I’m proud to say that Cloudways is supporting the upcoming free Ecom Services Summit as a sponsor and also as a media partner to restream the event from May 25th to 29th for free from the Cloudways website.
This truly is an example of how the Cloudways Mavericks program is dedicated to giving value to the community and in this spirit, you can find the embedded videos right here. Below the embedded content, you’ll find an exclusive look behind the scenes of the Ecom Services Summit and details on what it takes for you to run your own virtual summit.
Now, the Ecom Services Summit is my fourth summit. In 2015 I ran the WP Summit, which Cloudways already was a sponsor of. Then in 2019, I ran the WP Agency Summit – again sponsored by Cloudways. The WP FeedBack Summit in April 2020 was my third event in this space and now the Ecom Services Summit is my fourth overall virtual summit. You could say that I have some experience under my belt.
Since we are all very much working from home due to Covid-19, virtual summits are a valid way to create alternatives to physical conferences like WordCamps or Meetups. I even got approached by WordCamp organizers to share my thoughts and advice on converting WordCamps into virtual events.
Let me start with a caveat, it is a lot of work to run a virtual summit. I learned how to properly run these events from Navid Moazzez, who’s sponsoring the Ecom Services Summit with his Virtual Summit Mastery program. If you’re interested in learning more about that, click on the Virtual Summit Mastery logo in the embed above.
It took me four months to run the WP Agency Summit in 2019. The WP FeedBack Summit was done in two months thanks to a fantastic team, and the Ecom Services Summit is done within just one month – because I have the process nailed down and know what to optimize and the order in which to do things.
To give you perspective, there are five major points you want to consider when running your summit:
1. Is There a Need for the Summit or Are You Running the Event Just for the Sake of Running It?
Got the idea to run a virtual summit? Firstly, do your research! What virtual events do already exist in your niche? Can you compete with them? What do those events do good and what can you do to differentiate your event from them?
Running virtual summits is no small feat to achieve. The preparation and execution of any virtual event can eat you alive if you are not structured and bite off more than you can chew. Be sure that you have your event structure in place and know exactly how you are going to promote it so that you actually get attendees.
I can promise you that, once you get word of mouth going about your event, you will be bombarded with ideas for promotion, speakers you “need to have in your line-up”, PPC campaigns you cannot afford to miss out on, and thousands of other things that demand your attention.
Map out your process (e.g. in Asana or Trello) and visualize your funnel using tools like Geru (my personal favorite) or Funnelytics, so that you are always clear about what steps you need to do at which point.
2. Build a Speaker Line-Up That Attracts People but Also Helps You Get the Word Out
When building your speaker line-up, you obviously need to ensure that you get speakers who can cover all topics relevant to your summit’s audience. There’s no point in bringing on A-list speakers with big names if they cannot contribute a meaningful session to your attendees.
If you attended one of my summits already or have a look at the schedule on the Ecom Services Summit, you’ll see that the event not just has A-list speakers like Dennis Yu who gave over 730 talks in 17 countries or Rhonda Swan, the 7-figure branding strategist who got featured on Forbes in April.
I always make sure that I have speakers with huge audiences but also speakers who are up and coming, as the latter are more likely to share your event with their circles. Let’s face it, oftentimes you cannot afford to pay speakers for being on your virtual summit and thus you allow them to advertise their services or become affiliates – but that isn’t enticing enough for the big speakers to share your event.
By bringing together established speakers with up-and-coming experts, you can almost guarantee that your event gets exposure from the experts themselves. And that’s exactly what you want to happen.
3. Have a Strong Technical Foundation
If you’ve seen the WP FeedBack Summit, you will know that on the first day, our server crashed because we received too much traffic. We load-tested for 1,000 concurrent users, but we were hit with 10x that amount of visitors. The event ended up with over 100k unique visitors in six days, which is more than we could have hoped for.
It also meant, however, that the team and I worked all Monday to build a stronger server setup that could cope with all the visitors. Full disclosure, the WP FeedBack Summit was not hosted with Cloudways but with our custom architecture using Amazon Lightsail (and later AWS EC2). I certainly learned this lesson the hard way, make sure that your server can handle the traffic if your event goes viral.
While the WP Agency Summit and all my other websites are hosted with Cloudways, for the time the Ecom Services Summit is live, I will likely move it to a load-balanced setup on Amazon Lightsail.
For day-to-day promotions, Cloudways is more than good enough and can handle almost any traffic you throw at it. I am even sure that, with a server that’s big enough, I could host the Ecom Services Summit at Cloudways with no issues.
But since the event will be embedded on countless high-traffic websites all across the globe, I find it hard to estimate how much traffic will actually come to the website. That is why I am setting up a scalable setup with multiple web servers and load balancing on Amazon Lightsail for the time the event is live. Once the event is over and traffic numbers go down again, I’ll move everything back to Cloudways.
4. Monetize the Event to Cover Your Costs
As I briefly mentioned already, running a virtual summit requires a reasonable investment of time and money. Even if you can build everything yourself, you’ll still need to set aside the time to do it. That’s why you need to know how you’ll end up monetizing your event.
It is very important to me to make the content available for free while the summit is running so that as many people as possible can consume the sessions without any investment whatsoever.
For me, I like the model of bringing on sponsors for my events, while I also sell lifetime access to the sessions. The sponsors get exposure through their virtual booths and can advertise their services, just as they would be doing on WordCamps or exhibitions. With selling lifetime access, I can also give people the opportunity to secure access to the sessions if they found value in them. The lifetime access for my summits usually ranges anywhere from $47 to $147, which is less than what a ticket for a real conference with comparable speaker line-ups would cost (not to mention travel costs). I always try to offer compelling value for the prices I charge, and I think with the lifetime access passes, it is an exceptional value for money.
You can also run other monetization models like bringing on affiliate partners, doing JV launches during summits, or keeping summits for free and selling other products to the attendees as they go through the event (e.g. products from your speakers).
5. Promote, Promote, and Promote Some More
I’d like to end this article with a lesson I learned the hard way in 2015. You need to promote, promote, promote, and promote your event some more. Without a clear promotion strategy, your summit will fall flat on its face and you won’t see any measurable results.
You are putting a lot of effort into bringing your event into reality, so you need to have a good approach to getting the word out. I already talked about speakers sharing the event, you’ll obviously ask your sponsors to do the same (if you decide to have sponsors).
Another way I found to work exceptionally well is to leverage Facebook groups. Get in touch with administrators and moderators of relevant Facebook groups and ask them if it’s ok to share a link to your summit’s website. Ideally, you’ve built these relationships way before you need them.
Affiliates can also be a viable option for getting more eyes on your event, which is why I have affiliates for 99% of my events. Mostly, those are my friends and fellow WordPress experts & agency owners. I create swipe copy for them and promotional graphics, because I cannot demand that my affiliates write every email and every status update from scratch.
These are just some of the ways you can promote your event. Get creative and watch what other events in your market are doing. Model what works and put your own spin on the strategies others are using.
