Learn about the ultimate virtual summit template to grow your training platform audience with Andy Cabasso in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Andy breaks down the process behind the virtual summits he has run, and some key takeaways you can bring into your work with summits for live online, live in-person, and passive-online summits.
With COVID, the virtual summit space is growing, as in-person events are becoming less common. A virtual summit is basically a webinar on steroids where over the course of one or multiple days, speakers give talks on specific topics. And some summits include workbooks/frameworks for achieving a specific result.
Summit attendance and finding speakers is the largest challenge in the space, which is why Andy and his team built Postaga, which is a free all-in-one link building outreach tool that allows you to find opportunities for outreach based on other websites with content similar to yours. This can help you connect with other leaders in your space to build a possible roster of speakers for your event and to build an email list of people interested in attending your summits.
One innovative approach to virtual summits and webinars Andy shares that may be worth trying is to have a pre-recorded set of videos and resources prepared for summit attendees. Then during your summit you’re playing your videos and interactive live with people in the comments answering questions that come up. It can be difficult to demonstrate something live and also answer questions in a chat at the same time. This way, you’ve already done the work of making the presentation, and you can address questions live.
If you’re familiar with how to build LifterLMS courses or memberships, you have all of the tools you need in order to build your own virtual summit. You can creatively use memberships to accept payments for your summit and include some ‘members-only’ content. Then you could run a live event over Zoom, or even do a pre-recorded virtual summit and interact in the comments as the event happens.
You can learn more about all of the things you can do with Postaga at Postaga.com. Also be sure to connect with Andy on social media. If you look up Andy Cabasso, you’ll find him on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, Andy Cabasso from postaga.com. Welcome to the show, Andy.
Andy Cabasso: Hey, thanks for having me.
Chris Badgett: Today, we’re going to talk about virtual summits, which is awesome. We’re recording this at the very beginning of April during the whole COVID crisis that’s going on. And we’ve seen a slew of conference cancellation and just the challenges of people being more at home, but still wanting to learn, wanting to share their message and do that stuff.
For those who don’t know what a virtual summit is, can you give us just a lay of the land? What is it?
Andy Cabasso: Sure. Basically, a virtual summit is a webinar on steroids. Virtual summits are… It can either be one day, or multiple days, or multiple weeks of different talks by speakers on a given topic. They could be paid, they could be free, they could be freemium. They could be live, they could be prerecorded, there’s a lot of different configurations that you can have of them.
But the essence is a virtual summit is, you have a topic or general industry that you’re trying to cover and a bunch of different speaker sessions on that given topic over a day or several weeks.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How long has the virtual summit really been around? I think I started seeing it two or three years ago, but it’s a relatively new thing, right?
Andy Cabasso: Well, the first virtual summit that I put on was about three-and-a-half years ago in December 2016. The first time I saw a virtual summit was maybe a year or two before that, and that was my first real introduction to virtual summits, and I hadn’t heard of it before then. It’s silly saying this, it was a magician’s virtual summit. A friend of mine is a practicing, working magician and he had come across another professional magician’s summit that he was putting on.
And it was this two-day event where a couple dozen magicians were going to be sharing their tips of their craft from working restaurants, to costumes, to certain tricks and things like that, to aspects of running their business and sharing that with an audience of other professional and aspiring magicians. It was over two days and they charged several hundred dollars for it, really premium content.
And I was looking at it and I’m like, “Oh wow, they’ve somehow managed to package a bunch of really good quality webinar content together and make an event out of it.” And basically what would otherwise be in in-person conference where you’d have to spend days of traveling, and spending money on hotel lodging, and then the conference itself. And that money that you’re forgoing by not working on your business and having to travel, which is definitely can be a big time investment there.
Some cost of or opportunity cost of not being able to work on your business because you’re traveling for the conference. The fact that you can do it all from your own home was really interesting to me. That was some of the first inspiration I had to see if I could put it together myself.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And yeah, as a course creator, membership site niche industry person, I see so many niches. We have people making magic courses, health courses, dating courses, whatever. There’s so many different niches. The magician thing is not weird at all. I’m actually a practicing amateur magician myself. I do magic tricks for my kids and their friends and stuff, so I totally get it.
