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Here are 10 Tips to get out there online speaking in a much bigger way. Live meetings lately are canceled due to the Coronavirus, so now’s the time to get into the online space for speaking in a much bigger way. Online speaking can get you much greater results than live speaking anyway, because you can reach far more people all over the world. Your content can be made available for years and people can watch the replay many times — thereby getting deeper value, as opposed to a live event that people only see once.
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Topics Covered:
1:15 – The kinds of results people have gotten from online speaking
2:50 – Tip #1 – Think Through a Specific Marketing Strategy
6:30 – Tip #2 – Ask for Guidance from Your Future Se
8:45 – Tip #3 – Explore the different types of online speaking
11:25 – Tip #4 – Titles are everything
15:05 – Tip #5 – Learn the basic technical requirements yourself
18:40 – Tip #6 is – Choose one method of online speaking and get really good at it
20:58 – Tip #7 is – get good production quality
24:13 – Tip #8 is – Think through what you want to say
27:32 – Tip #9 is – Connect with the Group Mind of Your Listener
30:02 – Tip #10 is – Don’t be Afraid to Make an Offer
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LINKS
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Explore Your Passion worksheet (FREE) – to find the overlap of your skills, credibility, passions, communities you’d like to serve, how you’d like to serve them, and what’s actually marketable. And turn all that into an expertise mission statement.
https://courses.carlarieger.com/explore-your-passion-lp/
Private Coaching Series to Become a Well-Paid Online Speaker. Taking applications now. Special deal available only until the end of the month. https://courses.carlarieger.com/private-vip-coaching-for-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 50 – ONLINE SPEAKER – how to 10 X your business quickly. Well, I’ve hit the 50 episode mark. It’s exciting. I started about a year and five months ago doing one every two weeks and now I’m doing one a week so you can expect a new one every Tuesday. Hi, I’m Carla Rieger and you’re listening to the Mindstory Speaker podcast for influencers who speak live or online to build their business.
Speaking to groups live is a much quicker and easier way to build your business than talking to people one on one. That said, online speaking is exponential in that way because you can reach many more people all over the world and often people watch your replay and it’s available for years and some people watch it many times and get a lot of deep value from it, as opposed to a live event that people only see once and never again making your content easily forgettable. Not only that but live meetings lately have been canceled due to the Coronavirus. More people are moving into the online space for speaking.
So here’s an example of the kind of results you can get. I made a $10,000 sale from just one Facebook live where only 22 people watched it. I had another client who created evergreen content, which means a pre-recorded webinar. He did all the work once and then showed it over and over and over again twice a week for two months and sold $135,000 total from an online course. And we’ve created a short online course that ended up bringing in hundreds of thousands of income over a two year period. I’ve also been paid by companies to deliver content online, just a paid speaking fee of several thousand dollars just for leading one webinar. So there’s lots of options. Now these results aren’t typical, but they are possible.
So let’s get started. So here are 10 tips to Tenex your business through online speaking, which I love in some ways more than live speaking because I spent a couple of decades on airplanes, living in hotel rooms, going to live meetings. And while that’s fun, occasionally to do it all the time is too exhausting. So this way I get to be in my own home. I get to control the entire environment. And often when you’re doing online speaking, if you’re producing it yourself, the costs are like nothing almost, as opposed to if you were to put on a public seminar and pay for a room and pay for people to come help you with the event. It’s just so much less expensive and so much easier.
Tip #1 – So Tip #1 is to think through a marketing strategy. I see so many people just start doing Facebook lives with no particular goal in mind. That’s fine if you just want to test the waters and see what its like. But if you want online speaking to turn into income, and to add value to the online space, it helps to already be clear how you can have a big impact on a certain type of person, and solve a certain type of problem for them, or help them reach a certain goal. If you don’t have clarity just yet go to MindStoryAcademy.com/free and check out the “Explore Your Passion worksheet” to find a niche that works for you and is marketable, that will make you income. For example, an unclear niche is “mindset for people in transition”. Everyone is in transition especially these days with the pandemic and lockdown. Plus mindset is a huge topic involving thousands of areas you could help people.
