Biography:

Navid Moazzez has made a name for himself in the online business world as a leading authority on how to create, promote and profit from a virtual summit to skyrocket your business and brand online. He’s known as a lifestyle entrepreneur who is now living his ideal lifestyle, running his business from cool locations around the world.

Having focused on building his audience and personal brand online since June 2013, Navid hit his breakthrough moment by hosting an epic virtual summit late 2014, called The Branding Summit which turned into a massive success. Navid was able to quit his job, leave Sweden and finally move abroad to live the dream while making even more impact in other peoples’ lives around the world. Navid has been featured in Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, The Guardian, Fizzle, RazorSocial, Firepole Marketing, and more.

Navid is also the summit strategist and partner behind “the online event of the year” The Self-Publishing Success Summit which got 25,000 opt-ins and generated over 6 figures in revenue.

Topics of Conversation:

[00:14] Introductions
[02:12] Virtual Summits
[07:11] List Range
[14:27] The Strategy Used
[18:20] Affiliate Speakers
[23:11] Self-Publishing Summit
[25:11] All Access Pass
[30:33] Inviting the Big Guys
[35:33] Summit Profit
[39:52] Affiliate Percentages
[41:43] Summit Making
[43:03] Cost of Setting Up
[47:05] Moving Up
[50:51] Opt-ins
[53:08] Redesigning Sites
[54:00] Value, Content and Transparency
[56:14] In Conclusion

Reach Out To Navid Moazzez:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NavidMoazzez

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NavidMoazzez

Links For The Latest Interview Show Notes:

• The Self Publishing Success Summit
• The Branding Summit
• Navid Moazzez Q2 – Lifestyle Review
• Navid Moazzez – Website

Transcript:

[00:14] Stephen: Hey, Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing on the Move and I’ve got Navid with me. How are you going, Navid?

Navid: I’m doing great, how are you doing?

Stephen: Fantastic. I was going to pronounce your surname, but I was thinking it might be a little bit difficult. You don’t have to do it for me, is that Moazzez, is that right?

Navid: Oh that’s perfect, man. Navid Moazzez. That’s my name. My dad is from Iran, that’s why I have a kind of foreign name and my mom is from Sweden so it’s a mix.

Stephen: Great mix.

Navid: Yes. I kind of always refer to myself even when I was younger. I loved traveling. Now I’m actually what I’m doing it’s just right now I’m at Cancun and, I have been traveling the world for the last 7 months and I always referred to myself as a citizen of the world, a mix of Stockholm where I lived for the last 8 years before I moved to Prague and then the big cities like New York and LA and the beach lifestyle now I’m at Cancun so it’s pretty convenient.

Stephen: That’s awesome. I love that. I’m sure we’ll speak about it later. Yeah. You’re a massive traveler, aren’t you?

Navid: Yeah I love traveling. But now I also like to stay at one place because it lets me focus. That’s why I’ve been living in Cancun now since the beginning of May.

I was here also earlier this year and I went to the US for a little trip and to Hong Kong. I’m now am back in Cancun and I plan to stay here, maybe, another 3 months or so, maybe longer, who knows.

Maybe down to Columbia, Medegen, you know there’s a big entrepreneurial community there which I kind of lack here in Cancun. I liked the community aspect and network with fellow online and lifestyle entrepreneurs than I can do that more I think in Columbia than here.

Stephen: Yeah, 100%. I’m sure we’ll talk about it later anyway; I won’t dive into the last in but first question that I want to do, because you’re massive in the virtual summits as well. So hopefully that would give us a —

Navid: Yeah that’s my thing.

[02:12] Stephen: That’s your thing? So tell us a little bit about what is a virtual summit, and how did you come across it? How did you get into the whole virtual summit space?

Navid: Yeah, just to give you a brief idea, if you have no idea what it is, and you’re tuning in to this? Essentially a virtual summit is very similar to doing podcast interviews, actually, but I call virtual summits a podcast on steroids because you can still interviewing experts in your field and kind of bore off their authority, build your brand by association, learn from them in a free membership. But not only that, you can also grow your email list rapidly which we all want especially if you want to build a personal brand, maybe sell some ploys to them, market to them.

