 Have you ever been invited to participate in a tele-summit as a speaker, virtual conference, sometimes they're called, or yeah, it's basically when like a bunch of speakers all have like half an hour to an hour in a span of a few days. So it's like really sometimes it's in the span of a few days where every day there's like packed schedule of people versus sometimes it's only like, you know, a few speakers per week and it goes on for several weeks. And I have received invitations like this for 12 years, you know, and I used to say yes to them. And I think that there are some benefits and there's some drawbacks to it. So, first of all, I think it's important to understand that. I mean, I think the whole tele-summit strategy is kind of a cynical marketing strategy, because the real winner is not the audience, because they get overwhelmed. And they probably get people adding them to their various lists. So they've got a bunch of new email lists that they just been added to sometimes. Or they join people's email list because they're like, oh, this person sounds cool, this person. And then they have to. So the real winner isn't the audience. The speakers of the tele-summit may benefit and may not benefit, depending on the quality of the audience, the right fit of the audience that's been collaborated on with all the speakers promoting. And that's on one of the drawbacks for the speakers is usually when you get someone who's invites to speak on a tele-summit, it's so honored. You want me to speak? Little old me, you want me to speak? Oh, oh, that's right. To be able to speak, I have to promote your tele-summit, our tele-summit. I have to promote it with two dedicated emails to my list, preferably with 5,000 person email list. Such a common strategy. And I could cuss and swear here, but I won't. But you get the idea. That's how I feel. I mean, it is so old school. It's somebody who started teaching this at some point 15 years ago. And then everyone started teaching it, who like, oh my God, this is the business. This is the email list building strategy. It's like, screw Facebook and social media. Screw, you know, SEO. It's all about summit. You build a list. Come on. And I even had somebody who was, was a, you know, I engage with quite a bit as a fan years ago, invited me recently to her tell us to her summit and her summit was about building an audience you love. And, and then I'm like, and then of course I checked out her audience. She doesn't really have one, or at least not not in terms of social media, maybe she has an email list or whatever. I'm like, an audience you love, but do they love you back? It's like I'm hearing because what you've just done when you've built an audience with a tell us summit is you've overwhelmed them for seven days, 14 days, however long tells them it goes beforehand and afterwards the total together is however, however many weeks, you've overwhelmed them with emails about. All right, next up speaker. All right, next up. Oh, be sure to buy the summit before the early bird bonus and now the early bird bonuses ending. You have one more chance to buy the summit with these bonuses. Oh, last chance to buy the summit. You've just overwhelmed your audience and I have, I have a, I have a good business friend who created a huge summit, very, very big summit. I have more subscribers than usually, most of us get many more bite by, you know, many, tens of times more. And, and now it's been about a year since that summit. The email list has gone down to only 20% of what it was when when they built it even and even the 20% list isn't isn't meaning if it used to be, I'm not going to use the real numbers to keep privacy but it used to be 100 people on email list. Now it's only 20 people left. And even the 20% are not that responsive. So and this is not the first time I've heard this, I've heard this year after year after year after year after year with people who are building an audience they love through summits. It's like, come on people, do you know what's going on? The audience is not winning. The audience is, is, is being driven along by FOMO fear missing. Oh my God, the speaker. Oh, I have to listen to the segment. The expires tomorrow expires today or whatever. So you're using FOMO. And you're so the summit creator is using FOMO on the audience. And good copywriting and good design, like great looking design, great looking copywriting to get audiences to try to, and then secondly, the speakers are not really winning because they have to promote this overwhelming experience to their audience to two emails, 5,000 person email list, which I don't even have. But of course my email list, I truncate many years several years ago down to much smaller. My email is way more responsive than most 5,000, 10,000 people email list. So it's like, people saying those numbers like, if you really wanted to be smart about it, you wouldn't even ask people for 5,000 person emails you would ask people, give me the average number of opens you have for your last three email lists, it's much smarter. What's, what's, what's the 5,000 because the 5,000 person email list might only have a 15% open rate and barely and then maybe even a half a percent click rate like these people are not real