Virtual Summits for Podcasters with Dr. Mark Wade

Hey everyone. Ashley here with RSS.com. On today's episode, we're talking to Dr. Mark T. Wade with Virtual Summit Software. Enjoy the show. All right. Well, Dr. Mark Wade, welcome to the show. I'm so excited you could be here. Could you do us a little bit of favor and tell us what it is that you do? Hey, Ashley. Super excited to be here. Yeah, it's Dr. Mark T. Wade, as you just said. So I am a doctor by trade.

I started off in the health industry with a brick and mortar practice and wanted to help more people. But instead of opening up more clinics, we looked for an opportunity to kind of expand outside of that and started an online institute, which now is almost 11 years old at that time. It's called the American Posture Institute, and it did really well.

We used a strategy, a marketing strategy called Virtual Summits to build the exposure, to build our audience, to get our message out in front of more people. But at that time, there was no easy or simple or cheap way to do it. It was actually pretty complex. And I was a little frustrated because there's so many easy ways to do webinars and courses and people, you know, you don't have to have a bunch of tech skill or knowledge. And I thought there has to be a better way to do virtual summits.

They're so powerful. They're so beneficial. And so in 2016, we set out and we created the first platform for hosting virtual summits called Virtual Summit Software. And then in 2017, I exited the American Posture Institute and went full time into helping people get their message out to the world via these virtual summit strategies. From there, we've hosted in-person conferences called Summit Fest Live. We host one of the top biggest virtual summits on virtual summits.

We have a agency, a six-figure agency that hosts high-level virtual summits. And of course, we have the virtual summit software, which is the quickest and easiest way to host virtual summits. So what's pretty cool is I get to spend most of my day doing two things. One, helping amazing visionaries and thought leaders like yourself get their message in front of more people, which I see as a way to expand the world and make the world a better place.

But I also get to like brainstorm ideas and see those ideas actually come to like real life fruition on a computer and play with it. So I kind of feel like a kid on Christmas almost every single week. Now you said you were looking to expand, but what was it exactly that sparked you to want to do virtual summits? I mean, a lot of people don't even know what virtual summits are.

Exactly. So I stumbled across virtual summits through a podcast, and I should mention we have a podcast as well, the virtual summit podcast. We've had it going on almost three years now. It's kind of crazy. My good buddy, best friend, John Lee Dumas, is a big podcaster, and he was kind of like, Mark, you have to have a podcast. I'm like, yes, okay, let's do it.

So well, I heard on a podcast, a now good buddy of mine, Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income talking to Lewis Howes about a summit that they had ran. And I was like, you know what, like, let's give this thing a go. And so like we'd been trying the typical things we were trying, like lead magnets and, you know, like putting webinars and things and trying to put it out there.

But we weren't really getting a whole lot of people coming in to our audience and growing our audience, at least not as quickly as we wanted to. And at that time, we didn't have a lot of experience or even a budget really to spend much money on like paid traffic. Again, this is like, you know, nine years ago, 10 years ago. So it was still really new back then as well. And so we set out to do this. And with that, the concept of it just made perfect sense to me.

It's the concept of for a virtual summit for those who aren't familiar with it is essentially you're taking a problem that your audience has a problem or a series of problems and you're bringing together some of the top minds in the industry or in the niche to solve those problems and you're making it available to this audience for free for a set period of time. So it's a really great way in my mind to build no like and trust. Now you got to keep in mind, I actually have two doctorates.

It means I'm a really big nerd and one of the things I love to nerd out about is psychology, why people do what they do and don't do what they do or, you know, don't take action. And for me, like I saw this as a great way to give. You give value first, you build a relationship, you create no like and trust, but you also are positioning yourself as the expert, as the influencer, as the authority, which creates even more momentum with this new audience.

So for us, it was a really great opportunity to again, build our list. And if we go, if I look all the way back and I haven't looked this far back in quite a while, Ashley, so you're pushing my memory here a little bit.

But if I go back to our very first summit and because I'll actually bring this up because it's counterintuitive to what the people who are familiar with summits would probably think or say. I'm a big believer that it's not about the size of the list. It's not how big your summit is. It's about how quality that audience is, which is also why virtual summits are so powerful.

