6 Tips to Start Delivering High-Performing Professional Public Speaking Courses

Public speaking is indeed a thing, despite what you may think, and is a veritable career choice for anyone in most fields and endeavors. While it is often maligned for its ubiquity, public speaking demands a high level of intention – you’re most probably not going to stumble upon a “speaking career.”

However, you might be considering a public speaking career without a lead on how to begin. Professional public speaking courses and coaching might be of excellent help, but only if you’ve got started. The article provides six tips that help you to get to grips with the fundamentals of public speaking.

• Have a Clear Topic Focus

There is a tendency to focus on sounding great when training for your first public speaking gig. However, this is often at the expense of the topic specificity. It is essential to maintain focus on a particular topic, as it invariably allows you to keep the audience’s attention.

Furthermore, it would help if you speak on a more specific topic, with a particular scope, rather than a broad blanket one. 

For instance, the line, “How to land the job in the first minute of an interview” is manageable for training, but the topic “How to pitch yourself as a computer scientist applying for a job in tech writing” sounds more specific and resonant with the audience.

Most public speaker workshops and TED talks leadership coaching classes encourage a clear topic focus, as it means that you would easily relate with a specific kind of audience and better share your knowledge as you speak.

• Substitute Cold Calls for Lists

Cold calls or emails are a way to acquire new contacts interested in a public speaking coach or other related services. Unfortunately, there are proofs that cold calling would rarely help your career, at least at its early stages. It’d take a lot of your time, resources and the rejection you’d likely get isn’t worth it.

An excellent way to go is to draw up lists of current and past connections and contacts. They are arguably the best options you could work with at the fundamental stages of your public speaking career. 

A practical list would typically contain the names of people you know – past or present – who can either provide you with a quick testimonial or hire you to speak for them personally or as a corporation.

• Pull a One-Pager

If you’ve made a list of people you could approach as you begin public speaking, you would also want to have a one-pager to make contact and interactions much more accessible. A one-pager would contain the necessary information concerning your topic, presented on a page to make it possible for busy individuals to understand the speaking skills you’re trying to offer.

The critical factor for a compelling one-pager is organization. You’re better off starting with the first words of your topic (e.g., Dating, women empowerment, leadership speaking coaching, politics, e.t.c), as opposed to dropping your name first. It allows you to lead into the topic as you capture and maintain the reader’s attention.

Also, it would help if you described your speaking sessions. Touch on the various vital areas you intend to cover and use bulleting to make more precise reading. 

Further down the one-pager, include elements of entities with which you’ve worked in the past. It adds more credibility to your topic choice. Lastly, you could specify the various rates with which you operate, as well as your contact details.

• Get a Website

In today’s world, the internet provides the best chance to reach out to a larger audience. Online methods vary across various industries, and there are veritable platforms such as email and social networks. 

However, a website is a perfect fit for your budding public speaking career, as it allows you to maintain professionalism while being accessible to online contacts. You could host coaching sessions on the web and have interested people book now, in real-time instead of calling and traveling. 

The first step to getting a website is to buy a URL, which is the name a user types into a browser search bar to visit your website. The recommendation is to go for a professional-sounding name, preferably your company name. 

Alternatively, you may also use a personalized name. URL vendors such as godaddy.com are an excellent source, to begin with, and you can acquire multiple URLs according to your needs.

Next, you’d need to flesh out your website to suit the purpose. Aesthetics is a significant factor, as it allows your site to stay unique. You can either make your designs or model after any similar website.

Pay attention to the key elements to attract and engage visitors to your site. These include a mailing list implementation, a description of yourself, the professional public speaking courses, and other related services you offer.

• Invest in Customized Email Address

A customized email address shows that you’ve gotten serious about a public speaking career. Other than the professional look, customized email addresses give you a better chance at getting lucrative speaking and coaching businesses.

Typically, a custom email would look like info@customname.com. You can quickly get a custom email address from URL vendors such as GoDaddy.com and maintain it without going through third-party clients.

• Pay for a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software

When you start experiencing an increase in traffic on your website, the number of people who drop their names and email addresses goes up as well. Between the people who give you their contacts offline and online, there’d come a time when you’d need to automate your customer information organization.

A CRM is a software solution that can handle customer data and build a list from it. Some of the more suitable options on the market are MailChimp and InfusionSoft, and they offer features that allow you to keep names and email addresses, so you don’t have to lose leads due to manual computations.

Wrapping Up

The primary goal of any public speaker is to influence causes and people and get paid to do it. Just like in any other industry, you need to develop a unique public speaking product or service which makes you valuable to a larger audience. Also, you’d need to have a mechanism that enables you to plow back feedback to hone your skills over time.

You could go on to deliver your own professional public speaking courses, but you’d have to cover the basics. The tips mentioned above aim to give you the push in the right direction as you solidify your foundations of a public speaking career.