How I Sold $15,375 Worth of My Course With My First Virtual Summit

A few weeks ago on March 23rd, I wrapped up a crazy experiment into launching my first virtual summit and course.

I briefly introduced you guys to what I was doing but today in this post, I want to get into the nitty gritty details and show you everything that went into making it a success.

This has been one of the hardest projects I have worked on but also the most rewarding.

If you're able to avoid the mistakes I made you will have the perfect tool to grow your online business in an even shorter amount of time.

Let's get into the results first:

Results

*Note: many people are on payment plans hence the lower total showing

Here are the important metrics etc:

• Revenue: $15,375.48
• Expenses: $2,925.61
• Affiliate Commissions: $1,009.72
• Refunds: $1,800
• Profit: $9,640.15
• My Share: $4,820.08
• In CDN: $6,316.96

Here are the less tangible but equally important numbers:

• Customers: 38
• Sponsors: 18
• Blog Posts: 12
• Words Written: 20,758
• Team Members: 7

I'll go into more detail below but I just want to clarify that if you want to achieve these sorts of results in a short amount of time then you need to be:

1. Very organized
2. Employ a team of people
3. Spend money

And it clearly paid off with a great return on investment.

Alright…let's get into the benefits of a virtual summit and how it all went down.

Benefits of a Virtual Summit

Accountability

The number one thing for me in why this project worked so well is that there is a natural accountability built into running a summit.

You set a date for your event and then book all your speakers and you're required to hit that deadline or you look like a chump.

So if nothing else, early on in your project – take a stand and choose a launch date 3 months out so that you can work around that date.

It'll keep your, the team, affiliates and speakers all focused.

Build Relationships

Next up, the summit allowed me to build some great relationships.

All the speakers are now friends as we worked for many days leading up to the event and got to also spend an hour on a webinar sharing our knowledge.

Moreover, I got to connect with CEO's of 18 startups when we asked them to be sponsors and hopefully, I can work with them again in the future.

Lastly, in the lead up to the event, we wrote 12 blog posts for some big publications and now I'll be a warm contact if I choose to write for them again.

Build an Email List

On Feb 31st, my email list was sitting around 200 people which I had built up during the launch of Quora Domination.

Today, I sit at 1,631 email subscribers who I have built a great relationship with as I've given out a free summit that they attended and they've seen my face and heard from me many times over the last few weeks.

Most of the growth happened just before the summit started with us adding more than 150 subscribers on some of our biggest days.

I don't know of any other way to grow your list this fast in this short amount of time.

The power really comes from leveraging the affiliates and speakers existing audience and funnelling them onto my own list.

I can now sell them on services in the future and this list is now a massive asset for me.

No Experience Required

When I came into this, I have very little experience with presentation design and I was hardly an expert on the topic.

So I just reached out to Eugene on a cold email back in November and had him fill the role of expert while I focused on marketing this launch.

What I want you to consider is that you don't need to spend years sharing your expertise and learning how to be the best, you can leverage other people's experience.

Most people struggle with marketing and if you can put together an event that gets them in front of faces, they will provide that expertise.

And by association, you will come to be seen as an expert yourself.

Earn Money

Finally, the obvious one – you can earn some good money from running a virtual summit.

We did $15,000 in sales but after talking to Navid Moazzez – the expert on virtual summits, I realize that people are doing A LOT better even with their first event.

For instance, Chandler Bolt ran the “Self Publishing Success Summit” and added 30,000+ people to his email list and earned $370,000 from the event.

Another one of Navid's students, Steph Gaudreau ran the “Women's Strength Summit” added close to 20,000 email subscribers.

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I plan to run a lot more of these types of events given that it hits all the points – list building, relationship building, earning money – all at the same time!

Let's get into how my program went down:

Step 1: Closing Your Partner

When I got all this underway in October/November of last year, it simply started with a cold email to a few keynote authors on SlideShare.

Eugene was one of five that responded and we started collaborating on a book and course.

I quickly realized that we needed more traction and after reading about virtual summits from an article about Navid, I was sold and jumped in.

Step 2: Getting The Speakers

I asked Eugene to leverage his existing network and he quickly reached out to a few SlideShare users he had worked with in the past.

Because he knew them well, they eagerly signed up and we actually had to turn people down as the topics ended up overlapping.

At this point, we had our speakers, the dates they were available and we had to start putting together a team to market and promote this event.

Step 3: Creating Your Team

I knew that we wouldn't be able to do this ourselves given the tight timeline with only 2-3 months remaining until the launch date.

As a result, we outsourced a lot of the work to different people including:

• Varun: Got us sponsors, affiliates and helped them them all up.
• Mikhail: Facebook retargeting ads
• Svetlana: Assisted Varun in finding leads
• Kate: Assisted in writing guest blog posts
• Andrew: Copywriting review for our sales page and emails

We found people on Upwork or through friends, organized everything with Google Drive and communicated over Slack which really helped streamline the process.

Step 4: Finding Affiliates

Part of Varun's job was to actively find affiliates who could promote the summit and course and he worked with Svetlana to build a list of people with existing email lists.

Our buyers would be professional speakers and business consultants so we checked lists like the National Speakers Board for potential candidates.

We then sent them the following email to see if they would be interested in being partners:

From there we were able to nail down about 12 affiliates who were interested in working with us and help promote the event to their audience.

