virtual summits

5 Hacks For Connecting With Influencers

October 3, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Relationships with influencers are critical to your content brand’s success: they help you expand your knowledge as well as open doors to new opportunities.

Some of my biggest successes are directly tied to the relationships I’ve built and fostered along my journey. However, reaching out to influencers and building relationships with new contacts can feel overwhelming.

You may feel uncertain about how to go about it, and even question whether you’ll get a response to your initial efforts.

I’ve been there, believe me.

That’s why I want to share five powerful hacks that helped me build relationships with some of the most influential content marketers and productivity experts on the planet.

#1: Interview Influencers On Your Podcast

Both my Breakthrough Success Podcast and virtual summits have allowed me to interact with some of my niche’s top influencers. Interviews are a brilliant excuse for asking for an influencer’s time 🙂

Not only do you get to ask questions and interact with top influencers, you also get to provide your audience with valuable content.

Combine that with the fact that podcasting is a growing and less-tapped-into industry than blogging, and you’ll begin to wonder why more people aren’t doing it.

I currently publish an interview every week, but I am formulating a plan for daily episodes. And my knowledge stores will only grow as I interview more and more influencers – it’s amazing what you can learn from a single interview with a top influencer.

#2: Collaborate With Influencers

As I plan my blog content, I consider which influencers can provide relevant advice, resources or opinions, and contact them well before the publication dates.

I often work on the copy first, and then copy and paste submissions into the post to craft a more engaging article. Once the post is published, many of the influencers I mentioned will end up sharing the blog post to their own audiences, expanding my reach.

If you’re pressed for time, you can simply mention the influencers by name while you’re writing the post, and then let them know you’ve included them in the post once you publish it (and be sure to provide a link).

Some will share it and others won’t, but having at least some influencers share your content is a thousand times better than having no influencers share your content.

#3: Do The Influencer A Favor

The more you give someone, the more willing he or she will be to return the favor. But keep in mind these small favors will change according the influencer.

Some influencers (like me) would love a positive review for their podcasts (here’s mine). Other influencers would prefer you leave a 5-star review for their latest book. Writing a guest posts for the influencer’s site is also a viable option.

Determine which favor holds the most value for a particular influencer, then offer it without expecting anything in return.

If you approach relationships in this manner, it won’t be long before an influencer voluntarily provides you with something in return (if you have to ask, start with something small).

#4: Ask Meaningful Questions

Top influencers love shepherding other people through the path they once traveled.

Gary Vaynerchuk has an entire podcast dedicated to helping others. Want to get on Gary’s radar? Ask him a really good question.

Nearly all influencers recall a time in which they spent countless hours trying to figure things out. When they see other people in a similar situation, they naturally want to lend a helping hand.

Influencers enjoy steering people in the right direction and providing that little nudge to keep them moving forward. And they like it even more when people act their advice.

This is the starting point for repeat interviews and a much greater relationship.

#5: Be Everywhere To Them

You can’t be everywhere for everyone, but you can be everywhere for someone. What’s everywhere for someone mean?

Simply focus on the places where your special someone spends the majority of his/her time. This is why television ads used to work (and why now they are less effective).

Today, people spend more time on Facebook than they do watching tv, which is why social media ad spend has greatly increased over the years.

But that doesn’t mean you should try reaching an influencer with an ad. Rather, you should seek out the places they’re engaging with their readers.

Do they reply to tweets? Do they respond to blog comments? Are they posting a lot on LinkedIn?

These are the places where you need to be. Like, share, and comment on everything they post. Mention their social media handle when you share their content and eventually they’ll notice you.

For example, I notice the people who repeatedly share my content on Twitter more than anyone else in my audience. While I write with my entire audience in mind, I can match names and faces with the people who consistently share my content on Twitter.

Find the platforms most frequented by top influencers who share your mindset.

In Conclusion

Connecting with influencers is as easy or as difficult as you make it. The beginning stage may feel difficult, but as you continue, you’ll have a much easier time connecting with influencers and building relationships.

The ultimate hack not mentioned above is that once you build all of these relationships, you can ask for referrals.

Once I have over 30 speakers for my virtual summits, I ask them if they know anyone else who would also be a great speaker for the summit. They usually make intros and that alone makes relationship building much easier.

