For several years, the author of this article regularly speaks at conferences. After numerous questions about how he succeeds in this, he decided to share his accumulated knowledge. What should I do to take your application for participation?

Tip 1: The Big Conference - A Big Topic

Conference organizers for a wide audience are interested, so that each presentation will be understandable to the majority. In this case, the narrower your topic, the less likely you are to be invited. For example, for a general conference, the topic of how to use event triggers in Angular JS is too narrow. But this is what is needed for the Angular conference. If I’m going to speak at the JSConf conference, I’m probably not going to give a talk on the introduction to ES6.

So match!

Tip 2: Submit your abstract to parallel sections

I usually provide abstracts on 3-5 sections. To reduce costs, many conferences require at least 2 reports from each speaker. Especially if it is an international conference that covers the cost of flight and hotel. Therefore, if you submit abstracts only to 2-3 sections, your chances are automatically reduced.
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Tip 3: Focus on “Why,” not on “How”

You can gain knowledge through books, blogs, videos, personal consultations and so on. But not with the help of conferences. It is impossible to teach a lot in one hour. Nevertheless, conferences offer a unique opportunity to interest listeners and explain to them why this or that topic is important. Read more about this in my article "The Conference needs to be interested, not to explain."

Tip 4: Increase Subscribers

Think like a conference organizer. Having two applications, the organizer will choose a more well-known speaker, all other things being equal. A speaker who has several thousand subscribers will help promote the conference and therefore sell tickets. Leave blog posts, work for open-source projects, post videos online - increase your circle of subscribers.

Tip 5: Choose a specialty

Determine your specialty - and do everything possible to make this area of ​​knowledge clear for others. Make it the topic of your blog posts, twitter, conference presentations, your biography. It should be as clear as day that you are an expert in the field of X. When I think of John Papa, JavaScript and Angular immediately come to mind. True, the specialty can be changed regularly. For example, John was previously known as an expert on the Silverlight and Knockout software platform.

Tip 6: Analyze Experience

I acquired this habit a year ago and it turned out to be priceless. At the end of my section, I ask 5 minutes from several people who want to discuss the section. And ask the following questions:

• Do you have any suggestions on how to best name the report?
• Did you get what you expected?
• Is there something I missed?
• Do I need to reduce the performance?
• What statements made you confused or misunderstood?

Answers to these questions can improve both your squeeze and your presentation.

Tip 7: Show theses to others

Your theses are salesman's speech. It must be compelling and unique. Ask a few people to see your abstracts. And suggest doing the same for them.

Conclusion

Honestly, I still refuse. However, thanks to these techniques, my applications for participation are more often approved. Also, over the last couple of years, conference organizers began to contact me more often with invitations to speak. But the final stage of success is when I can respond to invitations: “Yes, damn it!”. Or refuse.

Translator's note: the author refers to an article by Derek Sievers , who wrote a note that denies everything in his life, if the idea does not cause the desire to say: "Yes, damn it!".

Corey House is the author of Build Applications with React and Flux, Clean Code: Write Code for People, and other courses on Pluralsight. He is an international trainer on the themes of front-end development and clean code, an expert of MVP of Microsoft, the founder of outlierdeveloper.com.

By the way, this can be discussed personally!

This Thursday almost the entire Voximplant team will be at the INTERCOM conference. We organized it in order to discuss how to add realtime communication technologies to the web and mobile applications: voice and video calls, chat rooms, messaging. If you want to come to visit, chat with the speakers and over a cup of coffee, discuss with the eyeofhell how he selected the applications for speeches, write to the PM, invite!