Being a speaker is a great career that many of us would love to do. Problem is though that most speakers, like authors, never make enough money to support themselves doing what they love without another career to help them make it financially.

Just this past summer I was in Portland Oregon to see an Aunt, Uncle and Cousin I hadn’t seen in 38 years. For my wife and children it was their first introduction to these relatives.

Most Speakers are Broke
My aunt and uncle were both 85 and doing great and didn’t even look close to their age. The point here is my Uncle is a very renowned artist in his city and has many great accomplishments under his belt as an artist but like most speakers and authors he was not able to support himself or his family from just his art alone.

My Uncle actually taught art for about 25 years at the local university to support himself and made a little extra with his art. So many people look to speakers, artist and authors with envy and a perceived lifestyle they think they might like but have no idea that most don’t make enough to support themselves.

A Simple Solution to Attract Speaking Engagements
This is a tragedy, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a simple solution that Speakers can take advantage of and that is to write a book. Not only will it help them get and attract more speaking engagements but it will also be the first piece in their financial puzzle to making a living as a speaker.

Your Audience Will Buy Your Book
When you have a book and are a speaker it is very easy to sell your book to the people who are sitting in your audience. In many cases you will have people wanting to buy your book and have you sign it before you even start speaking.

Your book is your first date to many other products you can sell your listening audience and this is where the magic begins. If you are a speaker today there are two things in my eyes that are not options if you want to be one of the speakers in the minority that has a financially prosperous career.

Those two things are:
1. Write and publish a book
2. Set up a website.

Remember it is the author who is considered the expert. So take advantage of being an author and catapult your speaking career.

Do you believe it is hard to write a book and think you need help>>>
http://www.expertauthorpublishing.com/write_publish_make_money.html

Have you ever wanted to work less hours or maybe even part time but just couldn’t make it financially on part time wages? Well I’ve got a secret how anyone who has authored a book can make full time wages for part time work.

The secret is Continuing Education which is available at many post secondary schools and colleges in most cities and towns throughout North America or for that matter in most cities world wide.

Take the information from your book and make it into a 3 hour course and teach it at the local continuing education schools in your city. The continuing education schools are always looking for new instructors and courses and your book and course could be just what they are looking for.

Many of the schools will pay you 40 or 50 % subcontracting wages and this can work out very financially rewarding for 3 hours work. I have had as many as 35 students per class at $59.00 per student which works out to $1,032.50 for 3 hours work.

But wait it gets even better. You can potentially sell as many as 20 books to your class adding another few hundred dollars. Some may ask for further consulting or coaching. Are you getting the idea yet how profitable a 3 hour class can be for you?

Between all the different backend services and products available to your students you could very well have a $1,000.00 to even a $10,000.00 night. Not bad for a part time job.

Your students will love you because you are the expert! You will even start getting referrals which are another valuable source for your income.

Overwhelm can be paralyzing especially if you are writing a book. But you don’t have to let it stop you. I want to talk to you about a straight line to success that for many of us is achieved through a good mentor or mastermind group.

I still sometimes even to this day find myself in overwhelm mode when I think of all that must be done to keep my publishing and information marketing business moving forward. The feeling of overwhelm doesn’t last very long anymore because I realize that by just focusing on the task at hand along with a little faith will always get me to where I want to go.

As an author you don’t have to know about all the different steps to get your book written, published and marketed, you only have to get started. The universe always has a way of bringing to you what you will need next if you will only get started in the direction toward your goals.

You can’t see the next valley until you have climbed to the top of the first mountain. Once you conquer that first mountain rest assured the view will probably be greater than even imagined but you have to take that first step.

Even today I don’t worry too much about all the things I must learn and prepare for but I do know that I will have the right information and resources come to me when I get to the next step. Although I can most of the times get myself moving consistently along the track I still depend on both a good mentor as well as a mastermind group I meet with weekly.

My mentor and mastermind group have an uncanny way of being able to stand back from my situation and see it for what it really is, and more importantly keep me moving forward. I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it without them and I think many a successful entrepreneur or author would say the same thing.

Don’t let overwhelm defeat you but instead use it as your special sign to get a good mentor or become part of a mastermind group.
 

