Diversifying Income Streams Beyond the Stage

While speaking is an incredible business, it does come with some drawbacks. Every speaker eventually has to confront the same reality: if your only income stream is being paid for speaking gigs, you can only earn money as often as you can be on stage. Not to mention that between marketing, outreach, negotiation, preparation, travel, and networking, burnout is a very real possibility.

There is a solution to this problem, and it lies in diversifying your revenue streams. This is a major part of the final part of our SPEAK Framework – Know When to Scale. The speakers who build sustainable, scalable businesses understand that the stage is just one platform for delivering value to their audiences.

This isn’t about moving away from public speaking. Rather, it’s about leveraging the expertise and authority you’ve worked hard to build so you can create additional revenue channels that work together for your business. So in this article, we’ll show you why it is so important to diversify your income streams as a speaker, and how you can get started. Let’s dive in!

Why Diversification Matters

While speaking is an incredible way to make a living, getting 100% of your income from doing gigs can present a few problems. Your income depends entirely on your ability to book gigs and show up physically. If you get sick, deal with a family emergency, or simply want to take a vacation, your income stops. Event cancellations, economic downturns, or industry shifts can devastate a speaking business built on a single income source. By diversifying, you give yourself a layer of financial security even if you aren’t doing dozens of gigs a year.

But beyond financial security, diversification offers strategic advantages. Multiple revenue streams create different entry points and price points that serve different segments of your audience. If you only sell speaking keynotes, your only real clients are the event planners who have the budget to hire you. If you diversify, someone who can’t afford a $5,000 keynote might buy your $500 course. A client who hired you for one speech might invest in ongoing consulting. Each offering creates pathways to the others.

Diversification also extends your impact. A speech reaches dozens or hundreds of people for an hour. A book, course, or other product can reach thousands or millions over years. By packaging your expertise in multiple formats, you multiply your influence while building a more sustainable business.

Understanding the Seven Revenue Models

In his book, The Successful Speaker, our founder Grant Baldwin breaks down how scaled public speaking businesses generally fall into seven categories based on how they generate income. Understanding these models helps you decide which direction to grow:

• The Super Speaker derives almost all income from speaking fees, typically doing dozens of engagements annually. This model works for those who love constant travel and whose fees are high enough to justify the challenging lifestyle. It’s the most straightforward model but also the most vulnerable to disruption and the most likely to lead to burnout.
• The Teacher balances speaking with courses, workshops, and educational programs. These speakers package their knowledge into learning experiences (both online and in-person) that generate income beyond individual speaking engagements. The teaching model scales better than pure speaking because one course can serve unlimited students.
• The Influencer uses speaking primarily to build an audience that’s monetized through affiliate marketing, sponsorships, advertising, and partnerships. For influencers, speaking is lead generation for the real business: a large, engaged following across email and social platforms. The speech itself may not generate much revenue, but access to the audience makes it worthwhile.
• The Industry Expert combines speaking with research and information, often in book format, targeted at a specific niche. These speakers are recognized authorities in their field. They may typically negotiate lower speaking fees in exchange for book sales or back-of-room product purchases.
• The Coach uses speaking as a pipeline for coaching clients. Speeches and workshops demonstrate the coach’s methodology and build trust with potential clients. The speaking itself may generate modest income, but high-ticket coaching packages provide the bulk of revenue. This model offers flexibility and can be more lucrative per engagement than speaking alone.
• The Consultant leverages speaking to attract organizations that need deeper, ongoing support. An hour-long keynote may become the first touch point for a six-month consulting contract. These speakers might accept lower fees for audiences filled with decision-makers who can hire them for large consulting projects.
• The Jack of All Stages combines elements from multiple models to produce a wide range of offerings, including speaking, books, courses, coaching, consulting, affiliate marketing, and more. This diversified approach provides maximum stability but requires the most effort to manage effectively.

None of these models is inherently superior. The right choice depends on things like your expertise, lifestyle preferences, risk tolerance, and where you are in your career. Many speakers shift between models as their business evolves. The key is to think of where you’d like to be in an ideal world, which can help you decide how to move forward in the diversification process.

Understanding Your Current Income Streams

Before diversifying, you need to clearly understand where your money currently comes from. Most speakers have a general sense of their revenue sources but don’t have precise date, which can be a dangerous blind spot when making long-term decisions.

Create a detailed breakdown of every revenue source over the past 12 months. Include speaking fees, but also any side jobs, consulting work, product sales, affiliate commissions, or other income. Calculate both the total amount and the percentage each source represents.

Next, compare these percentages to how you spend your time. Are you devoting 60% of your hours to activities that generate only 20% of your revenue? Are there income sources you’ve neglected that could grow with more attention? This analysis can reveal surprising misalignments between the effort you’re putting in and the return you’re getting out.

