Hey, hey, welcome to the Summit Host Hangout Podcast where you'll learn how to host a high converting virtual summit that leads to your biggest signature offer launch yet. I'm your host, Krista from Summit in a Box. And since I hosted my first paid conference, finally, a couple months ago, I have an answer to the question, what is the difference between a free summit and a paid conference? And that's what we're going to cover today in Episode 195. So I'm going to start by sharing a short and sweet answer to the question, then I will give an overview of why if you resonate with the results I talked about with free summits, a paid summit probably isn't the answer for you, at least right now. We'll break it down more piece by piece to go over why that is. And then I'll share where I see each of these two strategies fitting into your business because they're both incredible.
You're not going to hear me sitting here saying free summits are the way to go. They're the only answer. Paid events are terrible, anything like that they can both fit really well into a business model. So let's start with the short version of the answer to this question. And then we'll start breaking things down. But the short answer to what is the difference between a free summit and a paid conference is absolutely everything. There's almost nothing. That's the same between these strategies, other than what you see on the outside, like it's an online event with a host and some speakers. And I honestly can't even begin to tell you how much this surprises me. I had absolutely no idea how different these strategies were, until I was in the middle of planning my conference and had a client asked like, I read her question and thought about it. And like had this realization and just sat there a while while it all processed, like it was like this question like totally broke my brain for a little bit. But honestly, I think that's good news. Because they're both incredible strategies with their time and place based on your goals. And they really do complement each other really, really well.
So to follow that question up here, could you you know, follow the summit in a box process step by step for a free event and slap a ticket price on it? Technically, yes. But you're basically destroying everything that works from the free event and the paid event by doing it that way. So I just like want to recognize here. Yeah, there are all kinds of strategies you can use for both. But I am comparing specifically our free summit model here at Summit in a box and the conference model that I used. Okay. Are there other ones out there? Yes. So just wanted to get that out of the way. So I'm going to break down some of the main differences coming up here. But first, I want to talk about why if you're here listening to this podcast, and find yourself resonating with the results I talk about for free summits, it's pretty likely that now isn't quite the right time for you to host a paid conference. Not that it will never be just that probably right now it's not it. But if you want to grow your email list by 1000s of leads, connect with and feature industry experts, make 10s of 1000s, or even six figures through all access pass sales and set yourself up to have a super incredible launch on the back end. A paid conference is not what you're looking for. Okay, so let's talk about why.
If you host a paid event, maybe you have a goal to bring in like 100 ticket sales. But getting those 100 tickets is not easy, no matter how low the price is, like, even people are like, Oh, I'm just gonna like charge $1. You know, no, you're destroying everything when you do that. To be able to charge a ticket price, you really need an existing audience, you need need dedicated affiliates, you need to be willing to spend 1000s on ads if you want to expand your reach past your own audience, you need super elevated positioning, which you heard me talk about in the last episode. Okay, if you're charging $30 per ticket, that brings you to 3000 in revenue. If you add it in a $100, all access pass, maybe that gives you an extra 3000. If you're charging like 100 Plus for a ticket again, that's a whole new strategy that I like, honestly can't really speak to because it's so different. But from there, now you have that 6k, you absolutely need a premium course or high ticket program that is highly successful to make a paid event payoff for you. And because you only have those 100 registrants, most of which will come from your own audience, you don't see as many ongoing benefits as you would with the free summit, like it honestly does not even compare, they are not the same thing.
Again, this isn't me saying that free summits are better. It's just that if you don't have a huge audience a ton of money for ads and super engaged affiliates, a paid event isn't it for you right now. So when we look at a free seminar on the flip side, 1000 to 2000 registrations is incredibly doable without ads without a huge audience of your own. If you get the positioning and strategy right. In a summit, the speakers bring the audience and have a much easier time doing so than with a paid event and they're more willing to do so in a free event than they are the paid one. That instantly sets you up to see far more immediate revenue in your free event than you would at this point in a paid one. We're talking like 1000s of registrations versus maybe 100, and 10s of 1000s, and all access past sales right off the bat. From there, you can compound on that success by selling like any offer, following your summit from a low price $20 A month membership all the way up to a 10k plus group program. You can sell really any offer in a free site and have it make sense and have it add to the benefit, you're already bringing yourself through that event. And then it doesn't end.