And that’s what makes course creation and just being a niche expert in whatever cool is… Just the niches people are in are amazing and they can run an event.
Andy Cabasso: Absolutely.
Chris Badgett: They can just like general like, “Oh, this is going to be a virtual summit about business,” or, “About health.” That’s like nothing.
Andy Cabasso: You’re right.
Chris Badgett: And if it’s about some kind of vegan green smoothie health summit, that’s very specific.
Andy Cabasso: Sure. And if you have your audience, and if you have your email list, and if you know your industry, then you’re going to get those types of people that are going to be interested in your summit. It creates an experience that is… It’s not just like a one-off webinar, it’s an interactive experience where you have this virtual conference.
Where you can get people from all over the world who maybe couldn’t necessarily afford to travel to Vegas, or California, or wherever for an in-person conference, but from the comfort of their own homes, they can all see these talks and interact with the speakers and other attendees.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think that’s a really important point. I think it’s really easy to miss how big the world is and how big the internet is. And if you see, let’s say a niche event that is working as like an in-person event and there’s really an online option, there’s a huge opportunity there. Even if there’s not, maybe your niche is so small, but if you can get the world at scale, there’s possibility there.
I wanted to ask you a business model question. It seems like as I watched the virtual summit industry over the past couple of years, it’s common for people to do this three, four or five-day event. It’s free while it’s live, but then when it’s done, it gets turned into like an information product. And you can use a tool like LifterLMS to package up and turn it into a course or a membership after you record all those talks and everything.
But do you recommend that path of free while it’s live, sell the all-access pass? Because you know, everybody can’t just drop everything most of the time and go to like five days of 12-hour content or whatever. But you mentioned the magician thing was charged. It was charged from the beginning, which is cool too. How should people think through these business models?
Andy Cabasso: The thing is, you got to think about what you’re looking to get out of it. A lot of people do the virtual summits for free because they’re looking you get a lot of leads and eventually like these marketing qualified leads, you can turn them into sales qualified leads by nurturing them with your email campaigns and your automation sequences. And then hopefully they’ll buy whatever product or service you’re looking to sell. And so by-
Chris Badgett: And your speakers there… If the thinking is the speakers are going to email their lists, “Hey, come to my free event.” So it’s like this email list goal, right?
Andy Cabasso: Absolutely. But there’s also beyond that, some promotion that you’re going to do. The fact that this event is this potentially one time thing, you have to be here at this day in time, it’s a femoral. And even if you are definitely going to record it and make it available later as potentially a premium product, there’s going to be that sense of urgency and FOMO that people are going to get like, “Oh wow, here is the event, I have to be here for this.”
And it’s going to really push them to sign up and show up to it. I’ve seen with doing webinars and I don’t know if you have similar stats or experience, but when I create a webinar, I get a good amount of signups and attendees. But then if I share with my audience, “Hey, we did this webinar. You can basically give us your email and then you can access the recording.” The interest drops significantly there because there is no time perimeter here, there is less urgency.
It’s like, okay, I’ll watch it when I get to it. But the summit time constraint of it definitely makes it more appealing to that audience.
Chris Badgett: Do you recommend prerecording or delivering it live?
Andy Cabasso: It depends how big your team is and what you can pull off. I was the only person really on my team tasked with putting together this virtual summit. And over the three years that I did it, every year, it was a two-day event with between 16 to 20 speakers total. There is no way I could have done that all live by myself. Because if you’ve done webinars, you know that technical things happen all the time.
Issues with speakers, audio, their slides, just things happen. And if you have eight speakers in a row on a day, you really, really increase likelihood that something goes wrong and it’s not great for your audience. But if you are doing it live and you have an assistant or someone to help you out, like a stage manager to help prep the next speaker, that can be more possible to do.
