Virtual summits continue to be popular among the online business community, and I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. Maybe business owners are looking at different ways to deliver the summit or the structure shifts a bit, but I believe that summits are here to stay.
If you’ve hosted a summit before, or you’re thinking about it, it doesn’t have to be a one-and-done event. You can create something that continues to drive traffic to the summit or virtual conference.
How? Turn your summit evergreen! It’s easy to do this when you plan an evergreen aspect from the beginning, but it’s also possible if your summit has come and gone.
Listen in this week as Jenn Zellers shares her wisdom about how to do this with the fewest hiccups and surprises as possible.
Mentioned In This Episode
- Episode 55: Gaining Visibility (and Income) Through Online Summits with Krista Miller
Episode 121: Leveling Up Your Virtual Summit with Krista Miller
About Jenn Zellers
Jenn empowers virtual summit hosts and speakers to create more reach and impact by extending the lifespan of their one-hit-wonder events. Through the Virtual Summit Search directories, she connects attendees with awesome summits, as well as hosts with speakers and service providers to help make their summit even more amazing. The Virtual Summit Search team also works with hosts to evergreen their summits to get ongoing leads and sales, and with speakers to make the most of their summit presentations to grow their email list and get more sales – all without being sleazy or gross! Follow her on Instagram or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Transcript:
Abby Herman 0:08
Hey there, and welcome to episode 170 of the content experiment podcast, a podcast for podcasters that support the idea that content and marketing are ever moving targets. And it’s okay if you don’t feel like you’re doing it. All right all of the time, you have permission to experiment with little tweaks and changes in your content and your podcast to find what works for you. What increases value for your audience and what grows your business, and most importantly, what feels good for you. I’m Abby Herman, content strategist and consultant for podcasting. Business owners who want to make their podcast their primary content marketing tool feel easier and more streamlined, so they can get back to serving their clients and making those sales. Because your podcast is your pillar marketing tool, and you want to leverage it to grow your audience authority and business. I will show you how while you do business in a way that works for you. I can help by supporting you through building a content marketing strategy, taking care of the podcast management for you, or giving you the tools and resources to take this on yourself.
Abby Herman 1:18
One thing that business owners can do to grow their list in their podcast listenership is to host a summit. And as someone who has hosted a summit before, I know it is a lot of work, so many tech pieces to have to connect to one another and to work together. Plus, there’s all the speaker management, which personally I think is the most time consuming part. And then you have the summit, and it’s over and it feels really Womp womp. Right.
Jenn Zellers 1:45
But what if your summit could continue generating leads and revenue and conversations long after it was over? That’s where the Evergreen summit comes in. And even if you ran a summit in the past, and you hadn’t planned to make it evergreen, you can still do it after the fact that’s exactly what we’re talking about today on the podcast with guest Jenn Zellers. Jenn empowers virtual summit hosts and speakers to create more reach and impact by extending the lifespan of their one hit wonder events. Through the virtual summit search directories. She connects attendees with awesome summits, as well as hosts with speakers and service providers to help make their summit even more amazing. The virtual summit search team also works with hosts to Evergreen their summits, to get ongoing leads and sales edge with speakers to make the most of their summit presentations to grow their email list and get more sales themselves all without feeling sleazy or gross. So if you plan to host a summit, or you already have listen in. Hi, Jenn, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m super excited to chat about next level or maybe different levels summits today.
Jenn Zellers 3:03
Yes, it is. This is one of my favorite things to talk about. So I’m very excited.
Abby Herman 3:07
Yes. Before we get into the interview, though, could you share with listeners what you do and who you do it for?
Jenn Zellers 3:16
Yes. So I equip a summit hosts and speakers to create an ongoing reach and impact through their one hit wonder events, namely summits. And so we have a bunch of different ways that we do that, including the summit, Speaker directory and VIP days, and all sorts of good stuff like that. So that’s kind of my nutshell.
