The Ultimate* Guide to Conference Speaking
published on
Over the last few months I have been collecting all kinds of different posts on speaking at conferences, from the dos and donts to sound advice and how to get into speaking in the first place. Without a lot of blah, here you go:
For Speakers
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Speaking? Pack a plan. by Ethan Marcotte
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Thoughts and advice for public speaking by Rob Hawkes
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Conference speaking tips by Dave Addey
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There’s no need to deliver the talk that “kills it” by Christian Heilmann
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On Speaking by Brad Frost
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A few tricks about public speaking and stage technology by Christian Heilmann
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On Speaking: My Personal Experiences and Advice for Getting Started by Rachel Shillcock
Getting Paid, Not Getting Paid And Other Options
Recently many people have been thinking, writing and discussing about getting paid for speaking. There are a lot of very fair points and it's great to see how motivations differ. I personally think it depends a lot on where you coming from and to what level you want to take it to. Many people have different reasons for why want to speak and you"ll have to decide for yourself. The following links contain good pointers and thoughtful opinions about the different possible directions you can take in this regard.
- A Formula for Speaking Fees by Jenn Lukas
- How to ask to get paid to speak by Seb Lee-Delisle
- Conference speakers, what are you worth? by Mark Boulton
- An open letter to speakers by Scott Berkun
For Conference Organizers
We all know that it (mostly) needs two hands to clap, thus it's not only on the speakers to make an effort, but conference organizers can also help make everybodies experience a happy and great one:
- What makes speakers happy by Lea Verou
- An open letter to conference organizers by Scott Berkun
Ready, Steady, Go
With all of this information you should now have all the basic knowledge to make a sane call on what you need to get started, how you would like to approach your speaking career and where to take it from here. For those of you who have been speaking at a few (or many) events already, I'm still confident that you"ll find some useful tips to enhance your future talks in some way or another. Happy speaking!
* I'm of course not claiming this collection ultimate or complete, but "ultimate" is an extremely good looking word ;) I also didn't want to call it something like "13 Links and what happens after reading will leave you speechless…", because I'm strongly opposed to this trend of bad writing.
Fun Fact: While reading through the above linked posts again and copying the titles I noticed that only about three or so didn't have text-transform: uppercase applied to the article headline. Must be a trend going on here ;)