(Click Here To Listen To Part 2)
We just got done doing 57 paid events last year, this year we’re on track to do 70 events, and I’m going to show you how we go about filling the schedule on a consistent basis.
This video is part of the Speaker LeadGen Project where I’m going to help 20 speakers build out their systems for getting a consistent stream of people contacting you to hire you. But we’ll talk about that in another video.
So far, I’ve been holding back on telling you how I’m really getting booked because most speakers can’t handle it, they treat this like a hobby rather than a business. They want the magic pill rather than what actually works.
But I decided that since I’m going to be spending more time on stage instead of teaching this, and I’ll teach this to the few who actually want to get serious with their speaking business…I decided I’m just going to give you everything, whether you can handle it or not.
In this video, I’m going to walk you through how I fill up my entire speaking schedule on a consistent basis.
Before I do that, I want to ask you a question and I want you to be brutally honest with yourself…
Where were you 6 months ago? Or a year ago in your speaking business?
You’ve probably had goals for your speaking business. You probably thought you would have more paid gigs by now. You probably thought you would be making more.
Be honest with your current situation…has it changed much?
And more importantly, what’s going to happen if you keep doing what you’re doing?
A speaker sent me a message 8 months ago, lets call him John…and he wanted me to help him book more speaking gigs. So I asked how he currently gets his gigs…and he said ‘word of mouth.’
Now when a speaker tells me that, I know they don’t actually have a system.
Word of mouth means you don’t have a process for getting yourself booked, you kinda just wait by the phone and hope someone’s going to contact you.
So I told John that he needs to build out is systems.
He needs to have a system for getting leads. If he wants 50 gigs a year then he needs a system that will book him about 1 gig per week.
If you aren’t consistently getting leads, getting people coming to you saying, “Hey, we want to hire you as the speaker for our event…” then you don’t have a speaking business.
Think about how powerful it would be if you had the right things in place so you knew that you were getting a consistent amount of speaking gigs.
But John was pretty desperate in the emails and he really wanted me to help him personally so I told him about the coaching program. And that’s when John flipped out…
He said that he doesn’t like paying for information. He said that he doesn’t want to spend the money and then he asked “why should I pay you?” And that’s putting it nicely…lets just say that John was pissed off when I told him to invest in coaching if he wants my personal help.
So what did I do?
Normally, I wouldn’t reply because someone who doesn’t see the power of having the right information to build their business faster is hard to deal with…but I decided to try something.
I told John to record where he’s at now. Record how many gigs he has lined up, record his systems…like how he gets leads for his speaking business, record everything…basically…record his current state.
Then I told him, in six months, to record everything again. Record how many gigs he has, record how many lead-generation systems he has in place, record everything in 6 months.
And I said that if you’re in the same spot 6 months from now as you are today, then that’s why it’s so important to invest in your business.
Is he doing it? I’m not sure.
What I was trying to tell him is that if you don’t have lead-generation systems set up in your business then that’s why you don’t have gigs lined up.
And if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, if you keep checking your Facebook, reading a book every now and again, reading a free blog post, and all that other stuff (eg; confusing ‘motion’ with ‘action’)…if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, then in 6 months, you’re going to be in the same spot.
But think about this…
What if he knew that by contacting X number of people, he would get Y number of gigs?
What if he had the systems in place, that once he set it up once, he knew he would be able to fill up his schedule?
Filling up your schedule isn’t hard when you know what to do. It’s not hard when you have lead-generation systems in place.
And that’s what I’m going to talk about.
I’m going to tell you how I filled up last years schedule and how I’ll fill up this year’s schedule.
The thing is…you need to know exactly how you get people coming to you to hire you.
Let me give you an idea of what you need to do to book 50 paid events a year.
First, you need to get at least 1 gig per week…that’s 4 gigs a month. In order for that to happen, you have to consistently be visible to the people that can hire you to speak.
Now I don’t want to talk about your website, your demo, your bio, none of that. I just want to talk about the specific things you have to do to get yourself on stage.
The question you have to ask yourself is…
“Am I getting one paid gig per week?”
Now think about what that really means.
Not every person who contacts you is going to hire you.
So it’s not like you need to talk to one person a week, you need multiple people to contact you every week in order for you to book just one gig…for that week.
The big question is…
Do you know how to get a steady stream of people to contact you for a speaking gig?
Now before I go further, I want to point something out to you that might seem a little harsh.
As you answer any of these questions, I want you to be 100% honest with yourself.
When I ask a speaker, how’s your business doing? They always say, “It’s doing great.”
But I know, deep down, they’re not getting the gigs they want….in fact, they’re struggling. And when they say they get their gigs through ‘word of mouth’ …I know…deep down, they have no clue on how to book at least 50 paid gigs a year.
It’s not that they can’t fill up their schedule, it’s just that the first step to doing it is to realize that you need to be honest with yourself.
It’s one thing to lie to someone else…
It’s another to lie to yourself.