And also sometimes you have to go to the bathroom. Even when I was doing it all prerecorded, which I was able to do because I recorded all the webinars ahead of time, all the videos ahead of time for the sessions. I put them on the pages, and once their session time was up, I made that page live. But even so I was still watching the event very closely so I could keep track of what the attendees were saying, the chats that were going on, engaging.
I was just running out quickly to go to the bathroom when I could. I’d made sure to bring lunch with me that day and just basically be glued to my computer as closely as possible. So with prerecorded versus live, I think it really depends on what kind of team you have behind you that can help you put it together.
If it’s prerecorded, you also have the benefit of having some lead time, so you can spend a lot more time putting it together. When I did it prerecorded, I really spent two months working on the different sessions, and promotion, and the content. Two months solid on these 16 to 20 sessions. It was a big time investment, and probably a bigger time investment because it was prerecorded because I needed to record all sessions and upload them.
So that is a consideration, but as a one-person operation, that was really, I think the only option for me.
Chris Badgett: For the delivery when it’s prerecorded, would you spin up a webinar and then share your screen and essentially play the recorded session?
Andy Cabasso: What I did was we recorded the speaker sessions using either GoToWebinar or Zoom, and it was just me and the presenter. And I’d get their session and recorded, and it was great. Then occasionally they’d like, “Hey, can we edit this out?” And I’m like, “Yeah. Okay.” So I’ll the session. I then also separately recorded introductions, just me standing in front of a plain background giving a speaker introduction as you would.
In hindsight, I wouldn’t do that again. It was a big time investment, I don’t think people cared all that much. I would have just done a regular webinars style introduction. Then once I had the videos, I uploaded them to YouTube, I made them unlisted. Then I created basically private gated pages for each session. And when the event was “live,” quote unquote, registrant’s would go to this… They would log in, they’d go to this page and I would make the sessions live at the appropriate times of day.
Chris Badgett: So they could self press the play button?
Andy Cabasso: Yes, exactly. I know there are some options and things that you could do to configure it differently, but it was… I was doing what I could with as little budget as I could-
Chris Badgett: I like it.
Andy Cabasso: … so we spent very little. We didn’t really spend any much on technology because we used what we had. We used GoToWebinar or Zoom for recording the video. We used YouTube, which is free for hosting the video. We used our website platform, which was WordPress and Offsprout Page Builder for building a landing pages and hosting everything. We used our email marketing software, which we were using HubSpot. Those were all the basic tools that we were using.
Chris Badgett: That’s really awesome. I could see with some summits, it’s like if it is delivered live, one of the benefits is you might get the chance to have a Q&A session with some subject matter expert. In your format, did you have comments turned on or was there any questions like chat or live comments?
Andy Cabasso: That’s a really good question because you’re thinking like, all right, it’s prerecorded, so how am I going to have any interaction with the speaker and the attendees? And that’s something that we were thinking about like, if it’s prerecorded, where’s the Q&A going to come from? And how is this going to be an event rather than just someone watching a static video?
Another scrappy thing we did, which was free is, on each video’s page, we inserted a comment box and we told all of our speakers ahead of time, “Okay. This is your session time on this day. Please be in front of your computer and available to answer any questions that will come in through the chat box.” And in the videos, we also prompted and said, “Hey, if you have any questions at all during this talk, please ask it in the comment box below this video and the speaker will get to you.” And that’s how it worked.
Chris Badgett: I love that idea. I do a lot of webinars and having to… When you start stacking things like I’m giving a presentation, and I’m sharing my screen, and I’m taking questions, it’s very hard to do.
Andy Cabasso: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: To me it just sounds so relaxing to have my presentation done and then just be available and be super useful in the comments. That’s a really cool way to do it. You said comments box, so is this some live chat thing? What did you use to power the comments? Do you remember?
Andy Cabasso: Yeah. It the Disqus, D-I-S-Q-U-S, I believe it. It was just a regular chat widget thing or plugin that we used. We were going back and forth, there are a bunch of different options you could use. You could use an actual live chat software. That would be maybe a bit more engaging, I don’t know. But we used what we had.
