(The second of two posts)

Giving keynote speeches is not where thought leadership begins.  And yet many people, learning that you can make $35,000 per speech, or more, and you can do that 40x – 80x per year, depending on your appetite for the life of a road warrior – well, they get excited and decide they want to do that for a living.

But that’s putting the money cart before the subject horse.  People in that world are not paid to speak, per se.  They are paid to speak for one of three reasons.  Either they are a celebrity (Matt Damon can name his price), or they have an important title (the CEO of Google can name his price, pretty much), or they have a marketable expertise (an expert in AI can name his price, depending on the current market demand).

The reason that the first two categories are in demand in a way that the third category can only dream about is that the first two can put bums in seats, as a friend of mine likes to say.  You might decide to attend a conference you’d heard about if you knew that Matt Damon was the lead speaker, or if the CEO of Google was the lead speaker.  You most likely wouldn’t decide to attend a conference if some AI speaker were the lead keynoter.  There are too many other ways to get the information you might be craving.  But there’s no other way to be able to say, “I saw Matt Damon in person,” or, “I heard the CEO of Google say that search engines were dead.”

To be able to join that coveted third category of speaker you have to become a thought leader first – a recognized expert in a category of knowledge.  Speaking is something you do once you’ve established that expertise.  You might have an academic title, you might teach, you might do research, you might invent a process, you might coach people to achieve extraordinary things, you might write a book about a compelling subject – all of these are ways to become recognized as a thought leader.  Once you’ve established that expertise, you can then start the next chapter of your thought leadership career.

You get to monetize your expertise as a speaker if you can figure out how to talk about your expertise in ways that are compelling, engaging, and inspiring.  And just like it takes time to become recognized as an expert, it takes times to become recognized as a speaker about a particular topic of expertise. You are now in Phase Two of your life as a thought leader – the heady times of monetization.  Enjoy!

Phase Three happens when you’ve got all the pieces together – you’ve developed the referrable, repeatable speech, you’ve written the book, or have some other way to prove your expertise, and you’ve got the word out via your efforts at branding and online marketing – social media and the rest.  It’s this triumvirate of activities that will sustain you until you grow weary of the nomadic life and find a bungalow in Bora-Bora that suits your needs for peace and quiet exactly beneath the majestic, extinct volcanic peaks of Mount Otemanu and Mount Pahia.

Send me a postcard.