marketers. I mean, they think they're marketers or they think they got good marketing advice but they're not, they're not in the trenches like most of us are and we actually understand how marketing works and how building an audience you love actually works. The audience doesn't really win. Okay, overwhelm and FOMO and afterwards doesn't really have a relationship to the creator of the summit because there's like, okay, this person just overwhelmed me for four weeks. That's that's my that's that's the beginning of my relationship with this creator is they've overwhelmed me for four weeks. Okay, all right. You know, all right, so audience, the speakers don't really win in most cases because they have to promote this thing to their audience their audience because that wasn't a great experience. But secondly, the speakers barely get enough people watching their, their, their segment, you know, the supposedly, you know, the summit creator was saying, our joint email list, you know, we are going to reach be reaching a joint number of 250,000 people will be reached by this. How did they get to 200 3000? Well, if you have 5000 person email list, and I got, I'm sorry to do the numbers real quick. I got 50 speakers. This is a giant summit. Usually it's like, we're going to jointly reach 100,000 people or 50,000 people or whatever but it's like a huge summit to be joint list of, you know, 200 3000 people. Why it's because people with speakers with 5000 email list, 50 of them equals 200 3000 people so it's not really they kind of lie about the size of the audience are going to be reached not really I mean it's because out of 250,000 people that were emailed about the summit how many actually signed up. Not that many. And then for those who signed up who actually shows up for every speaker obviously nobody showed I mean almost nobody shows very speaker. And so every speaker only gets like a tiny tiny dribble of the ones who signed up, and the ones who and then of course every audience members like, oh wow interesting speaker. All right, moving on next person. And so it's like a shiny new like you're training the audience to like constantly be moving on to the next speaker and the next opera and the next thing the next next thing. So, in my experience of having spoken on and promoted over a dozen summits and I've turned down many more than that. The main benefit of a summit for the speaker is the networking with the other speakers. That's the main that's the main benefit. That's how I met Ted Hargrave. Like that's like the best thing that happened to me for that summit that I had and I both participated in is I reached out to to several of the speakers. The summit creator wasn't even smart enough to help us network with each other. Like if I was a summit creator that's what I would understand that's the main benefit of a summit for the speakers is networking. For net caring among the speakers. That's really the main benefit. Not all maybe a five people, 30 people will join my some session of which only one third of a person is an ideal client. Come on, it really is the networking among speakers. That's where the long term benefit is. Okay, so anyway, I nobody else reached out to me during that summit and I've done the same thing with many with all the summits have been I did reach out to speakers reach out to speakers for for for foundations after the summit. Right. That's the main benefit okay so that's how I met Ted Hargrave that's how I met a couple other people that I have collaborated with over the years. And then guess what I got smart afterwards I'm like, I don't have to join someone to do that. I'm so what I do now is when someone invites me to a summit as a to be a speaker, which is really to be there to be there to be the promoter of their list eventual list right. I'm like, okay, good. I bookmarked that invitation. I respond to that person saying, oh, congrats on creating this, I remember my muck beat, congrats on creating the summit. This sounds like a wonderful opportunity. I don't actually have a personal policy. I don't participate in summits. However, I'd be happy to look at collaboration opportunities with you down the road. So I hope we can stay in touch and find win-win way to collaborate in the future. And I wish you continued success. So that's what I do. And I literally do that. I snooze that email. And on Gmail, you can snooze emails to bounce back to your inbox later in the future. So I snooze that email for six months, nine months, 12 months from now. And when the email comes back, then I look at the person's audience and usually months after the summit, they still barely have a social media audience. Because really, an audience who loves you follow you on social media. This is really important. An audience who actually cares about your journey and are eager to get your content, they don't just subscribe to an email list and then they go, oh yeah, I'm just happy being part of this. No, they'll look you up. They'll Google you. They'll look you up wherever they use social media. George, people are leaving social media. No, they're not. Have you seen the numbers? Go Google it. Google numbers, how many Facebook users? How many Instagram users? How many Twitter users? How