Should You Organize Your Own Free Speaking Events? | Public Speaking | Presentation Skills

Is it a good idea to organize your own free speaking events and speaking gigs to market your services as a speaker or sell any other product?

This is one question that I get a lot from aspiring speakers, content matter experts, and authors because they have seen other people do it and become super rich. The answer is: it really depends. It depends on your niche, how you market yourself, and many other factors.

Certainly, many people have done things like these where they invite the top wealthiest people in a particular area to a free steak dinner, give a financial presentation to these 50 people, three of whom come around later to find out more and two become clients. They then end up making thousands of dollars off of fees. Surely, making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of a $5000 dollar investment in a free event is not bad but it may not work for everyone every time.

I have seen countless people trying to market their own get-rich-quicks or something about how you can live a happy and prosperous life. They may market the event to the whole world and if they are not well known in their niche, they might end up attracting ten people who purchase nothing.

Before doing such an event, make sure you have a product or a service that you are able to sell one-on-one already. If you don’t have that, then try not to market mass events to the public. Before I started marketing media training and speaking workshops to the public, I had already done hundreds of private and group trainings where I was hired so I knew that I had a service which people wanted and needed.