4 Ways to Make Money from Public Speaking.??

Imagine stepping onto a stage, capturing the audience's attention, and walking away with new opportunities and increased income.

Public speaking might be considered a "soft skill" but mastering it can yield hard cash and open doors you never imagined.

Whether you’re in the corporate world, running a business, or dreaming of becoming a professional speaker, there’s much to gain from stepping up on stage.

In the past five years, I’ve helped people harness public speaking to:

• Step into leadership roles.
• Pitch for investment.
• Launch new businesses.
• Successfully interview.
• Secure paid speaking gigs.

I’ve used the same communication skills to launch, grow, and build my own business—training teams, coaching individuals, and getting paid to speak to audiences.

In this short post, let’s break down the four ways you can make money from your message.

??Stepping Into Leadership Roles

Great leaders are usually strong speakers. Confident communicators are frequently chosen for leadership roles because they can speak with authority and lead a room.

For anyone in the corporate world, career progression is a fast track to increased income. Speaking up in meetings, presenting to teams, pitching ideas, and demonstrating expertise make it difficult to ignore your leadership potential.

If you’re consistently:

• Sharing value in meetings.
• Presenting to the team.
• Stepping up to pitch.
• Demonstrating your expertise.

At a certain point, it becomes unreasonable to assume you won’t be selected for promotion.

Consider the financial impact of a promotion. For instance, if a promotion adds ￡10k to your salary, over the next 3-5 years, that's an additional ￡30-50k. Investing in professional speaking training can be a strategic move toward achieving this.

??Promoting Your Business

What if you’re not climbing the corporate ladder? For business owners, public speaking offers even more lucrative opportunities. Regardless of your product or service, business success depends on a consistent flow of leads.

Public speaking allows you to connect with potential customers at scale. By sharing your message, demonstrating credibility, and addressing audience pain points, you become known, liked, and trusted—one room, event, or auditorium at a time.

Get yourself a persuasive speech, add an attractive lead magnet, and finish with a compelling call-to-action, and you’ve got a public speaking lead machine.

For an idea of the financial potential here: Take the number of attendees in any given audience, divide that by 100 (for a conservative conversion rate), then multiply that amount by your average customer LTV (lifetime value).

For example, let’s say you’re speaking to a room of 200 people.

• Converting 1% of the audience would result in 2 new customers.
• If your average customer LTV is ￡3,000.
• That’s a potential speech revenue of ￡6,000.

Starting to see the value in public speaking?

??Getting Paid to Speak on Stage

Public speaking itself is big business. The number of industry events, conferences, and exhibitions is staggering. They’re all looking for people to deliver keynotes, join panel discussions, and provide value to attendees.

The glory of this option is that it’s open to anyone. Professional speakers come in all shapes, sizes, and industry specialisms. But you will need at least two things:

1. Knowledge or expertise that others find valuable.
2. The ability to share it in an engaging way.

Beyond that, you need to be KNOWN. Speakers usually get booked because someone has previously seen them speak. This is something you can start small and develop over time.

Here’s a back-of-napkin pro-speaking plan:

1. Work out what topic you want to be known for.
2. Share videos of yourself speaking on this topic.
3. Keep going until people know you as an expert/enthusiast.
4. Search for free events, small meetups, or communities you can speak to.
5. Get recordings of yourself speaking, and create a showreel of your work.
6. Use this to build your brand, prove your skills, and secure paid speaking gigs.
7. Continue to leverage upwards.

Typical speaking gigs can pay anywhere from ￡500-￡15,000—depending on the value you provide and the audience you bring with you.

For a few hours of your time, it can be a highly lucrative way to make money. Once your ‘signature speech’ has been crafted and refined, it becomes an asset you can use multiple times.

Create your Public Speaking Eco-system.

The smartest people use public speaking as part of their “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” with all of the above factors working together for maximum benefit.

They start businesses, launch books, offer courses, find partnerships, access leadership opportunities, and ultimately build an engaged audience of people who love what they do.

Each aspect feeds into the others, and together they create an ecosystem of services and offerings that generate huge value.

This is the winning formula that most thought-leaders aspire to. But there’s no real secret to it—it just requires the right training, time, positioning, and practice.

Why I’m Doubling Down on Speaking.

In the last two years, the majority of my revenue has come from selling services B2B and B2C. But moving forwards, I’m doubling down on not just the training side of things, but the actual speaking work too.

Why? For all of the reasons above:

• To build my brand.
• To grow my following.
• To find new clients.
• To create new partnerships.

And alongside all of that, to develop a revenue stream from something I already love doing!

So what about you? Are you excited by the prospect of stepping up, sharing your message, and getting paid to do so? If so—what part of the journey are you at right now, and what next step do you need to take?

Reach out if you have any questions, and who knows, we might see each other backstage sometime soon.

Ed.