Abby Herman 3:37
Fantastic. And can you share a little bit about I mean, you kind of already did, but like, how you work with clients, what that looks like, and then how that helps you to kind of live the lifestyle that you that you want to live.
Jenn Zellers 3:51
Yeah, so I the primary ways that I work with folks that, like I mentioned, where is the summit speaker directory, which is where summit hosts can go to find a list of great summit speakers, we’ve got over 100 in there now. You can sort it by categories. And everything’s when we sit a lot easier to find folks who are actually going to be quality summit speakers, rather than folks who don’t show up or don’t promote all that kind of stuff. And then I also work with my clients through VIP days. So we have evergreen summit VIP days where we either create a strategy and they walk away with a project plan in order to implement their evergreen summit or do it for them. And then I also work with summit speakers to create their Knowsley sales strategy, as well as their stand up summit speaker framework. And then we also my husband is a speech coach, actually. So he works with folks to develop their speaking and presentation skills. And so those are the primary ways that I work with my husband speakers.
Abby Herman 4:50
I love that I had no idea that your husband was a coach. So
Jenn Zellers 4:53
yes, it’s a perfect little match there.
Abby Herman 4:56
Yes, I agree. Did he start? Does he Working that full time does he have his own business? Does he have a different job?
Jenn Zellers 5:05
He works in marketing? And he’s a professor of communications. So yes, kind of fun.
Abby Herman 5:12
How fun. Yeah, this is a perfect fit. I love it. Alright, so we’re talking about evergreen summit study. So we’ve already talked on the podcast. And you and I have talked about this too. Krista Miller is kind of like the the queen of summits. And she has a summit Abaqus program. And she’s actually been on the podcast twice, in Episode 55, where we just talked about summits in general. And then Episode 121, where we talked about leveling up your Summit. So like, maybe once you get a summit under your belt, how do you make it bigger, better, better the next time around? But you and I are going to talk about evergreen summits Can you share for people what what is an evergreen Summit? What does that mean for it to be evergreen?
Jenn Zellers 5:57
Yes. So I know there are a few different ways that you can kind of extend the life of your Summit. But one of my favorites is to Evergreen your summit and what that in my definition anyway, there. I know that some folks have different definitions. But my definition is that you take your Summit, and you make it accessible to new audience members. So it means that folks can come and sign up for the summit. Knowing that it’s evergreen, we’re not pretending like this is a live Summit, which I’ve seen that around. And I hate that it just feels gross and weird. So they sign up knowing this is not a live summit, but they’re getting 48 to 72 hours typically is how long you give them for the access to all the presentations, they can watch whatever they want to within that timeframe. But then after that is when they get to upgrade to an evergreen All Access Pass, which is typically not the same as the All Access Pass that you have during your live Summit. But there are ways to go and evergreen that as well. And so that way, rather than going and saying, Oh, well, I’m so glad you’re part of my audience, and you’ve seen me talk about this summit that I ran, but you can’t actually get access to it, it gives you the chance to keep bringing people in through that to keep giving them those resources. And it keeps the speaker’s getting to meet new people as well. And that’s one of my favorite things is getting to continue expanding those networks, both for me and for my speakers.
Abby Herman 7:21
So I didn’t realize that. So when you sell an evergreen summit to a person to a buyer, they get 48 to 72 hours to consume the information from the summit. And so then it’s like, it’s similar to a regular Summit, where you are asking them to upgrade so they can get additional access and other resources that the speakers have offered. So okay, so let’s talk about the logistics behind that. So because I mean, I’ve hosted a summit before and I know the logistics of you know, does the timer’s and the you know all of that. How does that work logistically with for the buyer? And I’m also curious how it works logistically for the speakers who because because I know you’re not, they’re not necessarily giving away to the All Access Pass holders the same gift or the same freebie that they offered for the original Summit. So logistically, what does that look like?
