Elevate your personal brand as a professional speaker
This week I had the opportunity to interview Chiquita Searle on the prospects of becoming a professional speaker. Chi is the founder of Chiquita & Co, launched in 2015. Chiquita works with executives, founders and CEOs, thought leaders and entrepreneurs who are purpose-driven, on a mission and ready to grow their profile through a powerful personal speaking brand.
The best time to start your speaking career
Becoming a professional speaker is most often sparked by overcoming a personal or business challenge or life-changing event. You could also be a professional with a few years of experience in your industry and knowledge to share that could empower others on their life or business journey.
Benefits of becoming a speaker
Professional speaking can be a well-paid investment in your career, and starting out you could be earning around $5000 for a 45-minute keynote. As you build your personal brand and experience, you could be averaging about $10-$20K per event that you do.
Starting Out
When you’re first starting, to build up your experience and confidence, it is a great idea to volunteer at as many events as possible speaking to your ideal target audience. This could be through your local network and also community and council.
Creating your speaking topics
You want to have three topics that you become known for speaking about, and this is carried across your social media and touchpoints. But where to begin creating these? when Chi works with her clients they go through a detailed brief with deep thought-provoking questions that allow you to bring out your experiences and curate your stories. You can also have a big brain dump and start with post-it notes, devote 30 minutes to purely writing all the experiences and lessons you have learnt and sticking them on the wall. You can then group them and choose the most important ones. From there, work out what the key takeaways would be and how this would add value, inspire or change a person’s life.
Put together your impacts points and key takeaways, and this is your starting ground for writing your keynotes.
What you need to get started as a professional speaker
Creating a speaking deck or your pitch deck is first and foremost, this is all your documents and assets in one place that you would pitch to potential agencies and event organisers.
Your speaker’s deck would include:
Professional headshots (you know where to go for this)
Photos of you speaking
logos
Your 3 topics and clear takeaways
Bio
Screengrabs of any PR and media
Awards (great time to start applying for awards.)
References
Pitching yourself for potential speaking gigs
Have a clear plan for your ideal target audience and events they might go to. Put together a list of events and research who the best content person might be. When it comes to writing your intro email, refine your impact point and what you have to offer. Along with your experience and how you can make their event memorable.
Gaining experience and confidence in becoming a professional speaker
Chi recommends building up your confidence and professionalism as a professional speaker through media training. It is also important to video record yourself (which I know I cringe at the thought of) and watches and learn how you speak and use your body language.
If you’re ready to take your personal brand to the next level and begin a career as a professional or motivational speaker get in touch with Chiquita Searle. YOu can connect with her at https://www.chiquita.com.au/ or on Instagram here.
