Why Don't You Have a Product?
You are leaving a lot of money on the tabYle if you dont have a product at the back of the room waiting to be sold. You need something to sell. Most people expect it and if they love your presentation, they will almost demand it. I had a mentor talk about how he had to lug around a bunch of CDs, DVDs, tapes, and books back in the day. (I still have his CDs) That part of the business used to intimidate me, but now everything is digital. I was going to do flash drives myself until i found a fantastic service: DropCards dropcards.com A comedian that I love was selling an 8 album set of his past shows with the proceeds going to charity. I immediately went back expecting to walk away with a stack of CDs. I was surprised when he handed me what looked like a gift card. It had a website to go to where you enter a code and get the download of the MP3. I immediately saw the potential for speaking. I didn't have to do up a bunch of flash drives or shell out a ton of $$$ for other products to be created. You just upload the track and it costs about $.60 for each card to be printed. CRAZY CHEEP!!! Now all you need to do is create some material. Well, an easy way is to record speeches you are already giving to audiences. Then send the track to a sound tech to clean it up and add some theme music and you have a product you could easily sell for $20. As you grow and create new material and programs, you can have more products. Then have some of your programs transcribed and send it off to a ghost writer and you will have a book that you can self publish. When you have product, you will never do a free gig again. Because if you do a free presentation, and get a bunch of sales in the back of the room... then you got PAID!