Now you still have what 1900 extra people to continue to nurture for years down the road, versus what you would have had in a paid conference with a much smaller audience. This is not me exaggerating what free summits can do, or saying that no one should do pay conferences. After doing our conference, I truly believe they both have their place that complement each other really well. But you have to be in a certain place in business and understand what the actual goal of a paid event is, if you respond to our messaging for our conference, like if you want to grow your audience, fuel your funnel with 1000s of leads, paid events, just not what you're looking for right now. I learned about hosting a paid event from the person who really leads the industry and hosting them. And the training I took they broke down their results in to get I think it was 500 ticket sales for their conference, they spent over $23,000 on ads, like they run the multimillion dollar business and can do that kind of thing. But I'm not gonna throw $23,000 at ads for 500 ticket sales, that's just not something I'm comfortable with right now. And I'm guessing a lot of you most of you are in the same place.
You don't need a ton of ad money and existing audience or a bunch of dedicated affiliates for the free summit to work. You will end up with 1000s of additional leads to continue to nurture, and 1000s of dollars in additional sales. 10s of 1000s of dollars in additional sales. Our goal for our conference was not to grow our list by 1000s of people, it was to bring together a tight knit group to provide training without a ton of outside speakers, to reengage our audience was another goal, to make sales of our group program, to test the paid event model. And we've hosted several successful free events before we did this paid one, which initially gave me the confidence that we had what we needed to pull it off. Although now I know that they're so different that I had no right to be confident. So paid events have a place. But it's not the way to go for most of you who resonate with what I have to say. And that's like, especially if it's your first time. And especially if you're looking to like fuel your funnel with 1000s of leads, they are not the same strategy. And I'll talk about how to choose which one is right for you a bit later in this episode. And I hit on some of those pieces a little bit in my little rant that happened here. But let's now directly break down the main differences I noticed. And then we'll talk about where each strategy can fit after that.
So let's start with the list growth aspect, which I've brought up a couple of times. I know some of the things I'm saying here are gonna sound like a broken record, but I just want to be super clear. So first, if your goal is list growth, for immediate and ongoing benefits, nurturing those people into sales, this is where a free summit really, really shines. Like I mentioned, our goal for the conference was 100 tickets. If I was hosting a free summit for my audience, my goal would be 15 to 20 times that, okay, we'd be talking 1000s. Why is that? Really, it's simple, free events are a much easier sell. Okay, this does not mean you are attracting low quality leads, I have an episode on that coming up in a few episodes here. It means that you're attracting people at more stages of being ready for what you offer. So it takes someone being at a certain point of awareness about what you do to be willing to invest in a ticket, right? If they don't think they have a problem, or they don't understand why they need your your solution yet. Or if they're not ready to take action on that they're not going to pay you for that solution. That doesn't make sense for them. But if it's a free ticket, they don't need to be as problem or solution aware to be willing to learn more.
It's like, oh, what the heck, you know, I can enter my email address that sounds kind of interesting. The free ticket breaks down that barrier. It opens the door to more people that need what you offer both now and later, and takes those people who weren't as ready in the beginning. And it just warms them up a heck of a lot faster. And I've seen that with myself. There's a program I joined, a high ticket program I joined recently where this person had run their first event, I want to say in 2020, maybe 2021. And I was really excited and I wanted to go when I went and it was like a sort of $19 ticket. I was like, Ah, no, I'm not gonna pay that. And I didn't go. I can almost guarantee you if it wouldn't have been a free event. I definitely would have signed up. If I would have gone to a presentation and had her break down what I now know she breaks down in her presentations. I would have been like heck yeah, sign me up, you know. So it just opens the doors to people who don't know that they're ready for you yet. So a free summit increases the effectiveness of your own organic promotion. It drastically increases any paid ad results. It makes it a ton easier for speakers and affiliates to come because it feels good to promote something free to your audience, right, you're giving them an opportunity not selling. And it gets them your speakers much better results for the promotion.
And all of that comes together to 10x 20x or even more than number of registrations, you'll get from your event. And I'm sure you can see how the snowball starts rolling from there. Even if conversion rates to sales are lower, which we'll get to in a little bit. If you have 10 times, or 20, times the number of people you're putting an offer in front of like, you see where I'm going here. Okay, so that's the list growth aspects, you have a much larger opportunity for list growth in a free event. Now let's move on to ads. And this is another big difference between these two strategies, depending on your audience size, so with the free Summit, you straight up don't need ads to succeed. Because when you position things, right, and you get the right speakers, like we teach in our Launch with a Summit Accelerator, your speakers bring the audience, okay. With a paid conference, that's just not quite how it's set up to work, you can definitely have affiliates, you can encourage your speakers come up to promote and you should do that. But they're just not going to bring the same results as they would for a free summit, because it's a harder sell, and people are a bit less likely to promote something paid in most cases. Unless you like, uh, you know, I have a couple events, I'm thinking of off the top of my head that like everyone knows these events, everyone wants to promote these events. But it took them a while to get there.
