Liam Austin — One Page Virtual Summit Plan

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float.

Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Hi there.

My name is Matt Wolfe.

It's a good day.

I'm here with.

It's awesome.

Joe Fear. We're just having two separate sentences.

Yeah, we are. Just a great day.

This was supposed to be one. Two people having one sentence.

Yeah, well, yeah, I guess we'll work on that. We'll work on this whole thing. You know, it's figuring this whole communication thing out between the two of us. You know, we're not doing it quite a bit.

We're supposed to be so good that we finish each other's sentences. You actually did.

Wow.

That's precious.

Oh, wow. Okay, it's getting weird in here. All right, so today we are talking to a dude that has. Has mastered a completely unique kind of, I won't say, I guess business model marketing.

It's totally a business model.

Totally. Yeah. So we'll just say, yeah, business model. And it's not one that we've ever tr.

What?

But we're probably thinking about maybe doing it.

That's right. And it's pretty rare. If we haven't really tried some kind of business model online. This is definitely one that sounds like after talking to Liam Austin, he inspired us enough to give it a shot.

Yep.

So virtual summits.

What is it, Matt?

So basically a virtual summit is just like a regular sort of like summit. Like an event that you would go to in person where you have speakers on the stage. Let's. Let's say you go for like a two or three day event and there's like, you know, speakers, and each speaker gets like an hour or whatever. Virtual summits is kind of the same thing as those live events, but virtual like.

Yes. So you don't have comfort of my undwares. Yes.

So you don't have to travel. You don't have to pay for hotel rooms.

Right.

You just sign up to be to attend the summit and then you turn into all the speakers.

Yeah. Yeah, this is good.

I mean, I don't take showers when.

I go to events either, but it is true. I can vouch.

I don't wear pants at events either.

What? Everybody wants to go to those events now we're hosting an event ironically. No, we're not.

Nazi man's getting weird out now.

Not before this podcast comes out we aren't.

All right. Yeah. So virtual. Yeah, virtual summits are pretty damn cool. So. Yeah, Liam breaks it all down and he kind of just kind of stumbled into it more or less. But you know, he basically has a master plan that you'll freaking follow. It's really cool.

This is probably the most in depth discussion on virtual summits that I've had with anybody. And we. You're pretty much going to get a roadmap to put on your own virtual summit. And we're thinking about doing a virtual summit in the podcasting space based on this conversation, so should be pretty exciting and sweet.

Well, quick shout out. Just wanted to say we haven't mentioned this in a little bit, but GenM, GenIM, it's kind of badass still. Like, I know we haven't mentioned it maybe a month or so on this podcast, but kind of a theme. We always had these themes whenever recording our podcast and then we batch record. So we usually talk to three to four people a day. It's team, I think teams and getting like help outside of just tools. But actually having a team genim has been totally our go to as like a first touch of like, hey, like let's, let's check out some of these. You know, they're trained up pretty well in marketing, these apprentices and you know, super cheap. Under 150 bucks for three months of work. It's like 10 hours a week. So pretty sweet. And you can get some money off.

Yep.

If you go to evergreen profits.com jennm yes.

Go there.

G E N M. Go there. There's a link.

We always put a link in our show notes too because it's one of our favorite resources. It's where we find team members and it's a great value for the money. So check it out.

Helping them and they're helping you out.

You know what you go do?

What do we want to do?

We should go talk to. We should go talk about virtual summits.

We should go do that. Let's go do that. All right. Hey Liam, welcome to the show.

G' day, guys. Good to be on with both of you.

Yeah, no, this is cool. And we know a lot of the similar people. We're looking at some of your pages over there at Entrepreneur HQ and we're like, oh, we know that guy. We're buddies with that guy.

So you're a lot of mutual friends, it looks like.

Yeah. You put together pretty cool looking summit over there with amazing people.

Yeah, we've been pretty lucky, I suppose. I mean, lucky. Saying that it's been a lot of work. It's been since 2015. We first launched Entrepreneurs HQ and we've been privileged enough to get.

Almost 400 experts now teaching inside our platform, which is really cool.

Wow.

Very cool. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm looking forward to diving into what Entrepreneurs HQ is all about and virtual summits and all of that good stuff. But before we do, I want to kind of get your backstory a little bit and learn a little bit about you and how you became an entrepreneur. So how did it all start for you and kind of what was the progression to where you're at now?

So it all started at university, actually, when I got offered a role at a startup in Sydney which was a company called Soulmates Technology and they were powering Match.com's platform for dating. And I was just in there as, you know, doing a bit of customer service and managing some of the smaller affiliate partners and seeing.

The growth and the amount of people just connecting online. This is back in 99, 2000.

Quite a while ago, and. And just seeing the impact it was having on people's lives, like literally people finding love, getting married. And I just decided then and there, really that an online business was the future for me and was something that was going to be of interest to me in business.

That's cool. Yeah, I think that's. Especially back then. I mean, you were one of the pioneers in probably what that dating space that whole time when that was becoming more of a thing, it sounds like.

Yeah, well, it was kind of frowned upon, I suppose. Back home in Sydney, Australia, my friends would be saying, what are you doing on this online dating business?

It wasn't a mature market like it is now with Tinder and it being almost trendy in a way. So.

