6 Ways to Take Up Public Speaking as a Career

When you attend business or academic events and when you listen to lecturers, have you ever thought that you could be in the speakers’ shoes and you could even get paid for this? Do you believe that you have some important information to share with people? An extensive knowledge about some specific topic? Well, have you ever thought about the opportunity to turn this ability into a career? You actually can. However as well as having something to talk about, you also need to be perseverant and self-confident. If you are, it means that you already took that first step.

Be Sure of Yourself

If you want to speak publicly, you don’t have any chance to have any hesitations, neither about yourself nor your knowledge. Public speaking isn’t something that anyone can do so you need to keep your powder dry. Having a general opinion about a topic is not enough for being a professional public speaking. Make sure you master that subject otherwise you may look ridiculous.

Work Hard

If you are planning to be paid for speaking, you really need to be professional and being professional requires hard working. As well as mastering your topic you speaking skills should be sharpened. If you are not sure about how to be a successful public speaker, you can take a look at our related blog post. You should outline your lecture really carefully and you can get a video of you while speaking to make sure that you are doing this job really professionally.

Start from your Network

If you think that you are a professional speaker already, then you can directly start to turn this skill into a source of income. Your own network will help you in the first stage. Spread the word that you are interested in giving a speech at some events and wait for the offers. If passive waiting is not something for you, you can search for some communities to meet up and identify yourself.

Search for Events to Give a Speech at

The next step is to seek out the events that you can be a part of. When you attend events, you can try to network with the organizers and next time, you may have the opportunity to speak at the next event of the same organizer. Observe the style and the content of their events and prepare a speech that will fit their events. Or, you may prepare a brief introduction about yourself and your areas of expertise, attaching a short video of you giving a speech and send it to some interesting event organizers.

Build your Own Audience

Building your own audience is actually an advantage for you before getting touch with the event organizers. Because for a PCO, a prominent speaker with his own audience is much more attractive than the one who is not much known. In order to build your audience you can of course use the power of social media. Use Twitter, Facebook ant other social mediums effectively and start a Youtube channel for yourself and build interest among people, in other words, your future audience. Blogging will be your most effective weapon to spread word of your stories – stories that will make people crave to hear.

Be Interesting

If you are interesting, I mean, if you have really interesting things to tell, people want to listen to you which means event organizers want to hire you. Your eloquence is secondary as well with being important. If you are known and if you are a person that people are curious about, you are more likely to be hired than a speaker who has only good speaking skills with a knowledge about some topics. So think about your most interesting stories to talk about combining them with your areas of expertise.