//Get Paid To Speak with Elizabeth Bachman

Get Paid To Speak with Elizabeth Bachman

PRP 42 | Get Paid To Speak

 

Public speaking is a strong marketing strategy. Getting paid to speak is an even better strategy because you earn money while promoting yourself or your product. Elizabeth Bachman, the go-to person for speaking, presentation skills, sales, and leadership, speaks on how you can get booked and get paid to speak using her five secrets. Elizabeth talks about what she does, who she works with, and how her experience directing an opera relates to public speaking. She shares why you need to be a speaker for your marketing program along with some ways to get paid to speak, including promoting someone else’s program.

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Get Paid To Speak with Elizabeth Bachman

Before we get started, I want to invite you to go over to www.PromoteProfitPublishQuiz.com and find out where your skill set is with your platform building. Are you ready to launch? We have an incredible guest who is also one of my clients. Her name is Elizabeth Bachman. Elizabeth is the go-to person for advanced level training in speaking, presentation skills, sales and leadership. With a lifetime spent perfecting the art of presenting, she helps high-level clients master a message that brings the funding they need, the allies they want, and the recognition they deserve. A sought-after speaker and strategist, Elizabeth works with leaders and influencers who need to be calm, concise and compelling presenters. She helps them present as smart, down to earth, loose, friendly, even funny sometimes, and still be taken seriously. Elizabeth has directed such luminaries as Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo in more than 50 operas around the world, giving her a wealth of tools to help business professionals become respected presenters.

She is fluent in five languages. She’s also adept at working with presenters from many countries, bringing her global experience to her clients. She is an award-winning contributing author to an international best-seller called Messages That Matter, as well as the Creator of How to Get Booked as a Speaker: Taking Your Show on the Road, the ultimate guide to filling your calendar with lucrative speaking gigs. She’s also been featured by numerous media outlets alongside, among others, business greats Dr. Ivan Meisner, Dan Kennedy and Steve Forbes. She regularly presents at corporations such as Bank of America, McKesson, Turner Construction, as well as the National Association of Women Business Owners, Small Business Global Summit, E Women Network and many more. She’s also the Founder and Artistic Director at TOP Opera, a summer opera training program in the Austrian Alps, and continues to give back to the opera community. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Thanks, Juliet. I’m delighted to be here.

We’re delighted to have you. I have a lot of questions for you about the speaking world because there are a lot of misconceptions out there. Everybody who comes into the coaching world thinks they need to be an author and a speaker. It’s gotten to be this big buzz about, “I have to be all three.” There are hundreds of thousands of dollars into this coaching world without having and getting good clients. What’s the piece of it that you solve as a speaker coach?

I work with high-level corporate clients. I also work with speakers like me with a program called Get Booked, Get Paid Now, which is getting speaking gigs. I always figured that you need three things to be a speaker. Speaking is part of your marketing program. A book can be part of your marketing program to build up the rest of your business. The book could be the end game. Publishing a book, almost nobody makes money off it unless it’s Danielle Steel. Hardly anybody makes money with a book. Having a book is a great tool, but it’s not something that’s going to get you paid.

In the same way, having a great signature speech is a cool, fun and interesting tool. If you don’t have the right strategy, you could be speaking, once a day and still not make any money. You’ve got to have the right strategy for it. A huge part of that is how you get booked and how you get paid. That’s what I do for my fellow speakers. The Get Booked, Get Paid Now Program helps them get into paying speaking gigs. As a speaker trainer, that is probably the question I get more than anything else, “How can I get paid to speak?”

There are a couple of different ways to get paid in that sense too. It depends on what avenue you pursue. You work a lot with people who are paid to go to an event and speak the keynotes.

Delivering other’s material through speaking can be a great experience on the way to doing your own material. Click To Tweet

There are keynoters. It’s not the best way to get paid.

I’m one of the others. I speak to sell. That’s my avenue. I bring in more clients. That’s another avenue as well. Is there any other, besides those two? Do you have to be one or the other?