Chris Badgett: And this was a paid summit, right?
Andy Cabasso: This was actually a free summit. I ran a digital marketing agency in the legal industry and we created these virtual summits geared towards lawyers primarily as well as legal technology professionals. And so all the speakers that I had were people involved in marketing, or technology, or software. And we kept the summit free, but after the summit was over, we said, “If you want to watch this material forever, have access to it forever,” it was like $99 as a promo.
Then after three days, we raised the price to like $400 or something like that. Just to really get that urgency and get people to watch the content, especially. We had the event on a Thursday and a Friday and it was free. And then we sent out an email right after the last talk saying, “If you missed any of the talks, we’re going to keep it open until Sunday night for free, after which time there’ll be a paywall.”
Then we did a little promo where it’s like, “All right, it’s $99 for lifetime to this material for the next 72 hours, after which time the price goes up to like $400.” The reason that we did that was because we wanted really people to watch the content was the main thing. Anything that we sold from it didn’t even come close to covering our advertising costs that we actually spent. We weren’t trying to make money on it, I just wanted people to watch the content.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s so important. If the goal is building an audience, and adding value to your community, and doing partnerships, this is all stuff that you can prioritize over money, that money will come out of later. And-
Andy Cabasso: Right. There are people who put on to make money, there are people who put on conferences specifically to make money because that’s their business and their business model, and that’s completely fine. But our business was web design and we wanted to build our brand in the community. We wanted to build relationships with other vendors, so we could do potentially partnerships down the line.
Build our profile so people would have more recognition of us. And if they were going to ever need our services, coming to us first because they trusted us.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s a great point. I’m in the WordPress space and we have these things called WordCamps that happen all over the place. It’s like 50 bucks for the weekend and there’s all these speakers and all these volunteers. And the speakers don’t make any money, the volunteers make it happen. And the money is just the absolute minimum for a pull off to pay for the venue or whatever.
The goal of a WordCamp event is not to be a cash cow. It’s to connect people in the community and help people discover the software, and help people use it, and connect with other people. Somebody was just messaging me in Slack today about running a virtual event, a virtual summit for a WordCamp using Zoom. I happen to be a Zoom power user person and they had all these really niche questions about different tracks and what should our sponsors do, all this kind of stuff.
And I’m like, “Yeah, this is amazing.” The event space is huge. Unfortunately, the industry is really having a hard time right now, but events are massive.
Andy Cabasso: Absolutely. I’ve been to WordCamps. I love WordCamps just because… And it’s not even the sessions, sometimes it’s just having lunch next to people that you maybe talk with online or people that you’ve never met before, and just sharing stories, and just sharing knowledge. That’s great that’s… It’s maybe a bit harder to replicate online, but we’re doing what we can.
And if you can get everybody in the same chat box or using the same hashtags to keep conversation on social media, that’s not bad.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. I got a question for you around timing. The first thing I want to ask you about is, you mentioned you took a bunch of time preparing and then there was the actual event.
Andy Cabasso: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Roughly what was the amount of time of prep to the event? Was it like twice as much work to prepare, twice as much time to prepare, five times as much, 10 times as much? What?
Andy Cabasso: Like absolutely 10 times as much.
Chris Badgett: Okay.
Andy Cabasso: I say that I spent two to three months on it. The first one I did, it was in December and I started working on it in late September. I got the speakers together, I started working on the promotional materials, scheduling… The hardest part for doing a prerecorded was working with the 18 to 20 different speakers to schedule the recordings, which are each an hour long. And so each of those sessions, you have to find the time for, and then record them, and each of them is an hour.
Then I review them and edit them to make sure that they’re all good. Then uploading them to the platform and all of that. I think the month before, nearly all of my time was spent working on this summit. And that’s the challenge of doing it live… to pre-record it rather is there is a good amount of work to it. But there wasn’t really any other way that we were even considering doing it live.
