Selling Your Talk

You’ve got your idea, you know who it’s for, and you know where you want to give it. The next step is to sell the talk.

Think about your own process as a conference attendee. When you come to a conference, you open the brochure, and you read the abstracts to decide what to see.

The abstract is your sales pitch. You’re pitching your talk to the people at the event, telling them why they should come and see you rather than one of the other excellent talks running at the same time.

So take your idea and think about the key things someone might get out of it, and who it’s for. for example if you were a security person with a Cross-Site Scripting talk “You’re a JavaScript developer — we’re going to tell you about cross-site scripting so you don’t have to worry about your applications.” Or if you had a talk on handling alerts the core might be, “I built a SOC and we were drowning in alerts; here’s how to not get drowned and how to handle them.” Think about the people you want to reach and sell it to them.

You usually don’t have much space to do this — it might be 50-100 words, Don’t worry about writing whole pages; just have a clear idea of how you’re selling it.

You’re selling to two audiences at once. The attendees and also if it’s a conference, you’re also selling to the organisers.

Conference organisers have a tricky job, they get loads of submissions and can only pick a small number. The better you sell your talk, the more clearly you explain what you’re trying to say, the better and more informed a decision they can make about whether it fits their conference and their attendees. So you’ll want a title and an abstract.