It was, I suppose, pioneering and cutting edge and I hadn't really experienced or seen the insides of an Internet company and how it worked and the people behind it, and to see that business grow and be successful and eventually exit. When I was there in the space of just three to four years, it was pretty exciting. It was fast paced and just seeing the impact, I knew that this was something that I wanted to try to, I suppose, carve out my own niche in as well.

That's so cool. It's awesome to see that, like get that experience hands on, but also now to look back at it, you're like, man, that was like an awesome time, an interesting space to be in while you're creating this new industry. So you got that kind of entrepreneurial bug or the Internet bug, I guess from there. So where'd you go after that company exited it sounds like, yeah.

So I was playing around with a few different online businesses, just trying my hand at a travel business. Then there was like a catalog business. And it took a number of years before I kind of found a community online that was interested in doing digital marketing or maybe online marketing at the time. And I kind of fell away from the online space because I didn't really know how to progress and build my own business, which I found very difficult to do as a solo entrepreneur because with that business that I was working with, I was just an employee and I wasn't there from when they first got it off the ground and got that first bit of traction. So I played my hand at a few different.

Opportunities that I saw, but none of them really grew into what I envisioned. So.

I went and worked for a few different online companies, working in marketing and sales for those in Australia. And eventually.

LinkedIn was, I suppose, at its infancy, and they first allowed you to start a group on LinkedIn. And I thought, well, here's my chance to start an online community of people with similar interests. So I launched a group on LinkedIn called the Small Business Network. And at the time, LinkedIn Groups was really new, so grew quite rapidly. And it's still now one of the largest groups for small business owners on LinkedIn, though we've renamed it to Entrepreneurs HQ to keep the branding of what it is currently. And with the growth of that group of those small business owners that were joining, there was just under 100,000 people at the time. When I decided to do something with that group of people to help them grow their businesses. And when we launched Entrepreneurs HQ and.

Did our first summit, wow, I was just laughing over here because you waited until about 100,000 people to launch. I was like, man, that is an amazing way to launch anything because you have the captive audience just, boom, ready. That's cool.

Well, I think that's part of the problem, right? Like, I didn't see this opportunity sitting in front of me as something that I wanted to pursue. Like, I was playing in other fields, like testing other ideas that I had working for someone else. And I had this group on LinkedIn that had been running for eight years, doing its thing, growing organically by itself to a hundred thousand members. But I wasn't engaged, I wasn't part of it. It was really growing organically by itself. I've done some SEO things and I was.

Approving members to join into the group, but I wasn't inside it, looking closely or I didn't have someone maybe to.

Moderate and all that, to really kickstart it and start moving and making the most of that opportunity. Which, yeah, looking back, it is quite funny. I didn't maybe do something with it earlier.

Yeah, it's tough, though. I mean, like you said, you were trying to find your way, your community. I mean, that's. Fortunately, Matt and I have kind of started with a community from day one and kind of kept that and then just grew over time. But that's helped us immensely to kind of, just like you said, it's someone to bounce ideas around. It's almost like a little virtual mastermind.

So from that point on. So it sounds like that's when what, the first summit started. Then how did that look like?

Exactly. So we had this group on LinkedIn, there was just under 100,000 people. People were reaching out, actually, to me on LinkedIn as well as via email, just saying, why aren't you doing anything with this group?

Like, there's so many interesting people in here. We want to be connecting with each other.

And LinkedIn, considering it is a platform for connecting with people, it doesn't provide the greatest experience.

At least in the group features, for what these people were looking for. So they were reaching out to me as a group owner to do something about that.

Which is what made me move away from an idea that I was working on and put some effort and time to this, because the community, my audience was demanding or asking for, requesting for these things that they wanted. So I wanted to clarify that. I went and surveyed the audience, dug a little bit deeper into, you know, what it was exactly that was missing and that they wanted. And it turned out that they were on a group on LinkedIn to connect with other small business owners. So they wanted to figure out how to use LinkedIn a little bit better to do that.

Got it.

So we ran. Yeah. So naturally we looked at bringing in some experts and we ran a few webinars.

To teach people how to use LinkedIn to generate leads for their business on that B2B space. And from there they were really successful and we could see some traction. And we decided rather than just do these one off webinars, which we were holding once a month and sometimes even more frequently to weekly, we would package all of these webinars into one big event. And we called it the LinkedIn Success Summit, which was the very first summit that we launched.

Got it. Yeah. We're looking through the Entrepreneurs HQ page right now, and there's so many different summits you've done now. And I think that one was the first on the list was the LinkedIn Success Summit. That makes sense. Why did you pick summits? I'm just curious about that.

Well, so it's interesting that we saw that when we were doing the webinars, the one off webinars, people would be opting in.

One at a time, if you like, for each of these. And it was not the biggest opt in rate that I was seeing from looking at others in the industry as well as my past experience. And with I was looking at ways that we could.

Increase the opt in rates as well as reduce our work on a weekly or monthly basis. Running these webinars.

I came across other virtual summit, I think that was occurring online. I thought, well, we could do this for LinkedIn.

We decided to launch. We had, we had a 90 day window. My partner Sarah was just finished university at the time and we were, she's Swedish, so we were looking at ways that she didn't have to return home to Sweden but she could stay in Australia because originally she was on her student visa and that was expiring. So we thought, well, let's, let's, yeah, let's start this business, let's get serious about it. And that was really the, you know, the two main, I suppose inflection points were Sarah really needed to make a decision about, well, can I earn money here in Australia and continue living here as well as the audience on my LinkedIn group. Just saying, hey, you should be doing something about this.

