Your Speaker Page Is Costing You Bookings (Here's the Fix)

I grabbed my coffee this morning and started scrolling through some speaker websites, something I do more often than I probably should, and I kept landing on the same feeling.

So close. But not quite there.

Beautiful pages. Lovely headshots. Clearly talented people. But something was off in a way that’s hard to name until you’ve been in this industry long enough to feel it. The page looked professional. It just didn’t feel hireable.

There’s a difference. And it matters more than most speakers realize.

I think about a season early on in running Charli Jane Speakers, we came out of a really hard stretch financially, Mark and I, and I was just starting to find my footing with the business. I was studying what made speakers bookable, really studying it, because I needed to understand it deeply if I was going to help anyone else. What I kept coming back to was this: event planners hire speakers they feel confident about. And confidence doesn’t come just from credentials. It comes from the experience of landing on a page and thinking, “Yes, this is exactly who we need.”

Your page is either creating that feeling or quietly working against you. And most of the time, it’s the smallest things.

It’s a demo reel that opens with 30 seconds of your name on a screen instead of you connecting with a live audience. It’s a contact form that asks for eight pieces of information before someone can even say hello. It’s testimonials that say “she was amazing!” without giving a planner anything she can actually use to pitch you to her board. It’s a page that tries to do four jobs at once — promote your podcast, sell your book, collect emails, and book you for speaking, and ends up doing none of them well.

None of this is your fault. Nobody hands you a manual for this. And the truth is that most speakers build their pages from the inside out, from what feels important to them instead of from the outside in, the way a planner actually experiences it.

After 24 years of watching what gets speakers booked and what doesn’t, I can tell you: the page that wins is rarely the most impressive one. It’s the clearest one. The one that answers the planner’s questions before she has to ask them. The one that makes the yes feel easy.

You don’t need a full redesign. You don’t need to hire anyone or start over. Most of the time, it’s a handful of focused changes, a sharper opening line, a video that starts strong, a testimonial that actually sells you, and one clear place for planners to go next.

Doable momentum. That’s what this is. One page, not the whole book.

You’ve put too much into your speaking business to let a fixable page stand between you and the stages you’re meant to be on.

Come do this work with us inside the Charli Jane Speakers Club. We have AI-powered tools (not ChatGPT) that help you find real opportunities that are the right fit for you, pitch with confidence, and a community that will support and encourage you every step of the way. We’d love to have you!

Learn more here.