More niched would be “Break free from Procrastination and Get Focused for Life Coaches” So, that’s a specific area of mindset, for a person in a specific role. Most people get concerned they’ll miss out on business if they niche, but the opposite is almost always true. You need some kind of focus for your marketing message. It doesn’t mean you’ll only serve that group, it’s just that it will be the majority of the people you will serve. So choose a group you’d love to help and make sure the solution is something they really want and will pay for. That requires some market research, but a simple way to do that is to just see if there are others making a living serving that market in that way. If you can’t find anyone keep looking, you don’t want to try to sell alarm clocks to people who don’t have a job to wake up for in the morning.
Here’s a before and after to show you what I mean when it comes to niching. I had a client who came to me after trying various types of online speaking with no results—podcast, webinar, facebook lives. None of it turned into any consulting or coaching contracts, no list building, no referrals. It was a lot of work, so we analyzed it. First off she never made any offers, not even for anything free, she just sent people to her website. That rarely turns into business even for the most successful content creators on the planet. On top of that she didn’t have a good microphone, and the lighting was bad, and the internet kept dropping and she didn’t know how to reboot, so less and less people came to listen because each segment was full of tech glitches. When she spoke she came across flat because she wasn’t used to talking to simply a red light on her web cam. She was used to talking to real live people and hadn’t learned the art of coming across as conversational which we’ll talk more about. We went through her content and she didn’t really have a point, she kind of adlibbed her way through and so went off topic several times, and repeated herself. Also, her title was very general and vague and didn’t speak to a particular type of person wanting a particular type of benefit. So it didn’t stand out in the marketplace. If you’ve done any of that, don’t worry, it’s common. I’ve done all that, too. No need to beat yourself up, just get curious to learn how to improve, course correct, and try again. Once we sorted that all out she got a great platform, great mic, good lighting, well thought through presentation, with compelling slides, and niched her topic down to solve a specific problem for specific group, and she made a compelling offer at the end, asking people for business, and lo and behold it totally turned into business for her. It was hard for her to figure that all out by herself, though, so if you haven’t been getting much traction I suggest you work with someone who knows what they’re doing, like me or someone else you know in the online space who you trust, and get a customize a process just for you, your style, your topic, your audience and personality style…because different people need to make offers in different ways depending on who they are and who they are talking to. One style of making offers doesn’t fit all. I’ll talk more about that in Tip #10, how to turn your online speaking efforts into income in a way that feels good, right and authentic to you.
Tip #2 is – Ask for Guidance from Your Future Self. You may have heard me talk about this theory and other podcasts. It’s based on the philosophy that every goal you make creates a new timeline in your life and if you stay focused there you eventually reach the goal, and there is a future self who can tell you how you got there. So, imagine there is a future you who created a successful business through online speaking, and you define the success where you want. It could be in terms of a certain amount of monthly or yearly income, a certain number of people who listen to your content, etc. Usually something that’s numerical is a great way to measure, that way you can know if you reached it or not. If it’s kind of a vague–I will be successful– it’s harder to latch onto that timeline because it’s not a specific measure. Does that make sense? With that in mind you can talk to your future self who has achieved this specific goal. I like to write it down, what that future self says. I’ve gotten extraordinary ideas, completely out-of-the-box ideas, by doing this. And many of my clients have discovered the same phenomenon. You want to address specific questions such as, is this online speaking a good way for me to build my business? If so, what was the best platform, how often, how long, who do I market to, what problem do I solve, what’s the best title, what should I offer at the end, and see what you get. It helps you get out of the part of your mind that keeps telling you – I don’t how to do this, I can’t figure this out because I’ve never done it before. Those kind of thoughts will lead to inaction and procrastination. Your future self, if you still your mind, get quiet, and really open to new possibilities will give you the information. And the more you practice this skill, the better. After you’ve done this inner world market research, do outer world market research as well. Check out other people online doing something similar to get ideas.