Yeah, yeah, that makes, that makes sense.

Yeah. Merging them together just worked really well. And so we had 90 days to kind of make this happen before Christmas, before Sarah was planning to maybe move back to Europe. That was our deadline that we set ourselves. And fortunately for us, we put in a lot of effort to network with influencers on LinkedIn who obviously were great at building a network on LinkedIn, generating leads from LinkedIn to teach others. And we found 35 of those to share their number one tactic for generating leads on LinkedIn. And when we launched in December of 2015, we launched with over 15,000.

Attendees for the summit, which meant 15,000 new email subscribers for our list as well.

Oh yeah, that's so cool.

Yeah. Now, my experience with virtual summits, so Joe and I, we've never actually launched a virtual summit, but we have been asked to speak on a handful of virtual summits. So we've seen it from that speaker side. And my impression of it, it always looked like a very complicated thing. You're trying to herd cats and round up all sorts of people. To be at certain places at certain times. So I imagine you probably have some pretty good systems and processes built to kind of do it a little more effortlessly now. So I'm wondering if we can dive into that a little bit and, and discuss kind of your process for creating these virtual summits.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, you mentioned earlier that we've done a number of these summits now, and right now we've done completed 14 of them since 2015. So it's three to four per year. And so we've managed to create some really strong processes over the years that we've refined and tested and improved to make sure that we maximize the opt in rate that I was talking about before, which our opt in rate from our summit looking at, they're about 67% on average, but from targeted.

Ads and.

Emails, we can get up to a 75 to 80% opt in rate, which is awesome compared to those webinars that we were promoting.

Back before we started doing summits. And we're only getting, you know, a 30 to 50% opt in rate.

Wow. The one summit that I didn't see on there is a podcast summit. So we gotta get.

You know, a lot of podcasters if you need that.

Or an affiliate marketing summit. There may have been one of those, though.

I didn't look for that. Yeah, but sorry to keep going.

That one is available, mate. That one for sure.

Oh, there you go.

So we've created what we call a one page virtual summit plan. And we use this for our students as well inside our virtual summit academy, where we basically have a few.

There's five boxes here where we get people to complete and I can go through each of those briefly now and we can maybe dive into more detail if you guys have got some questions.

Sweet. Perfect.

So with the one page virtual summit plan, this is really set up to just make your summit much more simple and eradicate that overwhelm and the complicatedness that you may think about that summit. So we do this right at the very beginning to get really clear on our objectives and our goals, but also to just refer back to whenever we're planning our summits or launching our summits, which we recommend around 90 days if you're doing your first event.

Got it. So that's kind of the timeline. It's about 90 days or so.

Yeah, I think we've done it certainly in less time than that, but when you are rushing like that, it does become more overwhelming, stressful, and the results don't seem to be as good. If you.

Take your time and spend a full 90 days or even more in making sure that you've ticked all the boxes and that you've done everything you can to make sure that you maximize the results and the revenue that you get from the event.

Gotcha.

So just in that first box we're looking at.

Clarifying that, the topic of your summit, so what niche you're targeting, the name of the event, the specific dates of your event, and we can go into some details about these in a moment. But the next thing we like to go into is the target audience and really defining your avatar and who you're speaking to, which defines so much about the summit, including the copy and even the name itself.

Looking at the goals of your summit, like what is it that you want to achieve from the summit? Because a virtual summit can, like it did for us, launch a business and keep a couple together.

And in a relationship. So if you're looking to launch a brand new business, you've got an idea for a product for a service, for something that's going to help.

People in your audience, then Summit is a great way to get the word out about that, to build your own influence, to build your network of influences inside your niche, to build your email list as well as get a bit of money revenue coming in within those first few months of launching.

Gotcha. So that's the third box sounds like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the, that's the third box. That's right. The fourth is the, the tech stack you want to decide to use. So we, there's, there's kind of two options here. There's like an all in one solution where there's a couple of different software you can use. But ClickFunnels is the one that is kind of our go to, which will handle all of the tech for those people who are just starting out, may not have their own website. And the other option is to.

Bundle a few different tools together like WordPress, your CRM or email marketing system and a few other tools. And the fifth and final box is really just nailing down what your offer is and the bonuses you want to offer to people who are attending the summit. Which is.

The way that we like to market and promote our summits by offering a free ticket to the live event, which may be say a five day online event, but selling the recordings and any bonuses, any upgrades as well.

Got it. So just to kind of clarify, the actual model behind it is when people register, when they opt in to get access to it, they essentially for free get access to Watch live when you're actually doing the interviews, Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right. So with a virtual summit, the way that we like to do it with our Virtual Summit Academy students, and the way that we've done it for our 14 summits, that's worked most successfully because we have tested a few different ways here. But being an Australian, we don't get access to some of the experts that are taking the stages and the conferences in the U.S. canada or elsewhere, maybe in Britain or around the world. So to be able to give.

Access to Australians as well as people who may find it difficult to travel to the US to.

Learn from these guys, we make it free. And over 90% of our audience are able to access all of the video trainings from the summit for free.

And then there is an upsell for people who can purchase the recordings of those same videos to watch in their own time, but as well as some additional bonuses that really complement and add extra value to people who decide they want to.

Take that next step with us in that specific topic.

