Many aspiring public speakers love speaking, and are incredibly passionate about the message they want to share with the world. However, there’s one important question that you have to ask yourself before you launch your speaking career: will anyone actually pay you to talk about it?
It’s a brutal reality check that many aspiring speakers avoid until they’ve already invested time and money into demo videos, websites, and marketing materials, only to discover that their topic doesn’t have a viable market.
But market demand can be tough to gauge. So how can you. be sure there’s demand for what you want to talk about? In this article, we’ll go through how you can validate demand for your topic, so you can enter the speaking market with confidence. Let’s dive in!
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The Two Ways of Getting Paid
Before we dive into validating demand, you need to understand a fundamental truth about the speaking industry: there are two distinctly different paths to making money as a speaker.
The first path is getting paid for the talk itself. This is what most people think of when they imagine a speaking career: receiving a check directly for delivering a keynote, workshop, or breakout session. There is a second model, though. The second path is using speaking to sell something else. In this model, you don’t get paid for the talk, but you speak to your ideal customers and sell coaching programs, masterminds, consulting services, or products.
Both paths are legitimate. A speaker might earn $10,000 for a keynote on the first path, while another speaker gives a free talk but sells five spots in a $10,000 coaching program to an audience of 500, netting $50,000 on the second path. Understanding which path you’re on will dramatically change how you validate your topic and build your business.
The Three Entities That Pay Speakers
If you want to get paid directly for your talks, you need to know who actually cuts checks for speakers. There are three primary entities that pay speakers well:
- Corporations (think Google, IBM, etc.)
- Associations (there’s literally an association for everything from plumbing hardware to parking lot pavers to cost estimators)
- Educational institutions (colleges, universities, school districts)
Now here’s where it gets practical. These three entities only pay for certain types of topics.
- For corporations, the topics with the highest market demand are related to sales, leadership, marketing, innovation, culture, and communication.
- For associations, the topics vary widely depending on the industry, but they generally need content that helps their members do their jobs better or grow their businesses.
- For educational institutions, topics around student development, career readiness, and personal growth tend to have the most demand.
Your job is to figure out which box your topic fits into. If your topic doesn’t naturally align with one of these categories and entities in your target market, you’ll face an uphill battle getting paid directly for your talks. That doesn’t mean you can’t speak, but it may mean you need to shift your monetization model to the second path.
The Harsh Truth About Your Story
One of the main reasons why many aspiring speakers want to speak for a living is because they have an incredible story. Maybe you survived a car accident, beat cancer, or overcame a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to achieve your goal. These are all incredible experiences, but it often becomes an issue when speakers assume that their story is inherently marketable.
The harsh truth is that event planners and audiences simply do not care about your story for the sake of your story. They care about what’s in it for them. You may be able to open doors with your incredible story, but to sell speaking gigs, you need to connect it to solving a problem for your audience. Otherwise, it’s a nonstarter. Your story should simply be the vehicle for delivering your message.
How to Validate Your Topic Before Entering the Market
Because of the time and money that can be needed to construct a website, demo video, business cards, and other marketing materials, it’s wisest to first figure out if there’s demand for your topic and then begin investing time/money into your brand. But how do you do that? There are several ways:
Speaker Bureaus
Begin by checking speaking bureau websites. Bureaus deal with the biggest speakers in the market, and if a topic doesn’t work at that level, it likely won’t work at all. Go to the top speakers bureaus and look at how they categorize speakers. If your topic doesn’t fit well into any of their existing categories, that’s a red flag. These bureaus know exactly what buyers are purchasing because they facilitate these transactions every single day.
Event Planners
Next, talk to event planners. Have honest conversations with people who book speakers regularly. Ask to talk over coffee or have a virtual meeting, making it clear you’re looking for their opinion and advice rather than trying to get booked. Present your topic idea and ask them directly whether they get requests for this type of content and whether their clients would pay for it. Event planners are intermediaries who understand the market better than almost anyone. They know what’s being bought and what’s being passed over.
Real-World Experience
But there’s one more validation method many new speakers overlook. Assuming it makes sense in your specific situation, you should try to give the talk multiple times for free. Yes, free. But here’s why this matters so much. You need real practice in front of strangers. Your mom, girlfriend, and your stuffed animals unfortunately don’t count toward this.
Give your talk at your local chamber of commerce, Rotary clubs, industry meetups, or small conferences. Use these opportunities to test your content, refine your delivery, gather feedback, and see if people actually respond to your message. After each talk, ask audience members to summarize the talk in one sentence, tell you one thing they learned, and describe what action they’ll take because of what you shared. Their answers will tell you if your message is landing and if it’s something organizations would pay for.
Building a Personal Brand
Once they’ve validated their speaking topic in the market, many speakers try to obsessively improve their talk to completely perfect it. But before you worry about perfecting your talk, you need to think about your personal brand. The most successful speakers aren’t constantly creating new topics for different audiences. They’re known for one thing. They’ve chosen a lane and doubled down.
Yes, you could probably speak competently on six different topics. But having six topics means you have zero traction on any of them. No talk becomes great until you’ve delivered it at least ten times. You can’t get ten repetitions on six different talks while also building a business. The math simply doesn’t work, and neither does the branding.
When you ask event organizers what they want yo3u to speak about and then customize a topic to fit their curriculum, you’ve already lost. You might develop a decent talk and deliver it adequately, but it won’t be great because no talk can be great the first time you give it. Instead of asking what organizers want, you should be known for a specific topic. When someone contacts you, they should already know what you speak about.
This takes time to build, but consider the alternative. Without a clear brand and signature topic, you’re constantly rearranging everything, trying to land that one talk, rather than building the foundation of a personal brand that attracts opportunities to you.
Get The #1 Marketing Asset To Book More Paid Speaking Gigs Join us for the Booked & Paid Bootcamp — our NEW 2-day virtual event designed to help you start booking more paid gigs FAST. Over two 5+ hour days of live training and Q&A, our team of 6 and 7 figure speakers will give you the proven playbook you need to become a successful paid speaker.
Conclusion
The speaking industry rewards specificity, repetition, and excellence. Your job isn’t to be everything to everyone. It’s to be the absolute best solution to a specific problem for a specific audience. The speakers who build sustainable, profitable careers are the ones who resist the temptation to be generalists and instead become known for something specific and valuable.
The market will tell you if your topic has demand. Your job is to listen and act accordingly. Sometimes that means doubling down on what’s working. Sometimes it means pivoting to a different angle or audience. And sometimes it means accepting that speaking might be a marketing channel for your other work rather than a standalone revenue stream. All of these outcomes are valid, but you can only discover which one applies to you by actually testing your topic in the real world.