If I look back to the first summit we ran, it had like maybe three thousand attendees on which is actually pretty big, right? It was our first summit. But you hear people running like hundred thousand person summits and things like that. And we've had pretty massive ones as well. But that first summit had three thousand attendees and that summit ended up generating about thirty six thousand dollars in revenue just from the summit, which for us was our first real revenue online.

So we were doing the happy dance for sure, but then those three thousand people were aligned with what we ended up launching after that, which was a certification. We ended up doing over six figures on that launch just from that three thousand person list that we had brought in from the summit. The summit aligned perfectly with what we were launching. And we've replicated that over, you know, forty or fifty times now in different niches, industries and products as well.

So it's a really powerful way again to bring an audience in to create know, like and trust, but by doing it, by solving their problems and giving them something they want.

All that sounds so exciting. And unfortunately, I know that one of the things that's going to happen is people that are listening to this, they're going to jump right in and be like, oh, I can make so much money. But let's let's back up just a little bit for just a second. Why should podcasters care about virtual summits? Why should they even be having that on their radar?

Well, first of all, I'm a big proponent of virtual summits, not just because my buddy's GLD, but because they've been very successful for us in our company as well. You know, over the long haul, we've had a lot of people come in, listen to the virtual summit podcast to get knowledge, to get information and at some point come into the software, virtual summit software and run their summit through that.

What I can't do very well, and I'm not an expert at podcasting by any means, but I'm a big proponent of them. What I wasn't able to do is speed that process up or scale it on my own terms. Now, with a virtual summit, I have power and control to be able to make it as big as I want. If I wanted to go bigger, I could do other things to push it bigger.

But I can I know for sure I can get that information, which is a big thing, you know, that we have a lot of strategies in the podcasting space for trying to get people to go from the earbuds into the email. But a lot of times it is the challenge that we're trying to overcome. With a virtual summit, they're not getting access to the information unless they give you their information.

So it's a big way to collect that information, collect their email, their name and be able to communicate with them afterwards, which puts that monetization opportunity on your timeline versus just their timeline. Well, speaking of which, I mean, you said that you're giving value. So how exactly, like I kind of know this, but just for our audience, how exactly are you making money from it if you're giving away like three tickets to a virtual summit? How does that work? That's a great question.

I'm glad you asked that. I always leave that to like to see if people are even paying attention, right? Like, wait, you said it was free. How do you make thirty thousand or thirty six or one hundred, whatever. So it's free to attend, right? Just like, you know, you're giving them the opportunity to have access to these thought leaders, these amazing people and get this content for free. But it's during this period of time.

The summit, if you're doing a multi-day summit is like, let's say Thursday through Sunday and they can show up and they can get access to those sessions. But just like any conference or any summit, when those end, when that day's over, those sessions close down and they're no longer available. However, we usually offer a summit offer or like an all access pass for a nominal fee, like forty seven bucks or ninety seven bucks. And it gives them access, one, to keep those sessions on demand.

But we also throw in some cool bonuses or other things as well. So the people who are like the attendees who are like, this is amazing. Like I want to come back to this as is great knowledge or I didn't get a chance to get through them all. I want to come back to them. You know, they'll gladly pay forty seven dollars, especially if they see the value in it to have access to those ongoing. And so that's where the revenue from a summit comes.

Now, I always say your summit is not your monetization strategy. Your summit is your your relationship strategy. That's where you build the no like and trust. Your monetization strategy comes after that. It's what you're going to do after the summit is where you're truly going to be able to monetize most of our summits. You know, we see anywhere from ten thousand to fifty thousand.

We have had a couple hundred thousand dollar summits, but those were ten to twenty to thirty percent of the revenue we were able to generate after the summit because we've built the relationship with them. And then we bring them into our next promotion or offer.

Now, so I mean, it sounds like if you're getting all these experts, do you have to pay all the experts? How do you convince me but actually be part of your summit? So it's like it's very similar to podcasting. And actually, we see some of our most successful summit hosts are podcasters because they're very comfortable, you know, with reaching out to speakers or asking someone to speak.

Now, it is a little bit different in the sense of you are immediately generating some monetization from that summit. So maybe the speaker would like some kind of compensation. I'll come back to that. But also you are asking the speaker to participate. This is where there's a variety of different ways you can promote the summit.

There's really cool strategies, everything from press release to paid traffic to I mean, we've even seen people, you know, to local summits and put out stuff in the newspapers. So there's hundreds of strategies. But the most powerful, the most successful strategy is having the speakers on your summit share it with their audience. So their audience, they say, hey, look at this. I'm speaking on this cool summit. It's on this topic. If you have any interest, come join me.