There are quite a few ways to get paid to speak. You could also speak and promote someone else’s program. You can let them do the work of filling the room, which is always the hardest part if you’re doing a workshop. Anybody who’s ever done a workshop will know. The hardest part is getting people to show up. You could go be a speaker for a program that’s well known and guaranteed to have speaking. You’re delivering their material their way, but you do get a check for it. It can be a great experience on the way to doing your own material. The other way that lots of people do is they speak to get clients. They speak for free and use that to get clients.

This is what happened to me. For quite some time, I was speaking to get paid. People would come up to me and they’d say, “I love it. I love your work. I need you so desperately. I’ve got to get out there and start speaking. Do you suppose you could knock a zero off your fee? Maybe I could get six months of your time for $500.” I got tired of it. I got fed up. What I do is I help people give great presentations, it doesn’t matter to me what they’re talking about and who they are, as long as they care about what they’re saying. My skills applied equally to the entrepreneur and to the business field. I’ve always had a business brain. It’s one of the reasons why I signed up to work with you, Juliet, because you said you are the no BS marketing coach. I said, “That’s for me. This is someone who’s going to tell me how to do it and kick me in the butt so I’ll do it.”

Moving from speaking for free to a lot of astrologers and an aromatherapy people, it wasn’t paying my mortgage. I moved towards corporate where there are people with steady paychecks and where companies can hire me. That’s what I did when I went through that. Other people were saying, “How are you doing it? You’ve got to tell me how. Help me.” I created the Get Booked, Get Paid Now Program. It’s if you have material that would fit for a business audience, if you’re willing to talk to a business audience and help them, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent every year by companies who bring in trainers, it can be a lucrative way. That is the way to get paid to speak. You’re still speaking for free from time to time, but your chances are in some audience that is more employed and not just working on commission.

Probably once a year, I speak in front of a group of people who I know I’m not going to walk away from. It is getting in front of that right audience. There are a lot of speakers out there who will say, “I’ve got three gigs this month,” but they’re not in front of the appropriate audience. It’s also about knowing who your audience is very deeply.

That’s quite important, it’s the first thing we do. Get Booked, Get Paid Now has two pieces. It’s got the launch program. There is the mastery program. If you’re already working with corporate clients, if you know who you’re supposed to talk to or what your material is, you can go straight to mastery. I know so many speakers who are out there and they say, “I’d like to get into corporate,” but they don’t have a video. They don’t have the right material. They don’t have the right language. They don’t know how to get there. They don’t know what their niche is. The launch version is seven weeks. We talk about who is your niche and who are you looking for. You could go look for anybody. The dermatologist who says, “Who’s your ideal client?” They said, “Anybody with skin.” That’s an old joke. That’s where I was when I first started out. Everybody needs communication skills. They’re all marketing like you. Everybody needs marketing. How you find the ones who are going to be the people you concentrate on is the key. Committing to that niche, at least for seven weeks will make such a difference.

PRP 42 | Get Paid To Speak

Get Paid To Speak: The hardest part of speaking is getting people to show up.

 

I’ve related to you, Elizabeth. I don’t know about the readers. About my first year in business, I was on Google Plus. I had a rocking crowd, but they didn’t have any money. They were starving artists. Once I got some tools in place to assess that, I got off there and made a concerted effort to where I needed to be. That’s going to happen. Elizabeth drills down on that message and that niche. Consider overtime that niche may change. Mine has changed dramatically as we’ve gone from Super Brand Publishing to Quiz to Qualify. You’ve directed opera, which seems so weird to me. How does it relate to public speaking?