Got it. Monetization. Just to hone on that for a minute, it sounds like you're selling the recordings.

Is there anything else besides that? Are you getting a commission from anything affiliate wise from these speakers or, or anything later down the line?

Yeah, I suppose this is the biggest benefit of a summit is not necessarily the money you make just from the summit itself. And yes, you can be selling though the recordings as well as these extra bonuses that I mentioned. But if you do have another product or service that aligns really well with your summit topic, and hopefully it does, because that's the reason why you're doing a summit in the first place, is to build up your network of influencers, your email list, your audience, to ultimately.

Take them down the path with you to sell them the product or service that you originally have created in your business. So once you've got the email list, literally, yeah, you can start selling them your extra products or services that you've created, any affiliate marketing promotions that you may have set up in creating your virtual summit with, you know, the speakers, the experts or the affiliates that you've got involved. And there's, there's a numerous different ways that you can begin to monetize this email list that you've built exclusively from your virtual summit. And just as a reminder, I mean, from our very first virtual summit that we ran, we had 15,000 people who signed up for our virtual Summit. We had 500 of them purchase and there was another 14,000 of them who we were able to promote to.

After the summit.

That makes sense.

I love it.

So do you ever just pre record all of the, the, the videos? Because, you know, it's the, the virtual summits that I've been involved in in the past. There was never really a live element to it. They've always, you know, they've kind of scheduled recording dates, kind of like we do with this podcast, and they record a whole bunch of interviews with people and then on launch day they release them for free. And then, you know, you get free access for like three days or something. And then after the three days, that's where, you know, you, you, you want to have purchased the recordings to get continued access. That's kind of been my experience. Do you ever do any of that, that sort of pre recording of it or are they always done live the first time around?

Yeah, we always promote and recommend that people record the interviews or the presentations in advance. Especially, especially for the first summit when you may be a little bit nervous, you may have, you know, some, some difficulties in arranging the experts to come live at a certain time. And then going live on top of that really adds to your overwhelm. And if you've got, if you've got 90 days to prepare for your summit and you've got, you know, three months, then to fit all the interviews in, it's going to be a much better experience for, for you to as well as the experts, because you can schedule it in at the time that suits them, rather than saying, well, we need to slot you in this specific time on this specific date because that's when the summit's going live. And we found that it actually increases the quality of the content being provided to. Just because you as the host.

Bringing on the presenter is more prepared for each individual presentation because you're maybe doing only one or two at a time versus trying to fit in seven or more in a day when you launch the summit, which is just going to lead to stress, overwhelm and mistakes occurring.

Actually this just reminded me I did actually kind of manage. We didn't call it a summit, but it was basically a live stream stream all day long. This is back when I worked with Amish Shah and this is kind of in the personal development space. But yeah, I think we had eight speakers in one day and it was absolutely fucking chaos. And I had to manage a lot of it. I was involved in on there too. I was just like, this is insane. We had so many people working and it was just in a house. It wasn't like we were in some elaborate place either.

Yeah, yeah.

So I could see why pre recording it, pre planning it, I mean, like, dear God, like I'm gray for a reason way too early in life. So, yeah, I think that's a smart approach. Very scalable that way too.

Yeah. So when it comes to actually getting these experts on board, you know, what advice do you give people to actually connect with the people they want to bring into the summit? And you know, how do you, how do you kind of herd everybody and round everybody up to be on the show? Because I know from our experience of just doing this podcast, it's often really difficult to coordinate schedules. It's often difficult to get some of the bigger, you know, bigger names that maybe don't have as much time as some other people to actually set aside time for the show. And you know, looking at your list of people you've had, you've had some really well known, really successful entrepreneurs on your summit. So how do you, how do you manage that? How do you round those people up? How do you, how do you get them to agree to do it?

Yeah, there's definitely a process to it and making it easier for yourself if you know what you're doing. And I'm sure you guys running your podcast, you've probably got this process down pat as well. But what we like to do is look for people who have already appeared on some kind of stage before. So whether that's an in person conference, whether that's an online conference or summit, or even a podcast as well. And these people who have appeared on, say a podcast or virtual summit in the past, they have the tech setup, number one, to be able to join and be part of a virtual summit without having to go out and purchase a microphone, a camera and so forth. The Internet connection, that needs to be the right speed for the video quality. So we look at people who have already appeared on these stages before. If they've appeared on a summit, they're hopefully familiar with.

How a summit works. But also we like to make sure.

That.

We'Re explaining to them the benefits of being part of our summits and making sure that it is a win win. Because as you mentioned, we have had some.

Big names speak at our summits and now part of the Entrepreneurs HQ membership. But that really all came about because we were able to look after those relationships with previous speakers and in turn get referrals to others who are willing to recommend us based on their great experience and making that really a win win for both the speaker and ourselves.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And it sounds like you have a very similar process to what we do with the podcast. We, you know, we very much lean on our network and it's kind of a snowball effect. Some of the bigger name guests that you get can introduce you to other bigger name guests and you could kind of get it to snowball. So I totally see that for sure. Now.

You mentioned that when you reach out to these people, you need to really clearly explain the benefits of being involved in this virtual summit. Can you kind of give us a rundown of what those benefits are for the speakers to actually come on and be a part of the virtual summit, especially the bigger name speakers who they may not be coming on to get more exposure because that brand, that exposure might already be there. So what are the benefits besides the brand exposure kind of stuff?

