Do you get paid to speak? Or want to?

At Innovation Women, we talk with a lot of speakers and event managers and one of the reoccurring topics is speaker payment. Some great speakers continue to speak for free and wonder how to break into the “paid” speaking circuit. Some speakers who do get paid to speak are looking for more speaking opportunities.

We specifically ask our speakers to share their expectations about payment. We want them to be very clear about this. No sense having a long conversation with an event manager who has no budget when you (the speaker) can’t afford to speak without being paid. Right?

Our feelings about payment are also driven by the realization that many events don’t have speaker budgets. Especially if you are looking at events on Meetup or Eventbrite. But these events do offer audiences, sometimes valuable audiences. If you are selling a product or service and 400 qualified prospects are listening to you speak, you ARE getting paid to speak (if you can convert those people to customers.)

We’re looking to help our members get more value from their speaking engagements and event planner relationships. Please take a couple of minutes to tell us about getting paid to speak OR if you are an event manager, about your budget. TAKE THE QUICK POLL! We’ll share what we learn and continue to look for more answers.

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