It’s easy enough to land a speaking gig: every organization in your city wants a speaker to come in every once in a while. But that’s not the same as driving home a paid speaking gig.

To actually receive payment, beyond travel expenses or an event ticket, requires a different approach. You need to be more targeted, at the very least, in order to get paid for your talks. Continue Reading

While many speakers earn money for each speaking engagement they land, the real money is often in using your speaking engagements to sell the products and services you offer. That’s because you have attendees who already know on some level that you’re an expert — otherwise they wouldn’t be coming to hear you.

You don’t have to be overtly ‘salesy’ either — if you’re offering a product or a service that is a logical extension of your topic as a speaker, a brief mention can be enough to land you a sale.

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An amazing portfolio is crucial to selling creative services: if your potential clients can’t be sure that you’ve already done work that meets their standards, it’s hard for them to tell if you’ll be able to handle such work in the future.

The same holds true for landing speaking gigs. While a speaker’s reel — clips of examples of your public speaking — isn’t strictly necessary, having a great speaker’s reel makes it a lot easier to land speaking opportunities, particularly the big ones. Put together, your portfolio shows that you can do what you say, while your reel shows that you can talk about what you know. The combination makes you a double threat, far more able to land both client work and speaking gigs in the long run.

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In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to select topics for speaking engagements. Your topic can make or break you, if your goal is to sell a product or a service to your audience. Choosing the right topic to cover is crucial in engaging your audience and building a reputation as a great speaker.

Learn how to narrowly define your audience, choose a topic that is a great fit for that audience, test your ideas, and pitch your topic to event organizers. With practice you can build on your expertise with the topic you present on and refine your presentation each time you reach out to a larger audience.

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Public speaking is hard: we’ve all heard that it’s the most common fear, above and beyond death. Everybody in the room is staring at you, which is enough to make most of us want to run.

There are some lucky people who seem to not experience that particular sensation or who even seem to be natural speakers, but for the majority of us, there are always steps to take that will make us steadier on stage.

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In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to land your very first speaking gig, before you have any experience speaking in public. It’s an approach that can get you more than just one speaking gig, so that you can get on your way to establishing a speaking career.

Come up with the perfect idea for your presentation, target your audience with your message, pitch your ideas to event organizers, utilize time-saving techniques, track responses, and get speeding towards touching down your first speaking gig. Continue Reading

Whenever a reader marks your email newsletter as spam, you’ve got problems. The better classes of email service providers keep track of how many times they’re told a particular email newsletter is spam. If the number gets too high, they’ll shut down that newsletter. There can even be legal repercussions for sending out newsletters that are considered spam — including a $16,000 penalty for each recipient of an individual piece of spam in the US.

If you’re publishing an email newsletter — for marketing purposes or otherwise — you need to make sure that you can minimize the chance it can be mistaken for spam. There will always be occasional marks against you, from people who don’t remember signing up for your newsletter or who just want to get it out of their inboxes quickly. But the more you can do to keep those problems to a minimum, the better.

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Once you’ve got a newsletter set up to bring you in new clients, you may start to think about what else you can do with the newsletter format to promote your freelance business. One of the options worth considering is sending a newsletter to the clients you’ve already landed.

The logic behind this is clear: if you’ve knocked the socks off of a client already, that company may be more than happy to work with you again. But you need to remind them that you are available and point out the services you offer, particularly beyond what you’ve already done. A newsletter can provide a useful reminder to past clients of your existence.

Of course, you have to be targeting a specific niche of clients if you really want to make sure that your newsletter is effective: it’s much harder to create a broad newsletter that appeals to every client who has ever hired you to design a website than just writing for those clients who operate ecommerce sites. When it comes to newsletters, narrow is good. Continue Reading

What’s the point of having a newsletter if it doesn’t provide you with paying clients? It takes a lot of work to put together a newsletter regularly, as well as to make people aware that it exists. Unless you’ve got prospects coming from your newsletter, it’s not going to pay for itself.

There are some people who will argue that even if an email newsletter isn’t directly creating new clients for you, it’s a worthwhile endeavor for a freelancer; however, given that we’re more likely to be short on time than companies with multiple team members, there’s no reason to focus on any approach that isn’t directly bringing you new clients. It can take a little while to get a new newsletter performing to its full potential, but if you’ve been publishing emails for months on end with no results, it’s not worth the effort.

That means that you’ve got to invest some of your time into ensuring that your newsletter readers know that you’re selling something. Continue Reading

Back in the bad old days, many people would maintain email lists by hand: they would have a text file saved somewhere, with a list of email addresses. Then, whenever they were ready to send out a newsletter, they’d copy all those addresses into the ‘to:’ field of an email. There was no way to easily deal with bounced emails, unsubscribes or anything else that came up.

The right software can make a world of difference in managing your email newsletter. It can automate most of your responsibilities, letting you focus on coming up with great content that will bring in readers.

Deciding between the many options out there for running your newsletter can be a difficult prospect, but if you consider some key points, you can narrow down the field quickly. This will help you choose the best email newsletter software for your freelance business. Continue Reading

It can be difficult to write enough content to fill a newsletter on a regular basis — especially if your newsletter is doing its job and bringing you plenty of work.

But there are ways to minimize the amount of time you need to spend on producing each newsletter. The earlier you can think about these options in the process of establishing your newsletter, the better. You’ll have more opportunities to set up your newsletter so it runs smoothly that way.

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When you ask for someone’s email address, you’re asking for something that’s actually fairly valuable: you’ll be able to contact them directly if need be. It’s only reasonable to offer something of valuable in return. That includes valuable content inside your newsletter, but that’s just a start. As potential readers have become more savvy about newsletters, the norm often includes offering a big incentive in exchange for sign ups, like an ebook.

There are a lot of options on what incentives you can offer to potential readers. It’s important, however, to make sure that you’re offering something that matches closely with your audience — the people who could potentially become your clients. If your audience reads white papers, but not ebooks, you can guess what sort of incentive you should offer.

Before leaping in to creating any type of incentive piece, make sure you know exactly what will attract your audience. If necessary, survey a few of the people you’d most like to sign up for your list about what they really need.

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