many LinkedIn? It's only going up over time, not going down. It's ridiculous. There's a whole other rant, but there's a ridiculous tiny subset of holistic practitioners that are leaving social media. Some of which are doing it for political reasons because their politics aren't represented on social media and some of it, some of it, they're doing it because they don't have boundaries. A lot of holistic practitioners don't know how to trade boundaries, right? Don't have good boundaries. And so they don't know how to practice boundaries with social media. So they're like, well, therefore the answer is to leave social media. It's such a tiny, tiny subset. There are still many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many more holistic people, spiritual people that we can reach. Anyway, that's a whole other rant. But long story short, an audience. So when I noticed the people, summit creators who had reached out to me later on, they still barely have an audience. They might have now a 5,000 person email list, but I also doubt what you're open right there. Probably 10 to 15%, if that, right? Which, anyway, so, and they probably got burned out creating the summit. Any of us who have known people or have done it ourselves, my God, tele-summents are like, you're giving yourself three jobs for like three jobs within that short time window. It is so much damn work that you're like, I never wanna do marketing again after this. It was so hard. Anyway, so basically now I say no to summits. I keep in touch with the creator and then just this past week, I reached back out to a creator who had asked inviting me to summit six months ago. The summit has now ended. They still barely have a social media audience, but that's okay. They might have a bit of an email list. So I reached out to the person and said, hey, I'll be happy to do a swap interviews with each other. What do you think? Let's talk first. So anyway, so, and I'm gonna go back and look at the speakers in that summit and reach out to them as well. So anyway, that's my strategy now. Actually, let me revise the message I send them. I actually say to them, I may be able to participate in your summit, but I have a policy that I don't promote summits to my email list. So if you'd be willing for me just to put a social media message up, then I could speak in the social media message. I may, depending on my sense of the person's audience size and the other speakers, if the other speakers have a similar or larger social media audience than me, then what I would do is I'll tell the person, listen, I will even run a Facebook ad or Instagram ad to make sure thousands of my people see it. So you'll get an equivalent of a 5,000 person email list, right? So that's kind of what I say. If I'm impressed by the speakers and by the creator, but usually I'm not that impressed by what the creator is usually someone who took a business building program that taught them how to build a list is to create a summit and they have no list. And so they're just reaching out to a bunch of speakers who haven't, who probably look like they have a social media following and go, hey, you wanna be a part of my summit? Hey, wanna be a part of my summit? And they themselves have no list. And so they're just blasting and sometimes they will hire, they will hire a person to do outreach and just basically blast out the invitation to 300, 500 social media influencers and hopefully 10% of them will bite or 5% of them will bite. And so a lot of the invitations that we get for summits are very generic for that reason. They don't really care about you. They haven't really consumed your content. They just, you just have someone who has a more followers than them on social media. So it looks like they should invite you. And just thank you for those who are joining me live here and some of the comments. There are instances where summits are thoughtfully created somebody who is actually a fan of your content is reaching out to you and saying, I really appreciate your message on this or your presence on that. And I'd be honored to have you speak in my conference summit, film the blank series, interview series or whatever. And then they might make the mistake of saying, oh, but the requirement to promote two emails, 5,000 list, common line, right? But they might not really care about that. So it is okay if you sense that the invitation is genuine and a right fit audience to say, hey, it's great. I do have a policy not to promote anything to my email list and about summits, but I could post on social media if you like. I could post maybe twice during the promotion period, depending on how appropriate it feels, certainly at least once. And if it feels like I can match the other promoters, I could run a Facebook, I have Instagram, because now you know how to do that, those of you who are here. So yeah, I think it depends on the sincerity of the invitation that you're receiving. And you look at the person and it really seems like they're a kindred spirit that someone, they have the right kind of audience that you have that similar to yours. I think then you might want to say yes to that and see how you can negotiate the promotional requirements if there are such things. So yeah. Okay.