We have a client who’s an accomplished executive speaker and wanted to book more bookings. We were tapped to help.
 
If you, too, want to build business by building your live audience outreach, this article is for you. Or if you know someone with the same desire, share it with them. 
 
Teaser: we’ve got a killer tip to help you, toward the end of this article. 
 
The lay of the land
 
First off, we’re not talking about using some high-priced speakers’ bureau that books A-list celebrities at Fortune 500 corporate events. We’re talking about getting our client booked at things like regional association meetings and conventions of larger national business organizations. 
 
The point here, in case it wasn’t glaringly obvious to you, is to place our client in a target-rich environment. This isn’t about ego or garnering some kind of Tony Robbins-like adulation. It’s about presenting to business prospects, and then getting opportunities to close them, afterward. It’s a very narrow use-case of biz-dev. 
 
So. No big booking agency. No chanting crowds. But there are tons of these more-realistic gigs, across the country, all the time. And they’re booked, typically, ages in advance: we’re talking anywhere from six to 12 months, easily. 
 
How do you find them? 
 
These days, there are digital exchange platforms that connect speakers (such as our client) with event planners (i.e., people who seek to book speakers for their gatherings). An obvious one is eSpeakers; we’ll talk about that one here. 
 
Load up your ammo
 
If you want to get booked as a speaker on a site like eSpeakers, you need to stand out. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that you, like our client, are a stellar speaker with a great stage presence, absolute command of your thought-leading/breakthrough material, and have also done this before/are a published author/have been featured on podcasts, and so on. 
 
Yep. A high bar to start. 
 
Assuming all of that, you’ve got to let all of those eSpeakers-seekers know. Which means that, after you sign up for a (pretty darned affordable) eSpeakers membership, you’ll need to upload a lot of stuff about yourself to entice that audience. And herein is the gist of this article.
 
Here’s what you’ll want to upload, with some notes and thought-starters to help you along: 

• Your bio. You already have one, right? Well, this one should be tailored just to speaking engagements. You want to show off how many events you’ve spoken at; you might want to include, for example, an aggregate audience total (“Has presented to more than 50,000 people”). Include locations (“…across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico”). Be sure to mention any awards won; if they’re not recognizable, like Oscars, just say “Award-winning speaker…”. 

 

• Your headshot. Sure, a basic headshot is fine. But what’s better is a shot of you, on stage, doing your thing. Guess what? AI can help. Start with preferably a low-angle pic of you (as if taken from “the audience”) and ask a common tool, such as Grok, to add the catwalks and lighting way up in the stage ceiling behind you. 

 

• Your programs. These are the different topics you’re available to speak about. Each needs a sexy title, a bullet list of take-aways, and an “ideal audience” (such as “middle managers and their teams who are eager to take their sales production numbers to the next level”). These need to entice, entice, entice, and sell, sell, sell. 

 

• Your sizzle reel. Your what? This is a brief (about three minutes) compilation of clips of you on stage, doing your thing. Bookend it with an intro title, featuring your headshot and bullet-list of top credentials, and closing titles that include audience testimonials, your website, and where to book you. 

 

• Other stuff. You’ll want a nice 3-D image of your book, if you have one. You’ll want to create a doc known as your Presentation Rider, which includes all of your on-site requirements (time allotment for sound check, technical requirements, video recording limitations, etc.). You can also include discrete video clips of you, speaking at different engagements; these can be longer slices of the quick clips you’d featured in your sizzle reel. 

 
The best tip you’ll get
 
What’s the best way to find out how to put the best stuff up on a site like eSpeakers? Simply visit the “other side” of the site and pretend that you’re an event planner. 
 
Use the filters to drill down to direct competitors of yours. Take a look at them. You’ll easily see who the most impressive ones are. Then you can simply see what they’ve included in their “packages,” and use that as a baseline for you to, well, blow out of the water. 
 
Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us! We’d love to help you. 

​Wait, it’s December already? We must have blinked. 
 
Because it’s already time for the round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2025—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications. Here, then, is your chance to catch any articles you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit: 

• The most stress-reducing marketing tip you’ll read this week. This is, without a doubt, the most counterintuitive advice you’ll ever encounter. And you’ll love it! A ridiculously easy way to boost your marketing effectiveness. 

 

• Trade-show prep made easy. You’d be surprised how much stuff is already yours, for free. And how many “wheels” have already been invented. Get the tips here. 

 

• Is your business branding missing out on a blend word? Wait, what’s a “blend word” Or a portmanteau, for that matter? You’ll love this article; we’ve gotten great feedback from it—and it can really help boost your business, too. 

 

• A ridiculously easy trick for generating fresh marketing content. It’s staring you in the face: A source, right in your office right now, of endless custom marketing content for your biz. Read the article to find out where. 

 

• How to out-Google Google to broaden your marketing reach. We’re not SEO gurus, but some of our clients are, and we learned some wild tips that we freely share in this article. Take advantage! 

 

• Selling a client story is more than anonymizing a client story. You want to tell the world how you helped a client succeed. But sometimes, there’s a slightly different path to take, which will generate more business. Find out what it is. 

 

• So you want to be a podcast guest… What now? If you’re a thought leader, there’s nothing better than a podcast guest appearance for showing off your expertise, and engaging with new prospects. But becoming a guest is hardly straightforward. See how you can crack the code. 

 

• ChatGPT Doesn’t Wear Shoes. And if you think it does, stop reading right here. Seriously: This article points up a big weakness in generative AI, which you can easily exploit, to your sales advantage. 

 

• Sometimes it’s okay to ask the customer what they want. Wait—was Steve Jobs wrong? And if so, how can you profit? This is one of those staring-right-at-you revelations… you’re welcome! 

 

• You’ll never believe the best way to tease your webinars! You’ll likely laugh out loud when you discover this surefire trick to boosting attendance at your next webinar. Who said marketing isn’t fun? 

 

• How to McDonald-ize your B2B demo videos. Can you make a custom marketing video, showcasing your services… without any video footage on hand? And if so, how? Cash in on all the years of process improvement that we, and our clients, have been honing in this field. 

 
Phew! That should be enough reading and tips to tide you over for a little bit. 
 
But how about next year? Any topics you’d like us to address? Contact us and let us know! 

​There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again. 
 
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. 
 
Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. 
 
To webinar or not to webinar
 
This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 
 
1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 
 
2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. 
 
Those are huge assumptions. 
 
A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. 
 
To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. 
 
Phew. 
 
If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. 
 
While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. 
 
Building unbearable suspense
 
Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. 
 
So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. 
 
So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. 
 
Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. 
 
And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: 
 
You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: 
 
“The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” 
 
That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: 
 
“The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” 
 
It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. 
 
And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: 
 
Clickbait! 
 
Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. 
 
Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it.
 
Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.