The 3 Steps You Must Do Before Writing Your TEDx Script
By Bilyana Georgieva, TEDx Coach, Digital Nerd and Multi-Award Winning Professional Speaker, founder of The ‘Red Dot Speaker Star’ (formerly ‘Soon-To-Be a TEDx Speaker’) Program.
The ‘Red Dot Speaker Star’ newsletter gives you tips, tricks and hacks for your successful TEDx Journey. Make sure you follow me on Medium and click the 🔔 button on my profile to be notified when I share them.
The biggest mistake future TEDx speakers do is start writing their script or thinking what title is best ..
Know that both come as a second priority when you start preparing for TEDx.
What you need to do first is to ask yourself those 3 questions:
- What Outcome I want from my talk?
Your talk needs to be aligned with what you do in life right now and in the next 2 years.
Doing a TEDx talk for the sake of becoming a TEDx speaker will most probably end up with disappointment or a rejected talk.
2. Who is my Audience?
Defining your audience is important at the very beginning for 2 reasons:
a) when you write your script you need to keep in mind who this audience is, so you speak their language. Which means that you’ll use:
phrases they use,
stories and jokes that will connect you with them and
a wisdom that will create an A-HA moment
b) you need to spread your TEDx talk across the globe the moment it’s published. Defining your audience now helps you with your Diffuse strategy later on and who to target.
3. What is my target Duration for the talk?
Majority of people write long scripts and got lost when they need to cut before they finalise it. Making a decision on the length of your talk will help you during the process of trimming and clearing the fluff out of your script.
The maximum time given by TED HQ is 18 min. Up until 2020 was normal to watch talks for 15–18 min. However, pandemic changed the human behaviour. Majority of people got savvy and very selective how they spend their time. In 2021 the sweet spot for videos went from 15 min down to 10 min. Today, at end of 2022 that duration is more of 6–8 min with the tendency towards 6 min maximum.
Now you know the 3 steps you must do before writing your script. Decide them quickly.
Don’t spend more than 30 min for all three of them.
The fun is just starting for you!
Enjoy it!
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Sending you love and energy!
Yours,
Bilyana
#TEDxTalk #presentationskills #keynotespeakers