Jenn Zellers 8:25
Yeah, so from the attendees side, they find out about the summit, maybe they heard about it on a podcast, or they heard it mentioned on social media or whatever it happens to be. But they go to the Evergreen Summit website, they sign up for the same as they normally would I honestly use the pretty much the same landing page, I just take out all the references to like this is happening on these dates and change that out to an evergreen format. And once they sign up, then they automatically get redirected to a fast action offer, which is a slight discount on the All Access Pass. And but regardless of whether they purchase that or not, they will be able to get access to all the presentations for free for 40 to 72 hours depending on typically how many presentations there are. And then after that, the timers will automatically redirect them if they try to access those pages over to say, hey, you missed it. But here you can get the all access pass if you still want to get access to these presentations. And then from the host side. Honestly, you’re kind of recycling of the tech that you use for your Summit. So if you use deadline funnel or hurry timer or something like that, depending on what platform you’re hosting it on, then you’ll honestly reuse those and I typically only need to use a couple of timers. So I’ll have one for all of the presentations because rather than putting them on a day one timer or a two timer, and so on, you just have one timer for all of them. And then you have one timer for the fast action pass. And that’s pretty much all you need. And then you’re just using the same a lot of the same MTech. Sometimes people go and change it up. Like I’ve had clients who said, Well, I liked how it worked. But I have some new tech in my stack. Now I want to go and use some new things that I prefer the way that they work and see if that works better. And that’s the nice thing about evergreen Summit is you can kind of play with it, and change things up as you need to rather than being stuck with like, when you’re running a summit, it’s a lot harder to pivot that for the live Summit.
Abby Herman 10:25
Yes, there’s a lot of tech going on behind the scenes, is not always fun to deal with, especially when everything is so time time sensitive when you’re running a live Summit. I mean, if a link doesn’t work, or if an email doesn’t go out at a certain time, like everybody wants to know, well, where’s the presentation? How do we get to this information? So yes, I can appreciate that. What are some of the benefits of of turning into a summit evergreen?
Jenn Zellers 10:56
Yeah, some of my favorite benefits, the top ones that my clients typically are seeing are things like more leads, more sales and more connections. So the leads are pretty obvious, you’re getting more people coming through your funnel, whether that’s through your own promotion, through the speakers promotion, or other affiliate or attendee promotion, because sometimes you bring in additional affiliates, and that comes down with the connections, which we’ll talk about in just a sec. But bringing the leads in is a really great thing about evergreen summits. Because all that work that three to six months that you’ve probably put in to create the summit. It’s not just sitting there and going on the shelf after it’s done. Now you get to keep bringing in people through that. And and you also get to keep putting the resources out there like I ran some of the summit speaker edition, because there are literally no resources out there that I could find for summit speakers, there is nothing to help them figure out okay, well, how do I book more summits? How do I make more sales from them in an authentic way. And so that way, I have a resource to point people to. So especially if you have a summit, where there’s not a lot of resources out there, or you really want something where you can, someone comes to you with a frequently asked question, you can say, Oh, well, actually, you can go sign up for the summit. That’s a great benefit of having the Evergreen Summit. And then sales, of course, often follow the leads, is, the conversion rates may not be as high just because there aren’t as many bonuses going in with the speakers and everything, but the speakers can still promote it. And what I tell them is, hey, I’m not gonna ask you to keep giving away your bonus in there forever. But if they want to offer that as a bonus for people who signed up through their affiliate link, that’s a great way for them to be able to keep promoting it, and keep providing that value to their own audience. And then the connections is probably my favorite. Because, honestly, a lot of the time after summits over, I find new people that I sit there and I think, oh, man, I really wish I had known them before the summit happened. Or there are people who were not able to participate in the summit because of timing, but they were like, Oh, well, let me know next time, you can always go and add people and you can bring them in as affiliates. Or you can even bring them in as additional bonus speakers, you can record a session with them, or they can record a solo presentation. And you can go and put that into the Evergreen Summit. And it gives you a great chance to be able to go back to all the people who bought the All Access Pass and say, Hey, so you’re here for the live Summit, we actually added some additional resources. And it gives you a chance to update your audience who didn’t buy the All Access Pass and say, Hey, we you if you miss this summit, this is a great chance to go back and check it out. We added some new sessions to it. And he gives you that chance to continue the connections you made with the original speakers and possibly add new ones. So that’s those probably one of my favorite benefits of running an evergreen summit