Tip #3 – Explore the different types of online speaking to see which one would work the best for your situation. For example, you can be a guest speaker on someone else’s platform or host and produce it yourself. So there’s podcasts, radio shows (regular and internet), webinar, zoom meeting, YouTube, TV (regular and web based), evergreen educational content for a private membership site, Facebook live or any other lifestream platform, and probably some that I’m missing . You may wonder what some or all these are, so briefly go through them listing pros and cons from the perspective of being a speaker. A podcast, is just audio, that is distributed over the Internet to which a user can subscribe by means of syndication software like Libsyn or Soundcloud – like this podcast. It’s an episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that the user can download to a personal device for easy listening. It’s a convenient way for the consumer to access your content. For example the majority of people listen to podcasts are using iTunes which you can listen to on your phone, your tablet, your laptop or even in your car…as most cars now link to iTunes. You can also put it up on your own website and people can listen online or download the MP3 into their iTunes application, and then put it onto their phone. Then there is old-fashioned radio shows that you maybe listened to as a kid. Then there’s an Internet radio show where the person has a scheduled time that they do the show live like BlogTalk Radio. Webinars can be live or prerecorded and they are usually on a certain topic for a certain type of person like how to sell financial services online, for financial planners. It’s either all slides, or all just talking head video, or both. A zoom meeting might consist of a smaller group of people where you either host yourself or you come on as a panelist, or guest speaker. It’s usually just talking head video but you can also share your screen and show slides or a page on the Internet for example. Then you can have your own YouTube channel where you create and post videos, you can be a guest on someone else’s YouTube channel. For example I was just a guest speaker on second act TV. Then there’s traditional media like television, but there are also web-based television shows you could speak on. And then someone might just record an interview with you and posted on a private membership site. Then there are all the streaming platforms that are popular these days on most social media platforms, where people can be in various different places who are the speakers, talking to their web camera, and it’s being aired live to the people listening on the platform. I like podcasts because I’m a big podcast consumer so I can relate to the type of people who like podcasts. I download them and put them on my iPod go for walk, or listen while I make dinner. I like to consume educational content while I’m moving. That’s just me. Some people are happy to sit in front of their computer and watch the webinar, they like the visual element. Find out what your particular audience likes. My particular audience tends to be people over 45 years old, who tend to prefer audio over video content. However I also provide video content especially if I need to show something visually like how to speak to the camera, or how to use the zoom platform. So think about what your people would more likely consume.
Tip #4 – Titles are everything. Your fans will likely listen to your content regardless of the title, but if you want to attract new people to your work, title is everything. There are common guidelines in the world of content creation around titles, you can look those up on the Internet and get some ideas. For example, having a number like 10 tips is better than having no number. Starting your title with how to, as in how to 10X your business through online speaking. Having a solution you solve in your title. Most people want to build their business, so that’s solution in the title. Warning type titles such as – Remove This from Your Refrigerator Immediately. Indicator type titles such as – 7 Signs It’s Time to Reinvent Yourself. Contrarian type titles such as Why your self doubt could be a good thing. Most people think of self-doubt as a bad thing, peaks people’s curiosity as to how it could be a good thing. If you want to target a certain demographic you could put that in the title such as — Why people born in the 80s are poorer. Now I’m not a big fan of creating content that’s just bad news. I think if you’re going to give bad news, you should also offer a solution. For example, A Common Behavior That May Stunt Your Business Growth and how to overcome it. That said, more people are attracted by a negative thing they want to avoid, than a positive thing they want to create. I’ve tried this myself and it’s true. For example, a main title could be – A Speaker Habit that Guarantees Failure – that creates curiosity because nobody wants to have a habit that’s causing failure that they don’t know about. But then you can have a subtitle such as – three insider tips to win over your audience. Here’s a more positive title – 5 Things Most great speakers Do Differently. You can also ask your future self for title ideas, I’ve gotten some of my best titles that way.
