11 ways to get more results from speaking

Speaking and presenting are super effective ways to bring business in the door. (Skeptical? For all the reasons speaking can ramp up ROI, check out my three part series on speaking engagements.)

Done right, you’ll put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into a presentation. There’s the pitching, the planning, the rehearsal, the travel, and possibly, the stage fright.

After all that, don’t you dare leave business growth opportunities back at the conference. To get the most mileage out of your speaking events, here are 11 ways that you can get a bigger, better results from your efforts.

BEFORE

1. Ask your audience, clients and prospects for input.
Even before you devote hours to developing your speaking topic or crafting a killer slidedeck, solicit input from fans, current clients and prospects. Let them help you drill down on hot button issues.

The very act of asking for input and opinions (especially when you can let them know it’s for an upcoming speaking engagement *wink wink*) promotes your thought leadership and positions you as a playa.

How can you gather insight quickly? Through your blog, via email, Twitter, Facebook, professional forums, Linkedin groups, etc.

Ask a question, create a poll or send out a short (no more than three or four questions, please) survey.

DURING

2. Continue the relationship with your audience.

Use your presentation handouts as part of a lead collection or newsletter signup system. Attendees can sign up for your newsletter or blog to receive slides, notes or resources. By providing additional value, you can keep in touch with more people, even if you didn’t have a conversation at the event.

AFTER

Now that you’ve crafted and delivered your presentation, it’s time to accelerate the marketing momentum. How? By practicing one of the key principles of content marketing and your “be everywhere” strategy: repurposing.

Wait. Just in case that little voice is niggling at you, saying “I can’t distribute the same thing again. My prospects and clients have already seen it – they want something that’s fresh and new. They’ll never come back to my website again!”

Wroooooong.

Your prospects and clients are far, far less aware of the material that you distribute than you are. They’re busy. They don’t remember things. Most of them didn’t see that last article/blog post/tweet/email you sent.

Messages have to repeated, repeated, repeated and delivered in different modes to be absorbed.

3. Create multiple blog posts from the content of your talk. Break down the talk into single idea, bite-sized chunks.

4. Write one or more articles. Hate to write? Hire a freelancer from Scripted.com or elance.com or just speak your presentation into a recording tool and have it transcribed. A teeny bit polishing and boom-pow, you’re done.

5. Post your presentation on a sharing site like Slideshare.net or Scribd.com.

6. Post the presentation slidedeck (or just a few slides) on your blog. Slideshare makes it super easy to paste the embed code right into your post.

7. Republish the talk as a whitepaper or ebook.

8. Link to the presentation via Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

9. Tweet a series of soundbites from your talk.

10. Record yourself giving the talk and post audio on iTunes, Stitcher and your website.

11. Record and post video on YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites.

Now it’s your turn. What’s your favorite way to get more mileage out of a presentation? Am I missing some great ideas? Comment below and share your faves.

Your fame boosting assignment:

Dig out a presentation or talk that you’ve given. Shake the dust off and repurpose it in two ways, using ideas from this list. The world needs more of that magic you’ve got. C’mon, give it to us!