What online summits get wrong

Hello and welcome to the Traveling Introvert. Today, I want to talk about online summits. The reason that I want to talk about this is because I recently ran one, and it was about podcasting, believe it or not. I want to talk about the process that I use before I ran my summit, so there's some information out there that people generally don't know about summits. Summits are touted as a very good idea to help raise your visibility and make you look like an expert in your field. You'll find a lot of big names do summits, and so I wanted to do a virtual summit. I looked around because I like and I enjoy learning new information, and I realized that there was a podcast out there, a podcast summit, and it was the biggest summit in the world, and it had over I think 75 speakers and ran for a very long time, which is great, but 75 speakers? Okay. Say it's 30 minutes each. It's still an awful lot of time that you have to spend listening, and yes, we do binge podcast, but we don't binge summits in quite the same way, and I'm curious why not.

Also, I was doing some research. I listen to some podcasts. I use my podcast app to search for online summit, and it brought up all of the episodes that podcasts had that talked about online summits, and I went and listened to them. One thing that struck me when I did that and did some more research is there are very few out there that do the following things. There are very few online summits that pay their speakers. It's another one of those things where you get exposure, and exposure is the currency that people who run virtual summits use to get people on board.

Another thing that I realized is a lot of summits won't let you speak unless you have a certain amount of followers. They don't care if they're engaged followers. They don't care about that. They just want the numbers, so you need to have five or 10,000 followers because what they do is affiliate marketing. They say that, okay, if you're going to be on the summit, you need to email blast your newsletter and so on and so forth and do X, Y, and Z, and then whoever buys tickets, and not the free summit tickets but the actual all-access pass, which we'll talk about in a minute, then you get a percentage cut. While this is great on the surface, it means if you have a smaller sort of footprint as far as follows are concerned, you are less likely to earn as much money as someone who has 10 or 20,000 followers who click on everything that they do. It means your earning potential is low.

The other thing that I realized is a lot of the summits, in fact, all of the summits have something that's called an all-access pass. This all-access pass gives you access ... some of them, a lot of them say lifetime access to the summit, and you can look at all the videos and what have you afterwards. Great, except when they change their platform or they pivot their business. A lifetime access is a lifetime of what and or who. One of the things that I did with my summit, and I will continue to do so moving forward is I paid my speakers. I appreciate that they are professionals and they've given up their time to ... and spend an interview time with me. I will pay them. It might not be thousands of dollars, but I will pay them. It shows respect. I'm tired of people wanting to do events and not paying their speakers because of the exposure. I'm tired of people not being given a voice because they don't have a certain amount of followers. Just because people don't know who you are yet doesn't mean you or your voice isn't valuable.

The other thing that I did was, yeah, great. You have the all-access pass full and lifetime pass. Most of them are $200 to $300. My pass, not only was it an access pass, it's not a lifetime access because things change so quickly, and I want you to keep up, so it's a six months to a year sort of pass. It was at under $100, and you got four weeks' worth of one-on-one and group coaching on podcasting, so not only did you get all of the summit information thrown at you, but you also got the time to digest it, talk about it with other people who are in the same situation as you, and you got to learn from them. Then, you actually got went and got your thing done. You got your podcast started instead of having these 75 sort of things and you paid, and then you never look at them again. I wanted to provide support.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I will possibly be doing it again, but I didn't do it for the reasons that other people do it. I spoke to a lot of virtual summit experts, and they thought I was weird doing things the way that I wanted to do it, but I highly recommend doing a summit even as an introvert because you get to speak to people one-on-one, and we're really good at that. We get to ask deep questions. If you're an introvert and thinking of a way to raise your visibility, I highly recommend doing a summit. If anyone has any questions, please email me at janice@thecareerintrovert.com. It has been a pleasure. Thank you for listening, and this is Janice, the career introvert. Looking forward to helping you move forward with your business and your career.