Abby Herman 13:49
job because then you get to email you get to email your your people and just get in front of them again, so about you know, and add additional value. I love that. Yeah. So what do we need to do? So I want to I want to take this next question into two different parts. So because I have a summit that I have already run, and it’s just sitting there, and I know that people are people, not me. Newsflash, there is not going to be a content experiment. 2.0 summit as of right now, so there might be one down the road, but I’m pausing it. I’m pausing that idea for a little bit, but other people are planning summits. And you know, we may want to turn an old summit into evergreen, we may want to plan a summit that you know, knowing that we’re going to turn it evergreen. So I’m guessing that there are probably two different sets of things that we need to do in order to turn something evergreen. So let’s start with a summit that’s already been out there and has been hosted. We didn’t talk to the speakers about going evergreen, you know, they had a time limit on their freebie. You know, the tech is probably hopefully still sitting there. But what do we need to do to turn an old summit into an evergreen Summit?
Jenn Zellers 15:09
Yeah. So personally, one of the things that I tried to do is go back and edit out any references to say, like, a lot of the time, at the end of a pre recorded interview with a speaker, I’ll say, hey, go to the Facebook group, the community, whatever it happens to be, and ask your questions, go and let them know what you thought. So that, of course, is not available anymore. If it’s not a live Summit. So that is one thing you can do is go back and edit that out. And then if there are any references, like time sensitive references, like, if we’re referencing COVID, and stuff, that’s probably going to go on for a while. So I don’t worry too much about that. But if it’s something where they say, oh, yeah, so last week or last month, typically, if it’s a pretty time sensitive reference, and it’s not going to be helpful for them, or is going to be confusing, and they’re going to say, wait last week, you can edit that kind of thing out. And then for the, for my agreements, I use the agreement from summit and unbox because Chris has got a great one in there. And in that agreements, me see if I can find it.
Abby Herman 16:15
You mean by by agreement? You mean the speaker agreements?
Jenn Zellers 16:17
Yeah, sorry. Yes, the speaker agreement. In there, there is a clause that says that they retain full ownership and rights and everything. But we have the right to use the presentation. However, we’d like to make edits into distributed in free or paid products in the future. And so that protects you when it comes to Evergreen Simon’s because they’ve already signed that. They are aware of that. But it genuinely does still benefit the speakers. Because they’re still going to get people viewing them in the summit, viewing them as authorities because of that, and hopefully signing up for the freebies, because I continue to include the freebies on those presentation pages, because I want people to take the next step, take the next action after those presentations. And so I want them to connect with the speakers, because they’re the ones who know what they’re talking about when it comes to that topic. So that’s, that’s definitely a really important thing. If you don’t have that in the agreement with your speakers, go back and do like a sub agreement and amendments and make sure that they are okay, and that you have it in writing that they’re okay with that. If you didn’t include that in the original contract. And then let’s see the Yeah, the tech, the tech is always something a lot of times, folks, if they aren’t using something like deadline funnel in their business, normally, they may have gotten like one month, like trial of it or whatever. But they paid for it for one month, whatever it happens to be, they may not have that still. So you may want to go and look for alternatives. Or maybe you really didn’t like some of the way that the tech worked together in your original Summit. And you may want to look at a different tech stack. And that’s totally fine. That’s something that I definitely work through with my my clients who I’ve got one client coming up who’s considering using a different platform. So we talk through that figure out, okay, will this work for me, because there are some platforms that genuinely don’t work great for a summit, they put a gate in front of people where they have to sign in and 40 to 72 hours of access, that’s really going to be a difficult sell to get people to actually log into something in order to watch a presentation. So I definitely steer clear of that when I can, especially when it comes to Evergreen summits. Because it’s one thing for a live summit, I still don’t recommend it. But at least it’s alive. Some of they’ve got additional reasons to login, maybe there’s interaction opportunities, or they get some freebies or whatever, by logging in. But yeah, an evergreen Summit, you really don’t want them to have to do extra steps for those two to three days.
