Closing Keynote At Affiliate Summit

Another awesome Affiliate Summit in the box. 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. It will also be my last. I talked to Missy Ward about giving the keynote because I had given a keynote speech 3 years ago and... it sucked. Well I thought it sucked. Its actually been haunting me a bit. 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. Especially the closing keynote. I was really nervous about it and have been working on it for weeks driving myself nuts. 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. 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.... 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. 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. I practiced on the plane, in my room... 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. Pretty much everything I shared in the talk I had never publicly talked about before. 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.