Tip #5 – Learn the basic technical requirements yourself. I got into the online space 10 years ago, and went through a steep learning curve of figuring out how to do the technical stuff at a time when a lot of these platforms were glitchy and in their infancy. I sweated night and day trying to figure out how to do webinars, how to create streaming video content, how to create audios, how to create the artwork, the emails, the funnels, how to house content into an online learning platforms. I’ve pretty much tried every online learning platform, every content management platform, and have both done the backend work myself and hired people to do it. I’m now a big believer in at least doing it with the help of a technical person at first, then hiring others to do it for you. That way you know how to direct them, you know what’s possible. I know for some people, that’s a big turnoff, to sit on computer and figure out the technical details. But I can tell you, compared to 10 years ago, it’s just so easy now. If you’re a huge technophobe even when things are user-friendly, I suggest hiring a tutor. This would be either someone you know, a coach, or go to a platform like Upwork.com to find a virtual assistant who is an expert on a platform you want to learn. Get on Zoom with them or Skype, you share your screen and they tell you exactly what to do. Don’t have them do it and you watch, because you won’t learn that way. You physically need to go through all the buttons and learn the steps and then it will stick. I used to be a technophobe, and someone recommended that to me. So, that’s what I’ve done with every technical platform I’ve ever used. I got someone to sit there and tutor me one step at a time until I learned it. And make sure you can easily contact the tutor on messenger or Skype so they can instantly answer questions for you after you’ve gotten going on your own. For some of my technophobe clients, that’s part of the service I offer, I take them through the online speaking platforms and teach them about had to get set up, edit, how to upload, just do it once with them and then they know how to do it and answer questions as we go along. Most people need that handholding in the beginning, because left to their own devices, they have too much resistance to just get started.
So Tip #6 is – Choose one method of online speaking and get really good at it before you jump around to all the other ones. I tried learning many at once, and I started getting them all mixed up. Not only is it a lot to learn technically, but there’s a whole method of marketing for each of them, and different types of people like different types of platforms. So first I settled in on learning a platform called, EasyWebinar, because it was easy to learn. I created five different pre-recorded webinars, and just kept focused on that for a few years. I liked the pre-recorded ones because I could edit out the glitches. I could interact with my audience by having them watch the nicely distilled, and edited content, while I could fully respond to their questions on chat. Now my current favorite platform for livestreaming is Streamyard. Just go to Streamyard.com and check it out. You can live stream to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and several other platforms at the same time. This platform allows you to share your screen, so you can just be a talking head in front of your WebCam, or you can share your screen and have a little video of yourself talking at the same time in the corner, or you can have no video of you and you can just share your screen, if you don’t want your face seen on camera. The upside of live streaming is that you put the content out and it immediately is available on replay for all those platforms without you having to edit it, export it, and put it up and then have to drive traffic to it like with a pre-recorded webinar. All these social media platforms will make your content available to any people on those platforms so your content gets out to a lot more people, than if you’re just marketing a pre-recorded webinar to your list or social media followers. Also, the upside of Streamyard is that you can download the video, edit it and put it up on a membership site on online learning platform later. The other upside is that you can answer questions live as people add question to the chat, which some people really appreciate, especially if the question relates to many of the others listening. The downside of livestreaming is that everyone has to sit through your glitches and mistakes, and sometimes people get impatient with you responding to individual questions that don’t concern them, versus the evergreen webinar style where you just personally respond via email to the person who asked it. The other thing I’ve gotten very good at is, of course, podcasts. In this case I hired someone who got the whole thing rolling for me and I found them on UpWork. I found someone who labeled themselves as a podcast producer and she was excellent. She got the whole thing started and then taught me and my virtual assistant how to do it.
