What is best platform to host Virtual Summit?
I’ll try to give an honest perspective on what is best platform to host Virtual Summit?
Obviously, I may be biased but I challenge you to find another platform that has all the features you need.
Of course, the features you need might not be the ones I outline here as they are the ones I used and needed.
What is a Summit?
Before going anywhere else, let’s answer the question of a Summit.
It might be obvious, but I want to make sure we are on the same page.
My definition of a Summit is a meeting of the minds on a particular topic.
Basically, it’s a bunch of people talking about something, usually experts.
There as Summits about medical fields, marketing, social media, network marketing, online traffic generation, attraction marketing, Bitcoins, Blockchain technology, and thousands of other topics.
Typically, they are a day or a weekend and happen in hotels or meeting rooms where you must travel to attend.
What about a Virtual Summit?
The word virtual is pretty common too and it means to not be there in person.
Virtual could mean “in your mind”, “while dreaming” or lots of other “not real” meanings, but in the context of a Summit, we mean something run online.
So, instead of traveling, booking a flight and hotel, you attend the summit online.
It can be for 1 few hours, a few days of a whole month.
It can also be live video or recorded previously.
What is best platform?
So, the real question is this: what does “best” mean?
In the simplest terms, best means what gives your the best results.
It could be also about best performance, best integrations, most features, highest number of attendees.
There’s so many things that could be used to define “best”.
However, results can be different for everyone, so to be fair, let’s list the results that I was looking for when I put on my Virtual Summit
What are results I was looking for?
For me, it’s about giving the attendees and speakers the best experience.
Things like simplicity in watching the videos for attendees and easy promotion by the speakers are important for me.
Also, as a host of the summit, I wanted to be able to easily change the videos that were available each day.
I also wanted to be able to set special pricing (deals) based on dates.
I wanted easy integration with Click Funnels and notification of attendees of new comments and new videos.
In the end, I wanted people to have a good experience and feel it was easy to navigate.
What features give best results?
Given those results, here’s the features I want in the platform:
- Ability to host videos on the platform
- Attendees can register for free (or paid)
- Make videos available for a specific time
- Allow VIP full access pass
- Have ability to promote by others
- Allow others to get commissions on sales (affiliate program)
- Guarantee that a referral gets paid their dues
- Allow for attendees to comment on videos and the summit itself
- Allow you to give coupons to some people so they buy at lower price
- Allow you to set deals for a specific time frame
- Allow you to trim videos and add trailer to it
These are all features available on Click eCourse of course and I’m not sure which ones are available on other platforms.
Let me know what you find elsewhere but I’d love to have you use Click eCourse and tell me what is missing as well.
Hosting videos on the platform
The platform should allow you to host the videos you recorded on it.
Many allow you to put a YouTube link but don’t allow you to upload it.
The problem with that is you can’t prevent people from downloading your video – or at least make it harder for them.
On Click eCourse, the paid plans allow you to upload your videos and protect them from download (if you wish)
Attendees can register for free
One of the issues with many platforms is that there’s a limit to the number of attendees.
They also don’t have free plans – or at least, have limitations on their free plans.
For example, you can’t host a free course on their free plan because they want income from your sales.
On Click eCourse, you can create a summit that’s free and attendees can register for free – with no limit.
Making videos available only for specific time
If you’re running a virtual summit for 10 days like I did, you don’t want people accessing all the videos during that time.
What I’ve seen done in lots of virtual summits is allow access to some videos for 24 hours.
So, how do you do that?
You upload it that day and then delete it?
What about any comments you got on those videos or statistics, you’d loose those too.
On Click eCourse, you can upload the video ahead of time, make it accessible by the attendees the day you want and then make it a draft again after.
This allows you to keep all the comments and history of the video.
If you decide to move the video, the comments and history will come with it.
You can even make the video accessible by attendees later and all comments remain.
Allowing different access for VIP members
Imagine having a VIP access pass you can sell for those same videos.
You could create a different area for VIP members and upload the same videos twice.
Problem with that is any comments in the “free” area wouldn’t show up in the VIP area.
That’s fine if you don’t care about that, but I bet your attendees would wonder why their comment wasn’t there.
On Click eCourse you can “move” a video from one area to another.
Comments and statistics move with it as well.
An easy affiliate program
If there’s one thing about running a summit that you want, it’s to have lots of attendees.
The more you can have the better.
But you can do only so much – you need the other attendees and speakers to be able to promote it.
Sure, they could love you enough to promote it just because of that, but what if they could earn something?
That’s when an affiliate program comes in but how do you pay anyone for promoting something that’s free?
I mean, the virtual summit 24 hour access is free, right?
At least is was for me…
So how?
You give them a commission for anyone who buys the VIP pass and you record that they referrer the free attendees.
On Click eCourse, this is done by a simple cookie and a referrer id that is tied to the new registrant.
If someone shares their personal link to the free summit, that new attendee is tagged to them and if they decide to buy the VIP pass, the commission goes to the person who got them in the free summit.
Using deals and coupons to change price of VIP pass easily
One thing about the price of your VIP pass is that it’s set when you edit it.
On most platforms, you need to change it and some allow for coupons you can give to people.
What if you could set the price to, say, $50 from day 1 to day 3, then $75 from day 4 to day 6, $100 from day 7 to day 9 and $150 on day 10 – then $200 after that?
Sure, you could edit the price as the summit moves ahead, but what if it was automatic?
On Click eCourse, you can create deals that are a specific price or a percentage off and you can set a specific start and end date and time for them.
If you have multiple deals going on, the system even figures out the lowest of them all on any given day.
Conclusion
There’s even more features you might want and will want on your platforms to host your virtual summit.
For me, I hosted the BitClout Virtual Summit from May 17th to May 26th, 2021 and people can still access the first 90 seconds of every speaker in the free area or buy the VIP pass to get full access.
The platform even lets me turn off comments on the free videos and I can put specific footer text on each video.
There’s a lot more I could talk about here but I invite you to watch the video to get better understand of the platform.
Make sure to share this as well with your friends who want to run a summit by clicking the social icons.
