Remote Bob virtual assistants booked over 287 speaking gigs for our clients in the last
two years without investing anything other than their time.
In this article, we are discovering how exactly we did it. By following these simple steps, you can land speaking gigs for yourself if you are willing to invest some of your personal time, or you can hire a VA to do this for you.
What is speaking gig?
A speaking gig is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to speak publicly at an event, conference, or as a guest on a podcast.
Speaking in front of a big audience might sound stressful. Why every serious business owner should do it anyway?
An entrepreneur who has many speaking gigs:
Grows personal branding
Becomes recognized in the business community
Promotes their company and product
Increases credibility and trust in the industry
Gains numerous networking opportunities
Speaking engagements help business owners showcase their knowledge, grow their networks, attract clients, and build authority in the business community.
After every speaking gig, we had several potential clients, and partners inquiring about our services!
Results: New Speaking Gigs
Since 2022, we have assisted 18 entrepreneurs in securing additional speaking engagements. With every new client contract, we also sign an NDA, so on this occasion, we will be sharing details on how we landed speaking gigs for our Founder, Barbara Maheshwari.
The average founder gets 2-3 booked meetings with event organizers or podcast owners in the first 30 days when he hires a VA to work on this for 20 hours per month. Results slightly depend on location, industry, and the client's credibility.
Remote Bob founder Barbara Maheshwari had no previous experience as a speaker. When we started searching for speaking gigs for her, we were basically selling her vision. Over 25 speaking gigs for our founder were secured in the last two years.
Other than investing our personal time, we didn't have any budget - we never paid for Barbara to be a speaker at any event.
These are speaking engagements that our Founder attended...
Ok, enough with the bragging. Let's cut to the chase. Now we will explain how you can replicate what we were doing in order to book speaking gigs for yourself.
Process: How to Land Speaking Gigs
First Step - Understand Target Audience
What events is your target audience participating in? Which podcasts are they tuning into?
Where does your ideal client frequent?
For example, Remote Bob offers virtual assistance services to Coaches, Consultants, and small entrepreneurs.
Our potential clients are visiting conferences like Web Summit in Portugal, Finance Week in London, or Marketing Madness in Croatia. They are listening business and tech podcasts, about leadership, growth, blockchain, team management etc. Start with defining your target audience.
You can find a template like this in Canva...
Second Step - Research
Start by making a list of 20 business events or conferences, and 20 podcasts where you would like to speak. We recommend using a shared Excel sheet for tracking these details.
Column 1 title: Name of the Event
Column 2 title: Which Company is organizing it
Column 3 title: Date of the event
Column 4 title: Email or contact form
Column 5 title: Name of organizer
Column 6 title: LinkedIn Link
Column 7 title: Outreach Status (First Contact, Second Contact, Arranging Meeting, Meeting Booked, Speaking Gig)
Column 8 title: Priority (High, Medium, Low)
Column 9 title: Notes (empty space to add comments)
You can download this sheet and use it as template.
Third Step - Write Compelling Intro Message
Mention in your intro message:
1) For which event or podcast are you interested?
2) What is your expertise? About which topics can you speak?
3) Where have you spoken before, and what kind of positive results did it cause?
4) Call to action - Where can they book a call if they would like to hire you?
We recommend that you prepare 2-3 different versions of an intro message and test each one of them.
Example of intro message...
Hello,
I see you are facilitating the Leap Summit event for startups next year in October. I assume that you are currently searching for passionate speakers for your event.
Our founder, Barbara Maheshwari, could be a great addition to your list of speakers. She often speaks about these topics:
How to manage remote team
Leadership
How to scale online service-based business
Success story: Remote Bob
You have probably seen her already at the Marketing Madness conference, The Future is Remote event, or Web Summit as a speaker, or as a guest lecturer at Manchester University, Hult Prize, or IT University in Croatia.
We always announce Barbara's speaking engagements on our social media channels, which frequently triggers more ticket sales. She is one of those speakers that leaves everyone astonished!
If you would like to explore booking her as a speaker for your next event, book an introductory call here https://calendly.com/remotebobuk/
Kind regards
Fourth Step - Consistent Outreach
Continue doing research and outreach daily. Reaching out to 10-20 contacts per day, Monday to Friday, for one month will definitely show results. We advise you to set a fixed time to work on this, for example from 9 AM to 10 AM daily. Combine email outreach and LinkedIn outreach.
If you choose the relevant target audience, write a compelling intro message, and stay focused on outreach persistently for at least one month - after 2-3 weeks, you will start getting meetings with event organizers and podcast owners.
After consistently applying this approach for several months, you can start to see tangible results in the form of confirmed speaking engagements or invitations to participate in podcasts and events.
Persistence is crucial as it keeps your profile fresh in their minds and increases the chances of receiving positive responses.
Fifth Step - Track Progress
Track progress in Excel sheet, calculate every week how many messages were sent, and how many positive replies were received. If you are delegating this to a Virtual Assistant, ask him to send you a weekly update on Fridays about this.
Get ready for your first speaking gigs soon!
We have hundreds of resources and materials in Remote Bob, that help our clients to delegate work, and our virtual assistants to achieve better results on projects. If you are interested in hiring our VAs to support you with seeking for speaking gigs, book a Free Consultation call here https://calendly.com/remotebobuk/
Schedule This is just an example of the work schedule that our virtual assistant would receive from us for the first week on a new project. I hope this was helpful for you.
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