A self-employed professional needs to be a public speaker.
Giving away abundant, valuable information makes you the
person people think of first when they need help.

But speaking isn't enough. You need to create information
products. We used to say, "write a book," but there are
more ways to package information than that. If you hand
out free, promotional material, people will think nothing
of throwing it away. But if they pay for it, they will look
at it. If they find it valuable, they will keep it, and it
will remind them of you.

But when do you have the time to create these products?
Most of the work is already done if you record your
speeches. Here are seven ways you can use the audio
recording of your speech:

1. Sell it on CDs "back-of-the- room" at your public
speaking engagements. Some people listen to CDs during
their drive time for information, inspiration, or
motivation. A CD may be more valuable to them than a book.

2. Send it out for your CD-of-the-month club. Many people
who listen to CDs during their drive time will gladly pay
$20 a month to receive CD's. CD clubs are a good form of
"continuity income": they show an obvious benefit of
membership that arrives each month.

3. Sell the recording as a digital download. Digital
downloads have almost no cost other than processing the
credit cards.

4. Better yet, repackage them. Cut the recording into
parts, edit in a musical introduction, and use them as
podcasts. You can sell them, or give them away free as
promotions: Use them in your blog and ezine to attract
people to your web site.

5. Give the recording away as a bonus for purchasing
another product online. One way to get people to decide to
go ahead and make a purchase is to offer a collection of
premiums with high stated values.

6. Have the recording transcribed and use the material for
a book or articles. You can get an inexpensive transcript
over the web.

7. Put the recording with slides and create a digital slide
show to sell on DVDs or as a digital download. This is easy
to do, combining your slides and the recording in a free
movie editor. Unless you are a particularly dynamic speaker
slides are almost as good as seeing you, and a whole lot
cheaper than professional video production. Amateurish
video is a lot worse.

Make a video slide show of your seminar, and you create
additional income streams selling it on CDs or DVDs at your
speeches and other seminars and selling it over the web
either on CDs and DVDs or for download.

It's both simple and cheap to create a video slide show of
your seminar. Here's a recipe:

Ingredients:

An audio recording of your seminar.

Your slides for the seminar.

A digital photograph of you looking into the camera.

"Utensils":

A slide presentation program such as Open Office (Star
Office) Impress or Microsoft Powerpoint.

A video editing program such as Windows Movie Maker.

A computer with enough speed and disk memory.

Preparation:

Create a slide background for your presentation that
includes your picture in a corner. Seeing your face will
make viewing the show feel more like being present for a
live presentation.

If you expect people to watch the video over the internet
and you have slides with a great many bullet points or a
small font size split the slides up to have fewer bullet
points. Use a larger font on each. You will probably need
to make the window size smaller to allow the video file to
download quickly, and small text will be unreadable. If you
have slide animation such as bullet points sliding in, you
may need to create copies of the slide with increasing many
points showing on each one. The effects won't appear in the
sequences of slide images you load into the video editor.

Get an image file for each slide. Saving the slides as HTML
will give you a picture of each slide. (In Open
Office/Star Office, look under File>Export. )

Load the audio recording into your video editing program.

Drag the audio recording into the sound track. Edit the
audio file adjusting the volume and removing periods of
silence and extraneous material. You can do this, perhaps
better, in an audio editing program before loading it into
your video editing program.

Drag the slide pictures into your video editing program.

Drag one slide image at a time into the video track and
adjust the duration to match the audio it covers. If you
want to have a transition such as a dissolve from one slide
to the next, make the first slide last a little past the
point of transition. The next slide will start to appear
overlapped with the end of its predecessor.

Write out the video slide show file. You'll have a lot of
choices for output format. If you plan to have people view
the videos over the web, you better go for small files,
which is to say, small image size. For a DVD, you can make
them considerably larger.

Put the video slide show file up on your web site for
download or viewing, or make DVDs or digital CDs from the
file. There are plenty of companies that will duplicate
disks, label them, put them in cases with cover and side
art, and shrink-wrap them for you.