Mar 31, 2025
How Do You Become a Keynote Speaker?
Do you want to become a keynote speaker? Have you ever watched a keynote speaker on stage and thought, I would like to do that, too?
Becoming a keynote speaker can be as easy as someone asking you to speak at an event. Becoming a professional (paid) keynote speaker, on the other hand, involves more work.
Behind one professional speaker’s easy-looking 45-minute chat lies years of experience, months of preparation, and weeks of practice. Not to mention lots of travel. Speaking often involves long commutes, frequent layovers, and hotels.
As professional cybersecurity speaker Eric O’Neill says, if you “want to be a professional speaker, you have to love airports! Speakers spend a lot of time running through them to catch flights.”
If you have ever thought of becoming a professional keynote speaker, here are four things you might want to consider to get started.
1) Consider your motivation for speaking.
Before you go down the road of becoming a professional keynote speaker, consider your motivation for doing so. Do you want to educate, entertain, or inspire? Do you have a passion for your topic? While professional speakers do get paid, it’s their commitment to their message that keeps them going and helps them connect with an audience.
For example, Molly Bloom, who had suffered many setbacks in business, said she was inspired to show “an example that it’s not the end of the story and that you can have this incredible comeback—it’s not over.”
2) Find your niche.
For every business topic, you can find a keynote speaker who covers it from leadership to motivation to artificial intelligence. So, what makes your insights different from theirs? Do you have a new perspective on the topic that is different from most keynote speakers?
For example, personal development speaker James Clear, bestselling author of Atomic Habits, is not the first person to write about habits nor even the first person to talk about small changes. However, he found a niche. He was able to create a system for people to change their habits that separated him from other experts on the topic.
3) Get speaking experience.
Keynote speaking is more than creating a PowerPoint deck. The best keynote speakers are one part storyteller, one part comedian, and one part teacher.
If you want to speak professionally as your career, speak as much as you can. Offer to speak for free at local organizations. Join Toastmasters. Apply to local TEDx events. Or get training with professional speaker organizations like Impact Eleven.
When resilience speaker Jia Jiang started his professional speaking career, he got a boost from doing a successful TEDx talk. Then, he spoke wherever he was invited and got more training with Impact Eleven.
4) Create a professional presence.
Finally, if you’re serious about a speaking career, you’ll need to let people know you’re a speaker. You need to create a professional presence.
Post your speaking credentials on your LinkedIn page. Build a speaker website. Include a bio, video examples from talks, testimonials from organizations, a headshot, and descriptions of your talks. Ask Speakers Bureaus to post your information on their website.
Then, actively market yourself.
If you would like to learn more about becoming a keynote speaker, read
Want to Become a Keynote Speaker?
What All Keynote Speakers Should Have in Their Demo Reels