Promoting Online Summits for Health Coaches
I am sure you have attended your fair share of online summits and are wondering how you can use these in your health coaching biz.
Basically, in my experience, there are 2 main types of online summits, and only 1 of them you should try to avoid like the plague.
- The first is high quality, content packed educational presentations. Sometimes these are in teleseminar type formats and sometimes in a more recorded webinar type format. These are my favorite since the focus is on providing the listener with a bunch of super useful content that they can apply to their lives without having to invest a single dollar. Making connections so you can be one of these experts is a great way to get yourself out there.
Of course, these are not inexpensive to produce or make available so the typical way these are monetized is that the recordings are made available for a limited time (usually 24 hours). After this time, various upgrade packages are made available. I’ve purchased quite a few of these over the years, some super valuable and some maybe not so much. I recently attended the Gluten Summit, which just wrapped up and it easily had the best quality content of any “free” summit I have signed up for ever.
I think the upgrade package had something like 30 hours of recorded webinar trainings with various medical experts on the subjects of gluten intolerance, gluten free diets and all things gluten. They are even giving me a special powerpoint presentation that health coaches can use with their clients or for presentations on next steps in the gluten free journey which I can’t wait to get my hands on and share with everyone that purchased the upgrade package. There was way more content than I could ever hope to absorb in 1 week and having a son on the autistic spectrum whom I try to keep on a gluten free diet this was a real bargain for me. Being able to share some of these trainings with family members will be so much more effective than me telling them why he shouldn’t be eating that cookie.
No matter what your specific area of focus in health is, chances are there is a summit around that topic at least once or twice a year. These can be a great way to help educate your audience as well as generate a little extra income for yourself. Also a great place to get ideas for content or products that you may want to create.
Like everything else when it comes to promoting things like this, you cannot expect to just slap a link on facebook, send one email and wait for the dollars to come pouring in. I am perpetually telling people about the importance of building up their own email list and developing some sort of relationship with your audience. We may not have gotten a chance (yet) to speak personally, but I feel like I know a lot about you already. Sure, we have have different dreams and obstacles, but basically every health coach I meet has the same core desire to help people live healthier, happier lives.
A more advance tactic is to create a separate email list so that people from your main list who sign up for the free event you can send additional information to without pestering people who have no interest in the event. This is what I typically do. Send a couple of messages about the free event to my main list and then people that sign up I will send some additional messages, especially as the event is drawing to a close. You need to be careful if you don’t segment your list, since if someone gets 10 emails from you about an event they have no interest in, they will likely unsubscribe.
After people have invested some time in reading or listening to / watching whatever kind of content it is that you produce, have been on your newsletter list for awhile and have grown to trust your recommendations is when you can actually start expecting to see some results with stuff like this. I try really hard only to send out emails about things that I think will either educate you from a health standpoint or help you move your business further along. Sure I stumble once in awhile and send something more like the second main type of online summit.
While the first summit I just described is great to listen to, easy to invite people to, and can even generate a nice little chunck of change sometimes, the second kind really turns me off.
You see this in both online summits and live events. “Come see these 10 experts for free”. Then you attend the online summit and each speaker spends half of their time talking about some great promotion they have going on and the content is weak.
While I have no problem with people offering their services, there has come to be an expectation of how this will work. If I host a 1 hour webinar, I usually tell the presenter that we want to give a minimum of 45 minutes of high quality content that everyone can use, regardless of whether they buy anything or not. This is a pretty standard setup and people have gotten used to this. If they want to buy the product / service, great! If not, at least they learned something useful. What ends up happening in summits like this, on the other hand is that the organizer asks for people to share their event through some sort of JV relationship (you and me) where we will make a couple of dollars for people we invite and purchase the upgrade package. When they go on to heavily pitch each presenters products, the organizer has a JV deal with them, but you don’t. Besides which, it ends up feeling heavy handed (at least to me).
There is another kind of online summit that has a lot of value for health coaches or anyone who is trying to build a business. This kind of event is usually aimed more at list building than it is at income generation, although you can do both. Typically these are smaller events, with 6 – 12 people, where the organizer gets together a bunch of experts on the topic, and each expert (that’s YOU!) gives away some sort of free gift. These can range, much like the online summits from super valuable to a complete and utter waste of time. What ends up happening if it is not well structured is that the organizer will get a pretty good result in terms of list building but the experts will not. This does not have to be the case, just depends on how well everything is planned and laid out. Also, when you are first getting started, just getting your name and voice out into the discussion has tons of value, regardless of any list building or monetary gains.
I know the holidays are fast approaching and even though this may not be your focus, everyone is looking to either lose weight before and/or after the holidays. So I’ll leave you with a couple of upcoming online summits that I think will be a perfect fit. The first is more for your clients, and is a great way to share a free resource with them without having to do the work. The holistic weight loss summit starts in a few weeks which will give you enough time to sign up and get it into your marketing calendar. There are a few IIN grads, some faculty, and a bunch of holistic nutrition experts, so I am sure there will be lots of great stuff in this one.
If you want to promote this to your own audience, just sign up for free and then go to the affiliate signup page. This can be found at the bottom of the summit home page. They will send you all the information you need.
The second is more for your personal education. I recently got the opportunity to meet the founder of the META Health University and they have some great training available for those of us interested in holistic and integrative health. He has put together the first META-Healthy Integrative Medicine Online Summit. He has brought together 30 world-renowned health experts and their goal in this event is to Show you How to Improve your Physical, Emotional, Mental, Spiritual, Relationship and Financial Health. This actually started today, so be sure to check it out HERE.
