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Navigating The World Of Speaking Opportunities with Jackie Lapin

Our guest is Jackie Lapin. Jackie is a leader in helping leaders, authors, coaches, health practitioners, speakers and entrepreneurs connect with their next followers around the globe. For many years, her internationally acclaimed Conscious Companies have been providing PR campaigns, radio media tours and speaking engagements to support the growth and revenue of change-makers around the globe. Her clients have included Don Miguel Ruiz, Dr. Joe Vitale, James Twyman, Denise Linn, Arielle Ford, Hay House and more.

Jackie is the Founder of SpeakerTunity Cities Regional Directories, which provide leaders with contacts for hundreds of speaking opportunities in their individual markets at the touch of their fingertips. These purchasable geocentric lists enable regions to connect with clients in their particular demographic and region. Additionally, Jackie’s SpeakerTunity monthly subscription services give leaders ongoing lists of speaking engagements, radio shows, podcasts and virtual summits all across North America. She has personally booked more than 10,000 interviews and speaking engagements over the past years. She’s going to share her wisdom with us. Welcome, Jackie.

I’m so glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

You’re welcome. I’m excited about this because my audience all the time is saying, “I worked with a speaker coach. I want to get out and speak, whether it’s paid speaking or selling from the stage, but I can’t get my foot in the door.” Tell us about that. What should one do to start building a calendar of speaking events?

The first thing you have to do is put commitment to your time calendar and don’t assume that you’ll get to it because you probably won’t. You have to put three hours a week specifically in your calendar. Once you do that and you make the commitment, there are a couple of tools that you need to have. One, you have to have a great speaker one-sheet. Speaker one-sheet consists of the following. It includes a biography on you, a great headline, a powerful photo of you. If you have one of you speaking, that’s even better, then you should have a summary of your presentations. It should be a snappy title for each presentation, an explanation of what the topic is and then three bullet point takeaways. You should probably have three of those. Lastly, you should probably have a good couple of testimonials on your speaker one-sheet.

Here’s the important factor about this document. Most people write from the standpoint of, “Here I am. Here’s why I’m great. This is my background.” You have to realize it’s not about you. It’s all about them. What your speaker one-sheet has to address is what will you be offering that is a solution to what keeps that audience awake nights? What answer do you have for their problems? What can you say that’s going to change, motivate, heal or improve their lives? You have to write your headline and you have to write your bio from that positioning and then you can get into your credentials. That’s critical.

That thing you said about three hours a week, one of the things that we talk about a lot on the show is noticing that coaches, authors and speakers don’t engage and set that time aside for income-producing activities. This is an income-producing activity.

You’ve got to book it on your calendar just like you would in any other appointment because otherwise, it’s going to slip by. You’ll look at the end of the week and say, “I should have gotten to my speaking gigs.” If you want to be speaking in three to four months from now, you need to put that time in now.

Give us some sample ways on how you would find local engagements.

First of all, Google is a great resource. Most of the time that you think of Google, you think, “I can do better than that.” The truth of the matter is when we’re researching SpeakerTunity, it’s our first and foremost tool. If you want to look for meetings and venues in your association, meetings or conferences even in your region, then you need to put in the subject matter like business meetings and the city or women’s networking and the city. You can pull a bunch of keywords together that makes sense for the subject and the kinds of organizations that you’re looking for plus your city. If you do that, you’re going to find a ton of stuff.

Meetup is another resource. Most people think of Meetup as meetings specifically for meet-up purpose. Frankly, a lot of the bricks and mortar meetings that occur every month or every week at various different places use Meetup as a means to advertise, promote, and bring in new people. Meetup is a great resource for you. If you’re looking for events, a great resource is Events in America. This website will tell you what events are upcoming for the next six months, either by your local region or by category subject matter. Some are consumers, some are industry-specific, etc. The nice part about that is they won’t tell you the speaker booker is, you can look six months ahead and see what’s upcoming. That’s a good resource.

Back to Meetup. One of the nice things about Meetup is if you put in the market where you’re in and the subject matter you’re looking for, they will feed you new meetings that pop up in your region and subject matters. You want to definitely do that. If you’re specifically looking for associations, you can go to the Directory of Associations. That’s a great way if you’re looking for specific, but you’ll have to pay for some of those lists. If you want to download them, there’s a cost you’re going to incur. Those are pretty much some great ones.

Everybody knows that LinkedIn is a terrific source for speakers. If you’re going to go to the LinkedIn, you need to focus on the people who are the ones that are most likely to be those that book for events and programs. You’re looking for either the human resources, sales and marketing, event planners, meeting planners, conference planners or coordinators. Any keyword associated with those kinds of things will help you find. You can either do it by company where you say, “I want to speak at this company,” then you try to look for the people in that company that fit that profile. You can try to throw keywords out there for the title and different people will show up for you.

