thing. Any business owner needs it. Any person who’s performance in front of a group really needs it because it, you know, speaking is a kind of performance sport, just like be a pro basketball player. So whether you work with us or another coach or even just some kind of accountability support group, having that is very important. The survival brain drive to keep you in your comfort zone is very powerful. Don’t underestimate how much it takes to transform that and the repetition of that transformation over and over and over and over again because you’re having to override neuro-pathways thoughts you’ve been having for a long time, right?
Takes a while to build the muscle of the new South that needs to emerge to create the new life, the new income, the new creative fulfillment you’re looking for in your life, right? So you need a place, a space to continually create new habits of mind and have someone actually confront you on thoughts that are keeping you stock, able to see it and pointed out to you and show you your mind and show you how you’re keeping yourself imprisoned and break you free of that. And not just once, but as I say regularly, which is what we do. So make sure you find somebody who knows how to do that. It’s like, give me a garden. You have to continually weed or the weeds will choke off the good stuff. That said, one of the simplest and most powerful ways is to imagine yourself living the life you want.
Having the business that you want, earning the kind of income that you want. Like for example, when you first wake up in the morning, most people start to worry about their future or regret something from their past. So if you’ve ever done that, welcome to the human condition. That’s just how the survival brain is programmed. Worry about the future. Regret about the past. So don’t beat yourself up about it. Just take a breath, acknowledge it, except that’s just the default programming. And then choose to focus on, imagine yourself actually being the kind of person you’d like to be. Feel in your body. That’s what actually creates the new neuropathways, the emotional feelings, but the emotional feelings are created by thoughts. See, how did it start changing the thoughts she’d be imagining what you’d be thinking. Therefore, what you’d be feeling, which would motivate you to act in certain ways, which would lead to the kind of results you want.
And the more you focus your mind there, the more you train the neural pathways to see the world in that way and then you create it, if that makes sense. Even if he can only do it for like six seconds, the more you do it, the more you’re building this root system of possibility. A lot of people wait until they feel motivated, which is not a good thing because the survival brain won’t let you stay motivated for very long because it’s uncomfortable. You need to purposefully override the instinctual South to create the life you want. Again, that’s not fighting with yourself, but it’s like training a puppy not to chew your slipper. The survivor brain that wants to worry and fret is like the puppy chewing. You’re very good slipper. If you try to pull the slipper away from the puppy’s mouth, what happened? It just fights you back, right?
If you want it to let go, you give it something else to play with like a bone or a ball that will drop the slipper and run after the mall. So that’s what you’re doing. Say when you’re lying in bed in the morning worrying, you just give that instinctual brain, which is like the puppy, something more positive focus on and it will drop it and go to the new thing because it just wants to chew on something and then what you focus on grows. So there’s a tip. Give it a try. Works amazingly. Okay. Another question, it’s clear that just speaking, can’t really get you to seven figures unless you’re willing to be on the road all the time and with a certain kind of topic with certain kind of audience. But you can if you have other income sources. Can you talk more about those?
Okay. Yes. Seven figure earners do tend to multipurpose everything. So speech becomes a book which becomes an online course, which becomes part of the curriculum for say group coaching, which might even become a certification manual piece of content. She needs to think about how you can leverage your time. So passive income from a book usually won’t get you rich unless it’s this massive bestseller. And even then you only get a small percentage of the profits of a bestseller. And I’ve heard and worked with many bestselling authors. You say, yeah, I’m like a top New York times bestselling author and this is how much money I actually made. The publishing company takes it all, so don’t count on a bestselling book to get you to seven figures, you know, and all those people had like a massive marketing budget to get eyeballs on their particular books, so it’s easiest in my opinion, to have passive income from something like an online course or to leverage your offerings through some kind of group program.
Another question is what are the main ways to get booked to speak? Okay, cool. Bye. Have a lot on this topic. I’ll give you a few tips right now, but in the show notes you’ll also see my free online masterclass entitled how to get lucrative speaking engagements even if you don’t have a lot of time to market yourself. So just check the link in the show notes or on our upcoming eventsPage@mindstoryacademy.com and you’ll see how to attend one of the masterclasses. Now I’m going to give these answers in the order that most speakers get booked to speak. Now for you it might be slightly different. So the number one way that people find out about, say me as a speaker is through a referral. Sometimes those just magically come to me. But I also like to fan the flames ever funerals. I asked people who know my work who are well connected to somebody who books speakers to refer me, even go so far as to write the referral email for them because most people are busy and if all they have to do is cut and paste and edit as necessary, then send, they’re more likely to do it.
Also, the more you speak, the more you speak as they said. So sometimes it pays to do what’s called a showcase speaking opportunity where you speak in front of a group of decision makers, like VPs of sales. If you do a topic of interest to salespeople or HR people if you have, say a team building topic. So I give out a small card that set everyone’s seat or at their table that they’re sitting at. And I say something at the end, like as you can see, I’m very passionate about this topic. If you know of another group that might find this helpful, let me now for example, your workplace, your spouse’s workplace and association you belong to. And then people check off this box on the card that says, I’d like to refer you to another group. They write their name and the name of the group and their contact details and then they can come up and talk to me, gave me the card, give me their business card, tell me a bit about it.
If they have time or what’s really good is they can just write on it and leave the card on the table and just take off if they have to go. And then I just pick it up at the end and follow up with them by phone or email. The second way I often get booked is they find me online. So I call that a magnetic approach. So I’ve got a lot of SEO, search engine optimized terms and I have a lot of videos up online with all the right search terms. So you have to think about what are they going to type in to look for you. Like top keynote speaker, creativity, motivational speaker, engaging, funny, whatever is true for you. And then things specific to the topic that you speak on. So you want to think about four words or key phrases that people would type in say conference organizers or program chairs of associations or VPs of sales who are putting on an incentive event or senior managers like HR people who are booking speakers for their staff training event.
