Another awesome Affiliate Summit in the box. Â Great to meet new people and see old friends.
Today I gave the closing keynote.
It was my 50th time speaking at a conference going back to 2006. Â It will also be my last. Â I talked to Missy Ward about giving the keynote because I had given a keynote speech 3 years ago and… it sucked. Â Well I thought it sucked. Â Its actually been haunting me a bit. Â One of those things in the back of my mind I always knew I could do better at.
A keynote is such a different talk then doing a panel or presenting how to do something. Â Especially the closing keynote. Â I was really nervous about it and have been working on it for weeks driving myself nuts. Â I had all these things I wanted to talk about but going mad trying to figure out how to put them all together.
My assistant Anna helped me out a lot by just sitting down with me and putting all the things on paper…. then making a outline. Â From that outline I wrote a story around each topic.
After that was done I had someone read what I wrote and I wrote down keywords that I would want slides for…. Â Then had my assistant create a powerpoint making a slide for each keyword.
Then I went through and inserted images on each slide that represented what I was talking about. Â It started at 180 slides but after going through the keynote I got it down to about 120ish.
I finalized it last Thursday and started practicing. Â I practiced on the plane, Â in my room… Â It was difficult for me to really focus on much else I keep thinking about the keynote talk in the back of my head.
I probably went through the keynote 50 times.
When the time came to give the talk today I was pretty nervous until I got on stage…. then really I got in the zone and felt very comfortable.
I am that type of person that is really never satisfied and always feels there is room for improvement but honestly I feel that this talk well exceeded my ability to give a keynote.
When I finished lots of people said they really enjoyed it and it was very motivational and eye opening. Â Pretty much everything I shared in the talk I had never publicly talked about before. Â That was really cool to here.
I really want to thank Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for the opportunity and also having the faith in me that I could evolve from a panelist to a keynote level speaker.
John Chow was shooting video and I know the Affiliate Summit will have it online soon as well.