You already told us how to get into conferences. How do you get on other people’s stages? Because that’s something that I hear over and over, “I like X and I want to get on his stage.” How do you do something like that?

Build a personal relationship with them. Get in their mastermind group, go to their conferences, get to know them, work with them in some capacity. That’s one way to do that. Many of the leaders are going to ask you to pay to be on their stages. In the right circumstances, it’s a good bet. If you know that you close a certain number of people on a regular basis and you know what your price point is, then you can determine if it’s a good investment for you to get on somebody else’s stage. The other factor which I love though is there’s a way to beat that. Throw your own event and if it’s commensurate in size or big enough that they would want to speak at it, then offer your stage to them in exchange for you being on their stage. It’s called the stage swap. It’s a great way to mitigate that cost to get on some of the more inaccessible speaking space stages. They need to fill their events. They need to talk with a lot of events and if you trade out, that’s a good way to do it.

When you say pay, you’re talking about sponsoring their event. You need to know before you spend any money that’s your crowd.

It’s critical. I would never recommend anybody spending any money until they know that this is the right audience. There are lots of ways. You can ask for some demographics, but you can also attend their events, sit in on their podcasts or whatever other things they’re doing and get a sense of who the audience is. It needs to be a good match for yours. There are lots of ways to speak on less prominent stages that you can test the waters, but when you’re spending that money, you need to be sure it’s the right audience.

I know a lot of times we use the quiz to test audiences and say, “You’re never going there again or that is a good one, find out more about it.” You can do that before you go and spend that money as well. Another place where we use our quiz a lot that you book are radio shows. How do you find those shows that are aligned with your message?

First of all, there are different places that you can find radio. The whole radio and podcast landscape has exploded over the last several years. The first thing is if you want broadcast radio, then you will google radio stations and then your market and you’ll come up with a list of stations. You can go to their website and see what is locally produced. A lot of this stuff now is national. You have to find the locally produced shows and see if they have a producer or host listed with their email on the website. If they don’t, you have to do things the old school way. Get on the phone and call, find out the email and who the producer is and what the direct phone number is. That’s broadcast. The next thing is if you’re looking for internet radios, then you go to the aggregators like BlogTalk and VoiceAmerica, which have major channels and you can go into those channels. They have woman channel, business channel, whatever. You can go into those channels and find specifics to what you’re trying to address.

You can also go to subject-specific networks. For example, ProgressiveHealth.net or HealthyLife.net, that’s both health. If you want mind, body, spirit, then you go to BBS, which is primary. If you want the business, you go to The Business. Look for those networks that are specifically your target. There are some that are regional like LA Talk Radio. You would want to add those in. Once you’re starting to look for podcasts, before it was iTunes, but Apple is changing their format and it’s going to be something called Apple Podcast. You’re going to go looking at Apple Podcast for them and then you can also look on iHeartRadio.

There are some others like speakers and some of them. These are siloed by subject matter and you can go looking for the podcast in your subject matter. Here’s the problem with podcasts. In most cases, the email contact for the person will not be on the network that you’re looking at. You are going to have to go hunt them down on their personal website and see if you can find something. If there is not, then you have to submit on their contact forms and either ask for an email for submission or put your pitch into their contact forms. That’s the best way. That’s pretty much how to cover the whole landscape.

I know from being a podcaster and going through Tracy Hazzard’s training at Podetize, that it also becomes a reciprocal relationship when you have a guest on and they have a podcast as well. The same thing you did with your radio swap on there. It happens there too. Virtual summits, I saw this question and I was like, “Do people still do those?”

On any given month, we find eighteen to twenty of them a lot of times and some may be more. Virtual summits are still a very significant list building opportunity for people. If you’re looking to get into a cooperative situation with a bunch of other people who are going to bring their audiences there and you’re going to be connecting with people that you didn’t have any access to put previously, it’s a viable option. If you’re going to do that, you need to have a great freebie opt-in so that it’s compelling and exciting. You have to have a topic that matches what the subject matter of the summit is going to be. Sometimes you have to tweak your subject matter to fit what the host is offering, but make sure that you do.

Here’s the big thing that I hear from many hosts these days is they complain about people who they’d given a spot on their summit and then they don’t do the promotion. If you commit to a summit, you must do the promotion. If they’re asking for too many solos and you can’t afford to do that, either negotiate or don’t apply. If they do say that that’s what it is, commit to doing it and fulfill that commitment, then you’re going to be invited on other people’s summits because what happens is some of those hosts talk between themselves. One of the best ways to be hot on the summit circuit is to give great content that everybody loves to have you and they know that you’re a good partner and they want to participate with you.

Speaking Opportunities: Have a compelling pitch letter that presents you the way that you want to be perceived with a value-driven of what problem are you solving.

