Behind the Scenes of Our First (And Profitable) Online Summit
Episode 272: Show Notes
Thanks for tuning in to another amazing episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast! These are definitely our favorite episodes to bring today. Today on the show we are breaking it down and showing you the behind-the-scenes of the creation and the progress of our very first online virtual summit, The Boss Project Summit. The Summit will run for four full days from November 6th to the 9th, 2018. We have 40 different speakers, including keynotes and breakouts and we have divided each day into four themes throughout the summit. So as you can see, we have a ton of great stuff planned for y’all!
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Now before we jump into this episode and all the things that are happening, if you have yet to sign up, get your booty over to the Boss Project Summit website and sign up. It’s totally free and we are so excited for the 5,000 people who have already signed up! So if you want to hear about why we decided to do a summit and what lit the fire for us to take on this new project, you’re going to want to go back and listen to Episode 270. However, that episode is definitely not a prerequisite for jumping into this one, so let’s get started!
Getting Paid Sponsors for an Online Live Event
One of the things that we were nervous about, but have been very pleasantly surprised by, was diving into paid sponsors for an online live event. Working with brands on big-time collaborations isn’t something that has come easily to us in the past and isn’t where a lot of our focus is. So we were kind of going into it thinking that we might as well try it out and see what happens! Searching for sponsors was a completely new avenue and every time we explore something new there is always some apprehension around it. For the summit we decided to go over some bigger relationships and really define some packages that we felt would serve our sponsors well, and we have been so impressed by how it all worked out!
For anyone who’s been thinking of exploring sponsorship relationships or working with brands, consider our rule. From day one, even before we had an audience to land a sponsor, we agreed that we would never have a sponsor if we didn’t already personally use their products or services and know how big of an impact it could be for creative small business owners. So in the past, we’ve turned down sponsors when they did not fit with our business or the needs of you, our audience. The sponsors that we reached out to were hand-selected, we knew them really well, and knew that what they were putting out into this space is so helpful for our community that we had no problem talking about how amazing they are!
How Our Sponsors Have Helped Our Summit Event
We are absolutely floored by the amazing list of sponsors who have either reached out to us or agreed to work with us to put on the Summit. They have given us the confidence to know that this Summit was worth putting on for you guys. Just to mention a few ways that our sponsors have helped with the summit, Dubsado has been a huge part of this event in a way that we didn’t even anticipate. They are so excited and able to get their community involved in a way that is so natural for both our audience and theirs. Having our audiences on the same wavelength, getting excited about the summit just makes sense! Modern Conference has been a big part of our layout and how the summit was put together.
We also have Member Vault, who have truly helped with the gamification of our business. Tailwind is a product that we know and love, and hope our audience uses as well. Hello Bar has been working with us to create really awesome pop-over pages to increase conversions and signups for various things. We’ve had the founder of MeetEdgar on the podcast and discussed at length how we’ve reworked our Facebook communication and they’ve helped us keep that all organized. We’ve also had the owner of Shop Compliment, Melissa, on the podcast and she is doing all of our speaker gifts, which we are so excited for. Then we also have Leadpages involved, who we’ve used since the beginning! We are super excited to be working with all of these amazing men and women, and without them the Summit would not be what it is today.
Getting Over 3,000 Summit Signups Before Advertising
One of the things we decided to do for this summit that is different than a lot of other summits is to have affiliates. It is safe to say that we have pretty much never had affiliates for our own products before. For the most part, other than a few webinars, there’s never been anyone else promoting us. So this time we picked top-notch speakers to come on and we have these amazing sponsors, but we gave them all an opportunity to earn commission. Because of that, they have helped promote in a BIG way! We would not be anywhere close to where we are with signups today if we hadn’t had those relationships and we hadn’t given them the opportunity to tell share the summit with their audiences. Just from our affiliates promoting the summit, we are reaching well over a million people in just email inboxes alone, which is bananas! The main thing is, we just incentivized our people well to want to talk about it, casting a really wide net, which allowed the first 3,000 signups to happen so quickly. It was absolutely amazing to see!
How We Landed Big-Named Sponsors, Speakers, and Affiliates
First and foremost, we want you to know that we did NOT simply reach out and sponsors magically said yes via email. A couple things really lined up for us in that regard; first of all, pretty much every one of our sponsors is someone that we know personally and have known for a while. So that works to our benefit, dramatically! These are people we are friends with, they are people we talk online with frequently, which definitely makes it easier to get a “yes”. Also, these people are busy and a bunch of them have virtual assistants answering their email. So instead of emailing them, a lot of the initial conversations were us personally messaging them on Instagram or talking to them in person.
Creating a Well-Rounded Summit Event
Although having those big-name speakers on board is a major win for us, on the flip side, we wanted to make sure that the virtual room wasn’t just filled with our best friends. So once we landed people with recognizable names, we also made sure to lend our platform to smaller businesses with less-known names who are just super smart and killing it in their own areas. To find these hidden gems, we went on a hunt in our Facebook group and others to really rope in the people we were looking for. This will give them the opportunity to speak to this large of an audience for the first time, and we are really excited to see them shine and see how their businesses shift after a big event like this. These people are absolutely amazing, and in our books we feel that everyone should know about them for sure!
Quote This
We are not patient people; we get really excited and we go from idea to implementing very, very quickly!
Highlights
Getting Paid Sponsors for an Online Live Event. [0:03:22.1]
How Our Sponsors Have Helped Our Summit Event. [0:10:27.1]
Getting Over 3,000 Summit Signups Before Advertising. [0:16:02.1]
How We Landed Big-Named Sponsors, Speakers, and Affiliates. [0:26:41.1]
Creating a Well-Rounded Summit Event. [0:32:02.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Sponsorships, Online summit, Benefits of sponsors, Affiliate promotion, Landing sponsorship deals, In-person communication, Creating opportunities, Summit technicals
WE MENTIONED
Episode 67: Becca and Jake Berg
