I shared a ‘Core Conversation’ yesterday afternoon at SXSW with the consummate professional speaker Tim Sanders, author of Love is the Killer App, The Likeability Factor, and Saving the World at Work.  Aided by some great comments, suggestions and questions from the audience, we discussed some of the important rules to follow if you want to develop a paid professional speaking career.  Of course, there are a variety of ways to break into the speaking circuit, and these rules can be creatively broken, but they will help you get started learning the system (if only to hack it later).

1.  Your first job is to build a platform and a community around something you’re passionate about.   A blog is a great way to begin, of course; the idea is to create some buzz that connects you and the topic.

2.  Your next assignment is to write a book on the subject – and get it published by a ‘real’ publisher, not self-published.   The people who hire professional speakers – meeting planners, speaker’s bureaus, and so on – are all about risk reduction.  A speaker that says something offensive, or fails to show up, or delivers a lousy performance wreaks havoc on the conference that the planner has been working on for 6 months or a year.  They never forget and never forgive a bad performance or a diva.  A published book is a way of controlling that risk, because it suggests a certain level of seriousness and professionalism. 

3.  You need a few others things after that, the most important of which is a DVD that shows you speaking in front of an audience for roughly 20 minutes.   The Catch-22 here is that it’s hard to get a good audience without the DVD!  So accept a ‘free’ speech with a good crowd promised, and get the A/V folks to give you a copy of the tape of your speech at the event.  And make sure you’ve got audience reaction shots – if necessary, hire an extra cameraman. 

4.  After that, it’s up to you to create the buzz that will have conference goers demanding that you’re hired to speak.   Your allies in this are the speaker’s bureaus, so treat them right.  When you get a paid gig offered to you directly, take it to a bureau and offer them the commission. 

There’s lots more to be said on the subject, so perhaps I’ll start a blog series.  Thanks to Tim and the great SXSW audience for a fun afternoon.