Abby Herman 18:52
Yeah, and I actually feel like that’s the case for almost anything is that you want like the path to leave Least Resistance, right? So you want to make sure that they have to click the fewest number of times because the weed like when you’re selling it, or when you’re asking people to opt in, it’s, you know, let them click the fewest number of times possible. Okay, so it sounds like the biggest time investment to taking an old summit and create and creating an evergreen Summit is probably like going into the old videos and editing things out editing out anything time sensitive or time related or anything like that. And then just making sure that everything points to something that is not time sensitive. So if there’s a Facebook group that’s closed or archives like we’re not sending people to that or sending people other places, so that sounds like probably the biggest time investment but so let’s talk about creating a summit with the intention of running it live and then turning it evergreen, and I guess I should ask too, would you ever just go Create a summit that’s only ever going to be evergreen. Is that? Is that a thing? Is that something that people do?
Jenn Zellers 20:06
Um, I haven’t actually seen anyone do it. But it’s not a bad plan. Like it’s something I’m looking at alternate options for doing summits that are a little bit more. I don’t know the right word, but like, not quite as time intensive for the host. So that’s definitely a consideration. The only the one thing about evergreen summits is it’s harder to get the engagement. Yeah, I have a whole like this, one of the things we work on during the Evergreen summit VIP days is making sure that we have an attendee engagement on the strategy for an evergreen Summit. Because there there are ways to do it. But it’s a lot harder to get someone who feels like they’re the only one going through the summit, to do that engagement. And one thing with the turning the previous summit evergreen is you don’t technically have to edit the videos. Honestly, most of the time that I put into it is just switching out the copy and everything. I don’t always edit the videos, because oh, they know that they’re not watching it live. So yeah, it’s a bonus. It’s something I tend to do further down the road after gotten it up and running, because I’d rather just get it up and running minimum viable product and all that.
Abby Herman 21:17
But it makes sense. That makes sense. So okay, so if you’re running a summit, and you’re planning to make it evergreen, what are what are some of the steps that we need to take? What do we need to make sure that we’re doing as we’re planning out the summit?
Abby Herman 21:30
So one thing that I definitely recommend is kind of tried to avoid those really time sensitive references. Like if there’s something that happened in the world that isn’t like COVID, that is not going to keep going on? Try not to reference it honestly, like just don’t, don’t go and mention anything like, oh, yeah, on October 12, this and such happened. And so now that is a week later, because it’s going to, it’s going to feel dated immediately. As soon as you do that, like if you listen to a podcast episode, right? They talk about, oh, yeah, well, last week, I launched this and then the podcast goes live three months later, it doesn’t feel as relevant as it does when it feels timeless, if it’s something that they can apply whenever, and they don’t feel like it’s tied to a particular time is going to be a lot easier for them to wrap their brain around that implementation aspect. That’s probably the biggest one. But also, if you are worried about your speakers not being on board for an evergreen Summit, just let them know ahead of time, that’s what you do. And so that way, they can be ready. And they can be excited about the fact that this isn’t going to be something that they put all this time I’m working to because yeah, they’re not putting in as much time and work as you as the host are. But they’re still putting in their time. And especially if they’re showing up live for attendee engagement, whether it’s live video or in the community, whatever it happens to be, they are putting their time and their expertise and their effort into the summit. And so personally, for me as a speaker, because I also speak at summits, that is a really great way to make sure that I’m engaged in it, because I want this to be a success, ongoing, like on an ongoing basis. And I’m more likely to continue to promote it, especially for something that is a resource for my audience. That was something I heard a lot from my so will the summit speaker edition speakers, is that they were really excited about this, because they have their audience asking about how to speak at summits, because a lot of them are speaking coaches, or do events or whatever it happens to be, and they had nothing to send them to. So now they have a resource to send them to. And if your speakers know that this is going to be something they can keep sending people back to, they’re way more likely to be on board with it if it’s something that they need in their own business. And then keep an eye on your tech stack. That’s going to be something that if you aren’t sure either you’re experimenting with something to see if it works, or you are you have an established tech stack, and you’re not sure if it’s going to work for a summit. Test it out with the live summit and then decide from there if you want to do an evergreen, but if it’s something like you are going to try using deadline funnel, which is not the cheapest thing, it’s not crazy expensive, but it’s definitely not cheap. And you’re not sure if you’re going to keep it going. If you can find an alternate option like if you’re on WordPress, something like hurry time or veer on something like Kajabi or something like that, you’re probably going to have to use deadline funnel but make sure that you’re fitting your budget around something that you can do ongoing because if you’re going to have to abandon technology that you used for the summit, and you don’t have a replacement for it is going to be really hard to do an evergreen Summit. So that is one other thing to keep in mind as you’re thinking about doing an evergreen Summit. If you’re thinking about that before you’ve actually Run it.