It all seemed to happen by itself at the time. When I look back, I could see that I’ve been dedicated to the art of great communication since I first walked on stage at the age of five. I was in a children’s theater group. My mom said I was the best bunny rabbit ever to grace the stage in the Hillside School. I was hooked. I thought I was going to be a famous actress on Broadway. I got older. I realized I was a better director than I was an actor. At the same time, I was a language person. My grandmother spoke eight languages, mine five, plus Latin, Greek and Japanese. We speak five languages. That’s no big deal in our family. I discovered opera, where you could have music, theater, language and travel. I worked my way up through the ranks. My first opera job was driving the truck. I had to clean out the floor of the rehearsal room because they were in an old warehouse. I spent a week shoveling mud off the floor. Driving the truck and sweeping the stage was the beginning of my career. I worked my way up to directing at the Metropolitan Opera, internationally and running an opera company of my own.

You have these everyday experiences and you wonder. There have been times when I’ve had my resume out and I thought, “Why did I go from this to this?” It hits you and you’re like, “I needed all my experience to do what I do now.”

It’s putting it all together that comes out. You need a strategy. You need a good script. You needed a good delivery style. They say, “How do you teach delivery style?” For many years, I’ve been teaching people how to be fabulous in front of a group. I don’t know what I’m going to say until it comes. I see something and I say, “Try this. Let’s do this. Let’s do that.” It’s like, “It’s right there at my fingertips. I’m so happy.”

When you see how people start out, how stiff they look, and they don’t connect with an audience, you feel that as the audience. When I first started presenting when I worked at Chiat/Day, I wore reading glasses because I was scared to make eye contact. I would strategically look around the room. One day, I took those glasses off. They helped me get through the fear. Many people have that fear. They come across stiff when they’re up there.

Here’s the speaker tip. For women, wearing glasses makes you look smarter. I hope that’s true because I don’t wear contacts. My eyes won’t let me wear contacts. Without the glasses, I’m blind. I have to figure out ways that I can manage with the glasses. Somebody said, “That makes you look smarter.” At least that’s what I tell myself. I hope it’s true.

What are the five secrets to getting booked and getting paid?

Connecting to a niche can make so much difference to the way you are speaking. Click To Tweet

It starts out with why. You have to embrace that this is going to be worth it. It doesn’t happen overnight. I wish it did. If I had a pill, I could give you to make you a world-famous speaker overnight, I’d be a bazillionaire living on an island somewhere. It takes work. It takes at least nine months or a year to get established in a new market. If you are moving from entrepreneur to corporate market, you have to get yourself established. Think first about why. Embrace the concept that it’s okay to get paid for your expertise. There are a lot of people out there who say, “I have to go and help the world,” or heal people or teach them. Most of us are teachers. That’s the why is, it’s okay to get paid for it. Take a look at your numbers. Sit down with your accountant and figure out what is it going to take to pay your bills. That is a good reason to do it too.

It’s who, what, where and how. Who are your people? Who is your audience? Where do you find them? What do you say when you talk to them? How do you get yourself to do it? I designed this for people like me and the people I’ve heard. I heard so many people who said, “I have this book,” or that program or “I’ve read all the articles about how to get paid as a speaker. I just haven’t done any of it.” The thing that’s making this difference from all those other things is, my intention is that we do it. Two weeks out of the month, I ask people to schedule three hours instead of one hour. There will be one hour of class and two hours to do the things we talked about. You probably get up in the morning and know immediately what you’re going to do and you do what’s on your list. I am a world-class procrastinator. If there’s anybody else out there who procrastinates as I do, this program is for you.

I do have to admit I have a list, but when it comes to my own marketing, I procrastinate. I have this big blind spot back here. I went through two or three weeks where we’re getting ready to launch Quiz to Qualify. I had to marinate. I always beat myself up during that period because I don’t feel like I’m in action. My mind is just chewing it over. I have those points too. I know I’m all about action, but I do have those moments. Especially when it comes to your stuff, I can look at it all day long and go, “We need to do this, this and this.” When it comes to my own, it’s like a big, “Duh.”