So when you're looking at the bigger names, we've managed to tie some of these up based on.

Timing it right.

So looking at, is there a book that they're looking to launch and release to the marketplace that they specifically want to get the word out about, or is it a new product or service that they're about to launch and again, yes, want to get the word out about it. So we look at, take the people who we're keen to target that we're keen to bring on and have teach our audience and try to find when would be the most appropriate time and most valuable time for them to come on. So again, looking at that way that we can make it a win win for both of us.

That's actually really smart and we don't actively always do that, but yeah, that's a very easy way to get some larger names onto say a podcast or anything you're doing there.

Yeah. And it is sometimes hard to identify. Well, when is someone coming out with a new book? And it's a matter of, for us, the easiest way has been making sure that you're on their email list. Maybe you're following this influencer on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, wherever they hang out. And.

If you are getting their emails, maybe respond to them and let them know that you'd like to bring them on when there is an opportunity for them, when they want to get out the word about their new book or product, just to make sure that you're on their radar and they're able to reach out to you when the time's right.

Yeah, I was going to ask you actually, how do you keep tabs? And it just sounds like manual research and that's pretty much what we do as well that in connections, any kind of referrals we can get, that is usually the number one way we bring anyone onto this show. So, yeah, it's definitely very similar to podcasts. So if someone's starting summits for the very first time, and what would you recommend are the kind of go to traffic sources to actually get qualified people signing up to watch this thing and join?

Yeah, well, our number one traffic source has definitely been email and we. Well, I'm a big fan of making sure that you're growing your email list and growing that asset.

Because.

We had a LinkedIn group and we still do have this LinkedIn group. And the reason I said had was that.

The power of that group has reduced for me as a owner of that group.

And this goes for, I suppose, any social media where you may be promoting yourself on social media, you may be getting likes on Facebook for your Facebook page or growing your Facebook group, or it might be your followers on Instagram. For us, it was our LinkedIn group and.

When we first launched our LinkedIn Success Summit, we were able to send an email directly to all the members of our LinkedIn group. So 100,000 of them, but we could only do it once a week. Yeah, it was very nice.

It was something that was still sent by LinkedIn. So it's from their email address, but we were able to obviously customize the subject line as well as the content of it. Now, it wasn't as good as your own email list because there were some group owners that were spamming their groups and it meant that some of the. Because it was being delivered from a LinkedIn email, it was either hitting the promotions tab or hitting the spam folder for a lot of our audience, unfortunately. So quite early on, after we did our first summit, the second summit we did was on email marketing, the email Success Summit. And that really occurred because all of the people who we had on talking about LinkedIn were suggesting that, yes, LinkedIn is an awesome platform for connecting, reaching out and meeting people maybe for the first time. But as soon as you've, yes. Connected with someone, you want to get them off the platform, you want to get their email address, you want to get them on the phone, or you want to meet them in person. So getting their email address was really the first step. And that has been certainly the most.

Prolific way that we've managed to get traffic for our summits.

Got it. So basically you're saying, tap all these audiences that you might not totally control, bring them on your email List somehow.

Yeah, yeah. Now, how, how much of a factor is the actual speakers of this summit? Because I imagine part of the idea is, let's say you have 30, 35 speakers on one summit. Ideally, those 30, 35 speakers are going to, you know, maybe mail their list, maybe share it on Facebook or Twitter or something like that, and drive some traffic. How much of a factor is those guests driving traffic?

I mean, it's enormous. Partnerships for us have been responsible for maybe 70, 80% of our revenue and our growth.

And that goes for speakers, affiliates, referral partners as well. And those are the three main sources that we look to rely on to, to feed and grow. Our own email list is really looking at those partnerships. So each of those I can go through maybe individually. Our speakers. Virtual summits work really well because you're promoting someone as an expert, you're putting them on a stage alongside all these other experts and they're keen to share that with their own audience. So similar, if they got featured in a magazine and newspaper, or online or on a podcast in a book, they're quite keen to share it with their audience. So that's a fantastic source of traffic for us, having the speakers involved, and not just involved as a partner, but we're actually promoting them to our audience.

And they're more than willing to promote it to their audience because they're promoting themselves at the same time. We've then got our affiliate partners who are able to promote a free ticket to an event with 30 expert speakers that you'd normally pay a few hundred dollars for to turn up and learn from at a conference. So the value there is really high, which is why we're getting, we're able to get somewhere between a 65 to 75% opt in rate for the free ticket offer for our summit. So the partners win by just promoting the free ticket. And if any of those people that they refer purchase, they get a commission for that. And we like to provide a 50% commission for anyone who purchases one of our summit packages. And then the third partners is really looking to turn.

Your attendees, the people who have already opted in for their free ticket, into advocates or ambassadors. So they say they're probably part of a community or a group or a network, maybe it's their colleagues at work who are also interested in learning about this topic and attending the summit. So we enlist them to promote the event, promote the free ticket out to their own networks, and whether that's via Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, via email or word of mouth, and we reward them based on the number of referrals that they send. So typically we reward.

At 5 referrals, at 10 referrals, and then at 25 referrals. And at each stage they get more and more access to the full summit package.

This is like a foolproof system for traffic. And you haven't even mentioned paid traffic. I think maybe you mentioned that way early in the interview. But do you do any paid traffic at all to these summits?

