Dan Schawbel, a great blogger on personal branding (http://personalbrandingblog.com/), has just published a book on creating your own brand:  http://tinyurl.com/4un6g2.  It’s clear, concise, and useful for public speakers seeking to establish and grow a successful career.  It’s aimed at 20-somethings trying to ace the job market, but the advice in it constitutes a great primer for speakers of any age starting out and seeking to get a career going.  So, with thanks to Dan, here are my 5 steps to a successful public speaking career.

1.  Focus on your audience.  Speakers starting out usually are ready to speak to anyone, anytime, about anything.  But focus is the better way to go.  In an information-saturated age, people can’t get a fix on who you are if you try to be everything to everyone.  Instead, pick an audience and a topic.  Focus on them and you will be able to build your brand more quickly.

Questions Dan asks early on are a great place to start thinking about your niche as a speaker:

What would you like to accomplish?
Who is your target audience?
What brand elements will they respond well to?  Poorly to?
What brands (read: speakers) are successful and why?
How can you best showcase your talents through your brand?

2.  Become the expert in your area of focus.  It’s a big old world, and information is endless.  You can’t know it all.  Pick an area of focus and use that as a filter through which to look at the world.  Then check out every bit of news, opinion, and research in that area.  You’ll soon become knowledgeable and adept at sorting through all the latest developments in that field.  If you use the social media correctly, including your blog, people will soon come to you for expertise on that subject.  That will fuel the other aspects of your career.

3.  Establish the 3 points of your personal brand triangle.  Virtually all the speakers we work with have 3 areas of their business they focus on:  speaking, writing, and consulting.  Your income streams from each will vary, but be clear about what you want.  Are you primarily a speaker?  Then prepare for a life on the road and establish systems to support you in that.  Are you primarily a consultant who speaks occasionally?  Then figure out what companies and individuals will pay you for your advice.  Are you primarily an author?  That’s the toughest way to go, because of the nature of the book business.  Be prepared to write a lot, for many different outlets.  Create contacts in the journalism world and maintain those contacts assiduously. 

4.  Use social media to create and maintain your brand.  There’s good news here.  Just a few years ago, you were dependent on media to get the word out about you.  That meant cultivating contacts and begging them to talk about you.  But today you can start a blog, develop a Twitter following, and set up a Facebook page, and so on.  Each of these outlets supports and feeds the others if you do them right, and the result is that you can control the extent to which the world knows you.  Dan’s book is good on the subject of getting a blog going, as well as the other social media outlets.  Also study David Meerman Scott's blog and books; he's the grand master of social media and how PR works these days:  http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/.  His book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR is the classic in the field, and a huge bestseller:  http://tinyurl.com/dk9y9l

5.  Present yourself as a consummate professional.   The speaking business is highly lucrative, and highly competitive.  It’s intolerant of amateurs.  Speakers’ bureaus, meeting planners, association professionals – they are all risk averse.  They are your customers!  Treat them right.  They’re putting on a big conference, and they don’t want screw-ups.  That means that every interaction you have with them should be designed to put yourself forward as someone who will deliver an outstanding product with no muss, no fuss.  Your web site, your blog, all your marketing materials from your one-sheet to your DVD to your press kit all have to say ‘professional’ – and then the experience of you has to reinforce that.  If you deliver, you’ll get another chance.  If you screw up, they’ll never look at you again.  Word travels fast in this business.