If you have absolutely no idea how to get there, this book will show you what is required.

Jane Atkinson’s The Wealthy Speaker: The Proven Formula for Building Your Successful Speaking Business is packed with advice to prepare you to make the jump to $15,000 speaking fees, whether you are six months or six years away.

This article is the latest of a series of public speaking book reviews here on Six Minutes.

What will you learn from The Wealthy Speaker?

The Wealthy Speaker is a comprehensive insider’s view of the speaking industry. Jane Atkinson guides you through all aspects of a keynote speaker’s business, including:

• Positioning yourself as an expert first, speaker second
• Developing your message
• Setting and negotiating fees
• Development of marketing materials
• Creation of your website and demo video
• Building your contact database
• Working with speaker’s bureaus and event planners
• Growing your business and hiring staff
• Selling products

The Wealthy Speaker is written with authority, and Atkinson’s extensive expertise in the speaking industry is apparent. This isn’t a book with theoretical ideas that might work. These are lessons learned from her successes and failures in the trenches.

Numerous case studies highlight successful speakers and industry insiders. These are fairly short (1-2 pages), but highly enlightening.

Throughout the book, you’ll also find worksheets and personal assessments. These exercises are well-designed to help you apply the lessons to your personal situation.

As a final note, you won’t find much information here at all about honing your speaking skills. And that’s a good thing because that’s not what this book is about. I was happy to see this book kept its focus on the business of speaking, not the mechanics.

What I wish was in The Wealthy Speaker

As much as I learned from The Wealthy Speaker, it’s not perfect. You cannot cover everything in 208 pages. So, what’s missing?

First, as Atkinson states early in the book, the book has a bias towards business models based primarily on keynote speaking. So, you won’t find specific information here to carve out a wealthy career as a trainer, seminar leader, or speaking coach. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for the sequel: The Wealthy Trainer?

Second, a few topics could use more treatment.

• For example, the section on website management is thin. To be fair, Atkinson defers to “experts” for this topic. The topics which comprise her core expertise (e.g. positioning, marketing, speaker’s bureaus) are handled much better.
• The information on contracts also feels skimpy. I expected to find more samples and a richer resource here. Perhaps the rationale here is that wealthy speakers delegate the contract work to staff?

Third, while the table of contents is detailed, there’s no index or appendices (e.g. a list of all the resource websites mentioned throughout the book). This reduces the usefulness of The Wealthy Speaker as a reference tool. Maybe this will be added in the second edition?

The Bottom Line

The Wealthy Speaker is excellent value, and easily worth the purchase price. An investment of $11.53 is a small, small price for gaining so much knowledge.

About the Author – Jane Atkinson

Jane Atkinson has 15 years of experience helping speakers secure more bookings at higher fees. She is a business coach for speakers, specializing in positioning and marketing. You can read more about her on her website: Speaker Launcher.

Jane previously shared her expertise as a guest author on Six Minutes with 6 Key Steps to Dip Your Toe into the Professional Speaking Pool.

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Have a Question? Contact me anytime, or find me on Twitter: @6minutes

Andrew Dlugan is the editor and founder of Six Minutes. He teaches courses, leads seminars, coaches speakers, and strives to avoid Suicide by PowerPoint. He is an award-winning public speaker and speech evaluator. Andrew is a father and husband who resides in British Columbia, Canada.

How many times have you sat in an audience and thought to yourself: “Man, I’d like to be up there!”

Perhaps you’ve given a few presentations and you find out that you’re pretty darn good at this speaking thing. Maybe you join Toastmasters and rise to the top of your club. Some time goes by and you start thinking “I can make a living at this. Imagine getting paid to speak!”

You decide to go for it.

So what’s next?

Here are a few broad steps that you can take to get started in the world of professional speaking:

1. Pick a Lane
2. Be the Expert
3. Get Good
4. Set Up Shop
5. Creating a Great Promise
6. Develop a Marketing Program

1. Pick a Lane

The first step along your journey must be to “pick a lane.”

You need to choose a topic area to focus on, based on your expertise. Now you might say, “but I have several speeches that I’m very good at – how can I choose just one?”

