Simplifying Self-Hosted Summits: Promotional Planning and Engagement Strategies

Jennie Wright [00:00:01]:

Hi. This is the Acquire Podcast from the Odd Phonic Podcast Network, and I’m your host, Jenny Wright. I’m a list build and lead generation strategist, and I focus mainly on helping people build really great niched in lists, learn how to launch, and build great businesses. I also work as a CMO for some people, which is cool. This podcast is the podcast that delves deep into the world of list building and online events. It’s designed to empower entrepreneurs and marketers with the knowledge and strategies to master these essential business growth tactics. What I’m going to talk to you about today is a couple things that are happening in my world that are probably happening in your world too. And one of them is about Google Analytics.

 

Jennie Wright [00:00:44]:

I’m learning so much out of necessity. Just this Wiehler, I saw a massive spike on my Google Analytics. All the traffic was coming from Poland. I’m talking thousands of hits, and every single one of them is from Poland. And I thought, okay. What’s going on here? You know, need to look into a little bit more. And I went into where the referring site was coming from, where is this traffic coming from, and it’s coming from a URL called newsgrets.store. Now don’t go and put that in your browser URL and do not click on it.

 

Jennie Wright [00:01:20]:

Just trust me when I tell you that it’s, it’s spam, and it’s actually a brute force attack that is being attempted constantly on my website and I’m not the only one because I googled it for you. Well it seems that a lot of people in the past couple of days are being struck with these brute force attacks. So if you go on to analytics help and and you type in this issue, you’re getting people with the same thing over and over and over. And we’re looking at, like, what are these solutions? I’m reading a whole bunch of comments. What are The solutions that you have to do? And it’s basically adding that URL to the unwanted referral URLs in your Google Analytics. Now where that is, how to make that happen, Google’s your best friend. You can figure that out. But what’s really disappointing is when I opened my Google Analytics and it said that I had all of these new hits I was so excited because I just finished a Wright redo and I thought awesome it’s getting out in front of people.

 

Jennie Wright [00:02:20]:

People are coming to my website you know all these new thousands of hits are starting to come in. Whereas like before my website was redone I didn’t really have all the traffic I was hoping to to get. And then I felt let down because I noticed that there was no, The it was all new traffic. There was no previous traffic from those you know, from that URL or from any IPs. It was all coming from the same place. Kinda disappointing. And then I realized I wasn’t, you know I shouldn’t have been excited as as I as I hoped. So that was 1 thing I really wanted to tell you guys about.

 

Jennie Wright [00:02:57]:

Go and if you don’t already have it make sure you have security on your website. Make sure you have a plug in. I happen to use Wordfence. There’s lots of them out there. Use one that will actually do scans on your website and block these brute force attacks. You don’t want it to happen because one of my friends launched her brand new book a couple of weeks ago and on the day that she was launching her book and sending traffic to a page on her website where people could direct buy it, she got a brute force attack. It took her entire site down. I got lots of messages that weekend like what’s happening I don’t know and I’m like I am not qualified in this space.

 

Jennie Wright [00:03:36]:

I know enough about these things just to be able to talk about them and to notice things and but not enough to diagnose or fix them. So she had to get somebody to fix it. She lost a couple days worth of sales especially when the website, you know, she’s trying to drive traffic to it. She’s she’s got a brand new book and this is happening. It it was devastating for her. Make sure you have something. Wright so that’s 1 thing I really really wanted to talk about. Something else I wanted to talk about was I got a flurry or a bevy of questions about DIY Summits So if you know who I am and you know what I do, I talk about online summits because I’ve produced hundreds of them like well over 350.

 

Jennie Wright [00:04:16]:

I think I’ve crested 375, and I produce these online events to help people build really robust beautiful niched in lists so they can market their programs products and services to them. That’s the goal. It also has a wonderful ancillary side of building relationships, creating networking opportunities, creating referral opportunities, and all sorts of affiliate things that you can do as well as all the secondary stuff, including income. Okay? Like, income is in there. You can earn money as, from sponsorships. You can earn money from VIP. You can earn money from your programs products and services once you decide to sell. Summits are fantastic and I will I will stand and fight for the fact that summits aren’t going anywhere.