And then their audience, their database comes and participates in the summit. So it's really easy in this way to build your audience because you're leveraging both the expertise of the speakers, but also their database, their audiences as well. So in that instance, the speaker might be like, well, you know, this is great. I'm getting some publicity, which is really good because they're getting exposure not only to your audience, but to the other speakers audiences. So that's great.

But they might say, you know, let's let's make this a better incentive. So there's a variety of different ways. Typically we do not do honorariums. We don't pay speakers to speak because there's other ways we can make it a value to them. If you want to pay a speaker, awesome, go for it. But typically you don't need to. One of the easiest things to do is give them an opportunity to build their own audience, their own database from their summit.

So this is very simple by having them give a freebie on their speaker page. Like you know, that goes to one of their lead magnets or an opt in or free resource where they can collect the data. You might be thinking, well, you know, Mark, if we're if all the leads are going over to them, like what about you aren't you can you control the entire database and you have the ability to communicate with them and it's okay.

It's like, you know, I am a big believer that there's enough for everybody to go around. And when you do that, the speakers actually what we have found one of the other big benefits with these speakers, they become collaborators ongoing. You build a relationship with these experts. I remember some of the first summits I put on, I reached out to like mentors and coaches and by the end of the summit, we were colleagues. We were on the same level. We were friends.

I could reach out to them for help or advice or another collaboration in the future. So as a and I hear that almost from every summit host that I talk to, they say, yeah, the revenue is great. The leads were great. But one of the best benefits to hosting the summit is the relationship I now have with these other speakers. Now with that being said, one of the most common ways to kind of give back to the speakers is to give them an affiliate commission or a referral commission.

So if they send people to the summit and those people then that are participating in the summit from that speaker by that all access pass, let's give them 50% of that revenue right there. So that's a little something in the pocket of the speaker. They're generating a little bit into their list as well. So it's like a win, win, win for everybody around. There were several things that you said that really stuck out to me.

First was you said that you were basically building relationships with these experts. So not only are you building relationships with your potential customers, you're building relationships with people that can basically help you build their build your business and theirs and borrowing each other's audiences.

That's such an interesting idea because, you know, like you said, there is so much to go around and you don't have to fear that if you're trying to get people in on your thing, because maybe you could be on theirs. Well and to go with what you're just saying right there, I mean, in a way, it's not a lot different than a podcast, at least the conceptually, right? We bring a lot of the podcasts out there, interview based podcasts.

One of the reasons for that is we hope the person we're interviewing, one, not only adds value to our audience, number one, but number two, hopefully shares it with their audience, which helps us grow our podcast. A summit is like that on steroids. You got eight, 10, 20, 30, 50, 60 people all doing it at the exact same time. It's kind of like a podcast and a launch in a series of webinars or masterclasses all in one event. And that's one of the reasons they've they become so successful.

I will say, and again, I mentioned this a minute ago, I see podcasters do extremely well with this because one is really easy to reach back out to past guests. So they usually already have a speaker list lined up that they can reach out to. And they had a great interaction with you already once. Most of the time they'll be willing to do it again.

But with that being said, for for others, I wouldn't also necessarily recommend, you know, a virtual summit is extremely powerful and extremely beneficial, but there's a variety of different types. I wouldn't recommend everybody does every single type, at least not at the at the beginning. So we've been talking about kind of like multi-day summits.

And just to clarify, a multi-day summit is is anywhere from about three days to seven days and has anywhere from about 20 or 25 speakers onwards up, like 80 speakers. You know, I did a summit that had one hundred and twenty six speakers on it. I would not recommend that for anybody at any time, but especially not on your first summit. Russell Brunson did a summit that was 30 days long and did about a million dollars in the first 14 days of his virtual summit.

With that being said, the other style of summits, there's summit series, there's micro summits. But the big proponent for me is the one day summit. The one day summit is really great, again, for podcasters as well. But anybody just getting started because it's a little bit a little bit it's easier to put on. It's less risky. It's just like it says it's one day, but it doesn't mean it's a full day in content.

It just means that your audience has one day to essentially consume it, which really overcomes overwhelm as well. So these mega summits do really well. But there's a whole other side of this. Attendees that go, I don't have five days or I don't have, you know, 50 hours to watch all 50 sessions. So I'm not even going to participate in it with a one day summit. It says, hey, here's you have this problem. We're going to solve it on this summit in one day.

