It seems that one of the biggest problems speakers have is “How do I find events to get booked at?”
But finding events is actually the easiest thing to do…getting hired to speak is a whole new story.
The key isn’t to just ‘find events’ but to find the right events for you. And that depends on what you speak about and more importantly, whether or not your market can afford to hire you as a speaker.
But lets say that your problem is that you need to find events to speak at. What do you do?
The easiest way…and this is something you can do right now…is to use hashtags on social networks.
Go to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and use hashtags like:
#conference
#eventprofs
#eventplanning
#keynote
#speaker
etc etc
When you type in these hashtags, all kinds of things will come up…so what do you do with it?
Check out the conferences that you would be a good speaker for. Maybe you talk about leadership and the conference is called ‘Leaders360’ (I just made that up)…so you look at the conference, look at the speakers, and since you’re way better than all the other speakers…write down when their next conference is and contact them in the future.
If the conference is coming up and it’s 5 months away, contact them now.
You can see tons of events on Instagram and look at pictures of the conference so you get a feel for what it’s like.
If you see that the conference has a big crowd, find the person in charge and contact them.
On Twitter, follow people and companies that talk a lot about events.
Speaker bureaus, associations, meeting planners…these are the people you want to follow on Twitter…not your Facebook buddies who talk about what they’re eating for dinner.
You want Twitter to act like a constant stream of events so when you open it on your phone, you see nothing but people talking about events, speakers…anything and everything relating to your speaking business.
Think about how much more effective you would be if you opened up your Twitter and all you saw were things like, “We’re at conference xyz…it’s amazing.” “We just had this amazing motivational speaker for our conference.” Etc etc.
If you see posts like that on Twitter instead of posts about the news, how much more effective would you be? Instead of reacting to the world around you, you would start getting more speaking gigs…because it’s right there in front of you.
When you know an event hires speakers, you might not be able to contact them this year but you can put it in your calendar and contact them for next year.
Finding events to speak at is the easy part. The hard part is whether or not you’re going to do it.