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Excerpt
Sean:
What did they struggle then when, after you’ve given this advice and they’ve done that and now they’re like addicted to it and they’re saying, “okay, but now how do I get paid? How do I turn it into a profession? What do I charge?” What do they struggle with? What are some of the most common questions they ask you?
Brenden:
I would say the biggest thing that they struggle with from going from free to paid is niching down. So most people. So let’s say a good quote. I like to say, “if you want to speak for free, speak on anything. If you want to speak for a fee, speak on one thing”. They get paid to speak because the fee outweighs the problem they’re solving. If you think about me as a communication speaker, you can imagine that people, companies, clients, organizations want to pay me for my time, because the value I deliver is higher than the money, whether it’s a thousand, five thousand doesn’t matter, right. It outweighs the topic that I’m presenting on. And because I’m a subject matter expert from Master Talk and all that stuff, I have the credibility to charge high fees.
Figure out something that someone is willing to pay for. And the best way to do that, honestly, is to go on like speaking websites, people get paid $10,000, 15,000+ see what topics they present on and pick one of those topics and charge much less for it.
The key to speaking that most people don’t get is it takes a while to get paid for actually speaking. Because you need to have some sort of bread, whether it’s your business, some sort of credibility. That’s why I recommend building your long term brand early.
The key is the second part is to understand that getting paid to speak is not the best way to get paid to speak. Really pay attention to what I just said. Let me repeat that again, knowing that you’re going to get a fee is not the best way to make money speaking. The best way to make money speaking is the secondary way, which is to build a revenue stream of other services.
So when you think about me, a lot of my speeches these days are still free, right? Some I get paid for, for sure. But a lot of them, I don’t, but I still make a lot of money from those speeches. Why? because some of the people want me as their coach. They go, “this guy’s the founder of Mastertalk. I’m the CEO of this company. If I pay him X number of dollars, I’m going to make a killing off my speech. How much do you charge?” And then I just charge whatever I want. Because it just works. I have the authority and the best way to build authority is through speaking.
Because you’re right there or you’re there virtually. You come up as an expert, the person who’s hosting the events puts you there as an expert. The people go to the event, trust the organizers, which means they’ll trust you. The only other way to build trust that fast is referrals or podcasts.
The third thing is speaking. What you want to do, whether it’s through a book that you want to sell, it’s a product you want to offer, or a service that you have. You want to package your expertise in a way that helps people. If you’re passionate about career advice and make sure it’s something people want to pay for also, you’re passionate about career advice, have a career coaching program at the end of your workshop.
If you want to see more of this, do you want to get one of my one on one coaching programs? Here are some of the people that I’ve helped and what they’ve been able to generate and achieve. Work with me. 1% of people will say yes. And once you get those five, 10 clients worldwide, then the rest is history. Then you have too many clients. Cause then it gets annoying. Honestly. Because then they start referring you to everyone else and then you have an overload, then your price skyrockets, and then it gets challenging.