Almost everybody, if the problem is big enough, is willing to invest one day. And again, it's not a full day in time. It's not like eight hours. It's just that's when they consume it. That's how long they have to consume it. And it has anywhere from around six speakers, upwards of 12 speakers with kind of eight being the sweet spot. So it's much easier to do from a time perspective.

It's going to give you the same experience, the same understanding as doing a multi day summit, but you're going to be able to do it quicker, faster and easier. And you know, heaven forbid you mess up on something. You're not like wasting all of your opportunities. You didn't, you know, you didn't invite all 30 or 40 contacts you have. You could still run another one later and fix that, you know, error or whatever you had. So I recommend everybody starts off with a one day summit.

It's also really great because we've been talking about building our audience or building our database. Well, there's that's what a multi day summit is primarily geared at is like we bring on 20, 30 speakers, everybody shares it, promotes it to their audience. We build this mega list, whatever that word means to you. But with a one day summit, you can do that or you can do it for a variety of other reasons. We have actually 10 different frameworks.

We use the one day summit for you can use it to promote a podcast launch. For example, you could do it for a book launch. You can do it to fill your mastermind. If you're doing a product launch, if you're selling a physical, physical, tangible object, you can do that. You can do it to fill an in-person event. So there's a variety of different ways of doing it. Essentially, how you're going to do any summit is you start with what's your end goal. Always start with the end in mind.

Where are we taking this audience afterwards? Now if we're taking them to sell a program, let's say a course, a membership, a coaching program, a mastermind certification, et cetera, we're going to take whatever that thing is and we're going to identify what problem does that solve? Because if you're selling it to somebody, it's most likely solving a problem. It's a solution. So you identify the top problem or the top problems and that's what we're going to build our summit around.

That's what we're going to build our one day summit around. Now with that being said, a very common mistake I see some hosts make is they just kind of go with whatever they think is a hot topic at the time. They're like, oh, this sounds good. Or this is kind of popular right now. Or I would like to do this topic, which is cool.

But if it doesn't align with where you want to take that audience afterwards, then you're going to have a lower conversion into the monetization aspect, which happens after the summit. So that's super important. The other thing, the other common mistake I see summit hosts make is I said you're going to build your summit. You're going to theme your summit around what the top problem is. You take that top problem and identify what we call micro solutions.

So like if my top problem was how to build a, you know, I need to know how to build a business and I'm using a generic one right now, but I might need to know how to file for a business license. I might need to know how to get traffic or promote my business. I might need to know how to build an offer. I might need to know how to do taxes. Those are all micro solutions to the big problem. Those are now our sessions and those sessions now tell us what speakers to go out and ask.

Usually summit hosts will just go and go, Oh, I want this speaker, this speaker, this speaker, and they just start thinking of speakers that they'd want, which can create two things. It can either create a shotgun effect, which means it's kind of all over the place. It doesn't gel well with the summit or it can do a repetitive where everybody's kind of saying the same thing and nobody wants to watch 10 people saying the same thing. Right? So it's really great to start.

Always start with what's the problem you're where are you taking the audience? What's the problem you're solving? What sessions would be appropriate or great would be great for that problem. And then who's the best person to speak on that session?

So many knowledge bombs happening right now. So one of the things that you said is that you see a mistake that, um, that summit hosts make is that they're going after what's trending. It sounds like what you're describing is a lot better as like an evergreen approach so you can start building up some of that passive income and maybe use the same summits over and over again. You bring up an excellent point here. So this is a strategy that's now available.

I always think of whenever I build a summit, it's not a one and done, which is how they always used to be. Like our first summits, most people, when you built a summit, you ran the summit and you had success or you didn't. And then the summit went and sat over there somewhere because one of the most powerful things with a multi-day summit is building the audience. And after it's already happened, it doesn't really work as well.

Now two things have changed that have completely revolutionized is, you know, when we created the first one day summit back in 2016 and then started teaching people about this formula of using one day summits, well, there started being a variety of different reasons to use summit. So that started changing. The other thing is when the software virtual summit software launched in 2017, we had a, we have a proprietary technology and they're called the ever summit.

