There are many people that I know about and of course many others I have not, who want to be professional speakers.

Whether they want to speak about personal development, motivation or even business strategies, there are a lot of people out there who believe it would be challenging, exciting and fun to get paid to speak.

However, how do you make the leap from being someone who doesn’t get paid to speak, to someone who does? That in my mind is the biggest challenge that face most professional speakers.

Having personally spoken in front of more than 20,000 people in the past couple years, here are some recommendations on how to fill a room so that you can get paid by your own audiences to speak.

1. The money’s in the list. I’ve always put a lot of emphasis in my courses and in my speaking engagements on the power of a mailing list.

It is now easier and more cost effective than ever to do that using current technology and what you need to do is; either on your website, or in person, you want to make people an offer in exchange for their contact information.

That offer can be anything from a free eBook to a free audio recording. Once you have them on your list, then whatever speaking engagement you have coming up, whether it is one of your own or somebody else’s, you would basically invite the people on your growing list.

This is my number one strategy on how to fill a room. It works amazingly and literally every time.

Would you invite people who have been to your speaking engagements before? Of course. Let them come as many times as they want.

2. The second strategy for how to fill a room is to piggy back on other peoples relationships. We call this grass roots marketing.

Start with a group a people either in your community or in another community that could help you fill a room in exchange for whatever it is you want to offer them, whether that is one of your free courses or just for the learning opportunity to understand all the elements on how to fill a room and put on a successful event

I’m currently working on one such event in Florida coming up next month, where I’m working with fifteen people in the Jenson Beach area and walking them through all the elements of event production and promotion.

3. The third really effective way on how to fill a room is to go into somebody else’s room and make an offer so that a certain portion of that room, ends up in your room.

Let me give you an example. Every week there are thousands of opportunities in ever community around you to practice your speaking ie; service clubs, business clubs or even you’re local Church or Synagogue.

These organizations literally host events every week, sometimes two and three times a week. You need to align yourself with those organizations, work with the person who books the speakers and practice your craft at the same time.

At the end of your presentations, make an offer for your free course. You would only be only be speaking for a half an hour to an hour which, generally isn’t enough time to sell anything or get them to buy into anything.

So, what you want to do is; get them out of that room and into your room. Have them sign a sign-up sheet, or collect business cards from everybody who wants to be on your mailing list.

The biggest problem I see with most speakers is that they want to make an instantaneous leap to getting paid $3,000 to $20,000 for a presentation, when they haven’t yet earned the right.

My highest recommendation is to stop waiting around for other to people to give you the opportunity; you create it yourself  by picking a date and using the three strategies above on how to fill a room.

Even if only five people show up, that is a good place to start. One day, you’ll wake up and it’ll be fifty people, then five hundred, and if your as good as you think you are, maybe even five thousand.

But, it all starts with you making the choice fill your own room first. It is a very rewarding thing to do, and you’re going to learn a lot about what the event production business really is.

To learn more about how to fill a room and public speaking opportunities, visit my presentation training and Train the Trainer course information.