Speaking Opportunities

Describe your expertise to Featured — “find speaking opportunities on warehouse automation” — and it returns conferences, panels, webinars, and open CFPs that fit, with submission deadlines. From there the same chat drafts your abstract and speaker bio. It replaces the scattered approach of watching event sites and hoping a CFP crosses your feed.

A CFP — call for proposals, sometimes call for speakers — is the open window when an event invites session submissions. You typically submit a session title, an abstract, and a bio before a deadline. Most conference speaking slots are won through CFPs, which is why tracking their windows matters more than knowing conference names.

Write for the selection committee: a specific promise (“what attendees will be able to do after this session”), evidence you can deliver it, and zero product pitch. Committees score audience value, not seniority. Featured drafts abstracts around that standard and tailors your bio to each event's audience.

Most industry panels and conference sessions don't pay — the return is authority, pipeline, and content: a recorded talk becomes clips, a transcript, podcast invitations, and coverage. Established keynote speakers do command fees, and getting there is a ladder of unpaid stages done well. Featured helps you climb it deliberately.

Talks are among the most citable things you can produce: recordings get transcribed and indexed, event pages list your name and topic, and coverage of the event quotes speakers. AI assistants deciding “who are the experts in X” read exactly that trail. A speaking pipeline is an AI visibility program in disguise.

Ask Featured for lower-stakes stages: local business events, meetups, panels, and webinars, where the bar is expertise rather than a showreel. One recorded panel gives you the clip that gets you the next, bigger room. The ladder is real, and the first rung is easier to find than most people think.

Finding speaking opportunities is included in every Featured plan — free to start, $39/month (Lite) or $79/month (Pro, billed annually) as usage scales. Every plan includes every feature. Event entry itself is almost always free; you're contributing the content.

Major conferences close CFPs three to nine months before the event, so a Q3 stage is often a Q1 submission. That lead time is exactly why the Speaking Opportunities workflow exists — it watches for opening windows continuously so deadlines find you, instead of the reverse.

Yes — build a per-client pipeline: matched events, CFP windows, and drafted abstracts in each client's voice, with a workflow watching each client's topics. Speaking placements tend to be the retainer line-item clients remember; Featured makes them systematic instead of lucky.