SNM209: Everything You Need To Know About Virtual Summits with Ray Brehm

This is something I can help authors with because at the time I was just doing book launches for authors and those aren't income plays they're status plays, but getting bestseller, getting your book out there, but this is a way I could actually help authors make money. That's how I got into this.

My very first question is, can you explain what a Virtual Summit is from the very beginning to people that don't know what it is? I'm a big fan of cooperative venture, so I'm excited.

You're going to release them Monday through Friday, for instance, and a free attendee gets to watch the whole event for free. The videos are available for 48 hours after release. And it's a huge value proposition to watch these interviews for free, because they're basically getting coaching from all these different speakers.

And then you can offer a premium pass where you give lifetime access to those videos and any other bonuses you have, and that's the basic idea around it, but it's a fixed date event. It's not a live event where you're trying to coordinate speakers getting on stage or coming into your zoom room at certain times, you've got it all locked in. It's all automated. And it's really a powerful way for both you the host and all the other speakers to get in front of a much larger audience than you could.

So, for instance, you and I are doing this podcast one on one. Both of our audiences will get exposure to this, but think of it like this. If you had 20 people in here now, and you're going to interview them. Everybody's audience would be there. And that's why one of the best ways to build an audience, create an email list, find buyers, get some income and connect with other influencers is a Virtual Summit.

So, for instance, I had my first summit, I saw I've got Stu McLaren on membership guy, and I knew he was in the middle of a launch. Anyway. I knew he wouldn't promote, but that name attracted other speakers. So, from the standpoint of adding credibility and attracting other speakers to your summit. That's great. But you're going to get the most emails, the most premium past purchases so, income from the summit, from those B listers and their audiences, because their audience know and trust them.

And they're saying, come check out this summit, I'm speaking, Jonathan's the host. And it is amazing. Their best audience is going to follow them to that summit and check it out. So, for me, when I first ran my first summit, I didn't know any better, but I got who I could get. And there was all the workhorse B listers. And that was very successful. At the very same time, a friend of mine who was on my summit ran her own summit. And she had Dean Graziosi, Jeff Walker, this just list of lists.

And we just happened to compare notes afterwards a couple of weeks later, and I got more emails. I made more money. And so, you could stack it with all the people you think you want on there because of the name recognition, when really what you want are people that have raving fans and that are going to promote the summit itself.

So, that's the other myth and it's obviously probably easier to recruit the B listers and they're going to be more valuable to you in the long-term and in the short term with the premium past sales.

That's still not appealing. But if I come to you and say, Jonathan I'm doing a summit on this topic. It's in your niche. I'd love to hear you speak about this. And by the way, there's going to be 20 or 30 speakers on here, that are sending their audiences that you're going to get exposure to. And if you give away some freebie, we're going to get you opt-ins as well. That's a value proposition that you can make. Instant value offering the other person to come on your summit.

So, and you can do that with zero emails, with zero lists with nobody knowing you. Summit is not about you and what you're offering. It's what the entire picture is offering, which is multiple speakers and their audience is sending them to get exposure to you as a potential speaker coming on the summit. Now the question would be okay, but if I don't have any yet the first ask, will you start with the low-hanging fruit?

So, you get a few people that you can reach out to, or you've had interactions with. And even if those people you don't know very well, you're on their email list or so for most of them if you've either respond to emails before, left them good reviews, interacted at all. There'll be interested in doing it. And obviously the first couple are always the hardest, just from a nerves side and a, I don't have anybody else, yet side, but when I started, I knew I could get about three or four people.

And even as I was asking them, I got some verbal yeses. I didn't get responses right away from some, I was already asking the next group saying, here's who as so far committed. So even before I had the interviews, you start checking off this list. And for me, knowing what I know about summits, when people ask me, I'm like, sure, because for 20 minutes of my time, I'm going to get exposure to at least some audience that I haven't before.

And that summit and interview could be used in perpetuity as it evergreen or it's being used in a podcast later. So, it's like investing in a permanent marketing piece to an audience that someone else is going to promote in perpetuity, theoretically. So, I think it changes the dynamic of the ask and this guilt that I don't really have anything to offer, but will you help me when you do have something to offer that's really good for potential speakers.

