Hi, I recently went on the website of a local college in New York and submitted a proposal in outline form of what I wanted to offer to speak about. I help women to overcome food and body obsession using a non diet approach along with teaching stress relief techniques. Within a few hours of my submission, I received a response from the Dean of the Adult Learning division of the school, indicating that she wanted to receive a copy of my resume and for me to make an appointment with her assistant. I followed up and since have met with the Dean and gotten approval to do a course in June. After having secured that gig, I then went to my local YMCA and offered to teach my program there, telling them about the program that I will be running in June. They got very excited and we're now in the process of finalizing the details of my workshop with them for a 60/40 split in their favor. If you consider that your program is a public service, and necessary to help people to enjoy a better quality of life, then you will have many avenues open to you to share and teach your information. There is one other thing to consider that I recently learned. The National Speakers' Association Chapter in New York City is offering a mentor program for newbie speakers. I don't know if there is a fee attached to this or specifically how it works, but it will give inexperienced speakers a chance to get mentoring from well seasoned professionals and both the pro and the learner will commit to doing presentations for each other as part of the learning process. If you want more information on that, you can visit NSA website at
http://www.nsa.org. The contact for the New York chapter is Timothy Walker, TJ Walker. I also ran across a video on the NSA website done by Fred Gleeck explaining how you can leverage your content for cash. It' might be worth a peek. Here's the link for that too:
http://www.speakingchannel.tv/community ... yc-part-2/ Now there's another avenue that you can pursue and it will also increase your quality of life. Cruise lines are desperately seeking enrichment speakers, people who can do lectures onboard during the cruise. You don't have to be a professional speaker or have any credibility other than loving your topic and being able to speak passionately about it. In order to get approval from the cruise lines, you have to be able to impress them with your versatility in speaking, which means that you want to be able to offer them several different proposals to do three basic kinds of lectures. The first is a topic considered of general interest like weight loss, writing, parenting, anything that fits the bill of what people need on a daily basis. The second is a destination driven topic which is based on enriching their knowledge of the ports that you will visit on your cruise, the third is a basic arts and crafts session lecture. The thing is once you get approval from a cruise line, you have it for life, which means that you and a traveling companion will be able to cruise free in exchange for running your lectures on board. On average, you would just do 3 one hour lectures over the course of a 7 day cruise. If you have a book to sell, you would also get to sell it directly through the gift shop and they would also arrange a book signing party for you onboard. Lots of perqs are given to enrichment speakers who speak on cruise ships but don't just call the cruise lines and ask about how to do it, because you would reveal yourself as an amateur. There's a guy named Daniel Hall who teaches speakers specifically what to do to get approved. To get the best information on this and to learn specifically how to get approved, read Daniel Hall's book, Speakers Cruise Free. You can get more information on Daniel's books and programs helping speakers to get booked on cruise ships by going to
http://www.speakerscruisefree.com/cruise-free.html I hope that helps. If you have any other questions that I can answer, please email me at
andrea@thejuicywoman.com Happy speaking, Andrea