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How to get speaking engagements when nobody has heard of you · Speaker Hub
How to get speaking engagements when nobody has heard of you
The advice assumes you already have a reputation. Here is the order that works when you do not, and why the first booking is the only hard one.
•6 min read
Most advice on getting booked assumes you already have footage, references and a track record. If you had those, you would not be reading this.
Here is the order that works from nothing.
The first booking is the only hard one
Everything about getting booked is easier once you have done it once, because a chair's real question is not whether you are good. It is whether you are a risk.
A speaker with no record is an unknown quantity and the chair is the one who wears it if you are bad. A speaker with three past events and thirty seconds of footage has answered the question, and the conversation moves on to whether you fit the agenda.
So the goal for the first six months is not a keynote. It is evidence.
Where evidence comes from
None of these feel like speaking engagements. All of them produce the same two artefacts.
Inside your own organisation. Lunch sessions, all hands, training. Free, low stakes, and you can record it. Nobody checks whether your first talk was external.
Professional association chapters. Most industries have regional groups that meet monthly and are permanently short of speakers. They will often say yes to an email from a stranger, which almost nothing else will.
Meetups. Search your city and your topic. Organisers of these are volunteers looking for people to fill slots, and the audience is small enough that a first talk is survivable. Covered in more detail in local speaking opportunities.
Podcasts. Not a stage, and it still builds the thing you need: a public artefact of you explaining your topic well, with someone else's name attached.
Webinars and panels. Lower barrier than a solo slot, and a panel appearance is a legitimate line on a speaking history.
Do five of these and you have footage, three references, and a genuine list of past appearances. That is the whole toolkit.
Then, and only then, apply to conferences
With evidence in hand, applications become worth the time. Two routes.
Open calls. Most conferences run one, months ahead of the event. This is the fairest route, because the selection is on the strength of the proposal rather than on who knows you. How to find calls for speakers covers where they are listed, and how to write a speaker proposal covers the thing most people get wrong.
Direct approach. Email the programme chair. Lower volume, higher hit rate if you do it properly, and almost everyone does it badly. How to pitch yourself as a speaker is the detail.
The timing mistake
Speakers look at an event happening next month and wonder how to get on it. The speakers for next month were chosen last winter.
Larger conferences commonly plan six to twelve months out, with the call for speakers closing well before that. If you find an event you want, you are almost always looking at next year's edition.
That is not a setback if you act on it. Note the event, find when the call opened last year, and put a reminder in your calendar for a month before. A list of twelve events with their call dates is worth more than any amount of enthusiasm in June.
Aim at the gap, not the event
The single biggest improvement to a pitch is pitching what the programme is missing rather than what you want to talk about.
Look at last year's agenda for the event you are targeting. Every topic on it is one they now have. What is not on it, and what has changed in the industry since, is the gap. A chair building an agenda is trying to fill gaps and avoid repetition, and a proposal that names a gap is doing their job for them.
This is where research pays. It is also the specific job Stage Finder does, matching what you speak about against events whose programmes have room for it, which is faster than reading forty agendas by hand.
What to say when you have no fee history
You will be asked, early, and the honest answer is fine.
For the first several bookings, expenses covered is a normal arrangement and you should not pretend otherwise. What you should do is be explicit that it is a starting position rather than a permanent one, and start charging as soon as you have the evidence to justify it. How much speakers charge and how to become a paid speaker cover the transition.
What you must not do is speak free indefinitely because asking feels awkward. Speakers stay unpaid for years for that reason alone.
Capture everything
The most common own goal: doing a talk and keeping nothing from it.
Every time you speak, three things:
Get it recorded. Ask in advance. If they will not, put your own phone on a tripod at the back.
Ask the organiser for a testimonial within 48 hours, while it is fresh and they still feel warm about it.
Write down the event name, date, audience and size.
That takes ten minutes and it is what turns one talk into the pitch for the next three.
By speaking at things that do not feel like speaking engagements. Internal company sessions, professional association meetups, industry association chapters, podcasts and webinars all produce the two things you need for a real pitch, which are footage and a named reference. Applying cold to conferences with neither is the slowest possible route.
Do you need a website to get booked?
You need a URL an organizer can open that shows what you speak about and video of you doing it. That can be one page. What you cannot do is send a chair a PDF and nothing else, because they will want to check you exist and will search for you either way.
How far ahead do conferences book speakers?
Larger conferences commonly work six to twelve months out, and many run an open call that closes long before the event. If you are looking at an event happening in six weeks, you are looking at next year's event, so note the call date and diarise it.
Stage Finder returns four different kinds of answers from one search: events worth pitching, live open calls, where your admired speakers appear, and who to watch at your level. Here is which ones want a click and which are just reference.
Stage Finder's Open Calls list is ranked by topic overlap and deadline pressure, not by when a listing was added. Here is what actually moves a call to the top, and what to do with the ones sitting in the middle.
