FOR PUBLIC SPEAKERS
What makes a great speaker website? What event organisers look for
Event organisers visit your speaker website with one question: can this person hold my audience? Here is how to answer it in under a minute.
Paid speaking rarely starts with a pitch. It starts with a clear topic, proof you can hold a room and materials that make booking you easy.
Paid speaking gigs in the UK usually follow proof, not pitching. Organisers and bureaux book speakers known for a clear topic who can show live footage of themselves holding an audience, and who make booking easy with a bio, testimonials, photos and a speaker page. Build those first, speak where your audience gathers, then approach paid work with evidence.
Most people who want paid speaking gigs already have something worth saying. What’s usually missing is the material that lets a stranger say yes fast. Picture an events manager with a budget and a deadline, weighing up several names. The easy pick is the speaker with a clear topic and a short showreel, backed by testimonials from similar events.
No guide can promise you bookings or a set fee, and this one won’t try. It can show you what UK organisers and bureaux ask for, and how to build a speaker brand that answers their questions before they’ve asked them.
Paid work tends to come through a handful of routes, and most working speakers use more than one.
The biggest is often direct corporate bookings. Companies hire speakers for conferences, sales kick-offs, away days and internal events, and they usually find you through your network or your website, or because someone saw you speak.
Industry conferences and trade associations are next. Some pay their keynote speakers. Plenty expect breakout speakers to turn up for free or for expenses, though the audience can still make it worth your while.
Then there are speaker bureaux and agencies, which match speakers to clients and take a commission. They mostly represent people who already have a track record.
Referrals come from someone in the audience booking you for their own event after a good talk. That’s why every unpaid talk should be filmed and photographed wherever you can manage it.
Last come workshops and training. Lots of speakers earn as much from half-day sessions as they do from keynotes, and a client who has already seen your talk is often an easier sell.
No guesswork needed here. UK agencies publish exactly what they want. NMP Live’s submission page asks, as a minimum, for:
It also says it can only consider applications that meet these criteria, and that it can’t give feedback to anyone who’s turned down. Other bureaux have their own preferences on top. Scamp Speakers, for example, asks for biographies written in the third person. It wants testimonials from clients (other speakers don’t count), and showreels that are “bureau friendly”, with no contact details on them.
Put all that together and the message is plain. A bureau wants a speaker it can put in front of a client with no extra work. Organisers who book you directly want the same things. They just ask more casually.
“I speak about leadership” is hard to book. “I help operations teams recover after a failed change programme” is easy, because the organiser can see straight away which event and which audience it suits. Work out the problem you solve and who has it. Then ask what you’ve done that gives you the right to talk about it. This is brand design work, and it shapes everything after it, from your talk titles and bio to your photographs and website copy.
Give each talk a clear title, a two-line description and three takeaways for the audience. Organisers often paste this straight into their programme. Write it in plain English and keep it tidy.
Write both in the third person. The short one (around 50 words) goes in programmes. The longer one (around 200) goes on your website and bureau profiles. Open with whatever is relevant to the audience. Your full career history can wait.
Video is often the most persuasive thing a speaker has, because it takes the risk away for the person doing the booking. Inspirational Speakers, a UK bureau, advises keeping showreels under three minutes, making an impact in the first five to ten seconds and including live event footage where you can see the audience. The guide on how to make a speaker showreel goes into structure and footage in detail. If you have the footage but not the edit, brand videography can help.
A current headshot is the bare minimum. Stage shots with the audience in view do much more, because they show you actually doing the job. Plan to get photos of every talk you give, paid or unpaid.
This is where it all comes together. Topics and video sit alongside testimonials and photos, with a bio people can download and an obvious way to enquire. Organisers look you up online before they get in touch, and a social profile on its own rarely answers what they want to know. A personal brand website with a dedicated speaking page is yours to own and control, and it doubles as your media kit. For a page-by-page guide, see what makes a great speaker website.