So, a lot of times it just matters if the topic matches what their audience wants to hear, and the audience you're attracting to the summit are the type of people they want. A new people they would want in their audience. And of course, if they've got the time to do the interview.

If you get your first summit out of the way and muscle through it you're going to be much better equipped to use that as a business tool in the future, because of all the kind of the timelines and so forth, but that I think underestimating the time it would take. And really once you have all the interviews done, you can rapidly do everything else.

And if you can focus on that, but if you're still trying to get interviews and coordinate and get on people's calendars while you're building out the tech and everything else, that can be stressful. Two is, and this is something I've learned even more recently, I went back and did the books on that very first summit. People judge the success of the summit solely based on premium passes and emails. When, if you look at the big picture there's a lot more to be done there.

Now, in your case, your last summit, you had a couple of two or three tiers, of price points and the premium pass, you had upsells and so forth. You launched something afterwards. And so, you had that plan in place, which is what we'd like to try to do with people. But my first summit I did in premium past sales, which blew me away. Cause when I was doing the first summit, I thought this thing's not going to make any money.

It's just an authority play to seek, to be seen in front of these other people that I'm interviewing with. And the truth was I did about $12,126 I'll never forget, in premium past sales. I'm like wow. This is something I can help authors with because at the time I was just doing book launches for authors and those aren't income plays they're status plays, getting bestseller, getting your book out there, but this is a way I could actually help authors make money. That's how I got into this.

The day after the summit ended, I just had this feeling that there was, I was getting all these emails, thanking me and so forth. I'm like, I think I should offer something here. I hadn't planned on it. And I went back and forth. I could promote somebody else's product. I said, you know what, I'm going to take my highest price thing and just offer it, which was a thousand-dollar anthology book offer, which I had run 45 days earlier, already to my list.

Now I added about 2,800 emails to my list from the summit and ran this thing again. And I had sold 3 45 days earlier, so 3 K, but I sold 19 in four days right after the summit. And so, then I started looking at whoa, I just did a 50% increase on the summit premium pass. So, I did 31 K in a two week period. And I said, wow, this is amazing. And that's kinda how I got into the done-for-you summit side, but just recently.

So, I've worked with clients for a year and a half and doing their summits for them. And I've seen people dismissing the idea of launching something afterwards and also really nurturing those relationships with the speakers that they just made. So, I went back, looked at that first summit and then tracked all the income. For the next year from the top five affiliates and two through four, I did another 56 K in revenue with over the next year, from that first summit.

And the top affiliate, I did another 150 K in revenue. So, we're approaching like 250 K in business created from that first summit. And if you go back and look at the premium past sales, $12,000, that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's peanuts compared to what the business relationships did for me after that first summit. And of course, they just keep multiplying. A lot of those people are on multiple summits and you build those relationships. You and I are that way.

We've got multiple people in our circle that, now I can just send them a joke email or something, it's not oh, I'm afraid to hit send because it's this influencer, but we built those relationships and we proved out some of the offers. And now I've got standard offers. You and I emailed a few weeks ago about something we might do. So, that's the invaluable part is not seeing the big picture or seeing the big picture is the invaluable part.

That you're going to have business relationships and you could really justify all the expense without the premium pass, even without your core offer afterwards, if you just wanted these business relationships moving into the future, but you don't have to discount those. You can also focus on your core offer.

My focus with clients is, that core offer really should be a high ticket, like $10,000 or higher that you offer after the Virtual Summit, because you're authority you're at peak authority the day that summit ends and let's capitalize on that and share your top program. And if you don't have one, let's create a top program. So that's now what I do. With my whole done-for-you services morphed into this. Done-for-you summit is just a small part.

We're going to start by figuring out your high ticket that you're going to offer after.

So, I've got all these great interviews that I use it either as a bonus or a VIP upgrade, best of series. I can use them in multiple ways. I even took one of the interviews from that very first summit and turn it into a course because it was so good. And so, checkbox following a system, and that was a Matt McWilliams interview. But the value here is if you're starting, and you're trying to decide.

I don't like to do, obviously there's ways to monetize podcasts and everything else, and you should do it. But I like to do the thing that's going to get me the most bang for my buck. And for instance, if you and I, and that's why it's great, like you're recording this video. You can put that in a summit later. And I may take this, but at my summit or my podcasts, in fact, I'm there as well.

