Seven Ways To Use Recordings Of Your Speeches

A self-employed professional needs to be a public speaker. Giving away abundant, valuable information makes you the person people think of first when they need help.

But speaking isn't enough. You need to create information products. We used to say, "write a book," but there are more ways to package information than that. If you hand out free, promotional material, people will think nothing of throwing it away. But if they have paid for it, they will look at it. If they find it valuable, they will keep it, and it will remind them of you.

But when do you have the time to create these products? Most of the work is already done if you record your speeches. Here are seven ways you can use the audio recording of your speech:

1. Sell it on CDs "back-of-the-room" at your public speaking engagements. Some people listen to CDs during their drive time for information, inspiration, or motivation. A CD may be more valuable to them than a book.

2. Send it out for your CD-of-the-month club. Many people who listen to CDs during their drive time will gladly pay $20 a month to receive CD's. CD clubs are a good form of "continuity income": they show an obvious benefit of membership that arrives each month.

3. Sell the recording as a digital download. Digital downloads have almost no cost other than processing the credit cards.

4. Better yet, repackage them. Cut the recording into parts, edit in a musical introduction, and use them as podcasts. You can sell them, or give them away free as promotions: Use them in your blog and ezine to attract people to your web site.

5. Give the recording away as a bonus for purchasing another product online. One way to get people to decide to go ahead and make a purchase is to offer a collection of premiums with high stated values.

6. Have the recording transcribed and use the material for a book or articles. You can get an inexpensive transcript over the web.

7. Put the recording with slides and create a digital slide show to sell on DVDs or as a digital download. This is easy to do, combining your slides and the recording in a free movie editor. Unless you are a particularly dynamic speaker slides are almost as good as seeing you, and a whole lot cheaper than professional video production. Amateurish video is a lot worse.