 

Jennie Wright [00:05:02]:

I actually had that question posed to me today on a Podcast. No they’re not going Jennie. But this whole bunch of questions that I got was all coming like last week The the reason I was getting them was because I, I spoke at a conference recently, and I was promoting my summits made simple Wiehler promotional package, like a speaker promotional bundle. And if you want to go check it out, you can find it on my Wright. It’s Jennie, and then just look under products, I believe, or resources, and it’s right there. And you know I was giving it as a incentivized sort of like offer for people who were at this conference and afterwards I got people coming up to me saying okay I know you produce but could I do it on my own? And yes the answer is absolutely yes. So I’m gonna go into a segment right now that I’m sort of like calling you know your DIY Summit success like basically how you can use a summit and do it all yourself. I’m gonna caution you I’m gonna I’m actually gonna give you a trigger warning on this one maybe Summits are work, summits take time They’re amazing.

 

Jennie Wright [00:06:08]:

They have incredible benefits, but they definitely are something that takes work in organization. And you should have a virtual assistant that’s gonna help you with them. I really believe that to do with someone effect effectively, you need to have the minimum of a virtual assistant if not a team. Can you do it without it? Can you do it all your own? Yes. Do I recommend it? Absolutely not. Wiehler you thank me later by listening to me? Yes. Yes, you Wiehler. So just please listen to me.

 

Jennie Wright [00:06:38]:

So we’re gonna talk about DIY because some people just don’t want to have a producer like me The just want to do it on their own which is why I’ve created the Summit Made Simple products so you can do it on your own. Or you can go and get those Summit Made Simple products. They can help you with parts of the Summit and then you can get my help on the other parts but that’s neither here nor there. So let’s talk about the benefits of just self hosting. So one of the things is you have full control over everything which some people really love. It allows you to really tailor it. You can create a summit exactly in the vision that you want and not in the vision of anything else now I’ve always believed that summits are not square peg square hole and there are a lot of square peg round hole ideas. I absolutely believe that we can find the right sort of like fit for what you’re trying to do in the summit.

 

Jennie Wright [00:07:35]:

I love customizing them, making them incredibly bespoke, and making them sort of flow around the host versus trying to get the host to fit into something that they’re not. I saw this really early on. I actually saw this about 12 years ago where, one of the people I was in this course with wanted to do a summit, and they told her what to do the summit on, and it wasn’t a fit. It was really like, this person worked sort of in fashion, and they were telling them to not do a summit on fashion. Like The their profession is fashion. The summit should be around fashion. Nope. She was told to The summit around confidence and, shoot something else like confidence and I can’t even remember at this point but it was off topic it wasn’t niched in and if you know anything about me and if you know anything about what I talk about as well as my frequent guest Jason Wheeler who is talking about niche You know The niche is important and niching in is like everything you have to do for an event.

 

Jennie Wright [00:08:39]:

So make sure that when you’re doing a Summit, you absolutely can make it your own, which is great. You have the freedom of building it how you want. I mean, DIY is great. You have the freedom of the timeline that you want. So if you want to extend that timeline out and work on it piece by piece, you want to do it more quickly, you can absolutely do that. So I want to debunk the the myth or the concern or the concern or the misconception that hosting or self hosting is overly complex. It’s not. Nothing that I do as a as somebody who produces summits very regularly is anything you can’t do on your own.

 

Jennie Wright [00:09:16]:

Only thing that I do and I do it differently or better or more with more complexity is I’ve done so many of them and I was you know I’ve built events in person events before I did summits. There’s things that I know or things that I do that elevate the event that add more different I don’t know perspectives to it. I you know I had opportunities that you may not think of because you’ve never done it before or I have different insights or different strategies that I know are going to make more money and things like that. So can you do it yourself? 100%. Do you have to over complicate it? Absolutely not. And if you have budget constraints and you can’t afford a producer like me then absolutely go ahead do it on your own for sure. Get some of the The Made Simple products. I’ve got 3 in there right now and a 4th one being created so go and get The.

 

Jennie Wright [00:10:07]:

They’ll help you a lot. You actually get the templates I give my clients so you’ll have a lot all that kind of stuff and then when we’re talking about DIY ing your summit one of the things that you need to think about which you can do quite easily is attracting high quality speakers. Now a lot of people think that hosting a summit means you’re not going to be able to get any of the gurus and quite honestly I love the gurus. The gurus are great. Big speakers are awesome and I am very fortunate to be in groups with a lot of them and to have access to them. But one of the problems is is that you have to sort of measure the amount of big speakers that you have versus the people you know, the other speakers that are willing to do a lot of the promotional work. Big speakers tend to cover their audiences. The tend not to promote even though they have a wonderful amount of information to share.