Abby Herman 25:01
Yeah, the whole, I agree that deadline funnel is not cheap. So I did the I did the free trial, I think, but then I ended up having to pay for an additional month just because of the timing of things. So it’s not cheap. But if you’re planning to promote it, if you’re planning, planning to promote the Evergreen summit on a regular basis, or you have a really great plan in place for selling it and making a profit off of it, then I mean, I’m all for paying for something versus you know, to help simplify business and the back end and all of that I would much rather pay for something that is going to work and work well then try to like, put, you know, safety pin things together duct tape things together to get to get everything to work the way you want to. So yeah, I’m all for that.
Jenn Zellers 25:53
I was just gonna say Yeah, and also if, like, if you use a different tool, and it doesn’t work, and you’re running into problems, like don’t be afraid to pay the extra to get it. It does work.
Abby Herman 26:04
It’s worth it. Absolutely. 100%
Jenn Zellers 26:08
Kristen, I very much regretted not using Thrive cart for the summit. We ran together in 2020. And then we upgraded to thrive cart after that, like, oh, man, we should have just done that sooner. It was worth the money.
Abby Herman 26:22
Yes, I agree. I love Thrive cart and I will include a link to that in the show notes so people can check it out. But and and, and thrive cart has just recently come out with a new learning tool. So it learning tool learning platform. System. There you go. Yeah. So if you have one of those if you have courses and programs and things like that in a system, as of right now, I don’t know if this will change, but it’s included in your one time investment into Thrive cart. So I haven’t Yeah, I haven’t checked it out a ton. But I’ve I’ve done a little bit of looking and I watched the demo video and it seems pretty cool. It’s definitely on my list to look at further to see if that’s something I want to navigate to. From where I am right now.
Jenn Zellers 27:06
So the great all access passes teen options.
Abby Herman 27:09
Yes, yes, absolutely. So speaking of all access passes, we talked about this a little bit offline before, but can you share what is actually included in an evergreen Summit. So when you run a Summit Live, you’ve got the VIP or the upgrade or the All Access Pass, or you know, there’s multiple different names that you can call this extra piece. And there’s also a lot of different tiers that you could potentially sell people into. But I imagine it’s going to be a little bit different if you have an evergreen Summit. So what does that look like? And what do you include? How do you get speakers on board with with all of that?
