Want to become a leader in your industry, grow your email list, and deepen your connection with your peers? Host a summit using Searchie! You may think, “Me? A leader in the industry?” Yep—by organizing this summit, you will show leadership by making or drawing upon connections with other entrepreneurs and, as a group, sharing your combined value to new audiences.

When you hear the word summit you may be thinking of live events or (heaven forbid) in-person events. But a summit can be a virtual, evergreen, pre recorded event that is easy to create and can generate maximum value for both the creator and the audience.

Creating a summit is a lot easier than it seems, and it’s a powerful way to grow your audience, attract clients, and establish yourself as an authority. I’ll show you how!

Consider Your Adjacent Peers

Let’s pretend you are a health coach for men in midlife. Comb through your contacts and the businesses that are on your radar—folks who are not exactly competitors, but who definitely serve your market. Make a list of all possible collaborators.

For example, you could connect with folks who specialize in men’s mental health, sexual health, and cognitive health. You could connect with businesses that help men with hair and skin health. Perhaps you’d contact a coach who helps men evaluate their relationship with alcohol. And perhaps you know of a stylist who helps men revamp their wardrobe.

As you look at your list, come up with a focused concept for a virtual summit. For example, your summit could be “Men Mastering Midlife” or “Rebooting after Divorce.” All of the specialists in your list will be asked to contribute their knowledge for this summit.

What’s in it for these fellow practitioners? If you’ve come up with a compelling concept, this summit presents a great opportunity for them to get exposure to multiple new audiences: your audience, the audiences of the other participants, and new audience members who learn about the summit.

A Group Strategy for Creating Content

By getting buy-in from a substantial group of adjacent peers, creating the content for this summit is a snap. Each participant will be asked to contribute a small, manageable piece of content on the topic. We’re not talking about high production value videos that will take up a lot of time. They can simply turn on their Searchie Chrome browser extension and speak for a few minutes on their topic. Another way to gather content from your team of experts is to do one-on-one Zoom interviews with each of them that become your content (however, this requires a lot more of your time).

It’s easy for the summit presenters to create their videos and share them with you via Searchie. If they’d like to add an attachment, it’s easy to attach a document to their presentation in Searchie.

The team at Searchie recently created an online summit called “The World’s ‘Shortest’ Marketing Conference,” where 60 speakers (including me!) presented a 60-second marketing advice nugget. Check it out, and you’ll not only learn something from the speakers but you’ll get a sense of what a Searchie summit Hub can be like!

Create a Summit Hub

As you may know, once you know how to create a Hub using Searchie, you can do one in minutes. You’ll be creating a Hub for your summit. Consider creating a color scheme and graphics for your summit using Canva for a unified, professional look. For example, you can create a logo for the summit and thumbnails for each practitioner’s video. It’s a great idea to create social media images for the summit that all of the practitioners can use.

Create a welcome video that “kicks off” your summit and explains to the visitor how to navigate the videos and how the search feature works. Consider grouping the content in ways that help the audience navigate through it. And why not take advantage of how easy it is in Searchie to access the transcripts and make them a downloadable resource for participants?

See Example Here

A Summit is a Powerful Lead Magnet

I suggest leveraging your summit as a lead magnet that benefits all of the participants. Each participant (as well as you, the host) will spread the word to their audiences about the summit. All an audience member needs to do to access the summit is to submit their email. In this way, an email list will be created that will benefit all summit contributors.

Won’t we all just be essentially sharing our own audiences? Sure, the audience for the summit will primarily be made up of the audiences of the summit contributors, but there will be new audience members who are drawn to the topic of the summit. As the summit leader, it’s up to you to get any press that you can on the topic. Writing press pitches and guesting on podcasts will help grow the summit audience to new members.

Marketing is Easier as a Team

You know how much effort it takes to launch a new program or course. What if you could exponentially increase your results with less work? That’s how it is when all summit contributors share the responsibility for publicizing the summit.

When the summit contributors share the news that they’re a speaker for the summit, they’ll add social proof to their brand’s image—making it known that they’re a big player in the industry with connections. And the summit is a valuable, free resource that their audience will appreciate!

Ready to Be a Mover and Shaker in your Industry?

Creating a summit takes some time and some vision, but the results are so worth it. And Searchie makes it as easy as possible to collect the content, organize the content, and share the content.

Does a summit have to be a free lead magnet? No, you could certainly create a value-packed summit and then sell all-access passes to it (and some folks are already doing that). The sky's the limit when it comes to how much value you pack into a summit and the way that you put it to work for you and your audience. Your summit can also be repurposed later as bonus material in your membership or course.

Got your gears turning on this exciting idea? I’d love to hear about the summit you create!