If we were to do it live, basically, you’re doing your promotion ahead of time and just coaching the speakers, sending them out a sheet saying here, “Here are the do’s and don’ts. Don’t overly sell your product. We have to have the content be informative and relevant to the audience,” stuff like that. And just hope that during their live session, it goes well.
Chris Badgett: That’s words of wisdom. It’s not a tactic or a thing to take lightly, it is a ton of work. The other timing question I had for you was, let’s say you run it and it goes well and you decide to, I think I might do this on the regular. What’s a realistic… If you’re going to do it, should it be an annual event that you do once a year because it’s so time intensive? What’s the most you could get away with or what?
Andy Cabasso: I guess it depends on your team, and your environment, and what you have the resources for. I did it once a year and I don’t think I would have had the bandwidth for doing it more than that because I also had a marketing agency to run. When you’re working on the summit and it was very time intensive, there were other marketing initiatives that I wanted to do, but I wasn’t able to work on. So it’s just about prioritizing.
There are a million things you probably want to do to market your business and you have to choose what’s going to be the best use of that time.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What’s a piece of advice you have… Since we’re course creators and experts and people building membership sites, we have this little problem called a lack of confidence and imposter syndrome. Let’s say we want to reach out to somebody who has a big email list, they’re more famous than us, who am I to put together a virtual summit? So how do we get through the psychological stuff there?
And then when we do reach out, let’s say to an A-lister expert in the field, how do we present the opportunity in a smooth, solid way?
Andy Cabasso: That’s a really good question. What I did before the summit that really helped is I worked on building my relationships with people that I would have wanted to speak. Before I put on the summit, I… We weren’t particularly well known in the space. We were one of several marketing agencies and I readily published blog content, shared it. I would reference other people and their work in my content and share it with them to get on their radar.
I did what I could to get on their radar as best I could. And so if they are people that I didn’t know, but wanted to know, when I reached out to them, I had leveraged the cachet that I had from having other people. So first, I reached out to the people that I had built relationships and that I knew. And they were all very excited to participate in this because it was new and it’s an easy thing for them to do.
We spend an hour recording a webinar, and it’ll then be published, and shared with potentially thousands of people. I didn’t have anyone really that I was reaching out to saying no, which is maybe it will be comforting for your audience is, people generally want to participate in this sort of thing. If you invite people to speak, unless they’re a big, hot shot, paid speaker, someone who’s commanding big speaking fees.
Because of the relative ease of doing this, they’re getting me more like they want to participate. I had a one person I reached out to who ran a big blog in the space and often got paid for all the speaking engagements. When I reached out to him, he already knew me a little bit. I had just posted on his blog in the past. He said to me, “Normally, I charge for any speaking engagement that I do, but this is really easy for me. I can basically recycle some talk that I’ve done before, and they’ll help me promote my brand as well. Yeah, what do I have to lose?”
So once I got him on board I was able to reach out to other people and use that and say, “Hey, I have this person, and this person, and this person on board, would you be interested in being involved? Here’s some ideas that I have for your topic given what I know about you.” So I went to them prepared and that I think made all the difference. It’s like, oh wow, okay, you know what you’re doing.
Doing all the prep work and laying all the groundwork for that really helped. Even if these people didn’t know who I was and I’m a nobody in the space, me having worked on building those relationships really helped.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to add what Andy is saying here is, I’m not a natural marketing and sales person, but I’ve been just practicing for a long time and I am okay with rejection. So to give you an example, I have reached out to Tony Robbins to try to do something and his PR or whoever person politely rejected me. Go outside of your comfort zone and don’t be scared to aim too high. The worst they can say is… It’s not a no, what I hear. I hear, it’s just not right now.
Andy Cabasso: Absolutely. There were a couple people who gave me nos. They were like, “You know what? No, this isn’t good for my schedule.” Or some people were like, “All right, well, I charge this.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry, I can’t afford that. I’m putting this together on a shoestring budget and this is what I got. And if it’s not a good fit, then that’s fine.” I put it on over three years and had tons of great speakers.
