How to Start Your Speaking Career

You’re an athlete. You’ve got the gift for speaking (or you’re working on it). And you want to earn extra income doing paid speaking events. If this sounds like you then you’re probably asking yourself, what are the next steps to be able to monetize this? Here’s what to do.

Right now you are likely in the early stages of building your speaker business. During this phase you may receive the occasional request from a family friend or local contact, to speak. In the early stages it makes the most sense for you to handle these requests directly (no agent).

This is because your best strategy for building your business will be through referrals. A local contact (business, charity, school) may not have a huge budget (or any). But they will be more inclined to give you a great testimonial for your website and even make a few introductions (provided you ask).

Once you have a speaking event in the calendar, there are three things every great pro speaker does:

1. Before the speech: Make a post, LinkedIn is great, about your upcoming talk and what it will be about.

2. During the speech: Make sure you get some form of photo/video/screenshot piece of content for your marketing. This is really important.

3. After the speech: Make a "Thank You" post. Recap your talk, who the audience was, any quotes. Close with a call-to-action. "I'm booking my 2023 calendar now, email me if you are interested in working together. I would love to speak with your group next!".

Here's a good example of what some of our speakers are doing: https://www.cgsportsco.com/cejih-explains/athletes-should-make-more-posts-like-this?rq=speaker

This type of content can be reused in a future newsletter as well. Fantastic marketing tool.

When a speaker gets to the point where you are receiving an average of 1-2 inbound requests for you as a speaker - this is when it makes sense to loop in your "agent". They will make sure that hosts are paying your competitive speaker rate (usually it starts at $4,000 - $5,000, then up to $7,500 and then up to $10,000+).

It takes 12-18 months of diligent work to build up this type of inbound demand - but stick with it and it will happen. Soon you’ll find yourself earning and extra $20,000 or $30,000 a year in speaking requests.