You know, it's not like people are going out and hosting hosting their first, second third, even paid events and having people who aren't like just tripping over themselves to be able to promote it. Okay. So let's just like look at ad costs here. With my free assignments, my goal was always to just break even on ads with tripwire sales of the all access pass, so I could just be confident that I was going to be profiting later on with like, future sales of the all access pass anything we were launching after whatever, which I think with my conversion rates worked out to needing my cost per lead to be about $12, which, you know, I can do that. Now, ads have gotten tougher over time. But I know I was doing better than the $12. With my first few events, I want to say it was closer to like $30 per lead from my most recent free summit. Although I did still end up breaking even or profiting with those ads because conversion rates of the all-access pass are so high. With this conference, we were paying over $300 per lead. And someone else I know who runs a super well known conference a couple times for your shared similar results from a run of their event they did earlier this year.
So if you don't already have an audience to promote to, and super dedicated students, clients and affiliates, you are setting yourself up to need to spend 10s of 1000s on ads, or like I said before, someone the person who like leads the industry in this strategy spends like 23k plus on ads, for paid conferences to support getting a few 100 tickets. So if you aren't ready, but there's nothing wrong with that, by the way, this is just me saying facts. If you have money to dish out on ads to get yourself great results. Cool, do that. But if you're not ready for that, if you don't have those dedicated students and affiliates, a conference probably isn't right for you at this time. Not that it never will be just at this time. All right. Now let's break down the difference in speakers. So really, there are a lot of differences regarding speakers between free and paid events. And I already talked about the difference in promotion, it's easier to promote something free and see results from that. But the types of speakers you're pitching for these strategies is also different. So for a free Summit, you can listen to past episodes where I've covered how to find the best speakers, but really, it's totally okay to be pitching people you don't know. And a lot of the time I encourage it, because it's more important to pitch people who have the right audience, and then those are connections you can leverage later on.
For a paid event. I'm not sure that's the route that would be best, okay, you want people to that you know, will be dedicated to promoting, even though it's paid. And a lot of time, that's not going to be someone that's new to you, you want to know you can trust them delivering a live presentation, that's a little sketchy if you don't know this person. And you ideally want people who will say good things about you and your offers, when when it's possible for them or people who super closely aligned with what you teach without being a competitor, which isn't something I'm quite as worried about with a free event. So all of these things make it really difficult to find success when you're bringing in speakers that you're not already connected with. Okay. In a paid conference, you also want to feature your students and clients and the results they've gotten from what you teach as much as possible. So like any keynote speakers, and panelists, you want those to be your past students and your past clients. And they're presenting about their results a lot of the times rather than a specific strategy they teach although sometimes you know, you can of course we've both pieces in there, but you want people who will shout about the results you got them.
The thing is a lot of times that people who have gotten results from working with you don't necessarily have your audience which again, makes their promotion less successful, or makes it not even make sense for them to promote which was the case for a lot of my speakers. They were actually all happy to promote which surprised me and was really cool, but a lot of them just had audiences that were far, far different from my own. And as far as presentations go, I found all of the presentations for a paid conference, a really unique balance between a value packed presentation and a webinar. And I'm sure there are people out there running paid events that don't position it quite like this. But again, I'm speaking from my experience and the strategy I learned. So if you have clients and customers with success stories to share, and your audience, you can be set up well for this speaker portion of the paid conference strategy. All right, next up marketing, you heard us talk last week about how the marketing was so much different than we expected for our conference, like the fact that you're sending emails, posting on social media setting speakers and affiliates up to promote, like all of that's the same. But the positioning of that promotion is so so different. So I'm going to let you listen in on that episode. For more on that, that's episode 194. I'm not going to like you know, re say everything we said there, hop on back there if you haven't listened yet, and now move on to monetization.
So I talked about how different list growth was between these strategies in the beginning of this episode. And we're just finally getting to monetization now. But the monetization strategies between summits and conferences are way different too. So with both your goal is not to make money on ticket sales, the free summit doesn't have ticket sales. And even though a conference has a low price paid ticket, the point isn't to like make a ton of money off of those, it could be to offset ad costs. But you're not looking to be like rolling in money from ticket sales, rolling and profit. With a conference you could add in and upsell for replay access with a few bonuses, but again, the goal isn't to be making 10s or hundreds of 1000s. From that, because you want people focused on watching the presentations during the event. So they're ready for your bigger pitch that comes at the end. With the free Summit. Part of the goal is to be profiting by a good amount from the All Access Pass sales. And part of this goes back to the speaker strategy. And the fact that it's relatively easy to have speakers with offers, that makes sense as bonuses for you to be offering. And then in both, you have your big offer launch on the back end.