What are your thoughts about these hacks for building relationships? Have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Easy Hacks That Will Double Your Sales

June 27, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I’ve spent the past several weeks planning and orchestrating a virtual summit, so it’s been a while since I wrote my last blog post.

In the near future, I will offer a training course that goes deeper into the parts and process. But for now I want to share what I’ve learned about how to increase revenues, which was one of the questions I asked myself continuously as I organized the summit.

After all, a virtual summit is a huge undertaking, so its success was foremost in my mind. By asking myself several key questions throughout the process, particularly how to double my sales, I discovered several hacks that I’d never utilized for my business.

I realized early on that I’d been missing out on some great opportunities: if I had used these sales hacks earlier, I could have made thousands of extra dollars!

#1: One-Click Add-Ons

I’ve seen several marketers use this strategy. Basically you offer a main product and entice customers to pay a little extra for added value.

This is similar to the upselling model at fast-food restaurants when the cashier says, “Hey, you’ve already bought the hamburger. Wouldn’t you like a side of fries to go with it?”

That’s what the one-click add-on does (minus the body fat).

Now, if you’ve been to a virtual summit, or know the marketing behind it, you know that the All-Access Pass is a popular product choice.

Here’s how I incorporated the one-click add-on strategy into my virtual summit – in addition to the All-Access Pass, notice what else I offer on my sales page:

The Blog Post Promotion Blueprint is a mini training course I created for summit attendees who are looking for added value. Not everyone will opt in to the add-on, but just one click takes the order from $97 to $124.

While I am still in the early stages of the summit process (no partners have promoted it yet), the one-click add-on has already increased my summit revenue by 17%!

So even after the Content Marketing Success Summit (CMSS) has ended, I will continue incorporating one-click add-ons into future initiatives.

#2: Thank You Sales Page

I turned my Thank You Page into a Sales Page, and something magical happened – I got more sales! Here’s the background:

Most Thank You pages say something like, “Thank you for subscribing. The free gift will arrive in your inbox soon.” Some Thank You pages suggest a few blog posts to read while you wait for your free gift.

But I decided to go straight for the sale. After thanking people for joining the summit, I lead them to a video and a link to my sales page.

Here’s what the confirmation looks like:

I transition from “Thank You” to “Here’s my product” with “but first…”

You can use the “but first…” transition regardless of what business you are in. “Let me ask you a question” is also a universal transition into a sales pitch.

#3: The Evergreen Deadline

The evergreen deadline is critical to the success of a Thank You Sales Page. It combines a stacked offer with a sense of urgency.

The evergreen deadline creates a stronger sense of urgency than the “Cart Closes at Midnight” email. Here’s why…

When you reach my Thank You Sales Page, you’ll see the previous image in the confirmation I sent, but you’ll also see THIS:

I set a 15-minute timer for the $47 special. If you buy the All-Access Pass within the next 15 minutes, you get it for $47. If you wait, the All-Access Pass price jumps to $97.

This is a great way to increase sales even before your summit begins.

And to further increase the likelihood of action, I include the following for All-Access Pass customers:

Twitter Marketing Domination Course ($197 value)
My Productivity Cheatsheet ($47 value)
Boost Your Productivity NOW Course ($147 value)
A video tutorial on the prep work for this summit ($97 value)
Outsourcing Mastery Course ($97 value)

The total value adds up to $585, not including the All-Access Pass itself, which now seems like a steal.

But why stop there? This next piece is extremely important for the evergreen deadline. If anyone buys the All-Access Pass for just $47, I also throw in a personal audit of their website, which usually costs hundreds of dollars.

This offer doesn’t apply to the $97 All-Access Pass customers, so if you want it, you have to buy the All-Access Pass on the spot.

See how much urgency that creates?

#4: Host A Webinar

I believe that ‘not hosting a webinar earlier’ is Biggest Mistake #2 for most people, which comes right behind ‘not starting an email list earlier.’

I’m hosting webinars for CMSS. Not only because I want to, but also because I told every speaker and affiliate that I’d be hosting one. That’s one way to make yourself accountable 🙂

While this post doesn’t explain how to host a webinar, I’ll point you to two valuable resources:

First, I got to interview Jon Schumacher in Episode 39 of my Breakthrough Success Podcast. He shared a vast amount of knowledge about generating massive profit from webinars.