Whereas with one click of a button, the software will rerun your summit as if it's still happening for the first time ongoing forever. Hence a forever summit ever summit in the past, there was no easy way. There was no cheap way to rerun your summit. It was, it would look old. It didn't operate the same. And so most people's summits just went and sat on a virtual bookshelf somewhere collecting dust.

But now with the ever summit feature inside of the virtual summit software in these different strategies, we use summits again to map out a, like we have a reason to do our summit. We're going to sell this promotion. We're going to get people to that event or we have this sales promotion sequence or course or membership, et cetera. So we built out a summit. We use the live action of it in the sense of that having the speakers promote it. We're launching it for the first time.

And that's actually a really good point because we're seeing ever since the COVID happened, we saw most in-person events go online, go virtual. Those are, those are considered a live stream conferences. So those were essentially in-person conferences that just went virtual. They still have in the exact same way. It was 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 10 a.m. And if you weren't sitting there live on your computer, you missed that session and they operated essentially an in-person conference virtually.

And those are extremely powerful as well. Those are used more to sell like a high ticket product. So you have them live, you engage with them. There's a specific framework you use, and then you sell a $20,000 mastermind or something like that. To clarify here, virtual summits, these are a marketing strategy which are more used to build your audience. You're know, like, and trust with people who don't know you yet. So it's not going to be to sell a $20,000 thing on that summit.

You may end up doing it later, but you're bringing this new audience that doesn't know you yet and building a relationship with them. That's the goal of the summit. So historically, most summits are prerecorded, which is also means you have plenty of time in advance to get it ready. You don't have to worry as much about like, oh, if this speaker doesn't show up or this, you know, technology doesn't work or whatever.

So it's a lot less stressful and less risky because you can prepare it all in advance and have it ready to go. So it's prerecorded. Now, of course, you can do some live sessions like a live Ask Me Anything or a speaker panel to add some live into it. But traditionally, virtual summits are prerecorded.

And the reason for that is, is because the people who are attending it, they're sitting there consuming this in the morning while they're brushing their teeth, getting ready for work or on their lunch break or in the evening after they put the kids to bed. They're watching it when they have the availability.

If you're doing it like the Lifestream conference style, those are usually people who already know you, who have a relationship with you, who paid for a ticket to attend it and are going to spend six, seven, eight hours with you on a Saturday. This other strategy is to build that relationship and they're going to do it on their own time. So I wanted to clarify that as well. Now, I have so many questions written down and I know I'm not going to get to all of

them. So I do have to kind of hone in here, but it's hard. So I got to ask you, which do you think is better to participate in O Summit or host it? Because it's a lot of work. Well, to participate like so as a speaker, it's a great opportunity. And here's the thing I'll say out there. A lot of speakers are completely missing the mark on this. Because there's more opportunities for speakers to speak on virtual events and virtual summits now, a lot of them aren't giving it their all.

It used to be, I mean, I wrote an article blog back in 2019 for 2020, the future of virtual summits. And it's crazy how spot on it was even before knowing COVID was going to happen on what was going to happen. With that being said, virtual summits and virtual events aren't going anywhere. They're actually becoming more and more adapted.

Like we're actually having an entire department now that's dedicated to in-person or professionals, let's say like chiropractors, dentists, attorneys who are running virtual summits, one day virtual summits in their local community with speakers in their local community.

It's still virtual because people still want to watch it from the comfort of their home, but they're becoming like the local celebrity in their communities from these as well as building their list, their audience, and getting more people into their practices and their businesses. So it's being done in places you wouldn't have even thought of doing virtual summits before. So with that being said, they're not going to go anywhere.

The, where the speakers are missing the mark here is back in the day when you got asked to speak on a summit, it was a great opportunity. You played full out. A lot of times speakers now do the bare minimum.

I will say if you play full out, if you actually mail, promote, and participate, get in the audience, get in the groups, if they do a speaker panel, volunteer to be on that panel, we're going to build your bandwidth, your publicity, your growth, and the opportunities that are going to come out of that for you are going to be tremendous as well. 10x it's going to be great opportunity regardless, but pick the ones that you know are going to be great for you and play full out.

You're going to get so much more out of it. So being a speaker is amazing because you're right. You don't have to do as much work, but at the end of the day, you know, the, the, the rewards go to those who do put in the work and being a host, although there is work, it does take time. If you're doing a multi-day summit, you're looking at probably three or four months minimum. It's a decent amount of work just because of the amount of interviews and stuff that you're going to do.

