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Speaker positioning: why narrowing your topic gets you more work · Speaker Hub
Speaker positioning: why narrowing your topic gets you more work
Speaking on nine subjects makes you a candidate for nine slots and the obvious choice for none. Here is how to narrow without losing the work you already have.
•6 min read
The instinct when work is thin is to widen. Add topics, say yes to more, appear on more lists.
It reliably produces fewer bookings, and the reason is about how the decision gets made.
How a chair actually decides
They are not choosing the best speaker. They are choosing the least risky speaker for a specific slot.
That means the question in their head is narrow: who is the obvious person to talk about X to this audience? If your name is the answer to that question, you are in a shortlist of two or three. If you are broadly plausible for nine topics, you are on a long list of forty for each, and long lists are decided by who somebody already knows.
Being the obvious choice for a small thing beats being a reasonable choice for a large one.
The recommendation test
Most repeat work comes from a chair mentioning you to another chair. That conversation is one sentence long.
"You should get Jane, she talks about why experienced nurses leave."
That sentence has to be sayable. If describing you requires three clauses and a caveat, it does not get said, because the person recommending you cannot hold it.
So the test for your positioning is not whether it is accurate. It is whether somebody who saw you once can repeat it to a colleague a month later. Most speakers fail this and never find out, because nobody tells you the recommendation did not happen.
Where a niche comes from
Three things have to overlap. Two is not enough.
Direct experience. Something you have actually done, seen or studied, rather than read about. This is what makes you the person rather than a person, and it is the part that cannot be acquired quickly.
An audience with a budget. Somebody has to be running events for these people and paying for content. A topic aimed at an audience that never convenes is a hobby.
A problem people already have language for. If nobody searches for it and nobody puts it on an agenda, you will spend all your energy explaining that the problem exists before you can talk about it.
Miss the first and you are competing with people who lived it. Miss the second and you will speak for free forever. Miss the third and every pitch starts from zero.
Narrow the audience, not just the subject
The move most speakers miss. You can specialise by who rather than by what.
"Leadership" is broad. "Leadership for clinicians who got promoted out of practice" is a niche, and it is the same underlying material.
This is usually the easier direction, because it does not require abandoning expertise you have. It requires choosing which room you are in. It also produces much better talks, since a session written for one specific audience can assume things and skip the ground work a general session has to cover.
Turning down work. You can be positioned on one thing and accept a booking on another. Positioning is what your site and your pitches lead with, not a restriction on what you say yes to.
One talk forever. A niche supports several sessions. Three talks aimed at the same audience is focus. Three talks aimed at three audiences is not.
Never changing. Positioning is a bet, and bets get revised. Most speakers who have been at it a while have narrowed, widened slightly, and narrowed again around something adjacent.
Doing it without breaking what works
If you already have bookings, do not rewrite everything on Monday.
Lead with one thing. Whatever a stranger sees first, on your speaking page and in your first line, is the niche. Everything else stays available further down.
Give each talk its own page. The narrow positioning lives on the page for that talk. The others still exist and are still findable. This also fixes the search problem in your speaker bio, where a page about nine subjects is a weak match for all nine.
Change the first sentence of your pitch. That is where most of the effect is, and it costs nothing to test.
Keep taking the other bookings while you do. Positioning changes what comes in over six months, not what is already in the diary.
The signal it is working
Not more enquiries immediately. Better ones.
You will notice that people arrive already knowing what you speak about, that the conversation starts closer to the booking, and that fewer enquiries are for something you would have had to invent a talk for.
That last one is where the fee moves, and it is the mechanism behind everything in how much do speakers charge: a speaker who is one of three obvious choices is not competing on price in the way one of forty is.
You need a topic somebody can repeat to a colleague, which is narrower than most speakers are comfortable with and broader than a single talk. A chair who cannot summarise you in one sentence cannot recommend you, and recommendation is where most repeat bookings come from.
Will narrowing my topic cost me bookings?
It costs you enquiries you were unlikely to win and increases the ones where you are the obvious choice. The trade is usually favourable, since being one of forty plausible candidates for a general slot is worth less than being one of three for a specific one.
How do I choose a niche?
Look at where your direct experience, an audience with a budget, and a problem people already search for overlap. A niche built only on what you enjoy has no buyer, and one built only on where the money is has no credibility behind it.
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