The Power of Connection

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Paid speaking is paid consulting. You are an expert in something, and you should get paid for sharing that expertise. In this session Bobby lays out the system he uses to land paid speaking gigs, and it is simpler than most people expect.

It starts with three things: be clear on your speaker story, build one to three topics with a clear benefit to the organization and to the attendee, and have a plan for pitching. If you pick only one, pick the topic. A buyer has to look at it and say, yes, we need that.

Bobby walks through the triangle behind his own Power of Connection talks (connection with self, with others, with the world), why your target is the people who serve your audience rather than the audience itself, and a visualization exercise for picturing the room you were born to speak to. Then the practical side: the one-minute speaker video, collecting testimonials now, and three talks anyone can give tomorrow at their old high school or college.

On outreach: where speaking gigs actually hide, why your pitch should be short enough that they have to ask for more, and the best email subject line he ever tested, the one that landed him a lot of international gigs.

He is also candid about when to speak for free and when to walk away, including the conference that charged 1,000 attendees $600 each and paid its speakers nothing.

Also in the room: Mitch, who has sold from the stage for 38 years, on recording every talk you give and capturing "the money shot."

0:12 Everyone has expertise worth paying for
2:09 Three talks, and the Power of Connection triangle
3:24 Let a LinkedIn poll pick your topics
4:15 Target the buyer, not the beneficiary
5:16 Visualize your ideal audience
7:31 Your speaking style and your speaker type
9:59 If you pick one thing, pick the topic
10:49 Portfolio, testimonials and the one-minute video
12:27 Three talks you can give tomorrow
13:52 Where to find speaking gigs
16:31 Keep the pitch short
17:52 The subject line that worked
19:58 Pricing international gigs
21:49 When to speak for free
24:38 Mitch: record everything and make the promoter money
26:45 Paid speaking is paid consulting, and when to say no

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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This episode was recorded as a guest appearance on Michael J. López's show, now called The Top Voice Podcast and known as Top Voice Tuesday when we recorded. Shared here with his blessing. Go and subscribe to him: https://www.youtube.com/@topvoicepodcast

Michael asks Bobby to trace the whole arc, from motivational speaking twenty years ago to where thought leadership actually sits now, and the conversation keeps circling back to one question. If your story is the strategy, what do you do about the part of the story you would rather not tell?

Bobby is direct about the early blocks, the years when vulnerability felt like a liability rather than a tool, and what changed. He talks about the 80/20 split he runs his content on, and makes an unfashionable argument about virality: it buys awareness, not conversion, and the two get confused constantly.

On getting started, which is where most people stall: if you can just start, that is something. If you can keep going, that is another thing entirely.

He also names the worst career decision he made, which was choosing a path because he was good at it rather than asking what he actually cared about. It is the question he now puts to his own kids. What problems do you want to solve?

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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Digital relationships run on a longer clock than in-person ones. Several comments and a couple of messages spread over weeks, rather than one good fifteen-minute conversation at an event. Most people quit long before it works.

In this session Bobby is joined by Niraj Kapur, Ariel Lee and Jonaed Iqbal to work through how relationships actually get built on LinkedIn. Why comments are the currency that drives reach, and why a good one runs twelve words rather than "great post." The sequence that turns a stranger into a familiar face before you ever send a connection request. Voice notes and video over typed messages. And why effort is the entire differentiator when almost nobody makes any.

Bobby closes with his own approach. He is a huge advocate for multiplatform content, because we are all on rented space. And he makes the case that personal branding is what gives the whole thing direction, so that every comment and every reach-out is purposeful instead of scattered.

Niraj Kapur is a LinkedIn Top Voice in sales and author of "Everybody Works In Sales," based in Northern Ireland. Ariel Lee is a LinkedIn coach. Jonaed Iqbal is the founder of NoDegree.

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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A live keynote from the DYPB conference, and the clearest single statement of the ideas Bobby has built a career on.

He starts in the room, pulling the leadership struggles people actually name out loud: getting others to do the work without sounding bossy, patience when someone moves at a different speed, the confidence to take a risk, and knowing when to ask for help.

Then the definition that anchors everything. A personal brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room. It is a living thing built from a thousand small gestures, accumulated over time, and you have had one since the day you were born. A corporate brand is a promise to its stakeholders. Your personal brand is a promise you deliver to every single person you meet.