Also evaluate each revenue source by enjoyment. Financial success means little if you’re miserable. Identify activities you love, tolerate, and dread. The goal is increasing income from work you find meaningful while eliminating or minimizing what drains you.

Envision your ideal income distribution. What changes would you make to reach that goal? What do you need to keep doing, stop doing, and start doing? This exercise provides a roadmap for diversification rather than randomly adding revenue streams that may not serve your ultimate vision.

Discovering What Your Market Actually Wants

Although discovering what is ideal for you is an important part of producing diverse income, you also need to diversify into something that the market actually wants. Like with choosing your speaking niche, the key to successful diversification is creating solutions to problems your audience actually has, not problems you assume they have or wish they had.

Your audience tells you what they want if you pay attention. After speeches, what questions do they ask during Q&A? What topics generate the most engagement? Repeated questions signal unmet needs in your niche that are ripe for new offerings.

Your inbox can provide similar signals. When multiple people email asking for recommendations on the same topic or requesting deeper exploration of something you mentioned, that’s market research being delivered directly to you. Take note of patterns and trends in the topics people reach out to you about.

Your network is another source of valuable information. What do peers and colleagues consistently ask for your help with? You may have valuable expertise in areas adjacent to your speaking topics that you aren’t even aware of. If people regularly seek your advice on something, others would likely pay for that knowledge packaged properly.

Another great tip is to read reviews of books or courses in your niche, especially two-star or three-star reviews, and look for reviewers mentioning gaps and unanswered questions that represent opportunities. If they say something like: “This was great but I really wanted the author to dive more deeply into [topic],” that can be a source of inspiration.

Take Note of What Similar Speakers Offer

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when scaling your own business. Other speakers in your space have probably already experimented with various offerings, providing a roadmap of what works and what doesn’t. Identify speakers who address similar topics or serve a similar audience. Look at their websites, join their email lists, and follow them on social media.

Observe what they offer beyond speaking. This isn’t so you can create a carbon copy – remember that you need to meet an unmet need – but rather so you can notice obvious trends in the type of product that your audience in interested in. Also note their price points. This reveals what your shared audience considers valuable enough to pay for and gives you an idea of where to price your offerings.

Most importantly, identify the gaps in what’s currently offered. Where can you provide something different rather than simply copying existing offerings? Your goal is being similar enough to use your knowledge of proven models while being unique enough to stand out.

Validate Market Demand with Preselling

The last thing you want to do is spend months or years creating a course, writing a book, or developing coaching and consulting services, only to find that it isn’t as popular as you thought it would be. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that people are actually willing to pay for it.

Before you begin creating your product, ask your social media followers and email list if they see a need for something like you intend to create. Ask if they would be willing to pay for it, and if so, how much value they would place on it.

While this data and information can be an early warning if there isn’t market demand, it doesn’t represent enough validation to confidently proceed with product creation. People saying they’re willing to pay for something is one thing, but having them actually take out their credit cards is another.

This is where preselling comes in. You can validate your idea through a presale, which means that people pay before you actually create anything. For products like books or courses, crowdfunding through a platform such as Kickstarter can be a way to gauge market interest. This usually means that the product will only get made once it is “funded” (meaning a certain amount of customers and/or income).

With services like consulting or coaching that are one-on-one and highly customized, crowdfunding doesn’t really make sense. You can also simply presell directly to your client base. You can collect emails, commitments, and even payments from customers before the product is even fully created. This is commonly done with online courses and programs when you give the audience an overview of what they’ll learn and collect payment in exchange for delivering that course at a future date.

Scaling Successfully

From here, the process of creating your product will look different depending on what it is. We don’t have space in this article to cover the process of creating every kind of product and service in detail. However, you should apply the same principles you’ve used to build your speaking business as you create additional offerings beyond the stage. Focus on solving a problem for your audience, use your expertise and authority in your niche as a selling point, and proactively market yourself to potential clients.

As you increase the complexity of your business model, make sure to closely watch and analyze where your greatest financial successes are coming from, and be willing to cut your losses if you’re dedicating an immense amount of time and energy to something that isn’t paying off. Fundamentally, you want to make sure that you’re dedicating your valuable time to the things that you enjoy the most and that you are making the most money from.

Conclusion

Every speaker’s scaling journey will be different, and it won’t always fit into predetermined boxes like the models we’ve outlined here. Ultimately, scaling is about noticing when a change is necessary or beneficial, and leveraging the visibility, authority, and expertise you’ve built to expand into additional markets with more offerings.

The most successful speaking businesses are the ones that evolve and change intentionally, rather than sticking with one path or jumping between business models. That’s why regularly assessing what’s working from a time and money standpoint is so necessary to successfully scaling a speaking business.

Diversification isn’t about abandoning speaking. It’s about building a business that lets you speak more strategically, impact more people, and create a lifestyle you actually want. What are you waiting for?