How would you like to become an authority in your industry by creating the worlds largest online event in that space, generating over 35,000 email subscribers and over $120,000 in the process? How would you like to create an event where leading experts reach out to you to speak on it? And how would you like to have control over your success and not rely on affiliates?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are in the right place.
Virtual Online Summits and Facebook Advertising is my ‘thang’. Over the past (almost) 3 years I have built the world’s largest online fasting event in the health industry, which is the most overcrowded industry to be in if you are running online summits.
But you can have excuses for why you are not getting where you want to be, or you can have results.
We started late when everyone told us summits were dead. But we came in with a refreshing angle that everyone appreciated, which sent us to the top quickly. I have now created a multiple 6-figure brand in the health and wellness space and 99% of the growth has been from the results of the Fasting Summit.
In this case study, I am going to share with you the results from each event, and how we have continued to grow it each year.
I have made a lot of mistakes. I have had a lot of bad luck. I have had ad accounts shutdown, malware issues, email delivery issues, payment gateway issues and more. My goal is to share those with you so that you can learn from them so that you can prevent them and have the same hassles as I have.
Virtual Online Summits and Facebook Ads are, in my opinion, the fastest way to become a leading authority in your industry, while building your email list…fast!
And you get to make great contacts along the way.
Credit: I learned all I know from Navid Moazzez’s Virtual Summit Mastery. It is the best program out there on summits. Check him out!
Why Online Summits? Why The Fasting Summit?
Full disclaimer upfront, the Fasting Summit wasn’t the first summit I put together. I had already created 2 other health summits before then. But they didn’t really ‘hit’. My topics were too vague and they didn’t really hit a pain point that people had. So while we still generated a few thousand leads from them, and some $$$, they weren’t topics I could grow.
I also hosted the first two summits myself. My strengths are in high level strategy and implementation. So while I do ok at being an interviewer, there are better people than me. Which is why I bought in my sister to do the interviews for our first fasting summit, and she has now become the face of that brand.
Why fasting? Well firstly, I was really getting into fasting at the time. I was following an intermittent fasting protocol daily and even doing the occasional 7 day juice fasts every now and then. At the same time I was researching the market, trying to find an untapped area. And fasting was it! I searched far and wide and there were no fasting summits. Even on some of the other summits that were similar there were never any experts talking about fasting, yet there were a lot of ‘experts’ who were in the fasting space. Some of them with hundreds of thousands of followers.
While putting together the first fasting summit, I went back to a 9-5 job so I could spend money on advertising. It wasn’t an easy decision, I don’t like working for others, but it was the best decision I made because it allowed me to allocate money to advertising without any pressure.
Fast forward almost 3 years later, the first Fasting Summit we did over 7,000 subscribers and $19,000 in revenue. We reinvested in the second one and did 15,000 subscribers and over $55,000 in revenue and the 3rd Fasting Summit we had our advertising accounts shutdown (through no fault of our own) and still managed to do over 16,000 subscribers and $50,000 in revenue. These are all from Premium Pass sales only, we have generated $10’s of $1,000’s in backend sales as well.
The Steps I Followed To Create A Summit
For the most part, I followed Navid’s VSM System. But after being behind more than 7 summits there are some things that become intuitive. If I was to do it all again I would partner with someone who has produced many online summits before as experience is invaluable and they probably would have got me to where I wanted to be much faster. The steps I followed are:
- Find a pain point and solve it with your topic:The more niched the better for your topic. Like I mentioned earlier, the reason why the first couple of summits didn’t do well is because I was too broad. Fasting is still even fairly broad but because we were the first in that niche to do a summit, we have got away with it and now have a large brand behind it. If you can get super targeted with your topic and find a pain point to cover, your marketing can also be very targeted, specific and do well.
- Create Your Strategy and Hook:Before you start getting your speakers you want to have a great strategy in place (and even the landing page created). When you are specific about what date your event will occur on, the hook, who it is for or your target audience and how many people you are expecting at your event then it makes it easier for your potential speakers to see you are organised, prepared and experienced, which means they are more likely to say yes.
- The Execution Plan:How many speakers are you wanting? When will these interviews take place? How long will they go for? What combination of tools and software are you using? These are all very important parts of pulling together an online summit. Sometimes I will even ‘over prepare’ and have a backup plan for everything. “Plan for the worst and hope for the best”. We have done over 130 interviews and, luckily, have only ever come across 2 or 3 technical issues which meant rescheduling, so we have done pretty well so far.
- Creating your summit pages and branding:This MUST be done well. I have seen great people, with great content but bad design for their summit pages and their summits were a flop. I have also seen average people, with average content but with great design and they do really well. The first thing people see when they hit your page is the design. I think we have a standard we expect online these days so make sure you are holding yourself to that standard. It is really easy to create great quality webpage design these days, but if you are not confident with doing it yourself then hire someone who can. And if the person you hire cannot do it well, fire them immediately and find someone who can (trust me I have seen this and it’s not cool).
