127: Repurpose Your Virtual Summit Into a Money-Making Evergreen Funnel
You've spent three months or more on launching a virtual summit. Now that it's over, how do you continue to benefit from all of your hard earned work?
Did you know that you an evergreen a virtual summit?
Listen in while I chat with Jenn Zellers with Virtual Summit Search. Jenn is a Virtual Summit Alchemist and she empowers new and established summit hosts and speakers to create more reach and impact by extending the lifespan of their one-hit-wonder virtual summit experiences - without slimy sales tactics!
Highlights
How a virtual summit can help grow your business
Why you should evergreen your summit
How you can evergreen a summit that was previously a live 3-5 day event
What you can include in an evergreen all-access pass
How much work is required to evergreen a summit
Note: Some of these links are affiliate links, which means I may get a commission if you try them and purchase. However, none of the fees have been increased to compensate me.
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The Course Creator’s MBA Podcast Episode #127: Repurpose Your Virtual Summit Into a Money-Making Evergreen Funnel
Transcript:
And today, my special guest is Jenn Zellers. Jenn is with Virtual Summit Search and she is a virtual Summit alchemist. Jim Empires new and established Summit hosts to speakers to create more reach and impact by extending the lifespan of their one hit wander. Virtual Summit experiences without slimy sales tactics. And Jean, thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:00:29]
I am very excited to jump into this topic with you. As you know, I'm a huge fan of Virtual Summits and launching businesses and growing brands with Virtual Summits, but they're also a ton of work, and I can experience this firsthand. So I definitely want to chat with you about how we can get the most out of our Summit and all of that work that we put into them. Yeah, I love talking about Evergreening Virtual Summits because it's something that I think a lot of people miss when they're hosting the Summit. The summit itself is amazing.
[00:01:07]
It brings in all sorts of leads and sales and connections and everything. But then when the summit is over, you've put in three to six months of work, probably. And, yeah, the Summit went great, hopefully. And sometimes it doesn't go great, though. And regardless, you really kind of want to get something more out of it, but it ends up getting put on the shelf, and all that work that you put in just kind of goes by the wayside.
[00:01:33]
So evergreen in your Summit is a great way to make that work go farther and build into your evergreen funnel as a whole, too. So before we jump into all the goodness that you're going to bring to us today, can you tell the audience a little bit more about you and how you help people and also your Virtual Summit Search website, which I use all the time, by the way. Yeah, absolutely. So Virtual Summit Search started when a friend and I were talking back in 2017, I think it was, and we were saying, oh, my gosh, I can't ever find some of this before they are near the end or have already ended, even. Sometimes.
[00:02:15]
And especially, I can't find places to speak at Summits before they've already launched into the promotion when the speaker lineup is locked in. So that was where it started, is as a place for people to find Summits before they go live and as a place for host to find speakers, which, like you said, you've already experienced that.
[00:02:36]
That's what the original intent of it was, but it's kind of grown since then. And so now we offer VIP days for speakers and evergreening Summits, and we're getting ready to launch group programs and stuff like that. So essentially, our goal is to help both hosts and speakers make the most out of their Summits, whether they're speaking of them or hosting them or both. And so that way we get more awesome summits out into the world, because my goal is that there are no more slimy Summits. So let's jump right in.
[00:03:06]
And first, for audiences that may not be familiar with a Virtual Summit and what it does and how we can use that to grow our business, can you go in a little bit more detail about that? Yeah. So Virtual Summit is an amazing launch strategy. We've used it to launch courses primarily, is what I've used it for. But I've seen people launch memberships and group programs and all sorts of amazing stuff with them.
[00:03:35]
Because what a Summit does is it gets a group of people really engaged and connecting with each other and with you. And it just is a great way for you to make connections, to make sales. So rather than going and paying Facebook to run a bunch of ads that may or may not convert, especially these days, you are actually getting to get paid for your marketing. So a Summit can help you get paid to market your upcoming product or service. It can help you make more sales in general.
[00:04:08]
Like, I've seen people have $60,000 launches off the back end of a Summit, even after the Summit was already profitable. And of course, your email list and the connections you make with the speakers can turn into even more after that. So there's just so many reasons that I love using a Summit as a launch strategy, and I just want to. Go into a little bit more details about that. Obviously, I've used Virtual Summits in my main brand, my Destiny Pop brand, and you've been involved in some of that in the past.
[00:04:38]
But in 2022, we decided to launch a new brand called HobbyScool. And when I originally launched it, I was like, how am I going to launch a brand in 2022 when Facebook ads are so expensive, we're not getting much organic reach from social media or even SEO. I was like, how am I going to do this? And I originally decided to do it with niche bundles. So we launched two niche bundles.
