I've been doing this speaking thing since 2014, and this is my 61st talk. Like every speaker, I've given some talks I thought were great and some I hope to never think about again, and I've learned things from every single one.   

If you think you can't do even one conference talk. I'm here to tell you that you are wrong. 

First, why would anyone give a talk? 

You personally benefit from speaking because you make new friends, it builds your portfolio, and it lets you get the word out about changes that you want to see in the tech world. 

Your company benefits because your good talk is good for its reputation and its name on your badge is free advertising. 

The conference benefits from you submitting to speak even if you're not selected because the more options the papers committee has to choose from, the better a programme they can build. If you want that, here's how. 

"What should I say" and "where should I say it" are the same question.  The best talk for you to give is at the intersection of what you know, what the conference needs, and what the audience wants to hear. 

You might have heard how the easiest trick to getting a bestselling book online is to publish in the intersection of two categories with very little overlap. 

Talks can be the same -- if you've got two disciplines that you're just average at, you might be the best in the world at their intersection if nobody else is doing it. 

So you've got some topic ideas. 

Next, find some conferences you want to attend, from their dates and locations and themes and the communities they build. 

Write a talk abstract that gives context to your idea and asks the questions that your talk will answer. Submit it a lot and you'll get rejected a lot. 

But keep those rejections with pride because each one represents a time you dodged a bullet. Each rejection is a time that a committee helped you avoid ending up in front of an empty room or a room full of people who weren't interested in what you had to say. 

Keep applying and you'll eventually get accepted and then you have to go write the rest of your talk.

Acceptance letters come with a mix of "hooray" and "what have I even signed up for" feelings, but if your abstract asked a bunch of questions, it's also a rough outline for your talk: You start your talk by writing down your answers to them. 

And then you rearrange those answers till they tell some kinda story, with a beginning and a middle and an end. There's the structure of your talk right there! You flesh out your answers with enough context so people can understand them, and you practice with a stopwatch to see how long it'll take, and you add some more content if it seems to short or cut some out if it seems too long. 

Then you gotta make slides. Play around with different designs, don't be scared to draw them yourself, if xkcd can draw a bunch of stick figures and become an icon of nerd culture then you can draw a picture for a slide. 

Draw faces on stuff whether or not it's supposed to have faces if you want people to imagine how it feels. Your audience will have a lot of human brains in it and most human brains have a huge thing for faces. 

Try not to just read the slides but instead show pictures of what you mean -- your slides are like a camera showing a super simple movie of the ideas in your head. Look at how film and TV and art put visual concepts onto screens if you need slide ideas. 

So you have your content and you have your slides, now practice a bunch and get feedback from people like your audience.  And listen to your own recordings, even though it's miserable because everyone sounds funny to themself. Ask your friends to help you by listening to your practice runs and giving feedback, and they'll be glad to, because it takes no work from them but they get the good feels of having helped. 

You get to the conference and you give the talk just like you practiced.  

Then somebody asks you a question that you don't know the answer to yet. 

 It's terrifying because you think they'll find out how little you know and you just want to crawl back to your room and check the docs for the answer...

But that's your answer right there, you tell them where you'd look or who you'd ask to find the fact they asked you for, and that answers their question by solving the underlying problem of their not knowing how to find out. And everybody who had the same questions as your abstract and came to your talk has learned something because you delivered on that abstract's promises, and the audience and organizers are happy because they got what they were looking for, and everybody cheers.