This is a guide to professional keynote speaking. It is aimed at experts, meaning people who speak on the same topic repeatedly:
Conference speakers
Authors on a book tour
Speakers at corporate gatherings
The guide shows how to create and deliver a strong keynote talk based on your ideas – one that you can use again and again, with many different groups. It also covers all the hidden practicalities of professional speaking, including how to set your fees and much else.
The guide is focused on business audiences as that’s where my expertise comes from (I’ve been doing high-level public speaking for some 15 years). It is written for expertise-based speakers, but should also have some relevance for other kinds of speakers (e.g. motivational speakers and pundits).
For more on who I am, see my personal Substack or my website.
Why did I create this guide? In short:
Many existing guides seemed overly long to me. If you’re preparing to give a talk, the last thing you want to do is to wade through 220 pages of text. I wanted to create a guide that allows you to jump straight to what you need, and that delivers that info in a concise manner.
Most advice is too low-level. Many books on public speaking seems to be written for a regular businessperson who has to present something in a meeting. Nothing wrong with that, but what I really craved when I started out was expert-level advice for people who speak professionally.
The business model is a key part of speaking. And yet, it’s surprisingly hard to find good, in-depth information about speaker fees, negotiation, client types, and similar.
Many guides focus on TED-style talks, meaning short, filmed monologues that are delivered only once, with little to no audience interaction. But those are not the norm. As an expert speaker, it’s much more normal to actively engage with the audience. You’ll also have wildly different amounts of time on the stage, from 5 minute panel openers to 45 minute keynotes - which calls for a different approach than the TED talk. (Hint: Build your talk in modules.)
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