One of them, I actually invited back because they did so well and everyone seemed to like it so much, and it was great.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. And just as an example, if you’re watching this or listening to this podcast, if you were hosting a virtual summit and you needed speakers on topics, of course creation or building membership sites, topics on the entrepreneur journey, topics on creating digital products and stuff like that, and you asked me to come on your summit, I will probably say yes.
Even if you’re not super famous or have some giant email list, if you gave me the opportunity to share and add value, and yes, at the very end, I might mention the tool, LifterLMS. It would actually be really, really hard for me to say no to that regardless of how big your email list is. So just putting that out.
Andy Cabasso: See that? See that? If you’re looking to put on a virtual summit, you already have someone who is interested.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. Totally, totally.
So let’s talk about Postaga. This is another project you have and what is it? And then how could tie it into running virtual summits?
Andy Cabasso: Sure. One of the big challenges of summits are getting people to register and attend, and to also maybe finding some speakers. So what I was doing for a lot of it is I use what email list I had. I also asked that speakers share with their audiences, but promotion is a big part of it because you want as many people to register, and attend and get on your email list, and be aware of it and everything like that.
Otherwise, presenting a summit that you spend so many hours on to a small audience is maybe not working, really discouraging with all the time and effort you put into it. So Postaga is a free all-in-one link building outreach tool. Mainly we use it… Coming from the digital marketing space, whenever we publish blogs or content, we’re trying to promote that content to build links and get more traffic to our pages.
So we built this free tool that will find opportunities for you for outreach, for finding websites that are relevant to your content, or your website, or your product, or your app. Find contact details for those people, and then build personalized, get automated email sequences so you can reach out to them and follow up with them to help you build relationships, get backlinks, and build traffic.
You can also use Postaga for building relationships with potential speakers, as well as finding other websites that can help you promote your virtual summit.
Chris Badgett: That is awesome. That is at postaga.com, P-O-S-T-A-G-A. I want to ask you about affiliate relationships for virtual summits. Let’s say we’re using WordPress for our virtual summit, and if you happen to be selling it with LifterLMS, or WooCommerce, or something. AffiliateWP is a popular plugin that integrates with those tools. Even if somebody is not on your website, yet you can set them up and just give them an affiliate link, so they don’t have to even figure that out.
Or give them a coupon code that’s going to keep track of the sales they bring or whatever. Or even if traffic comes from a certain website, these are some of the beauties of AffiliateWP, you could do that. Should we consider both using our speakers and seeing if they’d be interested in earning some money? And also outside affiliate marketers in whatever the topic is, let them know that there’s opportunity here or should we steer clear of… Are we mixing too much here?
Andy Cabasso: That’s a good question. I was a bit more… With my summits that I was putting on, the speakers were asking at first, “Well, is this paid? Are you making money off of this?” And I was honest with them saying, “Well, we make it for free, but we will have a paywall at the end just to basically incentivize people to actually watch the content. But we’re not making money on this. We’re going to spend much more on advertising on Facebook ads, on Google ads than we are going to ever make in return.”
We gave each speaker their own referral link to share and get people to register with their own landing pages. Each speaker had their own personalized landing page for them. And so I could see what attendees’ speakers were getting registered. Just based on my scenario, I was a bit hesitant about trying to get speakers to get more involved, to sell the event for me just because of the nature of it.
I got the impression that they were going to think, if you’re asking me to promote this, to get people to pay you, then we’re going to have maybe a different conversation. This is framing it differently, but that was just me. I definitely can see the value obviously of if your speaker has a big audience and may are financially motivated to help make this happen, then that affiliate link with referral payments could work.
Chris Badgett: I got a hard question for you. The hard question is, I have heard people who have run virtual summits. I don’t know if complain is the right word. Let’s just say it didn’t quite work out the way they thought in that the experts, the speakers did not email their list. And what perhaps… We’re just hypothesizing here. And of course you can’t force somebody to do something. It’s weird to be like, “You can only speak if you email your list about this or whatever.”