- Landing your speakers and the interview delivery:I recently got tagged in a post by Webinar Expert, Jon Schumacher, on how to reach out to people as one of the people doing it right. Here is the post as it wraps up exactly what NOT to do, but so many people are doing it.
I still can’t believe people reach out this way. We get these types of requests from people all the time in the health space. Even from those who have a little bit of credibility (well they no longer have credibility in my mind). Don’t be like these people.My mindset when reaching out is that I love the work the expert does, I respect them, I respect their time, I want to share what they know with MY audience. And I will be investing as much money in possible to build my audience because I treat this like a business, not a hobby. I ask them for 25-35 minutes of their time, and they do not have to promote or even share the summit. If it makes sense for them and they want to that is awesome, but no requirements.And want to know the truth, most people are so appreciative of that they will share it anyway. Especially if you use my reach out strategy which I will go over another time. They may even decide to run ads for you….Proof….here is a screenshot from a recent reach-out I did for my next online summit, Ad Profit School.
Treat people how you want to be treated and good things will happen. Be humble. Be kind. Re-read this statement! - Deliver a Great EventThe easy part is doing the interviews and reach-out. The hard part is making it run smoothly. You need to make sure all pages are ready before you begin. You need to have them scheduled at the right times and a plan in place for when each day expires. You need to have your emails sync up with this execution strategy as well. Will you use an automated system or will you manually make changes?Even to this day I will typically be in there at the end of every day doing the changes manually or checking the automated processes go well. It means more work, but less chance of something going wrong, and if you have 10k, 20k, 30k+ people on the other end, a small glitch can mean hundreds or thousands of support requests.
- AdvertisingMy favorite part… The #1 reason for our growth has been because of Facebook ads. If it wasn’t for our ad account being shutdown for Fasting Summit 3 we would have generated over 30,000 subscribers and over $100k just from that summit alone. I have a 5 Step Summit Launch Facebook Ad Strategy that I created and I follow every launch. It has produced results in the health space, parenting space and homeschool space so far. I am confident that it is a proven concept. When you realise the power of running your own ads to grow your business your whole life will change.When you depend on affiliates it is 100% out of your control. When you run paid advertising, it is 100% in your control.So if you are not good at running ads, find someone who is and hire them immediately. If you are, you know exactly what I am talking about.I find the leads for summits are generally cheaper and it is often possible to be profitable even when the price of your Premium Pass is really low compared to an online program for example. I always tell my clients to expect to break even, but often we do way better than that. Especially if they have a great strategy behind them.
Virtual Summit Monetization Strategy
A lot of people don’t understand the business model of summits when they first hear about them. Here it is in a very simplified way…
The online summit is free for everyone to view for 24 hours each day over a 7 day period. When day 1 opens up, it is available for 24 hours, then it is closed and day 2 will be available for 24 hours. And so on.. You will start advertising 2-3 weeks before this 7 day period and you can offer a Premium Pass (sometimes they are called All Access Pass, or Platinum Pass, etc). This will get those people who decide to buy, access to all of the talks for an entire lifetime. Usually they will also get instant access as well so they don’t have to watch it on your schedule. For these people, the talks are locked away in a membership area. And we will typically have some added bonuses for members only, like MP3 recordings, Transcripts or Action Guides and other bonuses.
I love this model because everyone wins. Those who can’t afford it financially can still access the content for a limited time. Those who really want to support what you do can buy, which means you can make money from it. And it gives any affiliates a great reason to promote as they may also make some money from the promotion.
For the Fasting Summit we include the Video and Audio MP3’s, Action Guides and other Bonuses like online programs in our Premium Pass. I also tested having the old summits as an included bonus, but it did not move the conversion needle too much, so in future it will be an upsell.
Typically, we start our price at $47 or $59 fast action takers price. I have tested 72 hours, 24 hours and 15 minute One-Time-Offers. The 15 minutes does well but its a bit too ‘market-y’ for me. 24 hours seems to work almost as good. Then the price goes up to $79. We then typically bump the price to $99 midway through the summit. These bumps in price are to drive sales as people don’t want to miss out on the lower price.
I like to find the balance between driving sales but also doing the right thing by our market. And after 7 summits, I am still always testing, but it typically looks like something similar to the above.
We find that between 5-7% of people will buy the Fasting Summit Premium Pass, which is actually really high. Most people see 3-4%. I have also worked with clients who seen 10-12% conversions which are incredible.
Breakdown of the Results
Unfortunately, since we have moved our members area and payment gateways so many times since starting I don’t have a single screenshot to make this easy for me to figure out the exact results. In Navid Moazzez’s VSM Facebook group I have shared the numbers as each summit finishes, and I will pull those posts from the group to cover the first two below.
Fasting Summit 1:
I recorded in the group over 6,000 registered and over 190 sales. My main focus was Facebook ads, here is a screenshot of the ad data.
