Land Paid Speaking Gigs

I was recently asked to speak to the Miami Dolphins’ rookies about personal branding and how to use social media to amplify their message. I’ve spoken in dozens of college athletic departments, but this was my first time speaking to professional athletes.

I was understandably excited, and as I shouted it from the rooftops (i.e., posted all over social media), the number one question I was asked was: how did you land this gig?

The short story is that the Dolphins’ player engagement staff emailed me and asked to have a call, but I later found out it was an invitation that was years in the making and involved two unpaid speaking gigs, Twitter and Periscope. Let me explain . . .

Last year, I Skype’d into a class at USF and did a freebie speaking engagement for a class that was using my book, Saturday Millionaires, as required reading. I had just learned about Periscope, and I thought it would be fun to set up a second device on my desk and stream my speech live to Periscope.

Little did I know that two player engagement executives for the Dolphins were watching me on Periscope. How did they find me on Periscope? They were notified about the stream on Twitter, where they followed me – yes, there are a lot of layers to this, and that’s why you have to be using multiple channels to get visible!

After watching me on Periscope they checked me out on LinkedIn and noticed that I was connected with someone that one of them previously worked with at Notre Dame. I’ve never been to Notre Dame . . . but I did meet a young woman during a free speaking gig at University of Tennessee way back in 2011 who went on to work at Notre Dame. That lovely young woman gave me a glowing recommendation, and that led the Dolphins to email me to chat about potential speaking opportunities.

For more tips on how to land speaking invites in your inbox, check out this post.

So, to recap: it took two unpaid speaking engagements and my being active on Periscope, Twitter, and LinkedIn to land this paid speaking gig that I hope will lead to more paid speaking gigs around the NFL.

You reap what you sow, so start planting those speaking seeds!

 

Learn where to find your first (or next) speaking gig with this free guide!