But what might somebody be doing wrong if they end up in a situation where 90% of the speakers did not notify their tribes about the event? What might be off there?
Andy Cabasso: I definitely had that problem to some extent as well. Some speakers, depending on how they perceive your event, how they perceive everything, if they’re thinking like, all right, I’m doing this person a huge favor. I’m going to show up, do my talk and that’ll be it, and that’s the involvement I want to have. You have to be aware of that to some degree. But with some speakers you can say like, “This is what makes this event work for everybody. People want to speak at this because we are all working together to get as many people as possible.
If you don’t share this with your network and if the other speakers don’t share this with their network, then we’re only going to have a handful of people, and is that going to be worth everyone’s time? Probably not. So this only works if we all work together on this and share this with our audiences.” One thing that absolutely helps and is a must is, you need to make it as easy as possible for your speakers to share the event.
So I create media kits for all of my speakers individualized. So I’ll create a social media cards with the speakers face on them, their talk title, and registration information. I create sample tweet, template tweets, and Facebook posts, and emails, so the speakers can just copy and paste this stuff in. You as the organizer need to do your work on this because your speakers aren’t going to spend that mental energy to put this stuff together on their own.
So if you can have the material ready for them just to drop in and share with their audiences in a second, making it as easy as possible for them is definitely a must. And if you just hope that your speaker and say to your speaker, “Hey, can you please share this event?” Well, that’s kind of vague. It’s like, “Well, how do I do that? Am I going to have to write a big email about and I have to do more research and see who’s going to be speaking at this?” No, you, as the organizer need to provide them with as much content as you possibly can.
Chris Badgett: There’s a lot of wisdom in that like custom landing pages, graphics for social media. Also you don’t have to do it all yourself. You can use Canva if you want to do it yourself, you can use Design Pickle. If I have a high volume graphic design project that involves switching out people and changing names, I’m outsourcing that to Design Pickle once I got it. So it doesn’t have to eat your lunch for time, and when you’re proactively giving them what they need and making it easy, there’s just so much wisdom in that. I appreciate that.
One just last technical question. Do you give people lifetime access if they buy the all-access pass? Is that just like, okay, here’s the information product, it’s yours forever if you buy?
Andy Cabasso: Yes. That’s the only way that I did it. I’m sure there are other ways that you could. You can give them access for a year until the next event, but I think lifetime access seemed to make the most sense to us.
Chris Badgett: That is awesome. Well, Andy, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Your friends and collaborator, his name is Sam Brody, we did a podcast episode with him, episode 222. We talked about his journey as a course creator and the Offsprout page builder, which you guys have, which is awesome. So go check that out. Go check out postaga.com if you’re looking for a better way to build back links.
Any final words for the people and other ways they can connect with you?
Andy Cabasso: I’m ever around social media. I have a relatively uncommon name, so you look for Andy or Andrew Cabasso, that’s probably me. Andy Cabasso on Twitter, LinkedIn. Andrew Cabasso, I think, because that’s more formal, Instagram, Facebook, what have you. I’m also in a lot of Slack and Facebook groups. If you were looking to find me on the internet, you can. You can also check out my websites; offsprout.com and postaga.com. Check out postaga.com, it’s completely free.
Helping you to easily build links, traffic, relationships, and get your content shared. And if you have any followup questions or specific questions, anything about hosting a summit, I’m happy to share all that. I probably should put together an accompanying lengthy guide on putting together virtual summits. I’ll look into that as well on either the Postaga or Offsprout blogs. So yeah, check that out too.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, we do have a lot of podcasts episodes recorded, so you’ve got about, I don’t know, eight weeks to work on getting that together before this episode goes live.
Andy Cabasso: All right, I can do that.
Chris Badgett: All right. Well, Andy, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks for adding so much value to the LifterLMS community.
Andy Cabasso: Yeah, happy to. Thanks, Chris. This was a lot of fun.
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging, results-getting courses on the internet.
