March 9

How Do I Find Speaking Opportunities as a public speaker in 2020?

The first question anyone asks when they know that they must get out to speak to grow their business is “Where Do I Find Speaking Opportunities?”

And this can be indeed daunting. But if you break it down and you commit the time, you can master this skill.

I’m Jackie Lapin, and as founder of SpeakerTunity and SpeakerTunity Cities, I’ve spent the last 5 years finding and identifying speaking opportunities for leaders, experts and entrepreneurs. My team and I track close to 900 local organizations that have local chapters all across North America, so we can make sure that speakers can get connected with the ones that are their ideal match. But you don’t need to go that deeply down that rabbit hole!

Let’s look at what kind of public speaking engagements are possible by genre.

• The first and easiest to book are local meetings. Whether they are general business networking, chambers of commerce, service groups or consumer special interest groups, these are easy to identify using Google and MeetUp. Search use keywords + your market and it’s likely they will pop up. Then go to the website to see who is likely to be the right contact person or call the organization.

• Professional groups and associations are an excellent place to present, and a great source for these is the Directory of Associations. In this vast directory of 35,000 associations, you can search by subject matter or by state.

• If you are looking for corporate gigs, than your best place to get connected is at LinkedIN. Use this resource to find the most likely people filling roles that would possibility lead to retaining a speaker at a particular company you’d like to approach – human resource director, sales or marketing manager, event manager, event coordinator, meeting planner, etc. You can also do a search for the title of event manager, event coordinator or meeting planner and then reach out to those people who surface in your search process.

• Professional conferences are more challenging to find and get booked because there are many gatekeepers, it’s likely you will be filling out a form rather than talking to the meeting planner, and they fill up fast once they announce their “calls for speakers.” But if this is where you want to connect, then search Google for the keyword for that type of conference. For example: women’s conference, entrepreneur conference or summit, lawyer’s conference, health conference, etc.

• Consumer and Trade Events are a great place to speak, and one place you can track them in advance on a site called Events in America. It can be searched for events in a specific industry or consumer sector or by region. Another way is to check with your local visitors and convention bureau about conferences booked months ahead. Oftentimes, the meeting planner would like to have someone local rather than pay travel expenses.

• Fixed Local venues also might offer opportunities…organizations that offer job training skills, hospitals and holistic healthcare centers, bookstores, governmental bodies, municipal cultural centers, senior centers, youth centers and more. Google is your friend here, too!

Now, of course, you can do ALLLLLL of this yourself. Why bother?

When you can simply subscribe to your SpeakerTunity Cities Regional Directory and get from 800 to as many 1500 meeting, venue and association speaker contacts—at one time. How about we just do all that searching for you? And you just select the ones that are right for you, and then simply submit yourself? Without doing one minute of web searching! I don’t know about you, but that would sound pretty good to me, as busy as I am.

If that sounds good to you, why don’t you just head on over to www.speakertunitycities.com. You’ll find lots more detail and even a great FAQ that will answer all your questions!
I’m Jackie Lapin and I can not wait for you to book more speaking gigs!


Tags

getting booked as a speaker, SPEAKER BOOKER, speakertunity, speaking booker