Adam Trachtenburg has a new post today with a few helpful hints on how to get your conference approval approved when submitting it to any of the conferences around the IT world (he specifically mentions the upcoming Zend conference).

I strongly encourage people new to speaking circuit to submit multiple proposals because sometimes I don’t select a talk because of anything bad with the speaker or the proposal, but because I have a much better speaker for that position.

Therefore, the more quality topics you offer up, the better chance you have.

One common problem is that people often submit really specific talks about topics nobody cares about. For example, there are too many database abstraction layers already for PHP. Yours may be better, but if you don’t have a community of people using it to prove that to me, I’m never going to select it over a talk on PDO, PEAR::DB, ADODB, or even MDB.

There are a few other tips in this lengthy post - being more specific, submitting something that can get in on one of the "expensive tutorial slots", and advice on narrowing down the topic to increase your chances that no one else (more well known) will submit something very similar...