The entire monetization goal with a paid conference is your launch, every decision you make is setting you up to launch your thing. And for it to make sense, it really has to be a really successful premium course, or high ticket program. A lower price offer just doesn't pay off when you only have 100, or a couple 100 attendees. And this is why you choose the speakers you do. It's why you add ticket price, because you want people who are more likely to be ready to invest. Because you need that higher conversion rate. It's why you don't really care about an all access pass or might not offer one at all, you're setting yourself up for this launch. And with the free Summit, you have more freedom to really launch anything from a low cost membership to a high ticket program, you're profiting already through the All Access Pass and have 1000s of attendees. So no matter what you can see great results when you put it into action the right way. Okay, so the monetization strategies between these are very, very different. And, you know, the paid conference want again just requires you to be at a different place in business with a different kind of offer. Let's move on to engagement. So one of the main things people talk about when they want to host a paid event is the engagement. People are more likely to engage when they pay for something I don't want freebie seekers, you know, and we'll go on and on about that.
Overall, we did see higher engagement for our conference, it looked like on average, about 17% of our attendees were coming to our sessions live, I know a lot watch the replays. Part of that was because we limited replay access to seven days and then did not provide a way to upgrade for ongoing access, we did not have that available. So they like had real real pressure to actually watch. We did not have a community for our conference. So I can't say for sure how a Facebook group or something similar would have compared. But overall, no matter what, I don't think engagement should be a deciding factor based on everything else we've already talked about. What should decide where you know which route you take here is the overall goals you want and where you're at in business. And if engagement is a concern, you shouldn't be focused on considering live presentations over pre recorded instead of like worrying about the ticket price or anything like that. So focus on your sessions instead.
All right, let's get into sales and conversion rate. So with a paid event, again, something you've probably heard is that conversion rates are going to be higher. So that means if you were able to get the same amount of people you'd get at a free event at your paid one, you'd make a ton more money, right? But you're not going to get the same number of people, which we covered earlier. And I do have numbers to share with you here. When we launched our course through someone for the first time in 2020. We had a 1.5% conversion rate from attendees to sales of that program. With our paid conference we had a 6% conversion rate so quite a bit higher there. However, that one and a half percent conversion rate came after the first time I ever launched through was Summit. And it was only the second time I had ever launched my program. So I'm confident we would bump that way up. If we did now with everything I've learned and change and all of that in the past two years. As far as sales go, like actual revenue, we had almost the same revenue with our 2020 summit and our 2022 conference, the biggest difference is that our audience is more than five times bigger now than it was in 2020, I had about 2000 people on my email list and 2020. Now I have 10,000. And I hosted an event and it was like, you know, exactly the same size.
So I was able to bring in the same revenue at the summit, even though my audience was a fifth of the size, and I was still getting my feet wet with launching back then. So you know, I'm confident next time I launch through a summit, which I gotta get that in the works, I'll be able to, you know, see better immediate results than I did with our conference here. So the power of a summit, even though conversion rates will likely be lower, is that you have a much bigger attendee list to work with both during the initial launch and moving forward, which is something people do not think about enough. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about the ongoing benefits. I can't necessarily speak for the ongoing benefits of a paid conference yet, it's just been like, what a month since we did it not even a month as of recording this. But I will say that right now, we have over 1000 fewer people to nurture moving forward than we would if we would have done a free event. For our paid conference, less than 70 people signed up were new to us or maybe it was less than 50. Doesn't matter. A very small amount of people are new added to our list, we're so limited, how much we can, you know, sell to those people moving forward, there's only 50-70 new people to sell to. But with the free summit we ran in 2020, we had over 1000 new people on our list that lets us create such a big impact moving forward from that.