Tip #7 is – get good production quality. The most important thing to get is a good microphone. People will put up with poor lighting, and a cluttered background, but as soon as the audio is bad, people will shut off your content. John Lee Dumas, who is a podcasting expert, suggests at the low end something like Logitech ClearChat which comes at an affordable price of $29.99 US. And I usually insist this is the minimum that my guests should have before they appear on my shows and if not I would consider cancelling the interview. John Lee Dumas recommends this as well, otherwise no one will want to listen. That mic will take you from an audio quality of 2 (the equivalent of talking into a MacAir) to an audio quality of 7. Secondly there is the ATR-2100 at $49.99. I now use a $200 podcasting mic, but you don’t have to have that. Minimum of $30- $50 and you should be fine. If you don’t have video or camera lights that you can set up in your space, at least sit in front of a window when you are talking to your WebCam. There’s nothing worse than someone sitting in silhouette, we can see their background that they are in shadow. It’s also good if you can clear clutter from your background. Zoom has virtual backgrounds you can learn how to add, or you can put a nice painting on the wall behind you, or just have a nice room set up behind you, orderly and aesthetically pleasing. I also like to have a pop screen, which is a screen you put in front of the microphone that helps lower sibilance which is that sound of distortion when people say certain letters like “P”. It also helps to modulate your voice, and feel emotionally connected to your content and audience. That’s a whole huge subject that I teach in an of itself. A small majority of people can do it without training, but most people need some help. Again, I help people with that, and so do many others. Find someone who can help you sound interesting and not like an automaton, or not too nasaly. Many people have a style of speech that is hard to listen to and don’t know it…like being too stident, too nasal, too quiet, too raspy, etc. Or they have a style of speaking that’s not connecting with the audience like using words that are too academic. I’ve been accused of that. Or, too many verbal pauses such as “um” or “like, you know”, or “quote unquote”. You don’t know until you listen to yourself, or get someone to give you constructive well intentioned feedback.
Tip #8 is – Think through what you want to say. People appreciate a well structured presentation. Some people can completely ad lib the whole thing, without losing people’s interest, but most people have to have at least specific talking points, slides or even a whole script to ensure they don’t get off topic, or forget to make important points. It’s also important to understand how adults learn if you speak to adults versus kids. You need to hit all the learning styles – visual, auditory, kinesthetic, read-write, if possible – including stories, maybe some humor, something interactive or practical for your listener to do, even if it’s just a podcast. You need to understand at least basic curriculum design, because people learn best if there is a specific structure, an order, a logical flow, examples to ground the concepts…and again it’s useful to have certain structures for certain types of content and certain types of listeners. If you don’t know about all this, get educated. There’s nothing worse than putting out content in a way that people don’t like or don’t connect with. It’s harder to the win back people’s trust. If you do it right…right at the outset…you’re more likely to have ongoing success. That said, of course you’ll make mistakes in the beginning. We all do. Just make sure you get some help. There’s a lot of content out there, especially these days as everyone is trying to get online. Unless you’re doing it right, you won’t stand out in the marketplace, and it will be a lot of work, or little return.
Tip #9 is – Connect with the Group Mind. Of course it helps to be authentic whenever you’re giving a presentation live or online. But the advice to – just be yourself – rarely is useful for people. Being yourself is a lifelong endeavor. I have whole online courses and entire coaching series just helping people tap into their true, authentic self so they can live a more fulfilling life, is quite a bit of work for all of us. That said, here’s a tip that I find to be amazingly helpful for myself and my clients. When you’re speaking to a group of people live, you can kind of pick up visual cues as to whether there getting what you’re saying, whether they’re attentive, or whether their bord. You can’t do that with online. And often don’t even know how many people are listening, especially if you’re creating prerecorded content. So if a person is just talking into a microphone or just looking at a red light on the camera, they often talk in a whole other monotone, flat way. I’ll say the last sentence in the way I’m referring to. [flat like you’re reading] So if a person is just talking into a microphone or just looking at a red light on the camera they often talk in a whole other monotone, flat way. The only way you’re going to find out how you do it is by listening to a recording of yourself. To avoid that, what I do is create an intention, a prayer that goes something like this. I now ask to tap into the group mind of the listeners whether they are listening live or to a replay, so that I say the right thing at the right time in the right way so that these particular people can get the value they are looking for at this time. I ask to be able to tap into all the wisdom, skills, ideas and abilities possible in the entire universe so that I can be of deep service now and onward into the future in a way that best serves all those concerned. You can have something like that on a 3 x 5 card near your computer, to remind you to tap in. It’s the theory that you have a higher mind, and that within that that higher mind you have the ability to telepathically tap into other minds knowing what they need and want, and if you truly have an intention to help, this information is available to you. Whenever I set that intention, it’s amazing what comes out of my mouth, I say something and invariably a listener writes me and says – that’s exactly what I needed to hear.
