Hosting the summit gave me bigger visibility because I encouraged speakers to participate in the summit and contribute a bundle with their own digital course or product. I offered an affiliate commission for about 40% if someone referred a prospective course customer. 

Benefits: I increased my subcribers by about 200 new people, but had a big drop-off of subscribers when I started promoting my bundle. My engagement within my Facebook group, page, and Instagram increased about 11%, but seemed to drop off right after the summit. One of the biggest long-term benefit was that I revived and increased subscribers to my Youtube Channel which proved to be the greatest benefit since I’ve made several referral commission sales from programs that I use and that I recommend. I also had several bundle sales and one of my clients benefited from seeing me host a summit. 

Challenges: If I were to do it over again, I would have planned my summit much more in advance. I tried planning within 30 days, but this resulted in me working long hours writing emails and promotional graphics. I was also travelling two weeks prior to the summit being hosted. This resulted in me feeling stressed trying to figure out the tech and worrying about everything being done before the summit started. I may decide to host a summit in the future, but I think I would prefer to host it as a paid summit/ conference, running ads weeks in advance to get people to register – and then allowing speakers to prepare a slide deck.