Second, I recommend Russel Brunson’s Expert Secrets for crafting the perfect webinar. The title of the book suggests a deep dive into becoming an expert (and it definitely delivers), plus he literally provides the PERFECT blueprint for creating a highly profitable webinar.

Right now, you can get Russel’s book for free if you just pay for the shipping.

#5: Get Sponsors

This is more of a double-your-revenue tip, but if you double your sales, you theoretically double your revenues.

I wish I’d spent more time pursuing sponsors for CMSS. I contacted a few sponsors later in the game than I should have, but I still generated a fair amount of revenue.

In my opinion, pursuing sponsors is a very underrated way to make revenue.

With that said, my general method for pursuing sponsors is different from writing sponsored posts or using sketchy tactics. You can and should pursue sponsors for a virtual summit or podcast as well.

Want to see the true potential of getting sponsors? Check out this case study in which Brian Appleton explains how he made over $20,000 from his summit with sponsorships alone.

In Conclusion

We all want to double our sales. And once we do, we want to double our sales again (or triple them).

These five hacks will allow you to double your sales and revenue with your existing audience. Once you get these hacks down, you can then focus on generating more traffic.

I got all five of these sales hacks down before I asked anyone to promote my summit. Now that I’ve got the system in place, I’m looking for affiliates to promote my summit. You can become an affiliate for my summit here.

What are your thoughts on these sales hacks? Have any others for us? Sound off with questions or suggestions in the comments section below.

Until next time –

Marc

How To Host A Successful Virtual Summit

February 25, 2017 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Virtual summits are starting to pick up steam. Hosting one can give you an instant boost in authority and get you several media mentions.

You may have heard of real-life summits, but virtual summits take them to a whole new level. Navid Moazzez, an authority in the virtual summit space, refers to them as “a podcast on steroids.”

He’s right. At some virtual summits, the host ends up interviewing over 100 experts. I’d say that’s learning on steroids. And a major, if not tiring, advantage for the host.

If you understand how to promote your virtual summit, you can make six figures and attract thousands of subscribers. In less than two months, Chandler Bolt‘s virtual summit made resulted in 30,000 new email subscribers and more than $370K in earnings.

I first learned about virtual summits when Josh Denning and Tom Morkes invited me to be a guest at the Authority Super Summit, which had over 100 speakers and broke a Guinness World Record for the longest live summit in history.

Now I plan to host my own summit… in June 2017! I’ll reveal much more closer to the date.

Setting It Up

Take some time to think about how to set up you virtual summit, which creates a solid foundation from which to build. The first step is to determine your summit’s topic. Keep in mind that too broad a topic will negatively impact your summit’s overall success.

A virtual summit on “marketing,” for example, is too broad because there are so many areas of marketing (social media marketing, digital marketing, integrated marketing, etc.). A Content Marketing Success Summit (CMS Summit), on the other hand, is specific and clearly defined.

Oh, snap. I revealed the name of my summit. Let’s keep it between us!

A virtual summit actually requires months of planning. If you’re just starting out, it’s advised that you start with a 4-5 day virtual summit.

Part of the preparation for my upcoming summit was talking to several people who had already hosted virtual summits. Many of them used Vimeo to publish interviews that were conducted in advance, usually on Skype or Zoom. (Skype is the less expensive option and the one I prefer).

The final phase for setting up is creating a slick web design. The design is important because it will attract potential speakers and guests. A professional web design is an indicator that you’re professional and are investing time in energy into making your summit a success.

If you don’t know much about creating a professional web design, I advise hiring someone to design the website. If you host a virtual summit that makes 5-6 figures in two months, wouldn’t it be worth the money to hire a web designer?

Contacting Guests

A good rule of thumb is to contact as many guests as possible. You want your summit to showcase as many experts as possible (as long as these experts make sense for the summit).

Ideally, you should have at least 100 guests attend your virtual summit. Making that happen is partly why virtual summits take so much work. Not only do you have to contact enough people until to reach 100 confirmed guests, but you also have to interview everyone of them.

That’s where the bulk of the work resides.

Now let’s discuss contacting these guests. You have two choices:

Twitter
Email

Some people prefer contacting guests through Twitter because of its brevity; short and sweet interactions. Many influencers are also active on the platform.