But with the summit, the difference is, we're investing time during this interview and we're both going to get traffic from people that aren't even on this interview because there's other speakers on the summit sending their audience. So, while if somebody's starting with zero emails and they get on podcast with you, they're probably going to get some emails from your audience. But if they're on a summit with you, they're going to get emails from 20 people's audiences or 30.

And if you're the host and you don't have any emails, that's okay too. All you're expected to do is be the interviewer, the reporter. And if you look at, in fact, I just got it sitting right here, but if in Russell Brunson's expert secrets book. He talks about the five stages of becoming an expert. One is to have the dream of what you want to be the expert in. Stage two is be the interviewer, the reporter, and you don't have to be the expert yet.

You can be the reporter and by the way, your summit can be about something broader. And you're the expert in one niche. And you still might make your core offer after the summit about you. But you can bring in all these experts. So, for me, my first summit was Book Profit School. I already saw a ton of summits up publishing. I saw a ton of summits about hitting bestseller. And to me, both of those topics, I couldn't comprehend because it seemed like all the interviews would be the same.

I said, I want to know how people are making money on the back end of their books. And so, I went one step further and made that the theme of the summit. Now I still had my niche afterwards. At the time that was people that hadn't even written a book yet and wanted to be a part of a bestselling book, which is my anthology. That was just a small piece. So, we talked about memberships and hosting masterminds and creating courses and connecting with influencers and all this stuff.

Which made the summit successful and allowed me to invite speakers outside of self-publishing. Stu McLaren, you wouldn't invite him into a self-publishing summit. He certainly was a good fit for book profiting and creating some kind of recurring membership on the back end. So, that's what I love about summits.

You can create diversity in the type of people you bring, as long as you want their audiences to be a fit for your next thing, but you can add, you're going to get exposed to, it's basically crowdsourcing one content because you're creating a product with the summit and you're crowdsourcing an audience as well.

And for instance, in Stu McLaren's case, I didn't have any direct access to him, but I had one of his products and I had his help and I was on the phone, in fact, they contacted me for a testimonial and while I was on the phone and I said, I'm doing this thing. And I think it could help send people Stew's way and it'll help me. And they set it up. They're like, we'll get you in touch with his person. So, it's not always like you've got to go knock on Jack Canfield's door or something.

It's, can you get in touch with people? And most of them, if they've got the time and it's the right niche they'll consider it. So, the worst, I don't think there's worst there. You can do some things wrong, reaching out. Going for no is go for no, is that phrase where it's keep asking people until tell they say no. And most people aren't going to be offended for you wanting them on your summit. They just might not be able to do it or might not be a fit.

And sometimes they either don't get the message or they ignore you. That's okay, too. The other thing about summits are I've had people on my summits who I really looked up to and it turned out they were deceiving the world on how big their audience was. So, it shows who's been skinny dipping out there. And then, the flip side in your ass is don't send people paragraphs and don't act like you're doing them a favor, but also don't feel like they're doing you a favor.

You're offering them something very valuable and that's to be in front of everybody else's audiences. So usually just a short, nice email. Like I really liked you, your Serve No Master podcast Jonathan. I'm hosting this summit, I think you'd be a great fit to talk about living a free life and being a digital entrepreneur. And it's going to run this time. I always tell people there's no requirement to promote, although we definitely want them, but that first ask, we're just saying it's okay.

And also, it's okay to say no. And I've had people that I thought, oh, they blew me off. And then two weeks later I was on vacation, but I'm in. Just asking is good and I think people can start right after this podcast. They can go send something to somebody they know and say, I'm thinking about doing a summit would you be interested in interviewing? Get your first couple of yeses while you're building the whole concept out. I had three or four interviews before I knew the name of my summit.

That now I know before I ask people, but it's okay to switch the concept around, switch the taglines. The theme kind of switched as I did interviews. My little subhead or tagline was how to increase your influence income and authority beyond royalties, because there was Hey, if you're not feeling it from your book royalties, this is for you. But I didn't come up with that theme until I interviewed enough people that kept saying the same thing over and over again.

You talk me into it. So, I know how you guys are feeling. Make sure you grab that book at ray.fm/servenomaster. Thank you so much for being here Ray. This has been an absolutely amazing interview. I hope you guys found this as valuable as me, make sure to check out his amazing content and his book is absolutely worth the read.