We've done a little bit, but we've found that you don't need paid traffic for a successful summit, at least to cold traffic. Paid traffic works really well when you're retargeting. That's when you're obviously getting quite a great good return on investment. But we've found, As I said, 78% have come from our partnerships and our partnerships with, with speakers, with, with affiliates and with our ambassadors.

Oh yeah, I imagine this would just crush it with retargeting. Anybody lands on the page but doesn't register, you retarget them back to hey, you forgot to finish your registration or the virtual Summit. And then anybody who's registered but didn't buy the recordings, you retarget those people with, hey, we saw you registered but haven't locked in the recordings yet.

Yeah, discount offers, bonuses, whatever.

I would imagine that would work really well. We're huge paid traffic nerds. Our kind of thing is paid traffic and so we nerd out about that kind of stuff and the potential.

Yeah.

That'S probably something that I could probably brush up a little bit. I think more on is the paid traffic and the potential there.

Oh yeah.

Happy to bounce ideas around with you and you a lot of folks.

Yeah, hit us up.

I have one question about the actual presentations on the Virtual Summit. You know, obviously if you were going to go to like a summit in person where you fly out and stay at a hotel and see people on stage, the speakers, they typically have like a pre prepared presentation, right? They've got slides and their, their whole kind of presentation that they go through. Now on virtual Summits, it's typically a little different. Right now are you typically interviewing the people on a very specific subject or are they coming with a presentation prepared?

It's both. The thing is with a Virtual Summit is we're trying to make it as easy as possible for our speakers to say yes, to be involved and do a presentation or an interview. And so that's why we prerecord it where we're just like, all right, well all we need is 30 minutes of your time.

When suits you, book a time in the calendar. So we are able to make it easy for them and be flexible enough to work around the expert. And then it's a matter of, well.

This is the audience that we're speaking to.

Are you able to do a presentation? Is there something specific that you want to share.

Or would you prefer to do an interview and you can go at it a few different ways. The simplest from a speaker's point of view is to just come on without any preparation and do an interview. And then all the way up to the most time intensive, which would be to prepare a brand new presentation. And we've had.

That whole range of people present at our summits, from preparing a brand new presentation all the way through to doing an interview. But the interview has definitely been the most common preference from the speaker's point of view. And being able to confirm a speaker as being part of your event. And some of these bigger names can really be a draw card to bring in extra attendees. Especially when you're asking your ambassadors to share it with their friends. They want to share with their friends and tell them that XYZ is going to be attending and speaking, so you should really come. So that's how we approach it. But there are certainly different summits out there that focus purely on just doing recorded interviews. Then there might be some that incorporate a live element to that as well as going into a full blown.

New presentation.

Where do you see this going in the future with virtual summits? Do you think this is something that will keep growing or are you going to mold these differently as you get further on into this whole thing? You've been doing this since what, it was 2015 now, your first one?

Yeah, it was being done for many years before I got started in it too.

It has been going for a while and it's certainly evolved from being.

The way that we teach in the Virtual Summit Academy is a bit different to. And we've got a specific process that we know that works and has been proven to work across our summits as well as our students as well. But there's.

There'S people that are creating summits that are. For instance, there's one that's done over $30 million across a three year period running summits and continue to do so. And that grows every year. I think the first year they did a quarter of a million and now on their last event they did 9.8.

From their summit. So it's definitely something that's growing. And how do I see it changing? I Think that there's new ideas coming out into the marketplace. And I think a lot of your listeners as well as yourselves are probably quite familiar with the summit model. But there's so many niches that haven't come across what a virtual summit is, which would be really successful. I mean, when we did our LinkedIn summit, no one had done much in the LinkedIn space. And I think there was something that we were talking about earlier that, you know, LinkedIn is something that maybe, you know, should be talked about more. So we found something that there was a big opportunity, a big need for more information, and we managed to release it at the right time. So when we look at our opt in rates from 2015 all the way up until now, it hasn't really dropped. It's still in the high 65 to 75% opt in rate. And that's due to making sure that you're targeting the right audience with the right offer and making sure that you've got the right partners involved.

Yeah, I love this whole model because. Well, for one, I don't think that the virtual summit thing, outside of the business space, there's probably so many other niches out there that you could do totally take this to. And it'd be like, what is this virtual meeting, this thing based off of a specific topic? And I can even see this being great for anyone trying to break into a new niche or niche. And maybe you partner up with an expert or maybe you just interview people as like, I'm the dumb guy here.

Yeah, no, that's good to say. Like, it's a great way to sort of immerse yourself in a niche that maybe you want to be in.

Right, right.

Like if, let's say real estate, for example, I'm sure there's a ton of real estate summits because we know Scott Carson does them. Right. But, you know, let's say we wanted to get into real estate. We can go and ask some of our real estate buddies, like, hey, what are the top, like, 20 experts in real estate? Line them all up. And like, we just get our own education in that world and one of the side benefits is we get to share it and sell it with other people.

Yeah.

We'Re not claiming we'd be the.

Experts on that case, but I don't mind it.

Yeah. So, yeah, no, I could just see this being an awesome model that doesn't take a. I mean, obviously a lot of prep work, but it doesn't mean you need to be an expert necessarily in the space. Just gather up the experts and essentially present them.

Yeah. And we talked just about the 90 days.