We used SamCart to track affiliate sales and set each on up with pre-written emails they could send to their lists at the appropriate times.

Here's an image of our affiliate resources page:

Finally, once everyone was setup, we had to send out reminder emails for our affiliates to take action on each important date of our launch.

Step 5: Building an Audience

Now it was time to build an audience and even though we knew we'd be getting people from both speakers and affiliates, I didn't want to leave it to chance.

Hence our main focus was guest posting on big blogs to drum up interest for the summit as well as to spread our results and story about SlideShare.

We ended up writing 12 different blog posts and over 20,000 words. Looking back this was a tremendous undertaking and may have been easier for us to simply do podcasts.

The problem: Many big blogs simply don't allow you to include any links off their website to your stuff.

The links we did sneak in directed readers to the summit page or to a ready-made template.

In the future, we will probably look to bring on more speakers with an existing audience that we can leverage into attendees for our event.

Step 6: Going Live

So finally, after all that work, the day to go live came on March 9th and we started with an interview with Emiland De Cubber.

We had an amazing turnout with 150 people showing up over the course of the interview which was hosted on Crowdcast.io.

I continued to conduct interviews send people email invites once in the morning to announce the speakers for the day like in the example below:

And then emails 5 minutes before each speaker was set to get started:

Here's what I learnt:

Send Lots of Emails

Most people fear emailing their list because people will unsubscribe. Right?

This is a huge mistake as the people that stay on your list are committed to your message and need to hear from you regularly.

Anyone that leaves was NEVER going to buy from you so good riddance.

I probably sent over 20 emails during the course of the launch and my opt-out rate was never more than 1%.

People Still Forget

Even though I sent an email in the morning, I knew people would get caught up in their days and would forget about the start times.

So I could send a reminder email just before the event started and would get a rush of new listeners who showed up.

I also offered anyone on my list who would be annoyed with the 5 minute reminders a way to opt-out of them by simply clicking a link.

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Then the next day we got hit with two crises.

First, one of our speaker's connection broke off midway through his call.

We weren't able to get him back and all the attendees left disappointed.

Next, there was a massive flood in Louisiana and our next speaker had no internet access for his Friday call.

FML but thankfully Kenny was ok.

All in all, we had over 600 people attend live and a ton of positive comments from everyone.

We offered a 20% discount to only people that watched the webinars. This was to encourage people to buy right away and get the discount.

As many points of urgency you can created the more buyers you'll get.

We had 3 buyers during the actual webinars and another 10 in our pre-launch phase.

Step 7: Course Launch

Finally, our course actually dropped on March 15th, the day after the summit ended. To get people super excited we offered a 15% discount just on launch day.

Our sales page ended up being almost 5000 words long with a ton of images.

We even had a professional copywriter look through it – thanks Andrew.

Here's the launch email:

Another 10 sales rolled in before midnight.

The Challenge

Next up, we didn't want the enthusiasm to wane as we had a week to go before cart closed.

So we launched a challenge where Eugene and I would put together a presentation using all the techniques we taught in the course.

We'd then submit it to SlideShare and see if we could get featured.

Well guess what…we got featured on the homepage the night before our course closed.

Yes!

So that gave us more proof that our techniques worked and you can be sure I mentioned that in the final email:

So there you go, a little behind the scenes of this course and summit launch.

There's obviously much more to it but this is a good overall gist into what it takes.

Some Things to Note

Cheap Customers = High Returns

My cheapest customers were those who either paid 20% off the basic package which came out to $159 or chose to take instalment plans.

Coincidently, these people were also the ones who asked for a refund the most.

Here's the lesson: Your best customers that are most committed to the process of completing your course and getting the most out of it will pay the highest price.

Bottom feeders are typically looking for quick fixes to their problems and are the same individuals that will give you the most grief.

Don't be afraid to charge more for your work.

Have a Great Story

Even though guest posts weren't as effective as I had hoped, it did give us credibility. And what sold the blogs to let us write for them was that we had an awesome story to tell.

Eugene had gotten over 2M views on his 16 presentations and was getting 400 opt-ins per month from one. We sold this story hard and it opened a lot of doors.

Make sure you have a story.

Look Professional

Next up, we spent a lot of time making sure the look and feel of everything was professional. From the actual summit page through to the emails we sent out.

People need to trust that your putting time into the event.

A cheap and quickly thrown together website will scare people from joining your list and eventually buying your follow-on products or services.

Only 38 People Actually Bought

Finally, you don't need a boatload of buyers to make the project a success. We only had 38 people buy our high ticket course and still made a healthy profit.

That's the power of selling big ticket items vs. cheap books and Udemy courses which encourage lower quality content. I have been guilty of this in the past but going forward I I am going to use higher pricing for my products.

Final Thoughts

Honestly, virtual summits are the most powerful way to start a brand new business online.

As I've mentioned they hit all the goals I had including:

• List building (added 1400 people)
• Relationship building (with speakers + sponsors)
• Revenue generation ($15,375)

Beyond that, there was a natural form of accountability to make sure I hit that timeline and had everything ready for March 9th.

I highly encourage you guys to try it yourself even if you have zero experience in an industry or even if you think your topic is too niche.

To get started, check out this report from Navid – here

Let me know what you think of this business model in the comments.