Should you speak at a virtual summit? A case study.

This site uses affiliate links and I may earn a small commission when you use my links and make a purchase without incurring additional fee yourself. Many thanks for supporting this website. Please see my legal page for more details.

If you are a digital product creator then you are probably pretty busy. There are many hats that a blogger wears and blogging life can get pretty hectic at times.

Therefore, you want to make sure that you invest your time wisely.

What should you do when someone asks you to speak at a conference or virtual summit? What will that mean for you? How many subscribers will you get? How much money will you make?

So I decided to write up a case study for my very first virtual summit.

Now you may get completely different results and I am not sure if my results are typical or not but I hope it will at least give you some idea of what can be achieved so you can decide if you want to partake in a virtual summit yourself!

Summit details

So the summit I was a speaker at was the 2021 Blogger Breakthrough summit organised by Elizabeth Stapleton – lawyer turned blogging coach.

This took place in January 2021 so around 7 months before this case study was written.

I got invited as one of the bloggers in my community knew Elizabeth and recommended me so I was lucky I didn’t have to pitch myself – something I’m not a big fan of!

The summit was designed to ‘help bloggers go from being overwhelmed to overachiever without having to be constantly working.’ So there was a real mixture of topics covered from website speed to launching digital products and everything in between.

My own talk was about ethical affiliate marketing for beginners.

Elizabeth offered us the opportunity to promote a freebie to help grow our email lists and the sign-up box was prominent on the live webinar page.

My freebie was 6 affiliate article templates which I got a lot of nice feedback about afterwards.

I also contributed to the pro pass by submitting an ebook to the bundle of goodies that upgraded pass holders got access to. This meant my affiliate commissions were higher and helped me to get on a few extra radars!

Summit stats

Elizabeth sent us some summit stats which was really helpful.

The summit had 3983 attendees in total with over 50 speakers. Each talk got on average 2% live attendance and 11% total attendance.

	Summit averages	My own talk stats
Live attendees	82	108
Replays	371	446
Total plays	526	732
Upvotes	59	108

I really appreciated these stats as speaking at your first virtual summit can be a little nerve-racking so it was great to see the stats that show it actually went pretty well!

(I have my wonderful audience to thank for their live attendance as I saw many of my Facebook group members in the audience – thanks guys!)

I also think these stats are pretty useful for context when looking at my virtual summit outcomes.

If you are considering speaking at a virtual summit, you could ask how many attendees were present the previous year and use this to help you create some goals to work towards based on the results you are about to learn.

Summit outcomes

Not every outcome is something that can be tracked so keep that in mind when reviewing my results. But I will share with you the stats I managed to track.

New subscribers

I had a total of 321 new subscribers of which 248 are still on my email list 7 months later.

50% of attendees to my talk who joined my email list. I believe this was due to the freebie I offered as it was something that was genuinely useful.

7 months on, 37 subscribers have gone cold (not opened recent emails) so I am about to put them through a re-engagement sequence and remove anyone who doesn’t engage as I am of course paying for these subscribers so if what I teach is no longer useful for them, that’s fine, it might be time to part ways.

So in total, I acquired 211 engaged, long-term subscribers who hung around for my content – not just the freebies!

Income generated.

Of the 321 subscribers who signed up for my freebie, 18 became paying customers spending an average of $86.88 each.

So this worked out as an average earning of $4.87 per subscriber which shows that subscribers from a virtual summit are pretty engaged.

To put that into context, subscribers I have acquired from contributing to bundles generate between $0.85 and $1.36 each but subscribers who signed up via opting into a freebie on my site generate $9.12 each.

Therefore the subscribers are more engaged than those from bundles but less engaged than those who subscribed via my website – probably as on my website, they have fewer distractions at the time so more opt-in for tripwire offers.

Items sold

• 15 ebooks
• 6 online courses
• 7 databases
• 8 digital blog planners

This came to a total profit of $1564.50

I also earned affiliate commissions via promoting the summit which amounted to $414. This was on upgraded tickets as the basic access tickets were free.

I did a fairly soft promotion as unfortunately, the summit was very close to the genius bloggers toolkit flash sale dates and I didn’t feel comfortable promoting both at full force as I didn’t want to annoy my audience!

So total direct profit was $1978.50 (that I know of.)

Now I say direct profit because I cannot know how many of the new subscribers went on to purchase a product with my affiliate link – I am only able to track my own digital products.

There is also the possibility that some people have signed up again with a different email address and any purchases they made would not be included in these figures.

Therefore, I can say I earned at least $1978.50 but this figure is likely to be higher in reality!

Time invested

All the products that I promoted via email funnels once someone joined my email list were already in existence so I didn’t need to make any products for the purpose of this summit.