I prefer email because most people are addicted to their inboxes so you have a higher chance your message will be read. The average person checks his/her inbox every 15 minutes. Influencers will likely your message. The challenge is getting them to respond.

When contacting an influencer about your summit, provide the following information:

What your summit is about?
Who are you looking for?
When the summit will start?
Will the interview be live or pre-recorded?
What is anticipated number of people attending the summit?
Who else is speaking
Your credentials

All of this needs to be done in 10 sentences or less. Normally, I would advise five sentences or less, but I don’t think a message like this can be conveyed properly in just five sentences.

Just make sure you start by letting the influencer know you’re inviting him/her to speak. That’s usually enough to get the influencer on board (the intent of the email, what you want them to do, is what he or she wants to know more than anything else).

When I started contacting guests for my summit, I began with the people who popped into mind first. As I contacted more people I already knew, I had to think outside of the box. I had to contact people I didn’t know personally, but had recently learned or heard about.

If you don’t know the influencers in your niche, look for individuals in your niche who have or have done at least one of the following:

Attracted a large audience
Conduct podcasts
Run an engaging YouTube channel
Have been a guest on other podcasts
Speak at conferences

Contact More People Than You Originally Intended

Then contact some more. All of these guests will help your summit gain more traction, especially if you provide affiliate links.

In the virtual summits I have been a part of, I agreed to promote the virtual summits to my email list. You can arrange these conditions so that your guests promote the summit to their audiences. If you get hundreds of people to promote everything from the landing pages to the All-Access Pass sales page, you can boost your own email lists and revenues.

Scheduling the time and date for each influencer is a matter of back-and-forth emails. If you want a more expedited approach, use a tool like Calendly that lets you display your availability.

Once an influencer expresses interest, and schedules a time and date with you, the final step is to give the influencer a contract, which might ask for the following:

Promoting the summit landing page at least once to his/her email list
Promoting the All-Access Pass at least once to his/her email list
Showing up on the time and date you agreed to conduct the interview

Don’t be insistent when asking influencers to promote your summit, but make sure everyone promotes it. If you want your summit influencers to promote it more often, give them everything they need, such as swipe copy & subject lines for every email you want them to send.

You also have to pre-write social media posts, include images, and give everyone three choices for promotion (conservative promotion, balanced promotion, and aggressive promotion).

Within each sequence, you can tell your guests when to promote, how to promote, and which types of emails need to be sent.

Gaining Traction

Once your guests aligned, the next step is getting traction for your virtual summit. If you start gaining traction the day before the summit begins, you’ve made a big mistake.

Traction begins 3-4 weeks prior to the actual summit. Within that time, you should email your list about your virtual summit and start firing off social media posts. And if you haven’t already done so, finalize the prewritten swipe copy and social media posts for your guests to utilize.

After you’ve done the initial leg work, your guests should start promoting your virtual summit two weeks before it starts.

If you want more people to enter their name and email address, you should create a free offer relevant to the event. The truth is that some people will put off signing up until the day before. Including a free offer or workbook will help them act faster.

And if you know a thing or two about Facebook ads, you should definitely use those to promote your virtual summit. Not only will you get more subscribers, but with a $97 All-Access Pass and a 4% conversion rate (the typical conversion rate), you break even by getting new subscribers at a rate of $3.88 per subscriber, which is very easy to do.

Some ads get subscribers at a rate of under $1 per subscriber.

I recommend doing a bit of research if you’re interested in social advertising, or consult with someone who already knows the ins and outs to save time.

How To Keep Attendance Up During The Event

Once people agree to attend your event, your must ensure they stick around for as long as possible.

The most important thing you can do to increase retention is offer a legendary speaker line-up. You can do other things which we’ll talk about later, but your guests make or break your virtual summit.

You want to choose engaging speakers with the right expertise. Choosing an engaging speaker is just as important (if not more important) as choosing an expert. In addition to choosing engaging speakers, invite each speaker to provide a free offer.

Regardless of whether the free offer is some form of digital content or access to a training course, the idea of getting a free offer will entice people to stick around until the very end. You can also run sporadic giveaways throughout your virtual summit to keep people’s attention.

People Like Being Acknowledged

Make sure you acknowledge the audience’s questions during your virtual summit, and you’ll entice more people to ask questions. This is easier for a live virtual summit with a real-time commenting section, but you can also get audience member questions during pre-recorded interviews.

