Hi.  Winnie Griggs here again with the next installment in my posts about speaking engagements.  So far we’ve covered why book speaking engagements, dealing with butterflies and selecting a topic.  Today we’re going to talk about creating your speaker’s resume.

Why is that necessary?  Well a speaker resume is a great tool for growing your opportunities to secure better speaking engagements.   And coordinators for conferences and workshops, who often get flooded with applications and proposals, will use this document to evaluate the potential speakers against each others and against their particular needs.  This may be the ONLY tool they use to decide whether to issue you an invitation or not.

So what kind of information should go on your speaker resume?

A speaker’s resume should include

• Basic contact information
  Name, address, phone number, email info
  You can also include a personal website address and/or blog if applicable
• Your credentials
  This can include
  • Publishing history.
  • Education
  • Professional/career history, hobbies or personal experience that might lend weight to your stature as a professional or pertain to your topic list.  For instance, if you are an accountant, that would be worth mentioning if one of your topics is financial record keeping for writers. Or if you’ve raised five children and held down a full time job while pursuing a writing career that could lend weight to your ability to present a topic on time management
  • Prior speaking history – a list of venues and audiences
  • Media exposure
• List of the topics you have to offer
  For each topic/title, give a short description on what it covers and a note as to whether it has been presented to other audiences.
  A note that you are open to tailoring existing topics or developing new ones to fit the needs of the audience/event can be added to the bottom of this list if you are comfortable doing so
• References
  If you have collected quotes from previous event coordinators who’ve booked you or audience members you’ve presented to, you can list them here (with permission of course)

Keep in mind that this is an evolving document.  You want to steadily build your reputation as a speaker. Any time you speak in front of a group, add it to your resume.  Expand the list of  topics you have to offer.  Gather favorable comments from attendees at workshops you’ve given to use in promoting yourself as a speaker.  In other words, learn how to sell yourself.