From beginning to have your summit launched and finished. But the, the value that you've created lives long on past the launch of the summit. So say you've got 30 speakers that are the top experts in your niche. You've now spent half an hour interviewing them or doing a presentation with them over video. You're now friends and you've probably exchanged several different emails prior to the event, beginning as well as post the event. And you've done something great for them, You've put them on a stage, you've promoted them out to your audience as well as hopefully got them in front of a few thousand people that they wouldn't have been able to if they hadn't have met you. So suddenly you've got a group of 30 of the top people in your niche and you're now got a personal relationship with those people. And that can lead to many different partnerships down the road, introductions and referrals.

PR opportunities and new customers. There's so many, I suppose, opportunities that come from just that one interaction. By creating that summit with those experts.

And you're growing your brand and own credibility through association as well. Now anybody who goes through these virtual summits now goes, oh, Liam is buddies with Perry Marshall, Liam is buddies with the founder of Basecamp. And you actually start to build this sort of brand credibility through the association of others. And people start to see you on that sort of same level as those other people.

Yeah, absolutely. So when we ran our first LinkedIn event, we had 35 LinkedIn consultants, coaches, trainers, and I certainly wasn't one of those. Yet as the host of that event, I had the 15,000.

People on my email list now looking at me as the expert on LinkedIn, to provide them with more content, more training to help them grow their business, to generate more leads and sales on LinkedIn. And so my authority was instantly raised by association by being placed alongside these experts and being able to, or being seen as the head of that community and being able to be the source of bringing those people and that group of people together, wasn't it?

Like the Connectors. The Connectors are always remembered, the people who connect others, or that was the whole concept. Create the party, create the event.

That's the Go Giver.

That's the Go Giver.

Yeah.

You are that person. You are the most important person in that whole process there and to everybody. So it's a super powerful position to be in. That's why partially, we love our podcast that's one of the biggest reasons why we love it.

So I've got two more questions kind of on this rabbit hole and they'll probably both be pretty quick questions.

The first question is when you. So you said you start planning this 90 days out now, are you recording with people throughout that entire 90 days or do you kind of go, all right, I'm going to. This is, this is how Joe and I would probably do it if we were going to put on a virtual summit is we'd probably say, okay, this week, the week of, you know, March 17th is our hell week. And we're just going to line up interviews back to back to back to back for like five days straight and knock out like all 30 interviews over five day period. Knowing me and Joe, that's probably how we do it.

We like compressed deadlines.

We just like to get it all out of our system in one shot and go, all right, let's just get all the hard part out of the way right away. But I'm curious, like how, what is your process for actually getting these recordings? Do you kind of space them out and leave time between them or do you try to just knock them all out as quickly as possible?

Yeah, so we've, we've definitely got a process for that. And it that 90 days, we've actually got a 90 day summit launch planner that we have, which is like a calendar that counts you down from.

Day 90 all the way down to day one launch day.

Nice.

The way that we like to look at it is that first 30 days we're looking at figuring out that one page plan that we talked about earlier as well as starting to reach out to the experts, the speakers, the influencers that we want to be involved and be part of the event. Then once it comes down to scheduling and recording the sessions, it's important to be flexible with some of your experts, but at the same time keep your sanity.

With our virtual summit academy, we're all about trying to make it just simple and reduce your overwhelm. Similar to you guys, we batch our recordings. I've found that if I do any more than four in a row, four in a day, I become quite tired and I lose my enthusiasm. And that comes across during, during the session. So I normally just create or provide my calendar via calendly calendly.com link give that out to the speakers and just say, okay, well book a time that suits you in my calendar. If there's a time that doesn't work for you, that's fine, just reply and let me know of a couple of times it may work and I'll make sure that I fit you in.

Got it.

Yeah.

I mean it's very similar to our podcast process. We found that four in a day is about our max as well.

By the end of the fourth one and we're just like, man, we've done.

Five in a day. And I feel sorry for our fifth interview.

Yeah, that's why we're paranormal down. I think three a day now. Like we just want to keep it chill a little bit.

Yeah. So I said I had two more questions, but I still have two more. I've thought of more.

Go for it.

So as far as these, the interviews that you're doing with people for the virtual summit, have you found. So this is kind of a two part question. Have you found an optimal length of the actual interview? Do you shoot for like a 30 minute call, an hour call? What's the optimal length? And then also part two of the question. This is basically my way of turning two questions into three. So part two of that question is, have you found, have you found a sort of optimal number of guests for a virtual summit? So you know, how long per presentation and like how many guests are you shooting for per virtual summit?

Yeah, definitely. So we've tested from a 20 person event up until over 40 person event.

The 40 person event was overwhelming. It was a bit too much of an effort, especially when we looked at the rewards of things. It actually took away from the amount of time we spent marketing the event. That's what a virtual summit is actually all about. It's creating really valuable content, but making sure that it reaches as many people as possible. So marketing does take up 80 to 90% of the time and effort spent in launching your summit. So we've found that.

When we ran a 40 event, it was a bit overwhelming and the results didn't return.

Enough of the revenue as well as email lists to justify that number. When we did 20, it was a lot easier for us to do. We're able to spend more time in marketing. However.

The opt in rate was slightly lower than what we were getting with our 30 and 40 summit. So 30 and 40 person summit. So we've found that the 30 plus number has resonated really well with our audience. It's made sure that it's maximized our opt in rates.

