One of the easiest ways to market your business is to present yourself as an expert in the field. One way to do that is to talk about what you do, not just around the coffee table, but in public as a public speaker. As a public speaker, you can not only promote your business, but you can establish yourself as an expert, which will get you more public speaking engagements, getting you more recognition, more business, and on it goes.

What to Talk About
The first thing you want to accomplish as a public speaker may be more revenue for your business, but the last thing you want to do as a public speaker is to just advertise your product or service. Your audience will be turned off if they think they are being 'pitched' rather than being given information they can use. Yes, you want to talk about your product or service, but only as a reference or side item to the main topic of your speech. For example, if you are an entrepreneur who offers consulting services to Fortune 500 companies, talk about how you do that. How do you get clients? What tactics do you employ to assure your clients you know what you are talking about? How do you advertise? If you are a small business owner selling tires some topics for a public speech might be customer service, or dealing with suppliers. Give the audience a reason to remember you as an expert and as a resource to come to with questions. They might become customers, or they might refer others to you for business.

Where to Talk
In order to get your name out there as a public speaker and expert, you need to get out there and speak. Start in your own backyard. Contact the local high school to see if their business classes would like to have you come in and talk about some aspect of running a business. If you belong to any organizations, ask them if you can do a short presentation on some aspect of running/owning/operating a business. These short exposures will get you some experience speaking in public as well as start to build some name recognition for you.

Once you have done that, start looking for conferences in your line of work, both local and out of town. Most conferences hold breakout sessions and are always looking for presenters. Find out what the requirements are and submit your proposals. I have found that almost every time I do this, my proposal has been accepted. Most conferences do not pay the presenters, but some will give free admission to the conference or to certain portions of the event. If the conference is out of town, travel expenses are a business deduction so document them carefully.

Strategy to Get More Business
One strategy you can employ in your speech is to tell the audience enough about the product or service that they could do the job themselves if they had to, but only enough to make them realize it would be much easier to hire you to do it. Be careful of advertising or pitching the audience, but do let them know what your business offers. For example, if you run a secretarial service and are speaking to a group of professional sales people, emphasize the importance of correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation in all correspondence. Let the audience know that it takes time to make sure this is done correctly, time that they might not have if they are developing sales leads. Let them come to the conclusion that it would be wise to hire a service to handle their written correspondence.

Payment for Speaking
As I mentioned before, not all speaking engagements will pay for the speaker, but there are rewards beyond payment that can be had by speaking in public. You may get more business, you may get to travel, you will meet new people to network with. If an organization contacts you to speak for them, ask if there is an honorarium or budget for a speaker. If not, find out if the organization will provide meals, etc. If there is a budget, find out how much it is. If they offer a $50 honorarium and you usually charge $100 an hour you need to decide if there are other benefits to doing this particular speaking engagement. Generally, the only cost to you to speak is time, but the rewards can go way beyond the cost of your time, so do consider speaking as a way to market yourself.