The back half turns to networking, and to the follow-up math that became Bobby's signature stat. He once offered 500 people in a room a free coaching session if they came and got his card. Get the card and you are in the top 15 percent. Follow up and you are in the top 4 percent. Build the relationship and you are in the top 0.4 percent.

His closing argument: the number one barrier to networking is your own mindset. And the more digital we get, the more human we have to be.

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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Public speaking bundles networking, expertise and live content into one high-trust room, which makes it the fastest thought leadership tool there is. In this session Bobby is joined by Melanie Deziel and Lorraine K. Lee for a candid look at the business of speaking.

The three of them get into how event decisions get made 12 to 18 months out, why you pitch what the buyer's audience will get rather than why your talk is great, and why you are better off running one to three core talks you know cold than building a new one every time.

They are also refreshingly blunt about money. Melanie's rule is to open at $1,000, because if you ask for $500 they will talk you down to $200, and then you are losing money to teach on someone else's time. She is candid that she should have charged more sooner, and she names who that costs most, which is speakers from marginalized backgrounds who get taken advantage of precisely because nobody told them they could ask for more.

She also has a better move than working for free. Instead of saying you will do it for nothing, say you are willing to waive your fee in exchange for something you actually want, whether that is video footage, testimonials or introductions. You are still a speaker who charges. You have just decided what to charge in.

Lorraine's practical counterpart to all of it: you do not need a paid gig to get the assets in the first place. There is a stage at any university nearby, a friend can take the photos, and the reel gets built from there.

Also covered: how to choose a coach, what agents and bureaus really do (they manage demand, they do not always create it), whether you need a sizzle reel to pitch, and the pre-stage mindset that beats nerves every time. Bobby's version of it: be a teacher, not a speaker.

Melanie Deziel is a keynote speaker, two-time author and co-founder of The Creator Kitchen. Lorraine K. Lee is a speaker, LinkedIn Learning instructor and teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies.

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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Most people think pricing is a number problem. It isn't. It's a clarity problem, and usually a packaging problem wearing a price tag.

In this session Bobby walks through the full pricing system he uses with coaches, consultants and speakers, built on one idea: the moment you know your value, everyone else will know it too.

He opens with two clients who got it wrong in opposite directions. A therapist with 30 years of experience charging only $500 for a three-hour workshop, later coached up to $2,500 an hour. And a speaker asking $10,000 a keynote with no speaking history, who got silence from every organizer she approached.

What's covered:

 - The two failure modes, underpricing and overpricing, and why overpricing produces silence rather than a "no"

 - Why one offer beats five half-offers

 - Low ticket under $1,000: publish the price, because clarity beats charisma

 - High ticket above $4,000: sell the process, not the strategy, and publish the starting point rather than the price

 - Value-metric pricing, where you price the return instead of your hours

 - How to handle an objection without ever discounting

 - The scope leak that keeps people stuck at their ceiling

 - When to raise your price, and the signal that tells you it's already too low

He closes with live coaching on real member offers.

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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Leadership advice ages badly. What worked five, ten, twenty years ago does not automatically survive contact with the way people actually work now, and a lot of leaders are still running the old playbook without noticing.

In this conversation, Bobby sits down with Felipe Cofiño to work through what modern leadership actually asks of people: leading human beings rather than headcount, why human-centred leadership is a practical skill rather than a soft one, and how to tell whether the place you are in is worth staying in.

Felipe Cofiño is a LinkedIn Top Voice with three decades in leadership and HR, and a founder. He publishes on leadership, the workplace and careers on LinkedIn and YouTube.

00:12  Welcome, and introducing Felipe
04:08  Felipe's background and route in
09:07  Three decades in leadership and HR
19:08  Into the substance
24:07  The barriers that used to exist, and what changed
29:07  What a leader actually needs now
34:09  Human-centred leaders
39:07  Whether the place you are in values you
44:09  Why the old playbook stopped working
54:08  Closing thoughts

Recorded live with the TLB Club community.

Want Bobby to speak at your event? raeallan.com/podcast

The Power of Connection. Conversations on leadership, storytelling, and staying human in a noisy world.

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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This one is a conversation I was invited into, and the host went straight at the thing most people get wrong about TEDx.

