7 strategies to extend your influence as a Christian speaker

Strategy #2
Build your list

You need a list.

Without it, your influence is limited to the few minutes you engage your audience from the platform. But with a list – a database with at least names and email addresses - you have opportunity to engage your audience over a period of months and years following your initial contact.

Without a list, you are quickly forgotten. With a list that is used correctly, you have opportunity to shape lives and make a difference for years to come.

Example / Suppose your niche is helping families manage their finances so they can use their money to build God's kingdom. Along the way, you've spoken to about 20,000 different individuals. One day you come across a software program that will help families do exactly what you want them to do faster and easier than ever before.

Without a list / How do you tell 20,000 people about your discovery if you don't have a list? How do you find those people? How do you make them aware? Without a list it would cost you a fortune to help all those people with this new information.

With your list / In less than fifteen minutes, you've informed everyone.

What a difference!

A way of serving others / Building your list is your way of serving the people that you care about. A list empowers you to quickly and easily help them. Remember, the list is about them. It's not about you; it's about them.

Momentum / Your list empowers you to gain the momentum you need to serve a much, much larger group of people. Instead of serving one audience at a time, you can serve an accumulated audience many, many times the size of the group you might address on a speaking assignment.

Need a niche / But a list without a niche is meaningless. Without a niche – a specific promise you make to a specific group of people – your list has no focus. In other words, when you email your list, what are you going to say? If your niche isn't clearly defined, your message will seem irrelevant.

How do you build a list?

Here's one way to do it.* Before you speak cut up index cards into business card size.** Pass out the cards – with pencils or pens if needed. While you're speaking, ask everyone in the audience to write their name and email address on a card and pass it in. (They can substitute a business card.) Explain that you are having a drawing right there – while you're speaking – for a prize. The prize could be a book, a CD, a DVD, enrollment in a course, a T-shirt, whatever – as long as it has relevance and value. (Then, of course, do the drawing and give away the gift.)

Explain that you also have a free gift for everyone who turns in a card with a legible and accurate email address. (I'll explain the gift when we get to strategy #3.)

If you're speaking to 200 people, you just walked away with 150 names for your list. Maybe more. That quickly adds up, if you're speaking several times a year.

Over a period of time, you develop a list with thousands of names. What does that mean? It means that on any given day, you have the opportunity to touch thousands of lives.

But, of course, how you handle that list is extremely important. If you handle it the wrong way, thousands of people are angry with you, and you're stuck rebuilding your reputation from scratch. That's where strategies #3 and #4 come into play.

*Obviously, if you're speaking at churches, you want to adjust this approach, if necessary, to the culture of that church.
**Or, as an alternative, give everyone two copies of your business card. They write their information on the back of one (and turn it in), and keep the other.

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