As a public speaker, a great deal of your credibility rests upon having information products, traditionally books that you have written. Moreover, more than two thirds of your income comes off the podium through back-of-the-room sales and sales over the Internet. Both for income and for the reputation required to bring income, you need to create information products.
Public speakers usually think that they need to have a book. That leads them to think about long arduous writing and editing, spending thousands of dollars having a book printed, and having a house full of boxes of books.
All of those thoughts are wrong. The reason we call them "information products" rather than "books" is that technology has allowed the products to come in many forms. A book is probably still the best for building a reputation. But you don't actually have to write the book. You can create it out of transcriptions of the speeches you are already making. You don't have to invest thousands of dollars and you don't have to fill up your house with boxes of books. You can have the book printed on demand.
And you don't need a book to sell. Just record your speeches and with a small bit of audio editing create audio CDs. Many attendees will enjoy listening to your speeches while driving. You can have CDs duplicated on demand for $1.75 each.
Or you can create videos from your speeches and sell them on DVDs. You can have the videos made by professionals. This can cost thousands. Having it done without professional equipment and without professionals working on it produces amateurish videos. On the other hand, you don't have to appear at all in the video. You can combine an audio recording of your speech with your slides. If your talk is a slide show anyway, there is no loss. Indeed, the lighting required to make a video of you speaking would make the slides invisible. You can have DVDs duplicated on demand for $1.75 each.
For sales over the Internet, you don't even have to produce physical products. You can sell audio recordings of your speeches as podcasts. You can sell electronic books and videos for digital download. This of course has the highest markup, because the production costs are effectively zero.
Public speakers have opportunities for income and reputation building that were impractically expensive a few years ago.
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To learn more about how to create income streams with your own
books, videos, and other
information products, follow these links. Dr. Christopher offers instructional CDs for speakers, independent professionals, and small business owners showing how to make make money with new technology.