As you’re listening to this, if I ask you… “Do you know how to book a consistent stream of gigs…are you booking at least 50 gigs a year?” Be 100% real with yourself.
Are you really doing it or not?
The only way to get better is to realize where you’re at. It’s to realize that you do need help.
So as you listen to this, whenever I ask you a question…be honest with yourself. If you didn’t book 50 gigs last year then say it…you didn’t book 50 gigs. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it…it just means you didn’t do it.
Of course you can fill up your speaking schedule.
But what I’m getting at, is that, if you’re not consistently filling up your speaking schedule then something needs to change.
First, lets start off with where you’re at…how many paid speaking gigs did you book last year?
Now…ask yourself, how many paid speaking gigs do you want to book this year?
Earlier I mentioned that we’re going to do 70 events for 2015. that means we have to average 6 gigs per month…that’s 1.5 gigs a week. The question is…how do we do that?
The answer is simple…
I have lead-generation systems in place that fill up my speaking schedule on a consistent basis…
There’s nothing game-changing about the systems…you’ve heard of them before.
There is no magic pill…there is no game-changing method that allows you to book speaking gigs. It’s just a matter of mastering what works and translating it to your current situation.
What I mean by ‘translating it’ is that if I say something like Cold Calling is a system then that doesn’t help you much. You still have to know who to call…which would be different if you’re a leadership speaker versus a sales speaker…you have to know what you’re going to say on the phone, which is going to be different based on you as a speaker.
Basically…you can’t confuse knowing about something with the implementation process because it’s completely different.
Lead-generation systems are exactly that, they’re systems…meaning, you set it up once, and you’re good to go. Once the skeleton of the system is set up, then it’s just a matter of making the system better.
Here are 12 lead generation systems. These are systems I help you build in the Speaker LeadGen Project
- Cold Calling
- Email Sequence
- Direct Mail
- Google Adwords
- Search Engine Optimization
- Facebook Ads
- Speaker Bureaus
- Sponsorship Methods
- Publicity Campaigns
- YouTube Ads
- Social Media
- Referral Engine
None of those are game-changing…you’ve heard of those before…but there’s a right way to use them and a wrong way.
Remember when I said we’re going to do 70 events for 2015, that means we need about 1.5 gigs per week.
Well lets take an example from one of the lead generation systems. Lets take Google Adwords as an example.
Most speakers know what this is…so let me tell you how we book gigs with this.
First, I know that for every $700 I spend, about 200 people who click on my ad, about 4 of them will contact me and 1 of those 4 will book a gig. I also know that the average budget a client has from seeing me on Adwords is only $5,000.
Spending $700 and getting $5,000 isn’t bad…but I still want the $10,000 gigs…so let me tell you how that happens.
We spend money on Adwords and get a single gig. That’s one lead-generation method for getting the initial gig. But then I use the referral engine system that I have set up to get multiple gigs.
Most speakers don’t take advantage of a gig. They just go and speak, maybe ask for a referral, but they don’t really take full advantage of it. So the referral engine is set up to book multiple gigs from that one…it’s like a spiderweb.
Now the Adwords campaign doesn’t run every month because we don’t really need it. Once we get the one gig from the Adwords campaign, the Referral Engine takes over.
But I want to point something out, it took forever to learn how to use Adwords the right way. I can’t tell you how much money I lost on Adwords by doing it wrong…but once we got it right, we just turn it on and it’s ready to go.
Based on the numbers of spending $700 to get one gig…
If we spend about $3,000 a month, we will get about 4 gigs a month…and that doesn’t count the backend where I get spinoff gigs.
Even if it cost me $6,000 to get one gig…it’s worth it because I can book multiple gigs from that one gig.
But all of this works only because I have a system in place that works. I figured out how to get Adwords to work for my business.
I know what keywords work, I know what ads work, I know the system.
I know that because that’s what our system is set up to do.
The way I filled up my 2014 schedule was a combination of Adwords and the Referral Engine.
In the beginning, it was different because I didn’t have a good website to send people to for Adwords but I had a system in place.
Simple things, like recording how many people you contact versus how many people hire you, are really important for building your systems because it lets you know what’s working and what to improve.
If you use Cold Calling as a system and you know that for every 500 people you contact, one of them hires you…but you then try Adwords and you know that for every 200 people who see you, one hires you…then which do you think is a better system?
Which would you focus your time on?
You would obviously stop doing so much cold calling and focus more on making your Adwords better.
Or maybe you realize that when you cold call, you only contact 100 people a day. But when you send emails, you contact 200 people a day. So which system would you go with?
Little things like this really matter when you’re building out your lead-gen systems.
In the next video, I’m going to walk you through the process of how I’ll fill up my schedule with 70 gigs this upcoming year.
But right now, you need to make sure you actually have systems in place.
Just imagine how easier it would be if you were getting a consistent stream of people contacting you every week to hire you. That’s what systems do.
That’s what the Speaker LeadGen Project is all about. It’s all about the system that fill up your schedule on a consistent basis. Now, go on to part 2…