Jenn Zellers 27:53
Yeah, so I, some people go and instead of doing evergreen summits, the way I do where you 48 to 70 hours of free access, they just straight up sell the All Access Pass. And it’s usually a higher price than the regular like the live summit all access pass. But for me personally, because I’m not selling the speaker bonuses as part of the second tier upgrades, I usually have one tear, where it’s the replays and a workbook and transcripts and notes and that type of stuff, like relatively basic, and then you’ve got the upgrade where there’s live sessions and the speaker bonuses and some other things added into there. I actually, I switch out my all access past completely for the Evergreen Summit. So I will do a replays only where it’s literally just the replays and the transcripts. They like for accessibility purposes. I don’t feel right, not including the transcripts with the replays. But that’s that’s all I get is the replays and the transcripts. And if that’s all they want, awesome, that is a great option. I want that to be available for folks who are on a budget. But I do want to give other folks the option to upgrade to the second tier for the Evergreen All Access Pass, which includes all of that. But it includes also replays of the live sessions that were in that second tier for during the live Summit. It includes bonuses of my own. So like my summit speaker strategy membership was part of my evergreen all access pass for my speaker edition of soul the summit. I include like mini courses and stuff like that, that you want to make sure they’re related to the summit topic. But typically, if you’re running a summit, it’s going to be around a topic that you have products and stuff for. So that can be a great way to expose people to your other offers. And there there may be other things that you end up finding that you can include. So like I just kind of go through my resources that I have available, and I put in whatever I can, that is going to help the attendee take that next step after the summit is over. And then like I kind of touched on it a little bit earlier, but for the speakers, I don’t include their bonuses, but I do let them know, Hey, you’re gonna still have access to getting affiliate commissions from this. So if you do decide to keep sending people, there’s no obligation to but you can. And if you want to make it really easy for like a no brainer for them to upgrade to the All Access Pass, you can feel free to add a your own bonus, where if they send you the receipt from their all access pass, and they bought it through your link, then you give them bonus. And so that’s an easy way for the speakers to continue making sales and build deeper relationships with their audience as well.
Abby Herman 30:42
So I like that you don’t hold them to hold the speakers to, you know, giving, they’re continuing to give their thing away. So I’ve had paid offers that I’ve given away for free as part of, you know, an all access pass or giveaway in a summit before and some of those things I don’t offer anymore, or I don’t really want people to opt into those things anymore. And so it’s nice to have other options and to be able to change that up. Before we wrap up, I want to know, and you’ve kind of already covered this, but I would like to just kind of spotlight it a little bit any mistakes that you see people make maybe their like pet peeves of yours, or things that you are seeing people do in creating evergreen summits that maybe there’s a better way.
Jenn Zellers 31:33
I mean, one is straight up not evergreening your Summit. Honestly, this the biggest one is so few people do it. And you’re honestly you’re kind of depriving your audience of that resource if they either the timing of the original summit didn’t work out for them. So they didn’t sign up, because they’re like, Oh, well, I’m not gonna be able to take advantage of it. So what’s the point, or people that joined your audience after the summit was over. So those The first one is just not evergreening your Summit. But the second one would probably be not communicating with your speakers and not capitalizing on it afterwards. Because evergreen summits are such a great opportunity for continuing content, like including include your evergreen summit and your content strategy. Because that is it’s just a goldmine, you can pull out audio grams, you can pull up video clips, you can go and create top 10 kind of little clips from the speaker presentations. There’s so many things you can do with it. I personally go and clip down my speaker presentations, they usually run about 20 to 25 minutes, and I clipped them down to about 10. And I run them as podcast episodes. And I send people back to the Evergreen summit to get the rest of the presentation. And so there are so many ways that you can continue using an evergreen summit in your business strategy. And to keep getting eyeballs on that summit in bringing those leads bringing those sales keep making those connections. So generally just not capitalizing on a summit that you put three to six months worth of work into. And then you let it sit on a shelf.
Abby Herman 33:14
Biggest thing? Well, and I think too, I mean, you know, I ran my Summit, you know, earlier this year, what, nine months ago or eight months ago, I ran my Summit and the thought of going back and repurpose I’ve been as somebody who does that who does like content repurposing and content strategy for a living. I didn’t do anything with my costume. It’s just terrible. But the thought of going back to do it now. It’s it feels doable. I don’t necessarily want to but if I had, but I probably well, now that we’re talking, I’m thinking of all of the ways I can use some of those talks. But if I had thought about it, while I was creating the summit, it would have saved me a lot of time. Yes, it would have taken more time to produce the summit in the first place. But it would save me a lot of time in doing that repurposing because I would be doing it as I’m watching the videos. I watched every single one of the videos at least three times. And so you twice before and once during so yeah, I could have been making notes. I could have been pulling audio. I could have been doing all of the things and putting pulling video. So I Yeah, it’s such a great idea. And yes, such a good way to capitalize on that time that you’re spending on at on the summit, because it’s a lot it’s a lot of time.