I have to do all sorts of things to help my clients to do my own marketing. It’s so easy to put that off. That’s what this is about, is to give ourselves accountability and also referral partners. Hold a group who can refer people back and forth. I have sent people to you. You’ve sent people to me. We’re in a group that connects together. We see the value of what each other does. My favorite and absolute best way to find speaking gigs are from other speakers. If you develop a relationship with other speakers and someone says, “I did this gig for this group. This would be a good place for you to go.” One of the things about Get Booked, Get Paid Now is one of the agreements you sign is, we pledge to refer each other wherever possible. There’s a group that I work with. Once I’ve been paid, I say, “You know who you should have next.” Her work fits exactly into what I’m doing. What I try to do is get us book one, two and three. We’ve got a program at McKesson Pharmaceutical. I did manage to convince them. We’re going to do one after the other. It’s going to help people so much from the three of us because it all fits in. That’s one of the joys of what I do.

We do have a great little group that we work together. It’s Katherine Bell with her Extraordinary Women’s group, Olympia Hofstetter, Debbie Hoffman. We’re so interconnected in what we do that we can move people along from step one to step two. We know we’re going to get action. We know we’re going to get results. 

It’s complimentary. If it complements what you’re doing, then refer them.

Elizabeth, thank you so much. Do you have something you’d like to give away to our audience, where they can find out more about you?

PRP 42 | Get Paid To Speak

Get Paid To Speak: Take a look at your numbers and sit down with your accountant and figure out what’s it going to take to pay your bills.

 

I have a quiz, imagine that, your Quiz to Qualify. It’s a Get Booked, Get Paid Quiz. If you go to www.GetBookedGetPaidQuiz.com, you’ll have a free assessment that will give you an idea of where you are in the process, what you need and what you need to do next. The gift that comes from that, especially for the people who are in this group, is once you’ve taken the quiz, you get a free strategy session with me to talk about your results and help you plan your next steps. It might not be with me. I hope it is. It’d be how to get help, how to get support.

That’s one thing we work on within our group of people, is ethical enrollment. If I can’t serve you, I’m not going to take your money. I love that about our group of people. We’ll get you to the person who can.

There are times where I will send somebody someone else. I’d say, “You’re not ready for me. Go here and get this part set up first and come back and we’ll talk.” It’s GetBookedGetPaidQuiz.com.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Juliet. I’m honored to be on your show.

Important Links:

About Elizabeth Bachman

PRP 42 | Get Paid To SpeakElizabeth Bachman is THE go-to person for advanced level training in Speaking, Presentation Skills, Sales and Leadership. With a lifetime spent perfecting the art of presenting, she helps high-level clients master a message that brings * the Funding they need, * the Allies they want and * the Recognition they deserve.

A sought-after speaker and strategist, Elizabeth works with leaders and influencers who need to become concise and compelling presenters. She helps them present as smart, down-to-earth, loose, friendly—even funny—and still be taken seriously.

Elizabeth has directed such luminaries as Luciano Pavarotti & Placido Domingo in more than 50 operas around the world, giving her a wealth of tools to help business professionals become respected presenters. Fluent in 5 languages, she is adept at working with presenters from many countries, bringing her global experience to her clients.

Elizabeth is an award-winning contributing author to the international best-seller “Messages That Matter,” as well as the creator of “How to Get Booked as a Speaker: Taking Your Show on the Road” – the ultimate guide to filling your calendar with lucrative speaking gigs.

Elizabeth has been featured in numerous media interviews alongside – among others – business greats Dr. Ivan Meisner, Dan Kennedy & Steve Forbes. She presents regularly at such corporations as Bank of America, McKesson and Turner Construction as well as the National Association of Women Business Owners, Small Business Global Summit, E Women Network, and many more.

Founder and Artistic Director of TOP Opera, a summer opera training program in the Austrian Alps, she continues to give back to the opera community. Strategic Speaking for RESULTS * When you want to make a difference, not just a point!

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Join the Promote, Profit, Publish Community today:
By | 2023-07-26T06:32:53+00:00 June 4th, 2019|Podcasts|0 Comments

About the Author:

Leave A Comment