Whether you are a new or established speaker, there are only a very few people who are lucky enough to have conferences coming to them directly. Building your profile can help organisers find you, however for most of us who speak, actively finding events and applying to them is part of the job. In this article I’ll share some tips for finding and applying to events and conferences.
At a recent conference, a friend shared that she was anxious about getting up on stage because she’d counted three people in the audience that had already seen her give the same presentation at a different event. It’s a very common worry, and one we’ve written about before. I was thinking about this when I came across this really great TED Talk by Simone Giertz.
A common worry for presenters is what happens if you overrun, or come in too short? While this is something that does tend to improve with time, even the most experienced presenter can occasionally find themselves sending everyone for an early coffee or racing through the last section of a talk. In this post I share some suggestions for accurately timing your talks.
New presenters often feel that they need to write a brand-new talk for each conference they are invited to. Unless your job is giving presentations, or you are being paid very well for each talk you give, it is unlikely that you will be able to keep this up if you do more than a couple of talks per year. In this article Rachel shares some tips for reusing material and creating talks of different lengths.
I’m often asked how I put together my talks. How do I get past the blank page and make a start on a deck that might contain well over 100 individual slides? I usually start by asking myself a few questions. The main one being - what do I hope the audience will learn? Following on from that I consider which examples will best demonstrate that point.
One of the very early piece of advice I was given when I started out speaking at conferences has stuck with me the whole way though. It’s so simple and yet I see countless speakers at conference who either have never been told this, or with the many things you need to think about before going on stage, just forget. Speakers - remove your name badge!