Ask yourself this question: “What do I want to be known for 5 years from now?” If you don’t want to be known for anything and don’t care much about getting paid, then by all means continue with all of your speeches.

If you want to get paid well and be known as the expert on one thing, then pick a lane.

2. Be the Expert

When launching into a career as a professional speaker, many people make the mistake of thinking of themselves as just a speaker. In the big picture, however, you are the central cog of a company that helps to accomplish something.

Whether you help people manage their time better, lead others, get motivated, or be educated on the economy, your company should have a mission.

You should think about speaking as just one of the channels which you use to distribute your knowledge. You might also write books, consult, coach, run teleseminars, host retreats, etc.

The key is this: when you think about yourself, don’t narrow it down to professional speaker; be the head of an empire that helps people in your lane of expertise.

Remember that you can’t fake it. Your expertise must be real and credible. If you aren’t there yet, go out and develop your expertise before pursuing this path.

3. Get Good

Winning a speech contest is a step in the right direction towards getting good, but it doesn’t mean that people are going to pay you.

The real test to knowing when your speech has “made it” is when someone comes up to you after your presentation and says “I’d like to book you to speak six months from now in Las Vegas.”

When spin-off, which is king in our business, is happening on average 2-3 times after every engagement, then you can stop working on your speech. Until then, work the speech. [Ed.: spin-off refers to a future speaking engagement you gain as a direct consequence of your present engagement]

4. Set Up Shop

The speaking business is like any business. If you don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in your body, you may be in for hardship.

To get started, you need cash flow – start up capital. If you are starting on a shoe string, then you are going to find it more difficult. That said, with today’s technical world, things are a bit more possible.

For instance, you can use a blog as your website and manage it yourself. If it looks professional enough, then you might be able to save the costs of setting up and managing a website which can creep into the thousands depending on your supplier.

The key is to be able to communicate what you can do for people within 15 seconds of their arrival to your site. In our ADD web world, you don’t have long to impress someone. [Ed.: ADD = attention deficit disorder]

If they don’t see what they are looking for, they will abandon your website in a heartbeat.

5. Creating a Great Promise

The promise statement is the key to communicating your value to your prospects.

It’s like a tag line and would go on your website and marketing pieces. In five to nine words (less is more), the promise statement tells prospects what they will get by working with you.

For example, a speaker who delivers programs on team-building might create a promise “Helping Teams Win in a Competitive Field.”

You can work on making your promise more clever or reflective of your personality, but the real key is to show the outcome and the value, and to get that decision maker to lean in and say “Yes, we need that!”

6. Develop a Marketing Program

Now obviously I’m simplifying here, but once your website is up, you’ll want to create a flow of traffic to it.

You’ll want to choose industries that would be a good fit for your message and start a marketing campaign that will allow you to position with those groups as an expert.

I often recommend to my clients that they start a twelve month marketing calendar. The goal is to develop a list of followers by having people sign up for something on your website. Then to stay in touch with that list on a regular basis so that when they have a need for your expertise, you are top of mind. A few marketing ideas are:

• developing articles for your target markets
• postcard campaigns
• e-mail campaigns
• direct mail
• utilizing social media
• teleclasses

In my opinion (which comes from 20 years of working inside this field) it takes 3 years to launch a professional speaking career. Of course, there have been a few exceptions. But if you are determined to dive in and earn a living in the world of professional speaking you’ll need to pick a lane, establish your expertise, get good on the platform and develop a consistent marketing campaign.

And if you do all that and show your clients the outcome that they will get by working with you, then you will be on your way to becoming a wealthy speaker.

Similar Articles You May Like... Book Review: The Wealthy Speaker by Jane Atkinson Book Review: Confessions of a Public Speaker (Scott Berkun) What Does Your Personal Brand Say About You as a Speaker? Make Money Speaking – Book Review: Rain Making (Ford Harding)

Have a Question? Contact me anytime, or find me on Twitter: @6minutes

Jane Atkinson is the author of The Wealthy Speaker: The Proven Formula for Building Your Professional Speaking Business. She is a business coach for speakers, specializing in positioning and marketing. For more information, visit Jane’s website: Speaker Launcher.