We can't really go any higher with our opt in rates. Then if you go 40, 50, 60 people, it hasn't really made a difference for us. And then it's Given us also enough time to spend on marketing, nurturing the relationships with the speakers. I mean, 30 going above that is difficult to make sure you're being personal and building the relationships with these influencers, because that is, is one of the major benefits of being a host of a summit or a podcast is, you know, networking and building your network. So 30 + would be the answer to the number of speakers and then in terms of length of time. We did our first three events at the 45 minute mark for each session and we actually got feedback from our audience saying that it was too long. And when we looked at the viewing times of the videos, we were finding that people were dropping off.

And there was a bit of fluff involved in those 45 minute interviews where we were talking a little bit about things that weren't.

Heading towards the goal of the event, the objective, the reason why people were signing up in the first place. So we reduced it to a 25 minute session, which I think was good for a lot of the speakers as well. But it also meant that we could really just dive straight into the value of the presentation. So in our case, all of our summits and our Entrepreneurs HQ membership is focused on lead generation. So we just jump in and say, all right, so.

Today our speaker is Matt. And Matt's going to teach us his number one tactic on generating leads. Talk us through how you generate leads on LinkedIn and what kind of results people can expect. And we walk through people a specific process to attain that result.

Love it. So you're just jumping straight to the meat.

I think that's what people want.

Yeah, especially, especially with our, our, our niche and our topic. There might be other, you know, niches or topics that may vary on that and may vary with the length of time to record. But we've found that, you know, the short and sharp 25 minute sessions has, has worked really well for our audience as well as for our speakers to.

Makes sense with the objectives that you put out there too. It allows you to have multiple of these summits. So you're not trying to cover everything at once. Be very laser focused with it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So one last little topic here. So with this content, assuming the content.

Has some longevity, assuming the content kind of stays relevant, how long do you continue to sell the virtual summits after it's been recorded? Do you repurpose any of the content? But once the dust settles, what happens with all this content you just created?

Yeah, well, we didn't even get into any of that in the last hour.

No. That's why I was a little afraid, but maybe a little quick teaser and then obviously, you've got resources that we can point people to after this.

Totally, for sure. So.

As everyone knows, we started off with just creating one summit. We've now done 14 summits, which we sell individually, but we also package up into a membership. So you can certainly look at, if you're running multiple summits, packaging them up into a membership so people get access to all of the past events, especially if they're evergreen. And we've learned that it is certainly beneficial for you to be creating evergreen content.

Because we've been able to, yes, make sure we can sell those summits individually into the future. As long as they remain relevant, they remain relevant inside the membership and we can promote those topics as value to any new members. We've turned our summits into.

Each of our sessions, from each of our summits into blog posts.

So we repurpose them into a text form as well as into a daily email that we send out, which is all focused around, as I said, lead generation, how to generate more leads online.

Where do we start? We've got the virtual Summit, we've got the membership, we've got a daily email, we've got blog posts, and we've even been able to create a YouTube channel from.

Clipping out snippets from the video to showcase some of the top tactics for free out on YouTube.

I think that's.

Once you've got the. When you're recording the sessions for your virtual summit, you're recording it as video, so you can then look at opportunities to.

Repurpose those videos into text format, audio format, into images, infographics, that kind of thing.

The great thing, I suppose, about this is that you've got the videos there, so you can start.

Working your way down from there and repurposing them into different features. I've seen people create books and sell the books from the experts, as well as courses and of course, a membership.

Yeah, love it. We do a lot of that stuff. Very similar stuff. It's like, don't make the asset once and then never use it again.

Yeah, no, that's the benefits of being prolific content creators is there's so many ways that you can leverage that content once it's been created the first time.

Yeah, love it. Well, thank you for answering Matt's extra questions there.

I was just going to say, when you've done one summit, you've got 30 experts speaking at that event. You've certainly got enough content for the Remainder of the year for your social media, for your emails, for your blogs. So those 90 days can really set you up for the rest of the year.

That's smart. Very smart. Okay, so to wrap it up, just a couple questions. What is a book that you recommend to others that you just find yourself going to? It's an amazing resource. It could be your personal stuff outside of business or business type book.

Yeah. The most recent one is Work Less, Make More by James Schramko. And I suppose it kind of touches on one of the topics or people may assume about virtual summits being overwhelming. I think if you follow a process that's been tried and tested and, and this goes with anything in business, you follow the experts and model what they're doing. They don't necessarily copy, but model what they're doing, then you're going to be able to do things quicker, faster, and more successfully.

Love it.

Yeah. I mean, James is one of our mentors, actually. He's been on our show twice. We've been on his show twice.

I know he listens to every episode or almost every episode. So when he hears this, he'll be like, aha.

So that's cool. All right. And for folks to check you out, is entrepreneurshq.com the best place?

Yeah, that's right. Entrepreneurs with an S HQ.com and if people go to entrepreneurshq.com summit, they can check out a bit of a guide and some steps on how to create their own summit. They can download the one page plan that I was talking about there as well.

Perfect. Entrepreneurshq.com all right, we'll link everything up in the show, notes and all that. And Matt, I think we're good. Huh?

I think that covers about everything.

Awesome, man. Liam, thank you for your time. This has been super cool.

Yeah, brilliant. Thanks very much, Matt and Joe for inviting me on.

I got it. My man. All right, talk soon.

Bye. Bye.

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