Tip #10 is – Don’t be Afraid to Make an Offer. Many people create content online, or come on as a guest speaker for someone else, but don’t make an offer. What I mean by an offer is something free the people can take away in exchange for getting on your list, an online course, a digital download, that they pay for, a free strategy session that would lead to a potential coaching series, a workshop, a membership site, something that gives people a deeper dive, more help, more customized help. People say they don’t want to be seen as salesy. But here’s a few ideas around that. If you’re uncomfortable making offers, you will sound salesy, because people pick up on the incongruence between what you’re saying and how you feel about what you’re saying. So the very first thing to do is let go of your discomfort. So that might mean changing some core beliefs you have around making offers. I find, that out of every group of people listening to what I have to say, there always a certain percentage of people who want more, and if you don’t tell them that you offer more, they won’t assume you have it. They won’t hunt down your website and look through all your tabs and figure out how to get from you. Very few people do that. You have to spell it all out for them. You have to let them know the benefits getting a deeper dive from you, what it looks like, how to find out more information and people need some sort of deadline to do it by, otherwise they’ll say – a look into that someday, and then they completely forget about you. That’s why you always see people saying for the next 24 hours, or by the end of the month, you can get a special price, or the courses starting, or you can only take so many people, us people need some sort of limiter or they just want take action. That’s just basic psychology. Everyone has resistance to getting the deeper dive, and they also have the desire to get the deeper dive, and one of those is going to win out. So if they have that calling to work more deeply with you, to become a paying client, then help them get past that resistance, not the manipulative way, it’s only for people who you truly feeling your heart would benefit from working with you. But don’t expect people to chase you, they won’t. There’s so many offers out there, you have to fight for people a bit, you have to help them make a good decision for themselves. So I think you should always make an offer in every piece of content you put online. Some people will tell you put three pieces of content up and then on the fourth one make offer. I don’t believe in that, because what if somebody listens to your second piece of content and you don’t make an offer, and they don’t know that you offer coaching for example. And then they never find you again, and then they miss out on help you could give them. So even if it’s just one sentence where you send them to your website but you specifically tell them where exactly to go, and what they can exactly get and put some kind of limiter on it… That’s better than nothing. And I would go so far as to weave throughout your content sentences here and there to help people understand how you help people, as I have done in this podcast, which I did on purpose to demonstrate what I’m talking about. I am giving examples of how you can work with me, because I offer that, or find someone else who knows what they’re doing. I’m not saying I’m the only person to work with, but I’m saying I can specifically help you with that, because otherwise you wouldn’t know. So make those offers, and a certain percentage a people will go for it. Good luck with it.
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So, here’s my offer to you. I have a free downloadable process and a deeper dive offer. If you’re not clear who to serve and how to serve them as an online speaker, check out the Explore Your Passion worksheet link in the shownotes. It will give you a 30 minute process to find the overlap of your skills, credibility, passions, communities you’d like to serve, how you’d like to serve them, and what’s actually marketable, that you can make an income from. And then you’ll turn all that into an expertise mission statement. That process will also help you find titles for your online speaking content. If you’ve done a process like this before, but not for a while, often as the world changes how you belong to the world changes, and you might need to relook at who to serve and how to serve them moving forward. You can also find it by going to MindStoryAcademy.com/free and you’ll see it there along with all our other free tools. So check it out.
Secondly, if you want CUSTOMIZED HELP TO GET GOING AS AN ONLINE SPEAKER, check this out. Trying to do it alone can be challenging. I offer private coaching to help you turn confusion into clarity, make important marketing decisions, help you pull your content and tech together, vet your content to ensure it will be well received and a good use of your time and investment. By application only. If I think it would be a good fit, we’ll do a complimentary demo coaching session together first. You’ll see the link in the shownotes. But you can also go to mindstoryacademy.com and go to the coaching tab and you’ll see Speak to Grow Your Business coaching. There you can find more information about the program and find the link to apply. It’s specifically designed to help you get profitable in your business using online speaking to get you there.
So that’s it for today…I hope that was helpful. Until next time, I’m Carla Rieger, thanks for listening.