I will say because of platforms like virtual summit software, it's reduced the amount of tech work that went in my first summit. Took me over a hundred hours to build. There were seven different pieces of software, 26 plugins, and over a hundred hours cost me $7,000 and still looks like a third grader build it. Now I can build that same summit in two hours or less for $97 on the virtual summit software. But with that being said, hosting the summit does not have to take you a long time.

If you're doing a one day summit, which is what I recommend everybody starts with, you're talking 30 days, 30 days, that may be five to 10 hours. If you're doing like six to eight speakers, right? I mean, all of us have that extra time, especially to generate an extra 500 or a thousand leads that may turn into 10, 20, 30, 50, a hundred new sales. So it's really the cost, the cost of time benefit is phenomenal.

Most summit hosts that I know who run a summit end up running multiple summits ongoing every year because of how beneficial they are. And then they set them to the ever summit status, you know, and put it on their website or their resources page. And it just becomes now an automated funnel that brings people into their database, into their community and turns into sales without them even having to do anything. I mean, that's really the end goal. It's not a get rich quick scheme.

It's not going to make you, you know, if you're not running traffic to it, it's not going to make you millions of dollars on as an ever summit funnel, but it will generate you. I mean, we have a naturopath that wanted to break away from his practice. He started running, he did a one day summit, it was a Parkinson's solution summit. He focuses on brain solutions. He ran that he had eight professionals come and speak.

He ran that same one day summit on the ever summit feature in virtual summit software each month. He ran traffic to it, he think he put like five or $6,000 a month into paid traffic, which is nothing when you hear what I'm about to say. He got a hundred new patients a month, generated over a million dollars in new patient revenue over the course of one year by running the same one day summit. He built it one time, reran it and generated him over a million dollars in new patients.

We see all kinds of level, different levels of that. But I mean, that's the kind of thing that can happen when you have something that people want to participate in. Medical, you mentioned lawyers, you've mentioned a lot of different niches, but is there any

niche that wouldn't benefit from a summit? Like if you can actually, if you can come up with a topic, you can benefit from the summit and usually the most bizarre niche is the reason I mentioned like the healthcare professionals, the attorneys, because most people can't like, if a chiropractor can put on a virtual summit, you can put on a virtual summit. I promise you that that's kind of why I use those examples. I mean, we see podcasters crushing it. We see course creators crushing it.

We see no YouTubers, Instagramers, et cetera. They're all crushing it. This is like already in their wheelhouse and they already, most of them already have connections and they already have things to sell after it. I mean, a lot of these niches that I'm referring to, they are, they're building it all from the ground up and they're still getting the success with it.

So the funny, the actual beneficial thing here is at this point, the more bizarre your niches, the more unique your thing is, the better it's probably going to do. But if you're sitting there going, well, I don't know, you know, I'm in the garbage disposal niche. I don't know how well that would do. I promise you that summit will do phenomenal if you set it up correctly and your messaging is correct, et cetera. It would do phenomenal because you're also standing out.

And this is important when you're doing your summit. We talked about start with the end in mind. When you take that problem, the goal is not to be as generic or general as possible. You want to be as specific as possible. You want to be niche. And the reason for that is it stands out. Most people right now are inundated with information and this is marketing 101, but like most people are just getting so much information that they just don't have time for it.

And they're like, no, no, no, no. And we're just ninjas at like blocking things, but we all have a problem we're trying to solve. And so when they hear about your summit, the first thing they need to know is that it connects with their problem that they have, which is why I said pull out a problem. The second thing they're going to want to know is, is it for me? If it solves my problem and it's for me, I'm going to look further into it.

And so the more on point that is, and the more niche that is, you may not do a hundred thousand person summit, but I'll take a thousand qualified and engaged people who are primed for my offer over a hundred thousand people just hanging out, hanging around, kicking tires.

One of, uh, one of my favorite, uh, mentors, Denise Stufeld Thomas, she's my, she's my money mentor. She, uh, she says that you don't have to be an expert. You can just be a contributor and that kind of, you know, lowers the barrier. And after you're all, you're going to be the host anyway. So if you're the host, you're setting yourself up in the field of experts. You don't have to be the expert.