 

Jennie Wright [00:11:03]:

They’re awesome to have. The tendency is that they do protect their audiences. You should be aware of that. You should know what going in and I’d rather you have a bunch of amazing queen and king speakers, okay people who are just like top of their game willing to promote know whether you know know the game, know it’s a list build, know it’s a lead generation tactic, are willing to promote, are willing to network, and do all those good things that are going to help actually build the event up versus the transactional I’m a big Wiehler, I’m giving you the opportunity to put my content and my picture on your website and that alone is gonna draw in more speakers and more attendees, and you should be thanking me. So you really kind of need to get over that mindset and as a The time summit host or even a multiple summit host, you still sometimes have that mindset so I really want to debunk that myth. And then I really wanna talk about, making sure that you have everything that you need when you’re doing a DIY summit. I still want you to stay away from All In One because I really think they’re the master of none. I will never ever get off that soapbox.

 

Jennie Wright [00:12:15]:

And so there are products out there like Hey Summit and other ones and honestly they’re not terrible they’re not bad they’re they’re just never going to be really super good at the really one thing that I need them to be which is conversion because they have so many other things that they’re worrying about and having to build in. The only caveat to that one would be something like go high level, which is kind of an all in The, and they can make really high converting pages. So that that would be the one that I would just kind of use, but it is not like a all in 1 summit builder. Just think about this. If you use an all in 1 summit builder to build your event when the summit is over, you no longer need those pages. You no longer need that package. You can’t repurpose those pages. You’d have to rebuild them into your website or into Thrivecart or something along those lines so just think about the pros and cons before you actually make a decision in that space and that’ll help.

 

Jennie Wright [00:13:10]:

Wright let’s talk about key sort of steps to organizing your DIY event and this has to do with the crucial step of nichigan and defining your summit goals, making sure you understand who it is you want to reach out to, who your offer is for, what the offer is, big one there, and any goals and themes that you really want to achieve. Then you need to sort of make you have to make sure your summer revolves around your end game. If the end game is to sell into your program product or course, build the summit around it. If your end goal is to fill bums in seats in person for your in person conference happening this fall, build a summit around that. Make sure that you take the time to look at what that end goal is, reverse engineer the entire summit around that. Right? So that’s that’s kind of like the secret sauce. And doing that really opens up the doors to making sure that your event is really organised. The other 1 is making sure you have a ton of time.

 

Jennie Wright [00:14:16]:

You know summits aren’t that bad. The really some people are like oh my god it took over my life Wiehler sure if you want to do in 60 days it’s gonna take over your life but if you want to do it in 120 days which is what I tell people to do it won’t so plan it out. Also the other thing is that people don’t take advantage of when they’re actually building the summit and you’re in the runway phase which is before you actually get to the event portion to build their social media to engage with speakers to create non transactional humanistic, relationship driven connections with their speakers and their audience, and this is the key. You really need to use the time before the event to actually make the event successful. If you just go at the event and say, yep, I’m just gonna build the summit, I’m gonna connect with my speakers and I’m just gonna make it happen and you know that’s that and when it’s over it’s over you’re really neglecting the opportunity where you can make more money connect with better people and actually engage your audience earlier and create the transfer of credibility from your speakers over to you as the host which will help you with sales later on so don’t miss this crucial step I think it’s so important and then I also want to talk about some challenges that people run into and this is normal DIY stuff that you’re going to hit okay so this is managing your time The is managing your resources this is juggling your other business opportunities and not letting those balls fall like if you’re building a summit and you’re DIY ing it you are you know the chief cook and bottle washer as somebody used to say you do all the things you wear all the hats and you could let your other like you couldn’t let your main business falter whilst you’re doing it I actually I got called into working on a summit with somebody who their event was launching in 6 weeks And they asked me if I could consult and we had a consultation call to see if it was something that I’d be willing to do and if it was a fit. And what I found was they weren’t a fit. Actually they were not my ideal client at all because they had done it on their own DIY which isn’t a problem for me but they had let their entire business go The whole time they were planning. And they were so angry because they said, I have invested so much time and money on doing this on my own, and I’ve made a ton of mistakes, and I’ve had to hire people to fix my mistakes, which cost me a fortune and I am like in the hole because I haven’t been able to earn any income while I’ve been planning this thing.

