Get Booked to Speak at Commencement Ceremonies
My colleague James Malinchak weighs in today telling us how to get booked to speak at college commencement ceremonies.
Colleges do pay for speaking. Remember all those student activitiy fees your parents paid or perhaps you are paying right now? Some of those fees do go for paying speakers.
Speaker James Malinchak, ‘America’s Hottest Young Speaker, is the creator of the two top-selling speaker courses, ‘How to Make BIG Money As a Speaker,’ and the ‘College Speaking Success Home Study Course.
If you are interested in breaking into the college market James teaches a bootcamp called College Speaking Success and it is scheduled for November 29-Dec 2, 2007 in Las Vegas. Click here to learn more about the program.
If you are curious about it you might want to purchase the CD from the hour talk James did for the Speakers’ Summit on How to Get Booked to Speak at Colleges. Click here to check it out. I can send it as a CD or an MP3 let me know how you prefer it.
Here’s James and me at the NSA Convention in July ’07
As a speaker, if you get a college President who likes you and wants you speak on their campus for commencement, you´re in. However, while it may sound prestigious to serve as a commencement speaker, it´s really not because you have to sit through the entire commencement ceremony.
Some of these college commencement ceremonies can last five or six hours. As a commencement speaker, you´re usually sitting right on stage with the President, school trustees and other faculty members.
I don´t care how you attempt to maneuver it, it just doesn´t look good if the keynote speaker leaves in the middle of the commencement ceremony.
However, if you don´t mind the ceremony, then you could do very well as schools have budgets for good commencement speakers. I used to do 5-6 commencement speeches a year in the month of May. If I made an effort to market to college Presidents, I know I could easily get booked to speak for 20-30 a year.
Several years ago, one school even paid me a speaking fee of $2,500 to deliver a five-minute talk. (This is not a misprint!)
Actually, it was the most difficult talk I have ever done in my life. What can you possibly say in five-minutes that is effective? I told two quick inspirational stories and said, “Go get em!”(ha, ha).
You may think that charging them $2,500 for a five-minute talk is absurd. One thing you must begin to understand is that you cannot under value and under price your time, knowledge, experience and expertise.
Whether it´s a five-minute program or forty five-minute program your fee should be the same. I explained to the school coordinator who booked me for the five-minute talk that whether I talked for 45-minutes or five-minutes, my fee didn´t change because I still had to go through the hassle of traveling to the engagement, etc.