Jenn Zellers 34:36
So yeah, that was something I did with my last summit was as I was editing those videos and getting the transcripts ready and everything. I pulled up those other audio grams ahead of time. I knew there was no possible way I was going to be able to use for like 60 audio grams or whatever I pulled out of there. But I knew that it was going to be so much easier to go and grab all of those, put them up on Instagram put them On Facebook, LinkedIn, wherever I needed to put them, rather than having to go back and be like, okay, which where was it that like, golden nugget that I really wanted people to get, I can’t remember where it was in the presentation and go have to try to scrub all the transcripts. So yeah, that’s actually something to keep in mind, if you’re starting your estimate from scratch and planning to Evergreen it is pulled content ahead of time, that helps a lot.
Abby Herman 35:23
Yeah, so like, maybe build in a little bit of extra time into your planning calendar so that you have time to do that. And it doesn’t just become one more thing that you have to do. So you have a really great resource for people who want to turn their summits into evergreen summits. And what I love about the resource, it is audio, and I can put my earbuds in and listen to it. And I don’t have to be in front of a screen. So can you tell people about this because it’s genius.
Jenn Zellers 35:53
So personally, I am an audio kinesthetic learner. So sitting down, like you said, in front of a screen and watching a video or reading something is really difficult for me to absorb it. And so I wanted to do something a little bit different, especially because I know for a lot of my clients, they’re on the go, they’re taking kids to school, they’re running errands and stuff, or going to the gym and listening to a podcast is just so much easier. So I made this, I guess an audio webinar or like if it’s a private audio feed at any rate. And essentially what I did is I just sat down and recorded some really short episodes, they’re all less than 10 minutes long. Usually, I think most of them are about closer to five minutes. And I just walked through some of the steps to creating an evergreen Summit, talk a bit more about what it is where the benefits are, and the differences between traditional summits and evergreen summits and some of the steps like I said, to actually get there. And so that is, that’s been a really fun way to get to get the information out there, especially for other folks who are like me, and would prefer to listen to it rather than read it. Although there I do put the transcripts in the shownotes for people who would prefer to read it, as well as listen. So that’s been yeah, that’s, that’s my fun little resource, I guess.
Abby Herman 37:18
I’m the same way where I have a really hard time sitting still. And so I like to, I listened to podcasts, and I listened to, you know, audio books and all of that, like constantly wouldn’t clean your house while I’m cooking while I’m walking to the gym or whatever. So I appreciate that it’s in an audio format. So, Jen, I so appreciate you being here and sharing all of this information with us. Where can people find you if they want to know more about you?
Jenn Zellers 37:47
Yeah, so you can find me over at virtual summit search calm. I’m on Instagram at virtual summit search. And if you want the audio training, just go to Evergreen summits.com. And it is all right there.
Abby Herman 38:00
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Jenn Zellers 38:03
I’m so glad I got to be here. Thanks for talking to me about everything Dennis, I can talk about that all day.
Abby Herman 38:10
So much great information, right. I hope you were taking notes. A Summit is a lot of work. So why let it be a one hit wonder, I hope that you were able to see value in turning it or even a course or a challenge into an evergreen resource. If you found value in what you learned here today, be sure to share it on social media. Take a screenshot of the episode on your phone and share it over on Instagram stories. You can tag me out to the content experiment and tag Gen at virtual summit search. The more you share the more we can get the podcast into the hands of more business owners just like you who need to hear the message that they are not alone. Until next time, take care
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