Making money from royalties for most authors is not a very financially rewarding career.
If you don’t start to make money with your book it can get pretty lonely. This is where too many authors go wrong.

Don’t let that last statement depress you because your chance of making money with your book if you package and sell the information from your book in different ways brings up your odds of financial success exponentially. If you break your book into CD’s Seminars, DVD’s Consulting and a number of other ways that many of us like to consume information then you can turn a not so profitable book into a cash generating machine.

I always take a poll in the classes that I teach to see how many read books. Obviously in my classes most are book readers. Then I ask how many buy Audio CD’s? Still quit a number put up their hands. Next it is seminars and a number of hands go up as well. Then of course I ask how many take classes and everyone has to put up their hand for that.

I then use the example that we have 25 people in this class who all paid $59.00 for a 3 hour class. This quickly calculates out to $1,475.00 for 3 hours work which doesn’t even count other moneys that may come from coaching, consulting and other information I could sell the students.

I remind them at this point that this is mostly the information in my book sold to them in different ways of consumption. It would take quit a few books at even a $2.00 per book royalty to bring in the same amount of money from the class and other back end products I may sell.

They quickly see what I am talking about. My students are always a good example of how insatiable we can be for getting more and more good information. Many of them, myself included spend thousands of dollars per year and will continue doing so.

Even after you give your readers or clients every bit of information you have they will still want more and that is why you will always be in demand. As Martha Stewart says “It’s a beautiful thing”

One of the best things I like about coaching my students is how pumped up I get teaching the exciting opportunities we can all have by writing and publishing our own books.

Why do I get so pumped? Because every time I teach a call like the one we had this past Tuesday on continuity programs I get more excited hearing myself talk about all the great  opportunities we all have with our books.

Now I know many of you reading this article are no where near ready to retire yet and in fact one of the reasons I wrote my book with my coauthor Jeff McCallum is the fact that I never want to retire. So why the retirement talk?

Because in my last coaching call I gave many examples of how you can monetize your books information into having your customers paying you a monthly fee without having to do monthly work. So if you are getting money monthly for work you have done in the past isn’t that just like having a retirement income? You bet it is.

One student saw how easy it would be to get 100 people from her list to pay a monthly fee of $47.00 per month by setting up three, one hour support group tele calls for the information she has written about in her soon to be released book. Do the math! That’s $4,700.00 per month for three hours work.

What if she decides to set up four groups like this and maybe one is a little more expensive at $97.00 per month? Three groups bringing in $4,700.00 per month and the last one bringing in $9,700.00 per month makes a total of $23,800.00 per month and she would still only be working by telephone a total of 4 hours per week.

We talked about many of the possible ways of  having your customers opt in to a monthly continuity plan all relating to the information in your book including:

Newsletters
Membership sites
Coaching programs
Consulting
Certifications sites
Interview website

Actually when we started brainstorming the issue they realized it was endless and could be done with pretty well any niche or topic.

Does it take a little bit of set up work? Yes but with the right help even that is not a big issue. There is no better return on investment in anything else on this planet as writing & publishing your own book and that continues to make me jump out of bed each and every morning.
 

I know you are reading this blog title and thinking about most of the authors you know of are starving and I am way off base with this one.

In my second life I am in the fire and flood restoration business which is considered to be  part of the construction industry. Our industry in North America has an average net profit of 4.5%. To me that is a tragedy and even borders on pathetic and is probably not worth waking up for each morning.

Luckily my companies are not in the 4.5% profit margin group. In fact I learned a long time ago how to run a profitable fire and flood restoration business. I educated myself and we run net profits anywhere from 30 to 50 % each month. Now that is worth waking up for.

Why am I telling you all this? Because now that I am also an author and sell my information in a variety of different formats such as books, CD’s, DVD’s, Seminars, coaching and a number of other ways I am still in awe of how truly profitable being an author and information marketer is. In fact if you market your information properly you can very often make 90% and more net profit margins.

I am grateful and amazed every day about what an exciting opportunity it is to be an author and information marketer in today’s business world. If you are in this exciting business it is only going to get better over the next several decades.

I get more jazzed and excited each day when a customer buys a DVD set that I made once and now sell over and over again for profit margins that are not made by any other industry on earth. How cool is that?