We covered how a talk actually changes what happens after it: people respond to your outreach, they take your calls, they say yes to your fee. That's the real reason the stage matters, and it's why I call TEDx the ultimate thought-leadership brand builder.

We also killed a few myths. That you need to be famous first. That it has to be a professional topic rather than a personal story. That there's some gatekeeper you have to know. And we got honest about the parts nobody explains, like why you should film your own talk rather than trust the event's setup.

In this episode:

(05:00) The 3,500 TEDx events worldwide, and the video mistake to avoid

(10:00) Why the talk is only the beginning, and what you do with it after

(15:00) The myth that it has to be professional, and why the personal story wins

(20:00) Assets, and how being known got me four talks in two years

(25:00) What changed in what I could charge after the stage

(30:00) The single image that positions you as an authority

(40:00) Taking people on the journey, including the parts that might not work

More from me at bobbyumar.substack.com, or connect on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/bobbyumar).

The Power of Connection is conversations on leadership, storytelling, and staying human in a noisy world, from Bobby Umar: 5x TEDx speaker, Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, and 2x LinkedIn Top Voice.

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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A year ago AI could do impressive things that didn't really move the needle for your brand. That changed fast, and this conversation is about what it can actually do for you now.

I brought two people onto my Substack Live who use this stuff daily, not theoretically. John Aspinall spent two decades on the e-commerce and agency side and now teaches AI to brand owners. Ganesh Ariyur has led global technology transformation for over twenty years, bridging the business and IT sides of it. We got into what shifted, what's hype, and what we each actually run.

The line that stuck with me from this one: the shift isn't AI telling you what to do, it's AI doing it for you. Plenty of people are sitting on information they know they should act on and simply have no time. That gap is where this gets interesting.

In this episode:
(05:00) What changed in 12 months, and what actually moves the needle now
(10:00) You don't have to be a coder, you have to know how to connect things
(20:00) The misconception that AI replaces writers, and why it doesn't
(25:00) Training AI on your real voice, and why your experience is the part that can't be faked
(30:00) The four big levers for growing on Substack
(40:00) Why your files and folder foundations decide how far you can go
(50:00) Going from chat to projects to co-working to code, and what changed for me

Come do this with us: TLB Club is my membership community for small business owners growing their brand, business, and their AI and systems game. Details at thoughtleadershipbranding.club, and more from me at bobbyumar.substack.com.

The Power of Connection is conversations on leadership, storytelling, and staying human in a noisy world, from Bobby Umar: 5x TEDx speaker, Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, and 2x LinkedIn Top Voice.

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com

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I've delivered a thousand keynotes and workshops across four continents, and I'll be honest about what pushed me to build this model: I've sat in audiences watching genuinely terrible talks given by people getting paid very well to give them.

So this is what I actually do. It comes out of a module I taught in my old speaker mastermind, and here I walk through it live, slide by slide, using a real talk I gave for a recreation association in British Columbia.

The formula in one line: personal stories, plus data, plus case studies, plus an action plan they can actually use. But the rule that sits above all of it is the one nobody wants to hear, because it isn't a technique. Know your audience. It decides everything else.

In this episode:
(00:15) A thousand keynotes, and why so many well-paid talks are still bad
(02:05) I ask the room: what's the number one rule?
(03:10) The answer is know your audience, and that means the organizer too
(03:50) Stop opening with "thanks for having me," and what to do instead
(04:25) You get five minutes to win the crowd
(05:50) Why I build in an interactive activity whenever there's room for one
(07:45) Ask them their challenges, then put their own words back in your content
(08:55) The formula: stories, data, case studies, action plan
(11:15) The real goal of a keynote is to change how people think
(12:55) The whole model in ninety seconds
(13:30) The Q&A move that sets me apart, and why organizers always say yes

This one was recorded on a weekly TLB Club call, where we share our highs and lows, support each other, and I teach something I've actually used. If you want to be in the room for the next one, it's at thoughtleadershipbranding.club. More from me at bobbyumar.substack.com.

The Power of Connection is conversations on leadership, storytelling, and staying human in a noisy world, from Bobby Umar: 5x TEDx speaker, Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, and 2x LinkedIn Top Voice.

The Power of Connection is hosted by Bobby Umar, 5x TEDx speaker and Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. For weekly insights on personal branding and thought leadership, join his newsletter: https://bobbyumar.substack.com