Get Paid More to Speak With the Right PR

You could say I started my speaking career at a very young age. I was probably around three or four years old the first time I gave a talk in front of an audience. I say “probably” because I don’t remember it, but I grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka “Mormons”) and that’s how we do things. Kids enter a program called “Primary” at age three, and are constantly saying prayers, singing songs, and giving very short talks (generally with an adult helping by whispering in their ear) from a very young age.

Not all kids in my church cooperate with the standard program. Some kids won’t go to the front of the room to give a talk. Others throw a fit. Some kids get up to give a 10-second talk, looking all the world like they’re about to deliver a rousing oration, and…burst into tears and run out of the room looking for their mom. I guess you could say public speaking is about the same for kids as it is for many of us grownups.

Growing up, I tended to be the type of kid who didn’t want to go up front to speak, but eventually did, and as far as I can remember I never burst into tears (I do now, almost every time I watch a movie, but that’s completely different!).

I never truly got comfortable speaking in front of an audience until I became a missionary when I was nineteen. That forced me to speak to lots of people, individually and in front of audiences, so many times every day, that all traces of shyness were wiped away. When I came back at 21, you could have put me in front of an audience of 20,000 and I wouldn’t have batted an eye. I was brimming over with confidence. However, it wasn’t until a decade and a half later that I found myself on a stage in front of a large audience, and by that time I was older, wiser, and not quite as confident.

My First “Big” Talk

In 2015, I gave my first TEDx talk. I was nervous as I could be. First, because I had prepared the way I swore I would. Instead of having my talk done two months ahead of time, then practicing it a hundred times, I had finished it at 3 a.m. the morning of my talk, didn’t get any sleep, and “practiced” it on the way to the venue and while I was waiting to go on stage. Second, I was delivering my talk in Hong Kong, where I was not a native and I wasn’t sure how they’d receive what I had to say. And third, there were over 1,000 people in the audience and wow, when you’re used to giving talks in front of 100-150 people, an audience of 1,000 looks really big.

I survived, and I don’t think I embarrassed myself too badly (you can check the link above to see and judge for yourself). Afterward, I still had a surge of adrenaline in my system, and I wanted to do it again, only better this time.

Of course, you don’t get paid for giving a TEDx talk, nor did I get paid for the next few dozen talks I gave. I was happy to get the practice.

My First Paid Talk

A year or so later, I got my first opportunity to get paid to speak. It included travel, lodging, and $3,000 to go to Taiwan and speak at a startup conference as a breakout speaker. That seemed great to me!

One opportunity led to another, and eventually, just before COVID hit, I was receiving offers for $20,000 to speak at events.

How Did I Get Paid More and More?

There’s certainly something to be said for experience and a proven track record, not to mention having a topic people are interested in. Those things helped, but there were two things in particular that helped me to get paid to speak and increase my fees.

One thing I did was to publish a book. Back in the 1960s, when computers cost millions of dollars, filled huge rooms, and couldn’t do a fraction of what your phone does today, IBM was the leading in computing, and there was a saying about IBM (probably created by IBM’s marketing department), that “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”

It’s similar for event organizers hiring speakers. No event organizer ever got fired for hiring a speaker who has a book. If a speaker does a terrible job, the organizer can always say, “But they had a book! They’re supposed to be the expert!” because we assume if someone has a book, they know what they’re talking about.

Of course, you didn’t come here to learn about book publishing, you came to hear about how PR helps you make more money as a speaker, so I’ll end by saying that if you want to publish a book to help your speaking career, go check out Published Author.

The second thing I did to increase my speaking fee was, as you have rightly guessed, PR.

Two Types of PR

I engaged in two types of PR to build up my speaking fee. The first was that I secured columns in publications and wrote articles for them. I’m not talking about joining a Forbes Council (don’t), which is an opportunity you pay for, but becoming a contributor or freelance journalist. The articles I published were full-editorial articles, and they’re still up today on Forbes, Fast Company, Mashable, Fortune, TIME, Techcrunch, and another two dozen websites.

This type of self-produced PR is a great option, but only if you like to write and you have a lot of time to do it. If that’s you, I recommend joining Kimanzi Constable’s Published and Paid program.

However, if you’re like almost everyone else, you don’t like writing enough to write a dozen articles a month, or you don’t have the time, in which case the second type of PR is what you need, the kind where someone else is writing articles and putting you in them.

Although I was writing articles, I was also featured in many articles as I built up my personal brand through writing and speaking. Half the benefit of the PR I earned came from being able to put media logos on my website, like this:

It was unlikely someone looking for a paid speaker was going to read all my articles, or even one of them, but they were all going to end up on my website and see the logos of all the media outlets where I had either written, been written about, or received other coverage.

I can’t overstate what those logos did for me. It made it easy for an event organizer to check the box and know they were getting someone who was established and knew enough of what they were talking about to get all these publications on board.

Being in those publications + having a book? It made it a slam dunk.

How to Get Media Logos For Your Website

There are two ways to get the PR that leads to media logos on your website and higher speaker fees. You can either do it yourself, or you can hire someone else to do it. You may think I’m going to tell you that you should hire Canvas PR to do it for you, but no, I think you should do it yourself. The best PR will come directly from you, and here’s an intro on how to do your own PR.

The only way you should hire someone else to do your PR for you is if you absolutely do not have the time or inclination to do it yourself. If that’s you, then yes, Canvas PR is the fastest, easiest, and most cost effective way to legitimately get the kind of PR that allows you to put those media logos on your website, and we’d love to work with you.

Contact us or check out our pricing: