[JOE SANOK]: This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, bonus episode.
If you’re like me, this lockdown, quarantine thing is exciting, worrisome, crazy bonkers. I love being with my family, I hate being with my family. All these thoughts and feelings going on right now in the midst of this coronavirus. And, we’ve been working on this Podcast Launch School thing for a while and the time that this releases, we’ll have done our first webinar with all the first access people, and we’ll have a better idea of, you know, what works, what doesn’t work. And then we’re going to be launching to our affiliates and in June, we’re going to open that up to the rest of you. So, if you want to be on that early access list, head on over to podcastlaunchschool.com. We’ve got some awesome content there. We have a nine-part free email course that’s going to walk you through everything podcasting.
But I bumped up this episode, I just a minute ago finished recording with Liam Austin, who specifically helps people grow virtual summits, online gatherings. And it seemed like it was such an applicable thing. I said, we’ve got to launch this as soon as possible. And so, I was like, “Right now, I’m going to record this intro. I’m going to bump it up and Mitchell and Sam are going to get it going and get it out there.” And so, without any further ado, I give you Liam Austin.
Well today on the Practice of the Practice podcast, we have Liam Austin. Liam is a virtual event strategist having launched over 15 virtual summits and online business networking events, hosting over 400 speakers while educating a hundred thousand plus business owners through his program. Liam, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[LIAM AUSTIN]: Joe, thanks for inviting me on. I’m excited to be talking about virtual events at this time with your audience.
[JOE]: Oh my gosh. Yeah. We just had a recording issue, so we’re going to just take it from the top. But I was saying that, you know, never has there been probably a better time to be an expert in regards to virtual events?
[LIAM]: Yeah, that’s right. I think our inbox is flooded at the moment. We’re definitely seeing a spike in demand and Google certainly are loving us right now.
[JOE]: Basically, it’s, you know, Amazon is doing really well right now, Netflix is doing well and you’re doing amazing as well.
[LIAM]: It’s nice to be putting in those categories. Haven’t been putting in that category before, but that’s cool.
Yeah, my quote on your website, we’ll be lumping you with them. Well, let’s just start with historically before the coronavirus, let’s just talk about online events, kind of what they were like, what was working and then kind of what’s shifted. And part of this for me is, you know, we’re launching Podcast Launch School. The idea of doing some virtual events around that to launch our e-course and to just get more people involved and connected is really appealing to me. So, part of this episode is going to be me just being kind of selfish and picking your brain, but let’s historically talk about online events, kind of how have things worked, maybe BC, Before Corona.
[LIAM]: Yeah, DC. I like it.
[JOE]: Yeah. I’ve been saying BC for Before Corona, AD for After Distancing.
[LIAM]: I really like that. I’m going to steal that one, but —
[JOE]: Steal it.
[LIAM]: So, what was like life BC. Virtual events and specifically at the top of virtual events that we specialize in, which are virtual conferences or virtual summits, which are 20 to 40 speaker events held across multiple days. So traditionally say 30 speakers across a five-day virtual event. So completely virtual conference. We’ve been doing this since 2015 and there’s been a lot of progress in terms of the strategy and thought behind putting together these events, the tools and technologies made available and the demands from the attendees, speakers, sponsors and all other types of collaborators in these events.
So, we’ve seen a gradual climb in the changing landscape of virtual conferences, but just, yeah, since early March, there’s been a massive spike in just the new events being launched, people moving their in-person events online and at a rapid pace. We used to see a trickle of these people thinking about, “Okay, multiple different streams of income; how can I diversify and build new streams of income for my business? Hey, I’m already doing these in-person events over here. Let’s bring them online.” And that’s absolutely been fast-forwarded now. So, we’ve almost jumped ahead, maybe a decade if you like —
[JOE]: Yeah, because, we’re in the same boat. I mean, you think about, you know, if someone’s a keynote speaker, they don’t have the option to say, “Well, should I do a summit or should I do an in-person?? Like the entire world is in this boat with us. And so, it’s almost like people who maybe never would have even considered this are now doing it. I think about how I do improv. I joined an improv group in late 2019, and we did our first live improv performance on Zoom and my parents came to it. And I don’t think, well, I mean, they probably would’ve come either way if it was me, but I don’t think we would have had the kind of showing of people, you know, to a virtual improv event compared to kind of live. People would have been like, “Why this just sounds weird,” but right now you don’t have any other options.
[LIAM]: Yeah. It’s, I kind of put it back to when online dating was not so cool right back in the early two thousands and now like Tinder, Tindering and swiping left or right is now cool. And I feel like virtual events are going through that phase at this moment. It’s like a big time for them as well. And it’s going to be interesting that people kind of now are being forced to experience virtual events and these types of conferences that are going on. And if they’re having a good experience, both as the host, the sponsors, the attendees, then they’re going to want to do more of it. And there’s several benefits of moving an event online versus offline. And we can definitely dive into the details of why I’d prefer a virtual event.
[JOE]: Well, let’s start with just whether or not a summit or maybe when should a summit be free and when should it be paid, because I’ve seen a lot of people right now kind of hosting free summits, and I’m guessing it’s really just lead generation. And then I haven’t seen right now as many of the paid summits, and that might just be because people are worried about the economy and things like that. But when should you decide I’m going to do a free summit and when should you decide this is a paid summit?
[LIAM]: Awesome question. And this is what I like to discuss with our clients from the very beginning. What is the end goal of this? Why are you hosting or considering doing one of these events in the first place? And we look at like, what’s the end goal in mind? Is it to generate leads? Is it to build your authority? Is it to generate revenue, build relationships with the top influencers in your market to invite them to be speakers at your event? Or maybe just it’s about having an impact? If you’re a mission-driven organization that just wants to be providing a ton of value for free out to the audience, then, you know, you can maybe go down that free track, but what is that end goal? If the end goal is an existing product or service that you have, and you want to sell that and it’s not to make money from the event, then maybe, let’s put a free event on, put people into the funnel and send them up to that high ticket item.
Then that might be a product or service, a program, whatever that might be. And that’s where I like to start at that high-ticket offer. And it might be a brand new 10K coaching program that you’re providing, or some other kind of done for you, product or service that you’re currently providing to your marketplace. So, we can create that from scratch but—
[JOE]: And is the goal to, you know, when you have that really high-ticket item to just sell a handful of those, but to serve a bunch of people how do you kind of figure out the math on how high is a high ticket? Because say someone doesn’t have a 10K but they have a thousand-dollar product. Does that mean maybe you should charge or is there like a formula there in regards to the ratio of the highest ticket to the cheapest summit or, I’m not sure I’m formulating my question well, but is there a formula in regards to the level of the ticket versus the product that’s being pitched?
[LIAM]: I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily a number at the end there. When I say high ticket, I like to think of 10K plus offer. That might be a 12 months kind of program, or that goes a long-extended periods of time. But if you work your way back, I think you can look at combinations of doing these events some free, some paid and implement them into your strategic approach. But again, it’s about figuring out what the end goal is for the client. And each person really is different. But if we’re thinking about let’s just compare, say a free event versus a paid event; with a free event, you’re going to be able to attract a ton of your ideal clients if you’ve designed it and crossed that event by reverse engineering it from your high-ticket offer.
So, we’ve crafted this event to attract our most ideal clients. They’re all signing up and we’re seeing like a 75% opt-in rate for a really well-crafted opt-in landing page for your free virtual conference. Then you’re putting them into the funnel. They’re getting to know you at the events, you’re building your authority and rapport with those people. So, you can send them, post the event up in through your funnel, to ultimately purchase from you, whether that’s immediately after the event or months or even years after the event is in. But you’ve built that rapport and you initially got them into your funnel via a free event. The paid event is looking at different dimensions, and this might be for maybe there’s existing clients that you’re working with, and you want to give them a more private, personalized experience, and you’re inviting them to be part of that experience via a paid ticket. And so that access is only accessible by people who have paid. So, it increases the quality of the people that are involved, which means you can do some really interesting, like round tables, masterminds within this shortened version of a paid event.
[JOE]: Now, I’ve seen that oftentimes people will sign up for a summit that’s free, and then they’ll say, “Okay, the videos from the summit are free for 48 hours or one week.” There’s some time limit, but if you want to buy the videos, then it’s, you know, $49 or $400, whatever the amount is. Is that a pretty typical model to have an upsell for access to the videos after the event?
[LIAM]: Yeah, I think this is something that’s been around with these virtual summits for a long time. Now you’ll give free ticket and then people can choose to upgrade to purchase the recordings. Now, when I first did our first event, it was a similar model to that where we didn’t have a backend offer. And if I can walk people through the funnel and I can just you know, stop what they’re doing and just kind of like see this in their mind, you have 5,000 people coming into the funnel. They land on your landing page. If it is a free offer, we can see, you know, 75% opt-in rate for that. So, you’ve got close to 4,000 people opting in to your event. So, you’ve now got 4,000 people on your email list. You might be able to convert, —
[JOE]: Let me pause you there. So how do we get 5,000 people to land on that? Is that pay per click? Is that working with influencers? Like how do you get 5,000 people to land on that?
[LIAM]: Yeah, all of the above. And there’s certainly some different strategic traffic driving tools that we use to do this, but primarily we look at this as a collaborative event. So, we want to partner with three different types of partners. The first being speakers that we’ve already mentioned, the second being what I like to term affiliates, and they can be anywhere from paying sponsors or some kind of deal with sponsors, with media partners and PR as well as any kind of front leaders or community leaders, or they may be Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, if we’re thinking online. And then the third one is turning out attendees into ambassadors. So actually, incentivizing and rewarding those attendees for sharing the event and inviting people into the event that they know.
[JOE]: Alright cool. So, we got our 5,000 people on the page, we get 75% opt-ins, so we have 4,000 people that have opted in. Now take us through the rest of that funnel. I’ll probably stop you, but it’s just because I’m going to make sure that I copy your funnel.
[LIAM]: Cool. Cool. So, yeah, it’s a little bit less than the 4,000 we’ve got in there. And then we want to upgrade them, say to the all-access pass. We might get, you know, three to 5% of people buying, which if it’s a hundred-dollar all-access pass, we have 200 people buying. What’s that? That’s like 200 by a hundred dollars; that’s $20,000, right? Am I correct?
[JOE]: Sure, yes.
[LIAM]: And then, if it stops there and ends there, I mean, we’ve made $20,000 from our event, we may need to pay commissions to any affiliate partners that are involved. And typically, we recommend about a 50% commission. So, we might lose half of that. So, say we’re left with 10K in profits after we’ve taken out all of our expenses. Now, this is the most important part putting on that backend offer or program. If it’s a $1,000 product, great, if it’s a 10,000 even better, and I’ll just take the $10,000 example here. If you’re able to put, you know, 40 people through that, from 5,000 people, 40 of them purchasing your 10K offer, you’ve made $400,000. Just 40 people out of 5,000 coming through and purchasing your high-ticket offer. So, $400,000 from a virtual event, like it is a massive revenue generator versus just focusing on the event itself, which may have ended up with a 10K profit.
[JOE]: That’s awesome. So then let’s talk some of the actual logistics of running the summit. And so that kind of was the marketing side of it and the sales side. So, what do people need to be cognizant of as they plan a summit? So, we’re talking what kind of software to use, how to make these things flow to have a great user experience?
[LIAM]: Yeah. Awesome. So, I would suggest before we get into the tools and tech, that people spend a minimum amount of time on the setup and the technical side of things. So whatever works with you, if you’re comfortable with WordPress or ClickFunnels or some other type of technology, you can use this to run your virtual conferences, but spend 80% or more of your time on the marketing and building relationships with your collaborators in your event. So, when it comes to the tech, yes, you can use WordPress, ClickFunnels. There’s some all in one software that makes it really easy for you to host these virtual events and pulls all the moving parts together.
Two examples of those is, Hey Summit, as well as Virtual Summit Software. So, you can guys can go and check that out, and it’s, they’re purpose-built for running conferences online. And then you want to have an email automation platform to add to that as well as a way to accept payments. And those two all-in-one platforms allow you to do those two things, but if you want to be a bit more strategic about, okay, what is the long-term offer here? How do we put people into our funnel to ultimately buy a high-ticket offer? You want to have those other two things in place separate from those all-in-one packages.
[JOE]: Awesome. Now I want to hear a little bit about making sure the summit experience itself for the user is really good. So, what do you suggest in regards to prepping speakers in regards to having speaker expectations, so that there’s great quality? What works in regards to the actual summit experience? What do you suggest as someone that’s hosting it, how they get everyone kind of prepped for it to get the best experience?
[LIAM]: I love this. This is like the thing that drives me every day to get up in the morning and make virtual events better. It is the experience of the virtual conference because we’ve progressed a lot, you know, just in the last few years, since I’ve been running these standard back in 2015 virtual conferences, where there were prerecorded videos of presentations from speakers, and they may even just be a Q&A interview that we ran and we prerecorded prior to the event, just to reduce a lot of stress that comes with doing things live. Now, we’ve progressed to a point where we can make our events similar to an in-person conference, where we’ve got more engagement and interactivity happening between the attendees, the speakers, the sponsors, people who are actually standing or hosting virtual booths at the event and showcasing their products and services to attendees walking via, you know, the, the virtual room.
So when it comes to designing and crafting what your virtual event looks like, you really do have to look at that end goal in mind, but I’ll just go through, I suppose, the different options, which would be prerecorded versus live, mixing different elements of those. Do you do a presentation with slides from some speakers potentially? Do we do some live Q&A’s where it’s via a host and speaker or expert? Maybe there’s a panel discussion going on where you’ve got four experts with the host just moderating that. Are the attendees allowed to come on to speak on stage in that panel discussion or in that live Q&A? Maybe that’s a VIP experience that people can purchase if they want to get access to the VIP speakers that are involved in those panels and those discussions.
So, we can craft and design this in really interesting ways across multiple days to encourage people, to show up, turn up and get that experience and interaction with speakers. And we talk about virtual booths as well. So different, maybe even speakers or media partners, sponsors can have booths where they can go in and speak with the experts sitting at that table and have their questions answered. They could get access to a free copy of a book or a free strategy session, or even like a page strategy session. So if you want to sell VIP tickets, maybe they get access to jumping on stage with speakers or invites into special breakout rooms or round tables that are going on with only those people who have paid for their VIP privileges, as long as the, as well as the expert speakers who are there as well.
So, then you’ve got the engagement all happening there, and the different levels of engagement based on how committed maybe these attendees are. And these can also highlight to you who are your ideal prospects, or your most likely, this warm or hot leads to purchase up to your funnel. And then you’ve got engagement between the attendees as well. And one of the things that are exciting me right now is the engagement between the attendees, where if you’re hosting an event from the kind of startup space or small business owner space, where there may be some founders there who are looking for funding. So, we’ve got investors on the other side of the table, and you’ve got the speed networking event where each founder gets to meet each of the 10 investors for three minutes across 30-minute sessions.
So, they just rotated for three minutes to do their pitch or meet with the investor. And this can be done with any two different groups of people that want to be matched together. So, it might be you know, prospects or sellers and buyers, right? And then at the end of that three minutes, the founder can say, “Yes, I want to connect and share my business card details with the investor.” And the investor says yes as well. So, if both have said, yes, they both get each other’s business cards and they can schedule a meeting post the event as well. So, there’s almost, you can integrate say your calendar, whether you’re using Calendly or another tool to access your calendar. And people can just book meetings during the event to do business deals, post the event, which I think is really exciting.
[JOE]: Yeah. Now I want to, in the last five or 10 minutes, kind of walkthrough like good, better and best because, you know, I hear a lot of these tools and think, “Holy cow, that’d be amazing.” But then I think that software alone must be thousands of dollars. And so, I’d love to maybe think about someone who is just getting started in virtual events. Maybe they have a podcast that’s smaller, they have a smaller list, or maybe they have a message that they think can bring together you know, 20 or so speakers. I’d love to walk through what would that look like for someone that’s just getting started and what would be the kind of typical costs for them?
Then moving into maybe someone like myself that already has an established platform would want to do some of the basics of a summit, but maybe not full-on, you know, virtual tables and things like that. And then what does kind of that best version look like and the costs there? So, when someone’s first starting, what does kind of the bootstrapped summit look like? And then we’ll kind of move into how much time and effort and strategy needs to go into the other levels.
[LIAM]: Yeah, sure. If you’re a techie person, I would suggest WordPress and you can set that all up by WordPress or if you’re a non-techie and you just want to, you know, at that all in one platform I would suggest, Hey Summit or Virtual Summit Software, where you can actually just go in there and just input the data about the speakers or their bio, their image, you know, give your summit a name and you can drag and drop different elements of the pages, but it’s really simple funnel that makes it really simple to set up the tech side of things, and then you can go away and focus on the marketing.
[JOE]: Okay. And when you say WordPress, are there certain plugins that you recommend?
[LIAM]: So, I would always recommend you do this on a separate domain. Why, because the idea of, again, a virtual event versus a virtual conference or virtual summit is the marketing done around the event. The difference between say a webinar, which is just a one speaker event versus a 30-speaker event is a much bigger attractiveness of this 30-speaker virtual conference. And so, we want to put the marketing around it so that everything feels professional, and we can get that 75% opt-in rate. So, everything that works needs to be done really professionally, needs to look professional, you need to deal with the speakers, the partners, the attendees in a really professional way.
So, I just really think that people should be focusing on using WordPress and any other technologies that they’re used to. In terms of plugins, you can get like themes out there for conferences that are in existence from like Thrive Themes and others. You can download and just use some of their existing designs and templates to make it super simple for you to set up for yourself on WordPress, on its own dedicated domain.
[JOE]: Okay. So, if you’re getting started in either WordPress or with what was it, Hey Summit or Virtual Summit Software, like what’s a typical budget for putting on a virtual summit at that level?
[LIAM]: Yeah, of course. Okay. So, I would be looking at around the, I think, Hey Summit, it’s about a hundred dollars a month for that software. So, you want to budget in at least that, and with the hosting of the videos, you do need a separate platform for that. So, we normally recommend Vimeo, which is around 200-300 a year to turn your videos private, so that depending on the person’s access level they will be able to get access to the video. So, you don’t want to just host it on YouTube because people will be able to get access to that, whether they’ve signed up to the event or not.
So, there’s those two things you want to consider. If you’re not doing a podcast or you don’t have a good microphone and a good external webcam, I would encourage you to invest in say a Blue Yeti microphone, which is less than a hundred dollars as well as an external webcam, which I recommend the Logitech C920 for that. I don’t know how quick deliveries may happen these days.
[JOE]: Right. So, if I do a summit in June, now’s the time.
[LIAM]: Start ordering today. It’s like get those things in place. And they’re probably about less than a hundred each and then you’ve got them for life. And I think if you’re going to be doing anything online, generating revenue online, or doing meetings via Zoom, it’s good to have that professional setup. And the external camera actually does do a really high-quality output versus the inbuilt webcam. So, there’s those elements. You’ve got your email automation software, which you know, you might be looking at a hundred or a couple of hundred dollars a month for that. And that depends on yeah, your long-term view and strategy. And I think that, I’d encourage you to, you know, if you are doing one of these free events, you’re driving people into your email list, you want to continue the conversation, post the event. So have an email automation platform so you can send out emails to them on a regular basis or craft a sequence that pulls people through an opt-in to ultimately purchasing from you, whether that’s via a free phone strategy session or a webinar or some other type of virtual event.
[JOE]: Awesome. Now, if people want to take it up a notch and kind of want it to invest a little bit more in it, what would you suggest for kind of that next level?
[LIAM]: Yeah, this is an interesting one. So, with the networking elements, if we’re talking about taking up to a different level with that, if you want networking between the attendees, a lot of the software out there today is charging per attendee. So, what I would suggest is make this part of the VIP all-access pass or charge for it in some way. And it’s less than $5 per attendee for these networking elements and getting access to those tools. So as long as they are paying, you know more than $5, then you’re profitable from there. However, if you are just wanting to do a live session integrated with pulling speakers and attendees on your virtual stage, you can use something like Zoom and you’d want to be upgrading to, I think, the pro level of Zoom so you can have multiple speakers on at once and have them go for at least 40 minutes or more and be pushing that out alive through either WordPress, and a plugin you might want to use for that, or you’re just going live via Zoom through Hey Summit or one of the other tools.
[JOE]: Awesome. Wow. So many great tips. I feel like there’s just a lot that I have to digest to figure out with Podcast Launch School and with all the other things we’re doing. It seems like summits, especially now are just a thing that are going to bring people together in a way that they haven’t really done it in the past as much. And I think more people are open to it. Liam, the last question I always ask is if every practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?
[LIAM]: Well, now I think is a great time to be looking at your virtual business and how you can maybe diversify your income streams. And if you look at a virtual conference or virtual summit, as part of that strategy, I would be looking at, okay, what is the main goal? Is it to build my email list, to build my list of prospects, build my relationships with other top influencers in my market? Just be with my own authority and rapport and make a big impact in the marketplace right now so when we come out of this, I’ll be in a really, really good place with really hot, warm leads, ready to come and take my products and services. Or is it to make money right now during this lockdown? So consider how this fits in with your ultimate goal, if you’re, existing or new high ticket offer and then really reverse engineer it to create and craft this event that can really just bring you so many opportunities and benefits off the back of it, as well as a brand new product and brand new revenue stream.
[JOE]: Oh, so awesome. Liam, if people want to connect with you, if they want to work with you and learn from your work, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?
[LIAM]: Yeah, sure. So, if people want to learn more about this, like we’ve got our Virtual Summit Academy, which is an online course, six modules, people get all the videos there as well as the scripts templates to make this super easy for you. And we’ve got a forum there where I can answer any of your questions as you go through this process. And then also we’ve got our million-dollar virtual summit program where we actually partner with the right clients to scale their business by combining virtual summit with a high-ticket program to a million dollars and beyond.
[JOE]: Wow. So great. and if you want to have connections with Liam, feel free to check out the show notes. We’ll have all of those links to all the different things he recommended in there. Liam, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[LIAM]: Thanks for bringing me on, Joe. I appreciate it.
[JOE]: You know, now is the time to take action. When there are economic crises, those businesses that were already on the brink unfortunately often fail those. That had lots of debt that were kind of living paycheck to paycheck or month to month, those folks who maybe they weren’t paying attention to how often insurance payments were coming through, and they’re realizing that wow, getting paid 30 to 60 days later is really tough for my business. So that’s unfortunate when that happens but we can pivot. You have amazing things inside of you to say. It could be through a podcast. it could be through a virtual summit that you want to get this out there. I hope that Liam inspired. And if you want us to help you to launch a podcast, there are two options right now.
We’ve got Podcast Launch School which will be opening to people outside of our affiliates, probably sometime in June. So, you get on the early bird list over a podcastlaunchschool.com or we have our Done for You Services where we help you launch a podcast and you can apply for that over at practiceofthepractice.com/apply. And we’ll be starting a new cohort here soon of people that really want some help to launch an awesome podcast, get 26 episodes, to get your own sound engineer and your own show editor. All sorts of things as part of that. So, we’ll talk about whether or not that’s a fit for you.
But thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. I hope you are inspired by Liam today. We have more awesome podcasts coming up and the one after this one is Josh Fonger, who is going to help you work the system. So have an awesome day, stay safe, stay healthy, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.