 

Jennie Wright [00:16:53]:

I wasn’t able to you know I wasn’t able to do any sales calls and I wouldn’t even be able to fulfill those sales calls even if I did because I’ve invested every moment of my waking days into this event. I’m like, that’s not how you do it. You have to find that balance between what it is that you do every single day that brings in money and builds your business and add this in, which is why I think it’s essential that you have a VA or a team. If you’re DIY ing it, The is essential. You cannot, in my opinion, build The summit, do graphics, do copywriting, do tech all on your own. By the way I can do all of those things myself. I can build my entire summit myself but do I want to? Absolutely not. Will I ever do it again? And have I well first of all have I done it? Yeah.

 

Jennie Wright [00:17:39]:

But I don’t want to. And will I do it ever again? No, not ever ever again. I will always have my team. I will always have support. Never doing it solo again. But for those that want to, there are resources to make it happen. Again I’m trying to make it really simple for you guys by creating things that are hopefully gonna help. You know, the first thing is always finding really great speakers.

 

Jennie Wright [00:18:02]:

So I have, The Summit’s Made Simple Wiehler traction bundle which you can also get, but right now, I think it’s important for people to understand the promotional aspect, and that’s the next thing I actually wanna talk about is this typical challenge that we run into with promotion. That has to do a lot with the speakers that you choose and I have a lot of tips and tricks and tactics around finding and booking ideal speakers or experts The not only will provide really great content on your event but are going to absolutely promote it and are not going to be transactional. They’re going to be super engaged super interested and they’re going to show up for you. Like this is the you know this is the ultimate is you meet a speaker that is just so phenomenal and they end up being somebody that you can be friends with or collaborate with or build a you know a side business with or referrals with like that is the ultimate. And if you handle your speaker engagement, it’s totally possible. And then the thing that always kinda gets people is technical. Oh, you’re amazing, right? You’re amazing at what you do. You’re fantastic at it, but you most likely are not a tech whiz.

 

Jennie Wright [00:19:19]:

You’re most likely not an amazing copywriter. You’re most likely not, you know, a graphics wizard, which is why having tools like the AI tools by the way, yes, you can use all these AI tools to actually build your event. But technical things always go wrong. They always do. I always tell my clients, like, something’s gonna happen. A link isn’t gonna work. A page won’t load. All these things happen on a summit.

 

Jennie Wright [00:19:45]:

You just gotta be prepared for them. And if you can’t handle it because tech is not your thing, you need to have somebody you can call on. Who’s that person gonna be? Think about the contingencies. Plan ahead. If you can’t do something, who can pick up the pieces? If you’re not around, who can make it happen? Those things have to be thought of when you’re actually building out an event. So a couple other practical tips for this is making sure that you have your time management, which we talked about, effective tools and platforms, which you kinda touched on. I love building summits either in go Wright level, click funnels, or you can build it in WordPress Elementor, but it’s not gonna convert as well. Use a stand alone landing page builder if you’re you’re taking my opinion.

 

Jennie Wright [00:20:34]:

Those are the best ones. And I you know, you’re gonna wanna have a really good set of tools for recording, be that zoom although you know the quality of zoom sometimes the video output isn’t that great so look at something like steamyard and so on about these things like to make sure sure that you’re using the right platforms to enhance your experience and enhance the speaker experience and the registrant experience What you don’t want is somebody joining your summit and thinking that it looks really really challenging for them. Make it simple. No friction. Make it beautiful, and your people are gonna have a better experience. You’re gonna get more sales. Right? That’s where we wanna be. And then make sure that you have an advisory board.

 

Jennie Wright [00:21:22]:

And if you’re DIY ing it, talk to people. Do not build your summit in a bubble. Run ideas by friends. This is what I’d say is your advisory board. Ask them what they think about titles. Ask them what they think about topics. Get them to take a look at copy. Have them take a look at the landing page.