[00:05:06]
These were paid bundles. So we had some amazing contributors. Contributors we had for these bundles were really great. They did a good job. But we didn't get as much leads or we didn't grow our email list as much as I was hoping.
[00:05:22]
And the sales for the pay bundles weren't meeting my expectations for what I needed to really grow this new brand. So that's when we decided to do a Virtual Summit. I had done them in the past, I had been successful with them in the past, and I knew it was a tried and true proven business model. So we did our first Visual Summit this summer. It was called the Home Guarding and Cooking Edition.
[00:05:47]
Definitely, I was like, yes, I'm going to do Summits going forward for this brand, to grow it and launch it and make sales and everything. So I can echo everything that you're saying there. I can also echo the fact that they are a lot of work, which is number one of the reasons why we're chatting today to talk about how we can take all of that and kind of extend the life of that summit. So can you tell us a little bit more about the benefits of Evergreening A Summit and what are some ways that we can actually extend the life of a summit that we've done? Yeah.
[00:06:26]
So Evergreen in the summit takes everything that you did in the actual summit and pushes it forward, essentially. So the reason that I started doing Evergreen Summits is because I saw folks doing what I find to be kind of really slimy tactics with it, where they would pretend like the summit was going live again. So every single week summit goes live on Monday, you got to sign up the week before so you can get access to it, blah, blah, blah. And it just felt weird and gross. So the way that I approach Evergreen Summits is they get the same kind of thing as you're probably doing with a regular virtual summit where they get access for 24 hours to each day's worth of videos, so that way they can go and rewatch them.
[00:07:12]
They're not getting all the benefits of the live community and everything. But there are ways that I work with my clients to still create a community around that Evergreen Summit, even though everyone may not be going through it at the same time. So essentially what you're doing is giving them away because there's going to be people that come into your audience after the summit is over or into the speaker's audiences after the summit is over who could still really benefit from it. So by making it available for people who come into your sphere of influence after the summit's over, they still get the benefits, most of the benefits of the original live Summit by attending the Evergreen Summit. So they get to watch the videos, they can upgrade to the All Access Pass, which is different from your live virtual Summit All Access Pass.
[00:07:57]
And if the speakers have people coming in asking questions that they don't necessarily answer, but they know we're answered in the summit, they can keep sending people there too and hopefully make some affiliate commission. So you're getting ongoing leads. You can keep promoting the content. That's one of my favorite things, is it makes it really easy to have your content strategy because you can take clips of these sessions, you can take quotes from them, you can keep promoting your speakers, which solidifies the relationship with them a lot more. And there's just so many benefits.
[00:08:31]
So rather than having to come up with new content all the time and figuring out new products, you can just keep sending people back to your Evergreen Summits, which then stack on each other. I've had people go and buy during the membership edition of my sole of the Summit series of Summits, I had people buy not only the membership edition all access pass, but they did the full stack of the course creator edition, the podcast edition, and the speaker edition because they had multiple aspects of their business. So whether you're doing business to business Summits or you're doing business to customer summits, they are still great ways you can keep doing live Summits and keep stacking them on top of each other and just they build into each other as they're all evergreen. And you can even use that evergreen version of the Summit for the all access passes of your live Summit. So it all just stacks and it keeps building and it's an amazing ecosystem.
[00:09:24]
So let's kind of dive into this and dissect us just a little bit more. So in the Evergreen Summit, it's not life as you mentioned, and I agree with you. I don't think that people should position them as live because it's not the same thing. So they're not live. They sign up for the Summit and they get access to the speaker presentations for free for 24 hours or whatever.
[00:09:50]
That designated time period is 48 hours or whatever. And then how do you go about selling the all access pass or what do you recommend during that process? Yes, you can do a couple of different options with that access window. You can do it as 24 hours per day, so you can keep it segmented into your days. So, for example, my last Summit had very distinct daily themes, and so for me, it made more sense to do 24 hours for day one, for day two, and for day three.
[00:10:24]
Whereas in the past I've also done it where I don't go and segment it out that way. I just say, okay, so all of the sessions, you get access to them for 48 to 72 hours, depending on how long the original Summit was. And then after that, you lose access to them unless you upgrade. So pretty standard compared to a live Summit. But once they are inside the Summit, you're able to email them with reminders of, hey, don't forget these are the sessions that when you took the quiz, because I love having a quiz in there and I do keep that for the Evergreen Summit so they can kind of design their custom schedule for the Summit so they don't get as overwhelmed.