If you haven’t created a digital product yet, I would suggest you do this before you speak at a conference so that you have a way to monetise your list growth.

(Not necessary if you are promoting your services instead, of course!)

I was also able to re-use email funnels that I had created previously when I contributed to a bundle of products so the only new email I needed to write for new subscribers was a welcome email that was specific to the summit. I repurposed another welcome email for this.

I did of course have to spend some time writing emails to promote the summit itself since I was also an affiliate.

As I mentioned, it was quite a soft promotion as the summit followed the genius bloggers toolkit and I didn’t want to annoy my subscribers by promoting too many things at once! (If it were at a different time of year I would have sent more emails.)

So there was only 1 email sent which was purely to promote the summit. I also mentioned the summit in a further 3 emails as a ‘PS’ or similar.

During the event, people could still grab a free (or upgraded) ticket so I continued to promote it. There was actually so much buzz about the summit inside my Facebook group that it was easy to continue the momentum and energy via email.

I wrote 3 emails that week. One to remind my audience about my own presentation (probably the reason I had so many live attendees.) The other two included some tips and take-home messages from some of the other presentations I had attended. They were packed with value but also helped to showcase how valuable the conference way to encourage people to join in at the last minute.

232 of my subscribers clicked on my links to get a ticket for the summit. Most of those will have grabbed a free ticket. 12 chose to purchase an upgraded pass which either gave them lifelong access or also access to a bundle of products from the summit speakers.

It took a day or two to create the presentation and similar to set up the emails and promotion. Plus a few hours to practice my presentation. We’re probably looking at about 5 days work.

So per day of work, I earned around $400 which seems a fair return for my time, especially as there are other hidden advantages of speaking at a summit.

In summary

• I earned just shy of $2000 via upsells, funnels and by promoting the summit to my audience
• I spent around 5 days preparing for the summit
• I repurposed email funnel content which saved me lots of time!
• I recruited 321 new subscribers of which 285 are still active 7 months later
• In those 7 months, I earned $4.87 per new subscriber
• I didn’t get as many new subscribers as when I contribute to bundles (usually that’s between 1000-2500) but each subscriber is more engaged and more likely to spend money on my products.

* The amount of sales I earned via subscribers who joined from the summit has since gone up considerably. I recently launched a course and several summit attendees purchased it. I haven’t sat down to work out exact figures but it was at least several hundred dollars.

Other benefits of speaking at a summit

Beyond the obvious financial and list growth benefits, there are several other reasons why you should speak at a virtual summit.

• Brand recognition – more people will start to recognise your brand name and may sign up to your list/buy your products later on.
• New subscribers may go on to buy other products in the future. The above figures are based on the first 7 months only.
• New subscribers may use your affiliate links to purchase other products
• Social media engagement will get a boost – my Facebook group was buzzing during and after the summit!
• It’s an opportunity to network with other digital product creators
• More opportunities will open up e.g. being invited to other bundles or summits.
• You may get more testimonials for your products which you include in the upsell bundle
• You may also find some new affiliates for your products.
• You will grow in confidence and are more liekly to feel comfortable speaking at ‘in-person’ conferences

Here’s a testimonial I acquired as a result of this summit!

“After seeing Leanne’s presentation at the 2021 Blogger Breakthrough Summit, I was fairly certain that anything I purchased or downloaded from her would provide useful information. And her VIP Affiliate Superstar Toolkit has definitely exceeded those expectations. It’s been incredibly useful with the templates, planners, and resources she’s added – so I feel confident in recommending this toolkit to those who want to give their affiliate marketing skills a boost! Thank you for putting this together!“

Elizabeth Hepach

Tips for speaking at a virtual summit

• Get organised early. You don’t want to be scrabbling around at the final hour trying to put together a welcome series or upsell.

• Choose a topic which is related to whatever products you will be selling.

• Include a bump/upsell +/- downsell in your sign up funnel. This is where you will capture most of your sales.

• Make sure your lead magnet is really appealing. Consider giving away something that you usually sell for free.

• When it comes to email funnels, repurpose as much as you can – it will save you time.

• Encourage your existing audience to join you for your presentation live. Having them as cheerleaders will make you feel much more confident.

• Keep a folder of feedback and social media messages after your talk. When you are experiencing imposter syndrome (it affects us all) you can look back at the lovely feedback you got. You can also use this feedback when pitching for summits in the future.

• Make sure your welcome series is seriously good! People will be joining many email lists around the same time so make sure yours stands out. I like to give some extra free gifts in my first emails to keep my new subscribers opening them and engaging with my content.

---

Read next | Contributing to a digital product bundle – a case study/income report

So will you be speaking at any summits? What have your results been like? Do you track them? Let us know in the comments!