So with a summit, part of the power in that is now that you've grown your list by 1000s, you can continue to nurture and warm wealthy people up, and they'll continue to buy in future launches. So I know we've brought in at least 160,000 of additional sales since that 2020 summit. With a paid conference, you just don't have that as much. It's not the goal. The goal is not to like fill your list with new people. A conference is a really great way to take the 1000s of additional leads that you gained from a summit that you ran and get them to buy, which we'll talk about more shortly. But the goal is not to bring in 1000s of new people, unless like we said, you have all of those other pieces in place, the adspend, awesome affiliates, all that good stuff. Next up, let's talk about time and effort. And it's funny, because if you go back to the podcast episode where I talked about why we are hosting a paid conference, that was episode 186, you'll hear that I initially chose that because I didn't have time for a free Summit, which now is laughable now that I've gone through this process. I definitely spent more of my own time on a conference than I would have on a summit because all of the main pieces you need are like they're still there. Like you still need the registration page, like you still need all of those same pieces that you would with the summit. But it was a new strategy for me.
So I was having to have my hands and a lot more pieces, we were having to do a lot more from scratch. And I had to spend a lot more time like learning and strategizing and things like that. Elli definitely took care of the harlot hardest parts with all of the messaging and copywriting, which we talked about in the last episode. Like we were not prepared for how much copy was gonna go into that event. From my perspective, I still spent time finding speakers, although it was easier to me because I was just looking at our clients and students. And then where I or my team would have spent time working with speakers to get their presentations and said, I spent days creating my own presentations, you know, so there's like a trade off here. And then getting ready to coordinate three days of live events was a whole other story. And a whole new brain exercise. It was intense. I do enjoy detailed stuff like that. So it was both intense and fun for me personally to go, like make a minute by minute plan for all of our team members every day. But it was a lot. Okay. So I think, you know, if you have not done a summit or a conference before, you can probably do a conference on a bit tighter timeline because it relies more on you than your speakers. So as long as you can get things done on time, it can work. But overall, I think the actual hours put in an effort are the same for me.
And the conference just took far more from me since we have our summit strategies down and processes in place and all of that good stuff. So overall, I don't know that time and effort should be a big deciding factor in the two. All right, and I kind of talked about this before. But you know, something that can come up with this is can I just take a summit. plan a summit, put a low ticket price on it, and like call it a day? And like I said earlier, for most people, the answer is no. Doing that ruins the best part of both strategies. And I know of one person who has done this well, she happens to be a client. And I think it's the combination of the right niche and the fact that she donates profit to the thing her attendees are there for the thing that I really care about. If you're considering charging a ticket price for what would normally be a free summit, to make money and get more qualified attendees, please just don't do it. It is really not likely to work and you're missing the point. And I'm going to tackle the whole free segments attract low quality leads method, Episode 197. So keep an eye out for that. But just don't do it. Choose one strategy or the other based on your goals and do that strategy the right way. Okay, so how do we choose between the two, like I've said a million times in this episode, they really complement each other well.
If your goal is 1000s of leads, new speaker connections, not having to spend a ton on ads, revenue from an all access pass, either with no offer or any offer, a huge momentum boost, and a successful launch. If you do have an offer a summit, a free Summit is the way to go. If your goal is to reengage leads, you already have activate strong connections to bring in a lower number of new leads, and launch a very proven premium course or high ticket program, a conference is great, like that's the right move for you go for it. And really switching back and forth between the two can work really, really well once or to that point. And that's kind of something my team and I have been talking about. Maybe once per year, we host a free summit to get that flood of leads in the door have those people to nurture moving forward, make new connections. And then you know, in the other half of the year we host a paid event to nurture all of those people on the you know, people we brought up on our list and other ways throughout the year, leverage all those connections and things like that. So the to work together really, really well. But like I've said before in this episode, if you resonate with my messaging, if you want to bring in a ton of leads grow your audience, grow your community, your network, your visibility, and bring in the revenue of free summit is the way to go.
If you're ready to host a high converting virtual summit to replace your slow growth marketing strategies, and use it to lead into your biggest course launch yet, I've got an exclusive training just for you. This training is for those who are interested in working with me in our Launch with a Summit Accelerator to host a summit that blows industry standards out of the water, uses feel good engagement based strategies to create an amazing experience for everyone involved, seamlessly leads into your biggest course launch yet, and sets you up for additional post summit profits on the back end. Inside the Accelerator, we help our clients consistently host life and business changing virtual summits and in the free private training, I'll show you exactly how it works along with all kinds of examples. So apply for an invite to the launch with the summit accelerator and a training at summithosthangout.com/apply.
So I hope this breakdown was helpful. I know it was a lot of like switching back and forth and comparisons. But my goodness, these two strategies are so different, even though from the outside looking in, they seem pretty similar. So send me a message on Instagram and let me know what you think or if you have any questions on this, but thank you so much for tuning into this episode for shownotes and resources head to summithosthangout.com/195. Now go out and take action to plan, strategize and launch your high converting virtual summit.
