The professional speaking business is loaded with misinformation and misconceptions. The biggest may be that the business is all about marketing.  While sales and marketing is critical, you MUST have a GREAT product to get great results. Many new speakers are being told you don’t have to be good to get booked, and that’s an outright lie. Corporations aren’t stupid, and they’re not going to pay thousands of dollars per hour for an amateur speaker posing as a professional. Make sure you’re good before you start marketing.

Bill Gove, the legendary father of professional speaking, gave me a piece of advice back in 1996 that changed my life as a professional speaker. These are the two things most speakers miss, which opens the door for new speakers to enter the business and pass them. It’s part ego, part laziness, and part not fully understanding the uniqueness of the keynote medium. 13 years later, this is the model I still follow to rank among the top 1% of professional speakers, and YOU can do it, too.

One of the best ways to promote your book is by doing TV interviews. TV gives you and your book added credibility, while showcasing your ability to communicate effectively in different mediums. Once you obtain a digital copy of each interview, you can post them on your website for additional promotion. Last week I was a guest on a HOT new morning show with a large audience base of 4 million throughout South Florida, to talk about my new book, Die Fat or Get Tough: 101 Differences in Thinking between Fat People and Fit People.

Back in 2001-2002, post 9/11, over 1200 professional speakers went broke when corporate training and travel budgets were frozen after the terrorist attacks on New York City. This represented the professional speaking industry’s first major economic correction. The middle class of the speaking business went belly up, and almost everyone I knew in NSA thought it was a disaster. The truth is it was one of the best things that’s every happened in our industry.