[00:11:04]
So I hear the sessions that we discovered through the quiz are going to be best for you. And don't forget to go and watch them. You've got this much time left, so you're able to give them urgency. Whereas if you are just going and saying, hey, here's all the sessions for as long as you want, there's no reason for them to watch them. So a lot of the time people would sign up and then never go back to them, which is the case we see with a lot of free mini courses and stuff like that, which is kind of what a summit is, if it's done well.
[00:11:35]
So that's definitely one of the benefits of an Evergreen summit. And then I lost my train of thoughts. Well, I have a question for you, so I'll just jump in there. Let's talk about the all access pass because it is different when you evergreen it versus when you do the live stomach. What are your thoughts, your thought process there or how do you handle that?
[00:11:59]
Yeah, so with my live summit all access passes, I have a couple of different tiers. So I have one that's mostly the replays only. So you get the replays workbook, a couple of other little things. And then when you upgrade to the hired here, which is my launch kit for sale, the summit, then you get access to the private audio feed and bonus live sessions, including the replays of the bonus live sessions. And you also get access to speaker bonuses.
[00:12:31]
A lot of the speakers will contribute bonuses because it's typically 25 to a couple hundred dollars of normal value that they'll put in. And what that does is it gives them qualified leads because these people have already paid and put their money where their mouth is. And so they're signing up, they're getting their email addresses, all that good stuff. But I personally do not feel like continuing to require the speakers to put those bonuses in is good practice. It doesn't feel good to me because essentially what I would then be saying is, hey, so you contributed this, it was really generous.
[00:13:14]
And now I expect you to keep doing it on an ongoing basis, despite the fact that it may not be worth it to you because there's still going to be tech stuff that comes up that they have to respond to and they may or may not be getting as much monetary benefit out of it as they were from the live summit. For example, I do profit share for my summits now, where I split the profits 50 50. And if I'm going to do that only with the live summit, because for the Evergreen sum, it's too complicated to do that. So I give them the affiliate links then. But if they're not promoting it and they're not making sales, they're just giving something away, it just feels wrong.
[00:13:57]
So that's one of the biggest questions I get is should I keep the speaker bonuses in? And my answer is no, there's ways to work around that. So I'll do, instead of the lower tier, I do a replay only where it is literally just the replays. And then I have the upgraded tier where it's the replays. But then you do get the workbook, you get the private audio feed, you get the replays of those bonus live sessions.
[00:14:22]
And so that way you're still getting a lot more value. But I'm not having to put in all the speaker bonuses. So there's ways that I work with my clients when we do their VIP dates in order to work through that. And some speakers do say, hey, I'd still love to include this because for them, it is worth it, but I don't require that. And a lot of the time, I just say, hey, you might be better to offer that as bonus for people who buy the All Access Pass through the Evergreen.
[00:14:46]
So that way it also gives them a reason to promote the Summit. So there's a lot of ways that the All Access Pass is different, and sometimes it can work out better in the evergreen version. So I love what you said there in terms of taking out the speaker bonuses. Some of them may elect to keep them in there, but they certainly don't have to. You did mention something that really kind of caught me, and I wanted to talk about a little bit more, and I know that this is a little bit off topic, but you did talk about profit sharing and the fact that you do that for the live summit but not the Evergreen summits.
[00:15:24]
Can you go in a little bit more detail about what you mean by profit sharing and why you do it with the live and not the evergreen? Yeah, so what I did with my last Summit is I did 50 50 with the speakers and panelists. So 50% of the sales from the All Access passes, minus expenses, like processing fees, deadline, funnel and stuff like that, reasonable expenses. Then I split 50 50 with them, and I divide it up based on how much they promoted, how much they engaged in the community, if they contributed bonus, and for how many live sessions they showed up for. So that essentially was a way for me to make it more of a team effort rather than competing against each other to get that first All Access Pass purchase, essentially.
[00:16:16]
And that was the vibe that I heard from a lot of my speakers, is, hey, I'm so glad you did it this way. I really felt like I was in it with everybody else, and I was a lot more motivated to share the Summit. So that was a nice bonus. But the reason I don't do it for the Evergreen is because it would be just the complexity of it pretty much outweighs the benefits, unfortunately. I would love to keep doing it, but when you have 20 plus speakers that you're then sending like $2 every month to, it just doesn't make any sense.