 

Jennie Wright [00:21:39]:

Make sure that your advisory board knows exactly what’s going on and they’re willing to spend the time and effort to just keep an eye on things. And then keep an eye on you. DIY ing your Summit and I’ve already mentioned this is kind of taxing so you have to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself. I have yet to meet a summit host but I haven’t given them the message that self care is paramount. If you’re the kind of person who gets colds or sore throats, prepare for it. If you’re the kind of person whose back goes out when you’re stressed, prepare for it if you’re the kind of person who is introverted and your social battery drains quickly build that into your time around your summit and prepare for it I have a low social battery sometimes. Summits take a lot of battery so I always build in and I always say I don’t do more than 2 summit interviews in a day because that’s 2 hours of my time and I still have to prepare for it and other things and if I do 3 hours I’m on the verge of just being like battery drained so what does that look like for you Where does it fit? So again take a look at all these different things I love when DIYers go for it make sure you have the right tools I I have some stuff that can help you, and I was talking about a bit earlier, but I’m gonna get into a little bit more now. And that is the Summit’s Made Simple promo plan bundle.

 

Jennie Wright [00:23:07]:

It will support you if you’re doing a DIY summit, and it is specifically designed to address the challenges of self hosting. It’s meant to help you get right through the promotional aspect of the event, and it really does get into the planning and it talks about how to promote it. I even give you a promotional calendar. I’m gonna tell you everything that’s in here. So I’ve created a promotional planner. All you have to do is change the date on the planner and it populates with all the things that you should do to promote the event. It will tell you what to post and when to post it and it will make it super simple. It’s broken down by a platform and also by email and what you should say in your emails.

 

Jennie Wright [00:23:54]:

Like it’s it’s rinse and repeat it is gosh it’s just like plug and play it’s so easy to use so I created that for you And then I also have all of these customizable social media Canva templates like their promo Canva templates. Gosh, I think there’s a couple 100 in The. And, it’s all the different kinds of summits, all different kinds of graphics. You can use the templates. You can take the pictures out. You can just add in your speaker pictures, add their name, and I mean you could practically use them that way. And then the last 1 is this video training that I created called beat the numbers. And this training emphasizes how offers and valuable, like well, it gives you valuable insights into boosting attendee numbers and engagement, And it really pulls from my own real world experiences to give you strategies that I know are actually gonna help you get more people to attend the training.

 

Jennie Wright [00:24:54]:

So I threw that in there because I think it’s so key because promotion can be so overwhelming and really stressful. So I think it would be something for you to take a look at again it’s at Jennie and then you just have to click to get access to it. It’s right there, and I’d love for you to check it out, and you can let me know what you think. I was actually just gonna if you hear me typing, it’s because I’m actually pulling it up just to make sure that yeah. It’s under where are you? Yeah. It’s under services. So if you go under services, you’ll see it there. And, just scroll down a little bit, and you’ll end up seeing The, promo plan bundle.

 

Jennie Wright [00:25:30]:

It’s right there. So go check that out. And when it comes to summits and doing it DIY, if you started at DIY and you’re struggling, don’t worry. I’ve got episodes on how to sort of like pick up the slack and figure out how to do everything that you need to do for your summit. If you’ve got questions reach out to me let me know because I’m happy to help and if you need somebody to support you and come in and sort of take over things because DIY is just not how it’s going to work for you don’t worry about it I am not judging you I never will and I’m happy to come and assist and get my team to support you in the production of your event so go take a look at that and honestly when it comes to Summits they’re just they’re amazing. They really are. They really build out a beautiful list. Done right, they can attract all the leads that you need for an entire year.

 

Jennie Wright [00:26:22]:

And you don’t have to worry about working so hard to get the leads for your business when you can do a summit and attract those people pretty simply, pretty easily, and make it last for the entire year. I I just love them for that. So I’m going to wrap this up it was a little bit of a different episode but I really wanted to focus on this because these questions have come up recently thought I would address them so as always the Acquire podcast is produced and edited by Jason Wheeler if you found today’s episode to be valuable please do not forget to subscribe rate or leave a review Let me know what you think I’d be excited to hear from you and I really appreciate you being part of my community and I love talking to community members I do have a Facebook group that you can go and check out The link is in the show notes so go and do that and make sure to reach out to me on social say hi let me know what you thought of the episode Let me know what you’d like to hear more of. And as always, the Acquire podcast is brought to you by the Audphonic Podcast Network. Thank you so much for listening.