As you can see that is over a 2 month period. The promotion for the event started early September and the event closed early October, but I had a few extra sales come in over the month. These are just some of the campaigns, but all of the metrics are pretty amazing. The most important one to mention is the overall Website Purchase ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) at 5.16.
Which means for every $1 we spent, we made $5.16 back. This was my biggest ‘uh-huh’ moment and really the catalyst for what I have built today.
Fasting Summit 2:
In the group I recorded some better stats, here they are…
We had about a 52-58% conversion rate on the landing page.
Total Optins (after unsubscribes) – 14,700 (it was over 15,500 in total)
Total Sales – 914 (518 of them were because of the deadline funnel at $47)
Total Sale Amount – $55,362
We had just over $20k in costs – affiliate sales, ad spend, refunds, etc.
And here is the Facebook Account screenshot for this promotion.
The ROAS was not as high as the previous one, but we spent 4x the amount of money and I did a whole lot more testing. Not only that, but as you can see we generated over 8,000 leads from Facebook alone. Most people would be ecstatic to generate that many leads for a summit and there are plenty of people who have high 6 figure or 7 figure businesses from an email list smaller than 8,000 people.
Fasting Summit 3:
This is where I get sad. We picked up a malware issue from iDev Affiliate (don’t ever use them, they have the worst support in the world and they don’t care about their customers) and because of this issue our FB account got banned. At the time we had only spent $8,000 of a $40,000 budget. Which means we lost out on at least $60-100k in revenue.
Either way, we still ended up with over 16,500 subscribers and $50,000 in revenue. Once our account got shutdown we relied a lot on our reputation with affiliates and were lucky some of them came through.
Here is what our Facebook Account has to say, even with just 20% of the strategy executed the results were decent. The cost per subscriber was much higher because I was doing a lot of testing, but we had about 25 ad sets ready to scale that were sitting around $1 per subscriber. It still breaks my heart looking at these stats, but sometimes you have to roll with the punches.
This type of experience is not something I ever wanted to come across personally but to still do a $50,000 launch with so many issues it gives me confidence in seeing how much I have grown in the past 3 years. I could only dream about a result like this 3 years ago, now I am disappointed by it because I know where the next level is for me.
And having experience like this is invaluable for me and my clients in future. Imagine if you hired someone with less experience who had never been through something like this in the past, and didn’t know what to do, you would be pretty pissed right? Sometimes our biggest failures can become our greatest strengths moving forward. I hope so because I have a huge amount of strengths these days if that is the case 😉
Turning Your Successful Summit Evergreen
Between Fasting Summit 2 and 3, I turned the summit into a proper evergreen funnel. Using Deadline Funnel we are able to simulate the entire summit experience. There is a bit of a technical setup to it, but once it is done it is really cool. This also generated an extra $7,000 in revenue for us in between events.
The conversion rate was about 3% overall, much lower than a live summit. But I am sure with some testing we could get it a little higher.
I have been running ads to an evergreen summit for a client this year, and we have been brining in 1,000+ leads per week or over 7 weeks while still being in profit. Imagine that after 12 months, with 50,000 leads on your email list, what would that be like?
Once you find a summit that converts well and is scalable, there are a number of ways you can use it to continue to generate more leads and sales and an evergreen summit is just 1 of those options.
What’s Next For Fasting Summit?
For the FastWayToHealth and Fasting Summit brand we are continuing on with what we know…summits. The next one will be in June, 2 months after this one on detox, which compliments fasting. Then we will relaunch Fasting Summit 3 and spend our $40,000 on ads in order to get the result I want.
We have also created online programs as an upsell after the summits we do which have been our biggest downfalls in the past. We never had a backend offer setup after the summit that worked well. This was our biggest area of opportunity and what we are working on. We will also be launching an intimate coaching group.
We are in the middle of the first launch off the back of a summit right now, with an Intermittent Fasting program. I will share the results here very soon.
What’s Next For Me Personally?
Since the health business requires very little time from me each week, I have moved my focus into running Online Virtual Summits and Facebook Ads for others. Like I mentioned, the 5 Step Summit Launch process I have for Facebook Ads, works! It has now been tested and trialled in multiple industries and it continues to produce great results. I have clients who are breaking even or in thousands of dollars profit just from the summit sales alone (not including backend sales where the real money is made).
But I always like to put my money where my mouth is and I will be personally hosting Ad Profit School, in 2018. A Facebook Advertising summit. It is because of Facebook Ads that I have been able to grow a business to multiple 6-figures and my personal bran business is already well on it’s way to do over 6-figures in the first year. I want to share what I know and help other people achieve the same or even better results.
I work with High Impact Entrepreneurs who are here to do good things. I help them become an Authority in their industry so they can create more leads, make more sales and do more good in the world.
The world needs more people who are doing more good. And I choose you! Are you ready?