Your wealth or money can come and go but if you have valuable information to sell you will inevitably be rich in very short order. It is specialized knowledge and information that is and will be the most valuable asset to have for a long time to come.
.
Whether you are an employee, business owner or want to make your book your main business being and author and information marketer is the best gig on earth. Don’t wait make it happen now!
 

When you consider the cost of advertising and how many competitors you’re competing against in any niche you soon realize that writing your own book and positioning yourself as the expert is an absolute no brainer. It is the best way to totally set you apart from the competition and stand out in an ever increasingly noisy advertising market.

Want instant credibility, celebrity and expert status? Write a book and you will never have to cold call or waste your hard earned money on fruitless ads again. Our society in North America gives published authors a certain prestige not enjoyed by others. Use this prestige to explode your income and make your life easier.

People buy from people they know and trust and there is no quicker way of building trust and being the known go to expert as writing a book. Your book works for you 24 hours per day, 7 days per week 365 days per year building your good name all on autopilot.

You do the work once and the book keeps working for you day in and day out. Never taking time off for illness and never asking for more money like all the advertising sales people.

Is it hard to write a book? If you can have a conversation you can write a book. From do it yourself, to ghost writers to many of the outsourcing that is available to us all today there is no reason why anyone can’t write and publish a book and fast.

You never know what is on the other side of that door until you just go through it. Writing a book is a go through door that will change your life forever.

In business terms the internet is still a baby but in internet terms it is a lifetime old. Much has changed on the internet over its short life but I must say that without a doubt it is still one on the greatest opportunities for anyone to stake out a claim on the internet.

The internet is still the Wild, Wild West and you must get your virtual real estate plot now. The internet is still growing and evolving by leaps and bounds each day and will continue for decades to come.

Where else can you reach so many targeted customers, still extremely cost effective and get all this with the click of a mouse? The sooner you get on board with a website the better.

You must have a website for your book and you must have both your book and website pages titled with words that will make it easy for your targeted customers to find you. If you make it easy for your customers to find you; you also make it easier for yourself to sell books and make money.

One of my students a few weeks ago told me in class that he was looking for some information on how to write a screen play. He went to the search engines and quickly found a book entitled ‘How to Write a Screen Play’ He said it was exactly what he was looking for and bought the book.

It doesn’t get much easier than that and I’m sure that author will make money for years to come.

You will be taking a very big gamble as an author by not taking your spot on the net. Don’t risk not being able to be found. Set up your website today!

One of the greatest benefits of writing a book is that you position yourself as the expert. Most people I talk to have no idea about how to become the expert because most have never really thought about it.

When I ask people how they could become an expert in their field of work most are left without an answer. When I press them a little more for a response most think that it might be through training and a certifying board that regulates experts in any given field,

When I tell them that they can be an expert by first declaring themselves as one and second reinforcing their expert hood by writing a book some will just not believe that it is that easy.

You see in most industries you can position yourself quite quickly as the expert if you do a few very simple things. There is in most cases no certifying board of experts or a God that sanction you as the one for expert hood.

Why is this so important to you? Because once you position yourself as the expert your world will explode with new opportunities. You see most people will seek out and pay more money to people who they perceive as being the expert.

So rather than you having to chase down customers the table will be turned and the customers will seek you out for your expertise. The nice thing about the customers who seek you out for your expertise is that they will pay you more money and be a better customer in general because they know the value of good advice.

I remember years ago in my industry of fire and flood restoration a new fellow came out of the woodwork and declared himself the expert. Well about 50 % of the people in my industry took the stand of who is this guy to declare himself the expert? The other 50% took him at face value and believed he was the expert.

Well to make a long story short here it is 12 years later and he is making about 4 million dollars a year as the expert in my industry. He declared himself the expert and was positioned to attract the high paying clients that wanted his expertise. The miracle of stories like this is that it is easier than almost anyone thinks.

I will be writing about all the different tips and strategies you can use to position yourself as the expert over the next few emails. I will also be talking about eliminating any excuses you may have that rear there ugly head in your own mind. I am sincere when I say if I can do it you can to and I‘m going to show you how.

If you have friends or business associates that would like to substantially explode their income please forward on this article and have them opt-in to my mailing list.

Committed To Your Expert Success