How do I become a professional speaker?

Question of the day
12/19/07

How do I gain the steps to become a successful motivational speaker? Specifically, where could one position oneself to be marketed as a professional speaker? My first instinct, is to find the "voice" of the motivational speaker industry. What is that? It could be a website--It could be a magazine --catering to the professional speakers. The marketing part could be answered by finding out where and when to advertise oneself. If one talks about things that would appeal to those who buy or sell boats, one might find out if there is a marine trade show, and if so, where and when? What magazine caters to meetings and trade shows, that might also allow for classified advertising? And does it do an annual issue or feature on locating good speakers? And locally, what clubs can you join? Toastmaster is a great group that might network with someone looking for that kind of information.

"Public speaking" is the subject heading. Books in Polaris suggestions. Sometimes an ipage search can be mined, then taken out to worldcat. Alan Weiss's Money Talks is a classic... Then I also went on Specialissues.com and typed in motivational speakers. It hit on http://www.incentivemag.com/ which itself has a search engine (according to Special issues they focus on motivational speakers in December) which brought up an article detailing the topics, characteristics, and fees of most motivational speakers in a report from http://www.nsaspeaker.org/ . NSA is the National Speakers Association. Linking to there they provide literature and instruction as well.