Those are all ways to make sure that you are welcome. There are a few summits that you’re allowed to sell on. If you’re looking to get into one of those, you also have to have a paid offer that you’re willing to revenue share on because most of those summits want to revenue share. Those are the tools that you have to have. For radio podcasts or summit, you might want to have a compelling pitch letter that presents you the way that you want to be perceived and with a value-driven of what problem are you solving.

I wasn’t aware people are still doing summits. They are so much work when you’re putting your own together. I know when we did The Book, The Business and Beyond, I had no idea what I was getting into. Are there easy ways to find these opportunities? I feel like what you’re putting together fills that void.

It absolutely does. It’s called SpeakerTunity and you can find them easily on our website. There are three different options here. One is SpeakerTunity Speaker Leads, which gives you 120 leads per month which are everything from local meetings, conferences, conventions, lifestyle events, spiritual centers, presentation friendly bookstores, TEDxes, all of the above and then a private Facebook group where we put in immediate calls for speakers these organizations are looking right now. The next one is SpeakerTunity Radio Insider where we give you 25 radio shows and podcasts every month so that you can start ramping up that aspect of it. You don’t have to do that research. You don’t have to do any of it. Lastly is SpeakerTunity Summits where on the very first day of every month we give you a list of virtual summits with open guest presenter seats. Most of the time you find out about a summit when it shows up in your desk and they’re inviting you to listen. This is before they get booked.

Each one of these products is $35 a month. It’s simple and easy and you can pick and choose. You don’t have to stay on for very long. They will continue until you’re ready to stop. Here’s the best part. I’m going to make a little special offer to the people on this show. You can test and experience each one of these by going to this website and you get a month free in all three. It’s SpeakerTunity.com/free-trials. I also want to tell your audience about something that’s on its way. This is exciting for us. SpeakerTunity’s three subscription services give you stuff all over North America. Let’s say that you just want to get booked for speaking engagements or in-person engagements in your market at meetings, venues and associations and you need to get in front of people to fill your client list, tell your books, drive your audience, and all of those platform building things that you need to do. SpeakerTunity Cities is our new offering, which aggregates hundreds, even thousands of speaking gigs in an individual market where you could get out among them by reaching out to these people. We give you names, phone number, email and we do a variety of categories.

About 75% of them is business in various different categories. Everything from industry specific to entrepreneurs and business executives to women’s groups. It is very specific and detailed. You have also the philanthropic and service groups, your Rotaries, your Soroptimists and AUW. Next, we have consumers. All the places that you can touch the consumer. That’s going to be your health support group, mom’s groups, LGBT, hospitals, military, all of those kinds of things. Lastly, spirituality. If you want to talk to an audience that’s spirituality oriented, we have communities, faith-based groups and consciousness-raising. All of those kinds of things are all going to be in one simple place. If you want to go take a look at it, it’s called SpeakerTunity Cities. We have California with nine different regional directories. We’re going to be rolling out across the country and Florida is our next marketplace. Keep looking and there’s a form at the bottom of the page. If you don’t have your market, tell us which one you want and we’ll notify you when we have it.

Anything else you’d like to share with us?

If you need coaching on how to write your speaker one-sheet and some of those other kinds of things, on the SpeakerTunity.com, we have resources for that too. We’re not going to leave you alone. If you need to get calling up on those kinds of things so that you make sure you want to get booked, we’ll help you with that too.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

It was wonderful, Juliet. Thank you so much.

Important Links:

• SpeakerTunity
• Meetup
• Events in America
• BlogTalk
• VoiceAmerica
• ProgressiveHealth.net
• HealthyLife.net
• LA Talk Radio
• iHeartRadio
• The Book, The Business and Beyond
• SpeakerTunity Speaker Leads
• SpeakerTunity Radio Insider
• SpeakerTunity Summits
• SpeakerTunity.com/free-trials
• SpeakerTunity Cities
• SpeakerTunity.com
• www.JackieLapin.com

About Jackie Lapin

Jackie Lapin is a leader in helping leaders, authors, coaches, health practitioners, speakers and entrepreneurs connect with their next followers around the globe. For the past 10 years, her internationally acclaimed Conscious Companies have been providing PR campaigns, radio media tours and speaking engagements to support the growth and revenue of change-makers. Her clients have included Don Miguel Ruiz, Dr. Joe Vitale, James Twyman, Denise Linn, Arielle Ford, Hay House and more.

Jackie is the founder of SpeakerTunity Cities™ Regional Directories which provide leaders, with contacts for hundreds of speaking opportunities in their individual markets at the touch of their fingertips. These purchasable geocentric lists enable speakers to have a massive impact in their regions and to select directories for other regions where they want to connect with clients.

Additionally, Jackie’s SpeakerTunity monthly subscription services, give leaders ongoing lists of speaking engagements, radio shows, podcasts, and virtual summits all across North America. Jackie has personally booked more than 10,000 interviews and speaking engagements over the past years—and she is here today to share her wisdom with us.

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