[00:16:52]
And you'd have to promote the heck out of Summit and make a ton of sales in order to make it worthwhile for everybody. So instead, I give them affiliate links, because when we're doing 50 50 profit share, I'm not doing affiliate links. It's just a pain in the butt to try to keep track of those and everything so they still have ways to get monetary benefit out of it directly from the summit as opposed to after people have signed up for their freebie and everything. But it would not make enough sense to try to split up profits every single month from the Evergreen Summit. And that makes complete sense to me.
[00:17:29]
I do affiliate links for the summit, for the live summit and for the Evergreen. But that profit sharing thing, I was just like, oh, what was she talking about there? So can we talk about how much work does it take to Evergreen? A summit? We know that.
[00:17:46]
Putting together the summit. We work three, four, five, maybe even six months beforehand. Putting it together. Can you talk about how much work it takes to take all of that and evergreen it? Yes.
[00:17:58]
This is one of my favorite things about Evergreen in the summit. I had a client a little while back who was in the middle of her summit. She was just getting ready to go and launch it when we did her Evergreen summit strategy intensive, which is where we put together the plan for the Evergreen summit, because she wanted to be able to launch the summit and then turn right around and Evergreen it, which is what I tend to do. And so she went into this thinking, oh, my gosh, it's going to be like doing an entire another summit. It's going to be so much work.
[00:18:26]
And by the end of that intensive session, she told me. Oh, my gosh. This feels so doable. I can absolutely do this. I can choose how quick I want to work it.
[00:18:36]
So I have some folks who just put in a little bit of work here and there and don't have a deadline or anything for when they launch their evergreen version. For me. I just do it the weekend after the cart closes for the summit. So usually my cart closes the Monday after the summit is over. So say it runs Monday through Thursday.
[00:18:58]
Like my last summer did. I close the cart on the following Monday and then I evergreen the summit the following weekend. And I literally did that on a Saturday afternoon before I went to a wedding. And I've actually got some behind the scenes of that up on my Instagram, if anyone wants to check that out. But it does not have to take that much time.
[00:19:19]
You can do it in a day, a weekend, a month. Whatever pace you want to do it and how much time you have, you can get it done pretty quick. And it's not a huge lift because you did all the hard work in that three to six months of running the original summit. You're just evergreen in it at that point. And I can attest to that because I have evergreen something in a weekend, too.
[00:19:41]
But we'll make sure that people have the link for your behind the scenes kind of how you did that. Jenn. Any last minute tips for the audience before we hang up here.
[00:19:54]
As you're going through. If you're going to host a summit and you haven't hosted it before. Just make sure in your contract to specify that they retain the rights to their session. But also you retain rights and can use it for other products in the future because that includes the Evergreen Summit and any other iterations that you may do with it. And so that way I've had clients who have come on and said, hey, so how do I go and talk to my speakers now?
[00:20:20]
Because I didn't have that verbiage in my contract with them, or I didn't have an agreement at all, which I do not recommend. And so we had to go back and work through, okay, so here's how to frame it, because it genuinely is a big benefit to the speakers because you're going to keep promoting them, they're going to keep getting leads because they have a freebie during their session that people can opt in for. And so there's a lot of different reasons that it's a benefit to them. So you just have to figure out how to frame it like that if you didn't do that. But it's so much easier if you just have it in your contract and you don't have to worry about it.
[00:20:54]
And there may be speakers from my last one, I had an attorney who said, hey, so can we take this verbiage out of the contract? Because I actually don't let people do evergreen on my stuff because stuff changes with legal, and so I'd have to be updating that frequently. So hers is not part of the Evergreen Summit, but she was a great part of the live summit. So just kind of making sure that you talk to your speakers and include that in your contract before you go into your live summit. And I agree with you, that's one of the biggest tips I think I would have, to just make sure that you can actually do it and you have that in your original contract with them.
[00:21:34]
So, Jen, can you let people know where to find you? Yes, you can go and find me on Virtualsummetsearch.com. That's where we've got the Summit directory. If you want to list your summit. We'll be launching the Evergreen Summit directory shortly.
[00:21:48]
So right now we're recording this July 22, and it will probably be out by the end of the year. And the speaker directory is on there, which definitely has used. And you can also find me on Instagram at Virtual summer search. That's also where, like I said, those highlight the story highlights of the behind the scenes of Evergreen in my latest summit are going to be found, too. Jenn, thank you so much for joining us today and walking us through how to turn a summit into an Evergreen funnel and taking all of that hard work that we put into the Life summit and actually, you know, continuing to help people and to get revenue out of it.
[00:22:25]
So thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah. So glad to have been here.
[00:22:32]
You.