Host a Summit

Creating a summit is a great way to stop playing small and step into your awesomeness. If you’re not familiar with the term, an online summit is an intentional meeting of leaders to discuss important issues.

Most online summits feature several guest speakers and the content is organized around one central theme. For example, MLSP recently hosted a marketing summit and invited some of the top online marketers in the industry to participate.

Hosting a summit allows you to step up and be a voice in your niche. You can help your community connect with speakers and leaders they’ve never heard from before. But there’s a lot to do when it comes to hosting a summit. Here’s what you’ll need to keep in mind…

Start Small

You might be tempted to host a lengthy two-week summit with dozens of speakers. But don’t feel like you have to do that. Not only will a larger summit be exhausting, you may struggle to keep your audience engaged if it stretches out over weeks.

Instead, start small. Plan to have your summit last just a day or two. Once you have a few short summits under your belt, you might want to arrange for a longer one.

Choose Your Topic

Pick a topic that you know will appeal to your audience. If you’re a health and wellness blogger, then hosting a summit on marketing won’t be interesting to your community. But a summit about digital fitness is more likely to generate interest.

Curate Your Speakers

For a summit, you’ll need a group of speakers. For a one-day summit, you’ll want four to six speakers. Look around for speakers who might be a great fit for your event. You can also post your idea for a summit online and ask your friends for speaker recommendations.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to have eight hours of back-to-back speeches. Doing that doesn’t allow time for your audience to ask questions or for you to use the restroom. Just like you’d plan for some down time during a real-life conference, schedule down time during your summit, too.

Make It Awesome

Hosting a summit is a lot of work. It deserves excellence in every area and this includes the graphics and the sales page. If you struggle with graphics, outsource them to a virtual assistant who’s a whiz with PhotoShop. If you don’t enjoy writing the sales letter, find a ghostwriter who can punch up your copy for you.

You want to create an event that speakers will feel proud to be part of. You also want your affiliates to be excited about promoting it and your attendees to feel delighted by the speaker line-up.

Putting together a summit does take time so begin planning 4-6 weeks in advance. This allows you to create an amazing event that will be memorable for everyone involved.

If you’d like to know more about hosting a summit, check out Kelly McCausey’s Stretch Yourself Challenge. She invites her challengers to do daring things in their businesses like being bold on Facebook Live, starting a group coaching program, and of course, hosting a digital summit.

Jump into Communities & Stand Out

It’s easy to join Facebook groups then quietly lurk in the background for weeks or even months. While this might feel safer, it defeats the whole purpose of joining the group—getting to form relationships and build your own community.

It’s time to stop hiding out and start networking in your online groups. Here are a few easy tips to help you speak up and stand out…

Choose Communities that Fit

If you’re passionate about serving your tribe, then you have to go where they are. Pick communities where your ideal audience is likely to hang out. For example, if you are a low carb blogger, then find Keto groups and join them. You may also want to join group for health bloggers and low carb recipe creators.

If you get into a group and find it’s negative or the moderators are unkind, don’t feel like you have to stay. Quietly remove yourself from the group and move on.

Introduce Yourself

As soon as you’re approved to join a new group, take the time to introduce yourself. Share a few sentences about who you are and what you do. If you want, you can dive into why you do it but remember to stay brief.

Keep in mind that some group moderators don’t want you to post links to your website when you first join. If that’s the case, you need to respect the group rules. You’re not going to win friends by upsetting the moderators.

Add Value

This means participating in the conversations in your group and sharing what you know. For example, someone asks a question about how to install WordPress and you know the answer. Share it! 

If you don’t know the answer, you can always use Google and say, “I’ve never dealt with this problem but I did find some interesting advice over here: (link)”. This response shows you care even if you didn’t know how to help.

Voice Your Questions

Ask for advice in your groups. For example, you might say, “I’m not building my mailing list because I’ve been stuck on which list service to purchase. I’ve narrowed it down to Aweber or ConvertKit. Can you tell me which one you’d choose and why?”

Start Discussion Topics 

Don’t be afraid to share what’s going on in your life or business. Talk about a book you’re reading that’s inspiring you, a mindset shift that you experienced, or a customer interaction that made you smile.

Let people in and give them a chance to get to know you. It might feel scary (especially at first!) but as you do it, you’ll begin building an amazing community filled with caring and supportive people.