Well, when you run a summit, you end up become, you are now we have, I don't know what we're having to deal with kind of like imposter syndrome that there may be that there. Of course we all have that. But when you host a summit, you are an expert, like less than, what was it? Less than 14% of the population are entrepreneurs and less than 1% of them will ever run a virtual summit. So I also, one of the things I hear regularly is like, Oh man, there's so many summits, summits are overdone.

There's so many virtual summits. And what I think in my mind, if, if I'm biting my tongue usually is the reason you're seeing them is because they work. How many webinars are you're seeing right now? How many other promotions are you seeing? You're seeing the summit because it's getting your attention and it's B it's out there. Summits work. And again, if you, if you have them set up correctly with a problem and who it's for, they also convert well.

So yes, but like with that being said, when you host a summit and literally even if you just host one, I mean, you put that on your resume, it goes, you know, I am the host of the summit talk summit. I'm the host of the international posture symposium. There's different ways of titling your summit too, depending on where you want to go. But as after you've hosted a summit, you are now the host of that, just like you're the host of your podcast. That's credibility. That's authority.

It doesn't matter what the summit does. Like hopefully you crush it, but even if you don't crush it, you now have that authority, credibility, and the relationships you just built with all of these other experts and speakers.

Oh my goodness. So much good stuff. So where can people find you online? Because obviously we could only cover so much in about a half hour. So where can they find you online to get more info? Well, this has been an absolute blast. It's been great hanging out with you again, Ashley. I know we've had a lot of fun in our past at different places and it's great to be on here with you. Easiest and best place to go is directly to our, to our site, virtual summits with an S virtual summits.com.

That's the virtual summit software site, but there we have a resources area. So we have all kinds. You can get access to our podcast. You can hear other case studies if you want to hear, and we got case studies from all different industries and niches. If you want to hear about people in your industry and niche and we have a ton of free resources. The top one I recommend starting with is how to generate a thousand leads in 30 days.

That'll take you through that one day summit formula process and how within the next 30 days, you could have a one day summit out generating a thousand leads and then run it on ever summit every month after that. So again, you can get that over at virtual summits.com. Well, I definitely will be checking that out now before I let you go, you know, your buddy John Lee Dumas. It's his fault that I'm about to ask you this question.

One thing that's become kind of a thing on this show is before I let all my guests go, I asked them one question. What's one question I didn't ask you that you really wish I had? Ooh, that is a good one. That's a good one. What's one question that I didn't ask you that I wish you had?

Well, this is not necessarily one that I wish you would have asked me because it's a tough one, but very quickly is I would say like, what is the future of marketing, of business, of podcasting, of summits look like? Because we're in one of the most interesting times ever. It's so exciting to be alive right now. It's also a difficult time. So right now you have opportunity. You have two ways of viewing what's happening in the world.

And it doesn't matter any industry, any niche, whether we're talking podcasting, we're talking Instagram, we're talking summits, whatever. Right now things are either extremely opportunistic or challenging. And the only difference is your mindset. The only difference is your mindset because in reality things are changing. So we can either look at it as this is changing and it's a challenge. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to struggle. I'm not going to make it.

Or we can go, ooh, this is a perfect opportunity to see what the challenge is, to find out how to overcome that challenge. And the ones who do that are going to absolutely thrive over the next five, seven, 10, 20 years. Okay. We're in a great opportunity at this point. But I will say with that, one thing that I feel very secure about is people's need for information in relationships.

And so I love podcasting because it's a way for me to reach out to people and build relationships one-on-one with them when I have them on my show. It's also a really great way for me to give back to my community. And it allows me to stay on my toes and be listening to what other people are doing in real time as well. The reason I love virtual summits is it's a strategy that allows me to give to so many people.

And there's so many people both in podcasting space and in the virtual events space dumping money into these industries and niches. If it was me looking at it, I would say these are the two industries or niches I want to make sure that I'm in and primed for and finding a way to stay on top of and with. And so my personal opinion is every business, whether it's brick and mortar or online, should have an annual virtual summit that they're running, if not more.

And you should have a podcast as well.

Such great information. Thank you so much for all of the golden nuggets that you dropped. I can't wait for this episode to drop because I think that people are going to get a lot of value out of this. Thank you so much for being here. Absolute pleasure. Thank you, Ashley. Well, my fellow podcasters, I hope you enjoyed all the insights that Mark had to share with us. To learn more about how to launch and grow your own podcast, head over to rss.com backslash blog.

You can start your show for free and get your first episode on us. Thanks for tuning in.