The major trade association for public speakers, the National Speakers Association published a major survey about the public speaking industry in 2007.

One of the the things they concluded was that “NSA speakers are involved in many types of speaking engagements” including: Seminars, Training Events, Breakout sessions, Keynotes, Consulting

The top two audience types for their work was corporations and associations.

Then in a “perfect storm” of circumstances, the economy tanked and wiped out all of the reliable business models in the public speaking industry. The reason for that, in my view, is that professional public speakers ignored the new rules.

What am I trying to say? Just that when the economy was good, speakers focused on getting speaking engagements, then showed up and delivered their message to whomever was in attendance. Some of them sold their books or other products from the back of the room while others positioned themselves for consulting or training work with the companies in attendance.

Most speakers spent little time thinking about the attendees who were passionate for the topic being presented, and building relationships with them. Instead they focused on the companies that were there and on getting more speaking engagements. They never thought that the companies or associations could cut their budgets and reduce their speaking opportunities forcing them to need a new way to sell their products and services.

For the speakers who have really struggled in the last year or so, following the new rules of public speaking may have been a major help.

The new rules tell us that we’re not speakers, we’re publishers. Speaking is merely a form of distributing content to the audience that is seeking information on the topic we present on.

Some great news is that through the Internet, we can find and attract a perfectly targeted audience anywhere in the world. We’re not likely to ever speak in all of countries where we have followers and fans, but they’ll read our information, buy our products and hire us to deliver our services.

Since the market for speaking engagements is significantly reduced, the time is now to realize that the hunger for information on every imaginable niche topic is stronger than ever before. As a publisher your job is to seek and build relationships with people who are passionate about your topic and offer them your unique information in multi-media formats.

The logical place to start is to have a video produced and then re purpose that video into audio, a book, a series of articles, some blog posts and more. If you need some help with this, reach out to me and let me know. I have a professional speaker training program that will make this all as easy as A-B-C for you.

Professional Speaking Mentor Scott A Dennison is exploringthe future of Professional Speaker Training at his website. You are also welcome to claim a copy of his newest report “Public Speaking is Dead!” and a series of Public Speaking Tips for free. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.