If you email your list with the line-up of speakers, you can also ask which questions they might have for these individuals. Knowing the questions in advance will result in these individuals promoting your virtual summit to their friends (and especially the interview that contains their question).

You can also go through questions you’ve received in the past and if you can use it in a summit interview. You might want to outsource this part of the process as contacting so many people can become cumbersome, but if you have several questions from your audience lined up in advance, you can reproduce this effect within a pre-recorded interview.

Inevitably, no one will watch every interview the moment it’s published, especially if you do something similar to the Authority Super Summit in which they conducted back-to-back interviews without breaks for several days. That’s why you need to keep the interviews up for a short periods of time (48-hours after you publish them).

Keeping the interviews up for 48 hours is a strategic decision. The deadline will encourage people to act while the interviews are still free. There’s also another reason why you want to make interviews available for just 48 hours after they’re live.

Boosting Sales

A virtual summit is a big investment of your time and money. Here are some of the monetary costs:

Website creation
Website design
Outsourcing some/all of the outreach
Vimeo Plus
Optimize Press (the tool I use)
Advertising
I’m definitely forgetting a few things.

Here are some of the time costs:

Interviewing 100+ experts
Preparing for those interviews
Contacting the experts
Follow-ups
Marketing
Creating the free offer and/or workbook (unless someone else does that)
Similarly, I’m definitely forgetting a few things. So why do I mention the monetary costs and time costs? Am I trying to discourage you? No. I’m doing just the opposite.

The significant monetary and time costs (combined with a valuable virtual summit) gives you the right to charge for your virtual summit. So for some of the people balking at charging for virtual summit material, that’s exactly why it’s necessary.

Hosting an epic virtual summit will boost your sales, but there are other things you can do that will help your virtual summit sales.

The most notable way to make more revenue from your virtual summit is to recruit as many affiliates as you possibly can. Your speakers will be your affiliates, but why stop there? Remember Chandler Bolt, the guy I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post?

Don’t scroll back to the beginning of this blog post. Here’s what you need to know:

Chandler hosted the Self-Publishing Success Summit. While I was not a speaker at this virtual summit, I still promoted it as an affiliate. We both made a nice cut from my affiliate marketing efforts.

He had several affiliates who were happy to promote his virtual summit even though they weren’t speakers. Chandler even created swipe copy for affiliates who were and weren’t speaking at the summit.

Adding an extra affiliate to your team can result in an extra $1,000 (or more) depending on who you add to your team. I advise outsourcing the task of reaching out to affiliates (as you’ll already have enough on your plate).

Now you may be wondering, “That’s great. I get people to agree to join my affiliate program. How do I set up an affiliate program?”

I personally use Optimize Press for my affiliate program, but you can also use WP Affiliate Manager or one of the affiliate programs listed here.

Once you get these affiliates, you’ll want to put them into an affiliate email list. That way, you can effectively communicate with your affiliates and inform them of important dates.

You can also create a leaderboard and offer prizes to people who get the most opt-ins and sales.Leaderboards will entice affiliates and speakers alike to put more effort into their promotion efforts.

The icing on the cake to boosting sales is to raise the price of your All-Access Pass every other day. Start with a $47 price point and then raise it to $97 in two days. Two days after increasing the price to $97, raise it to $197.

Update your audience on these changes as the summit progresses, and include several bonuses that add up to thousands of dollars of value. The more bonuses, the better.

In Conclusion

Virtual summits are a lot of work, but the work is very exciting. You’ll have a blast organizing the virtual summit, and you’ll learn a lot from the interviews. A few weeks later, you could end up with an additional six figures and thousands of new subscribers.

In the Chandler Bolt case study, he said that in two months he made over $370K from his summit and got over 30K new subscribers. Let’s be clear, it took Chandler more than two months to reach that point, including several months of planning.

But if I told you that you could make $370K and get over 30K new subscribers in a few months, would you sign that deal? I’m sure you’d sign even if I said it would take you an entire year.

Summit preparation is a lot of fun. I’m in the middle of it myself.

Now Here’s What I Want From You

What are your thoughts on hosting a virtual summit? Which insight in this blog post did you find especially useful? Have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

Leave a comment now. I read them all 🙂

And if you know anyone else who needs this burst of insight, please be sure to pass it on.

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