Virtual Summits Online – How to Host a Profitable One? (Part 1)

Virtual summits online – You may not know this yet, but you’ve stumbled on a huge secret to success. What’s more, it doesn’t even matter what your niche is, you can earn impressive amounts of income by hosting virtual summits online. You can do them in several formats. One format is the interviewer/interview format where you just interview the speakers in succession. Another is that you allow the speakers to conduct a presentation on the topic of your summit.

Essentially, virtual summits online are just like conferences, or conventions, but since they’re hosted virtually, all boundaries are quickly erased. The boundaries of location are ended. All the guests and speakers can be in any location as long as they have a good internet connection. The boundaries of expensive accommodations are ended. Everyone stays home or in their office to participate and watch the presenters.

All boundaries of interaction are ended too. This is because everyone can ask questions, comment and become part of the event just like they can in person. This is due to the wonderful technology that exists now. Not only that, but you’re not bound by time limits, either. You can literally host virtual summits online single day and your cost will be nominal.

What’s more is that you don’t even need a huge following to plan, organize and host your first profitable virtual summit online. You just need to know what to do and how to do it and you’re in business. Many are saying that hosting virtual summits online aren’t just a way of doing business. But is actually an entire business model that you can replicate for any type of business that you’re in.

Of course, there are a few steps that you’ll need to go through to ensure success. Let’s get right to it.

You Need to Define Your Niche

One of the biggest indicators of success for any business is the ability to find focus on one particular niche, and maybe even one small subset of a niche. Many people fear being “too focused”. They think that it will bring less business.

But here is the truth. Be laser-focused on an audience of one in your marketing and you’ll bring more business to your door. You’re always welcome to accept business from people outside of the target you’ve set in your marketing, but you won’t be able to focus your marketing without finding that very focused niche.

Businesses that find it hard to choose a core focus often fail. That’s why you find very successful single-minded business owners everywhere. Whether it’s making the best chicken, or giving the best motivational speeches, or learning how to use particular software, it’s clear that being narrowly focused on a particular market is imperative for success on and offline.

To define your niche:

1. Know Who You Want to Work with – It may seem odd but your first job is to figure out who you want to work with. What type of people do you want to help? Finding the people first is an important part of ensuring that you like doing what you choose to do long term.

1. Match Your Skills to Their Needs – Once you’ve picked the audience, you can now match your skills to the needs of that audience. It doesn’t matter if you plan to make a physical product, an information product, or provide a service or something else entirely. Find the intersection of your skills with the audience’s needs and you’ll have a winning combination.

1. Create a Plan of Action – Once you know what you’re doing and who you want to do it for, then you have a niche and it’s time to create a plan of action. Since your plan is to host virtual summits, you can choose to have other products or make the summit your product. It’s up to you.

You should be able to fill in the blanks:

I (what I do), for (who I do it for), by (the value I provide).

For example:

I teach marketing funnel creation to business coaches by creating valuable online learning opportunities.

Once you can put what you do into a sentence you have the basis for your virtual online summits as well as numerous products. Now you can use that information to come up with a topic for your summit.

Develop a Broad Topic for Your Virtual Summits Online

Here’s where you can get more creative with your virtual summits online than you can with your own products. Using the information you have gathered about your audience, you’ll want to develop a broad topic for the summit rather than a narrow one. After all, you want each speaker to be able to address a different problem the audience has.

Using the audience “Business Coaches” from above you might consider making a list of needs any business coach may have. You already know they need what you offer, marketing funnel training – right? Now you need to make a list of things they need that other people can offer to teach them at your summit.

Coaches may need training in:

• Creating a Business Plan
• Branding
• Sales & Marketing
• List Building
• Traffic Generation
• Contracts
• Software
• and more…

They need all of this, plus very focused subsets of training in each category. You can host a summit that is all-encompassing for business coaches covering all these areas, or you can choose to focus only on sales and marketing and have each speaker speak about a different area of marketing, such as social media marketing, advertising on Facebook and so forth. It’s up to you and you honestly can’t be too broad as long as it’s something your particular niche, in this example “business coaches”, need. One thing you need to be able to do is to give your summit a name, along with branding so there is no mistake about who the virtual summit is for. You’ll need this for two reasons.

1. To attract the right guests
2. To attract the right speakers

But first things first. You’ll need speakers or presenters who also serve this niche in the broad topic you’ve chosen. Thankfully, there are great ways to choose speakers that not only help you market your event but also provide your audience what they need.

To be continued…