I've been helping to curate the content for JSConf Colombia for three years now and I wanted to pass on some advice I've gathered these years. The first year I worked on the selection committee, which is the first round of voting in a two round process. My second year, I was on the content team and nominated someone for the committee as well as participated in the second round of voting (where we look at the top talks from the first round and curate talks based on which make most sense for our conference and audience). This year, I'm one of three directors for the conference as well as the leader of the content team (the first time in my life rising through any ranks! hahaha). In these three years I've probably read more than 800 CFPs and there's a few things that'll help you get picked for conferences

1. Research the conference

• It's like when you're looking for a job, you want to make sure that a company wants you but you also wanna make sure that you want the company so make sure you research the conference. Who is their audience? What talks have they picked in the past? What have they never done? Have they mentioned anything anywhere about the kinds of talks they're looking for? Take JSConf Colombia for example - our audience is Colombian JavaScript developers so when we see talks that target this audience, it's always a committee (and usually team) favourite

2. Send original talks

• There's a conference cycle and there's definitely speakers who do this for a living but if I can google your name and the title of your talk and find various YouTube videos of you doing your talk, my audience can too and they will definitely let me know about it. As a curator, I want to make sure I'm exposing my audience to original content as much as I can - I want to make sure the conference is memorable (and worth the ticket price!). There's a loop hole here, sure, you can recycle talks but change them in some valuable way, shape or form (you could probably start with the title)

3. Make SOMETHING interesting

• I used to say that you had to make your abstract interesting but this year we had a talk that had a one line abstract and the committee loved it... why? Because the topic was original and interesting. Sometimes the title is what's interesting, sometimes it's the speaker's personality. It's an art but something has to be interesting and you've got a few options - the topic, the title, the abstract, the way you tie all of these together. A note here.. interesting is subjective but it's a good bet to make it interesting for the audience of the conference and how might you check that? Find some target audience folks and ask them

4. Lose the cliches

• I swear if I see another talk titled "How to [action] and not die trying" I will scream (in the privacy of my own home because I know y'all put effort into your CFPs and I appreciate it and I'm not a total monster). This might just be my own memories of my tenth grade English teacher scolding me for using a lot of clichés but I truly believe that clichés make our brains turn off and that's not what you wanna be doing in a CFP. It's lazy writing, it's boring and it makes me doubt if your talk will be exciting and interesting because your clichés aren't. Grammarly is awesome for catching clichés and the free version grabs them (as far as I know)

5. Make yourself available

• I have a hunch that if you do all of the above you have a really good chance of making it through the first round. I don't know how all conferences work but for JSConf Colombia we have a second round with a bit of screening to make sure that we're inviting the best speakers to our conference. I know, this process isn't free of human bias and I'm sorry about it but this is what has worked for us to make sure our lineup is diverse (in speakers and topics), financially viable and interesting to our audience. So for this part, it's very helpful to make yourself available online. I don't need to know everything about you but it helps to at least be able to see where you're based and if you have any past speaking experience. Speakers with personal websites that have their location and past speaking experience are gold. Tweet about your speaking every so often so we can find it. If folks have praised you, retweet it! If you've got an interesting interview, let's see it. If the conference you're applying to asks for it, give them your website and Twitter at least.

3 years later, this is my best advice so far. Unless you're a professional speaker, my recommendation is to pick a few conferences that are genuinely interesting to you and invest the time to CFP very well for them.

What do you think? Anything I might've missed? Anything I'm totally off on? Happy to clarify anything I might've not been super clear about :)

You can also find this in a gist here: https://gist.github.com/gomezjuliana/e70b926385d4af010a74c7a7379a545a