What are those phrases are typing in and you want to try and start to rank for those phrases in Googles. So quick tip, whenever someone contacts me, I was asked them, Oh, how did you hear about me? And they might say, I taped in funny engaging speaker on communication and team building. So I write all those words down and use them on all my videos. The second way is paid ads and there’s lots of places you can advertise yourself online as a paid speaker. Of course there’s offline advertising like in magazines, but you know Google ad words is one place. Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, so you can actually rank very highly if you know the keywords that you want to rank for because you just buy your way in. In fact, you can be the number one spot because you pay the most be ranked there in terms of your ads.
So if you have the money, that’s really great way to do it. Then there’s outbound emails, so this is where my team and I are looking at potential speaking opportunities and we’re reaching out to those people directly. So depending on the type of event you speak at, you get different conversion rates for that. So usually when doing outbound, the easiest type of outbound opportunity to find are like association events like a conference because everything is on a website, they’re easy to find. The more difficult ones, although sometimes the ones that are the most lucrative are the corporate organizational ones or the private seminar events. So they’ll take a bit more research to find the right person to contact. And that’s where having a group of colleagues who are also speakers, some of whom speak on similar topics to you can be helpful. If they spoke at an event one year, the organizer isn’t going to bring them back the next year.
They want somebody else and so they can refer you and you can refer them. Of course when you send out emails, you often don’t hear back from people. Many meeting planners are inundated with requests from speakers, so the more personalized you can make it, you stand out and the more you can just send short little tidbits about how your expertise can help their audience. That could be very kind of a drip campaign and then there are speaker bureaus or agencies whose job it is to match the perfect speaker with the perfect clients. And for some people who do speaking as a sideline or who are a celebrity in some way in their niche, they might get all their bookings from these kinds of agents. But for others like me, I only get say about 20% from those because I always get the question, how do I get a speaker, Bureau or agent to do all the marketing for me?
So there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is that they don’t usually want to work with you until you’ve already marketed the heck out of yourself and proved your value in the marketplace because they work on commission, right? They don’t want to do all this work and then have it not pay off because you haven’t done the groundwork first. Now, the good news is that if you’ve done some groundwork, once you get on their list, they can do a lot of that work for you, so you’re just showing up to speak. So they usually have a big director and their websites of all different kinds of speakers on all different kinds of topics in all different kinds of industries and they’re really working with clients to help them find the right speaker for their event. Now there are other kinds of speaker agencies that are kind of called boutique bureaus and they might focus on a certain type of industry or a certain type of speaker like safety and wellness or women’s events or incentive events.
Now, smart bureaus, and I’ve worked with many of them actually helping them with their marketing become the go to source for getting speakers for all the events for a specific organization. For example, a huge association that has events all over the country or all over the world. It’s just easier for them to subcontract to one particular Bureau to do all that for them. So if you get on as a speaker with you know, one event with that client, you might start getting a whole bunch of events with that one client in all their different chapters or locations. Now, most bureaus will not work with a speaker until a speaker is consistently earning, say 10,000 per speech or above and they take maybe 25 or 30% commission on that booking. So let’s assume that you are in that position. Then I would say a good way of building a relationship with them is actually giving a Bureau a booking without any work on their part in the first place.
So let’s imagine that you get a speaking inquiry and it’s in San Diego and you reach out to a Bureau that covers that region and say, Hey, I’ve been asked to speak at this particular event on this particular date. I’d like to connect you with this client and run the business through Europe, Euro. They usually appreciate that gesture and then we’ll put you front of mind for other engagements that come through the door after that. Now another thing that some speakers do is send a monthly newsletter to all the bureaus that they work with, with what’s happening when they’re going to be in different parts of the world. Because sometimes they can find additional dates for you. And I mean you can put up testimonials and they might add that to their website and it also keeps you front of mind in terms of who they’re going to pitch to a certain client.
So those are different ways that you can focus on getting on with a Bureau. But if you’re new to speaking, just focus on getting them directly yourself. So if you want to get to seven figures quickly, it does help to have a backend offering like coaching or consulting. In fact, many of my clients who speak for free make more money than the ones who speak for fee because they have these huge consulting contracts or they fill up their coaching practice whenever they speak. Now, if you want to get profitable much more quickly or jump up to the next level of influence and impact very quickly, I do have a VIP program that’s only for intermediate to advanced speakers. In other words, speaking feels like one of your super powers, and of course you can always hone and get better, but it’s something you are experienced with and you need to say reinvent yourself or fine tune your offers or stories or humor, rise to the top of your game, turn it into more income.
Those are all the kinds of people I work with and we turn your speech into a work of art. We deal with any mindset issues that are in the way of transforming and reinventing yourself. And we also ensure that your marketing strategy works for you, your lifestyle, the marketplace you’re working in, so that it’s all a win win. If so, just click on the link in the show notes that says VIP coaching from our details. So you do need to apply as I only have a few spots and you just fill out a short questionnaire and then we have a chat on zoom or on the phone and kind of do a demo coaching session to feel into whether it’s the right thing for you at this time. But I’ve helped people completely turn around their business by speaking and turning into massively more income and really bringing out their greatest potential. Because if you created your speech on your own and didn’t get a lot of feedback on it before putting it out in the world, it might be good, but it might not be great. So I can help you be exceptional and why not? Why not get out in the world and rock people’s worlds at a whole other level?
Anytime I’ve done that, I’ve upped my game up. Always worked with a coach. So I’m here for you if you want that. So thanks everyone for listening. Thanks for all your amazing questions and please email me if you have any more questions. And in the meantime, until next time, I’m Carly rear. Bye for now.