Fees swing hugely depending on profile and topic, as well as audience and format. As a rough guide, one UK agency’s 2026 guide to keynote fees puts UK keynote fees at £1,000 to £30,000+, with most corporate events budgeting £3,000 to £15,000 for a keynote slot. Celebrities sit well above that. Many speakers starting out earn less. Some are paid only in expenses and exposure.
The same guide says the most common agency model is a commission of 20 to 25% of the agreed fee. Bureaux set this up in different ways. If someone offers to represent you, ask exactly how their commission works and whether it’s included in the fee the client is quoted.
Use these figures as background and nothing more. Your fee depends on what organisers will pay for your topic and your proof, and it grows as your evidence does.
Sometimes. An unpaid talk is worth doing when the room is full of people who could book you, when you can film or photograph the session, or when you need to try out a new talk. It’s rarely worth it when the audience is wrong for you, the event won’t share footage or the “exposure” is fuzzy.
Here’s a simple test. If a free talk gets you neither a strong audience nor new material for your speaker brand, it’s probably a favour, and you shouldn’t count it as marketing. Favours are fine. Just know which one you’re doing.
A bureau can bring in work you’d never find on your own. Most will only take you on once you’ve got footage and testimonials to show, plus a track record, though. See a bureau as a way to speed up an established speaking career. It won’t start one for you.
Professional associations do something else. The Professional Speaking Association, which covers the UK and Ireland, offers Associate, Professional and Fellow membership, and Professional membership is aimed at people who are already paid to speak. Associations like this help with skills and peer feedback, and give you a community. They won’t book you, and membership doesn’t replace proof.
| Stage | Focus | What to build |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Define | Topic and audience | Positioning, talk titles, short and long bio |
| 2. Prove | Speak where your audience gathers | Filmed talks, stage photos, written testimonials |
| 3. Package | Make booking easy | Showreel, headshots, speaker page with enquiry route |
| 4. Approach | Paid opportunities | Direct pitches to organisers, then bureau applications |
| 5. Grow | Stay visible | Fresh footage, regular social content, updated testimonials |
We help speakers build what organisers look for. That means a clear position and story through brand design, a showreel and talk footage through brand videography, and a speaker website that pulls it all together. We can’t promise bookings or fees. What we can do is make sure that when an organiser looks you up, they find a speaker who’s easy to say yes to.
Your first paid gig will most likely come from someone who has already seen you speak or knows your work. Speak at events where potential clients gather. Film those talks and get them photographed. Collect written testimonials. Then approach organisers in the same sector with that evidence and a clear talk title.
Not always, but it helps a lot. Bureaux such as NMP Live want either live footage of a recent talk or an edited showreel before they’ll consider you. No showreel yet? A clean recording of a full talk in front of a real audience is a good start.
Check each bureau’s submission page and send exactly what it asks for, which is usually video, a bio, testimonials, a headshot, your topics and your fees. Most bureaux get a lot of applications and prefer speakers with a proven record, so build up your evidence first.
A one-sheet normally has your photo and a short bio, then your signature talks with their takeaways. Add a few testimonials and a way to contact you. Some bureaux, Scamp Speakers among them, ask not to be sent one-pagers and prefer editable documents. Check what each recipient wants before you send anything.
Yes. Plenty of paid speakers are specialists known inside a sector, not public figures. For their particular audience, organisers often care more about relevance and expertise than general fame, so a narrow topic with strong evidence behind it can work in your favour.
Event organisers visit your speaker website with one question: can this person hold my audience? Here is how to answer it in under a minute.
Your showreel is often the deciding factor for a booker. Here is how long it should be, how to structure it and what footage to use.
The headshots, stage shots and audience images that help organisers picture you on their stage, and how to plan a shoot that delivers all of them.
Four quick questions, and we’ll show you where we’d start. Your answers come straight to us with your message, so you won’t have to explain it twice.
A 30-minute introduction call on Microsoft Teams, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. Your answers come with the booking, so we’ll be ready for you.
Prefer to talk it through? Make an appointment for a 30-minute call on Microsoft Teams, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.
A closer look at the work behind each part of your plan.
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