Then you can also create a product fast and make money from that especially if you don’t have much experience or if you want to take an existing 6 to 7 figure business to the next level, you can do so at a summit. As an example, we did the self-publishing success summit, it got, like, 25,000 opt-ins and turned out to generate over 6 figures in revenue.

But to give you the idea of how I got into the space, it was actually by a little bit of a coincidence because I was doing my podcast, the lifestyle architects, in a little while I launched my site, mid June 2013. Did some interviews initially with Pat Flynn, Roller Yoder, you know, for my website.

And then I decided okay, there’s a lot of buzz about podcasting. John Lee Dumas had EntrepreneurOnFire and then everyone was doing podcast, ’okay let’s jump on this trend’.

So I planned it out, I thought, ‘you know now I’m going to launch my podcast already in 2013’ but it was not really that simple or whatever, I procrastinated a lot then I did it in spring of 2014 instead. So I started to interview people like Robert Dream, Cal Newport, Todd Herman, Chris Brogan, many more people.

And it was the best relationship builder for me and free mentorship. I got that too but I found one problem for me at least. That I did not generate so much cash flow on my business or grow my email list rapidly.

Of course I create great content to my audience, I try different strategies like content upgrades, you know, providing epic guides. All these things and all the marketers are talking about is great.

I followed video feed by Ryan Harris and I did grow my email list a little bit. So my defining moment was really when I had to make money or I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent–

Stephen: To survive.

Navid: Yeah, it was a little bit like that. I was generating through the first half of 2014, maybe a few thousand dollars a month, maybe 2000.

So it wasn’t that good. Every once in a while I got a client to help them with the personal branding so that was a little bit what I was focusing on initially, personal branding for all my entrepreneurs and I thought that was an okay niche.

I was interested and kind of passionate about talking about the subject, the personal branding topic and I thought, ‘so okay, a lot of people were doing these kinds of online events in the Health niche, and some in the online marketing space like Marissa Meritroit.’ So I thought, ‘Why can’t I put together such an event?

Why can’t I grow my list?

I can build relationships with some big players in my industry.’ So I decided to create the branding summit, which turned to be the largest personal branding conference in the world with 88 speakers on there.

So it was crazy, went out of my way to get some people from my network, some people I didn’t know there like John Lee Dumas, Neil Patel. So I had so many people like Natalie Sisson on there, a lot of great players on that summit and that turned into massive success for my business and that was – initially I got the idea at June 2014 – but it took me a long time to figure out everything.

I spent thousands of hours and going crazy and studying while working for other people, how to write emails, how to market properly. And then in November 2014 I launched it and I got – I don’t know if you want to get into results what happened–

Stephen: Yeah, sure jump into them.

Navid: Sure. So initially when I launched, you know, getting your first sale, it feels so amazing. So I did a small, initial launch that I emailed to my list.

I wanted to test it first before all the affiliates and speakers were starting sending out emails to their list. So after, I believe like 1 minute or 2 minutes, I got my first notification–

Stephen: Type tells notification?

Navid: Yeah, and I got my first sale. I was like, ‘this is amazing’.

[07:11] Stephen: How big was your list at that time?

Navid: It was about a thousand people.

Stephen: Yup.

Navid: So it wasn’t that great. You know, that was what I built up since I started in June 2013 which when I didn’t focus at all, in mid-June 2013 to January 2014 my list was like, 100-200 people because I didn’t focus on it at all.

And then from January 2014 until the launch of my summit in November, it grew about a thousand people. So not that good either.

But I still had decent audiences that were passionate about what I was doing. I got like 1 sale, then another 1 came in and I think I got a few more there from my list initially and the summit was free to sign up for.

That’s what was interesting and I upsold them an all-access pass of the summit with all the recordings and videoing—I do videoing too, that’s why I normally recommend for summit because it’s perceived as high value than just audio recordings. You can have over Skype videoing or use Google hangouts, that’s what most people do and my summit was pre-recorded.

Some people like Merissa Meritroit, she does live summit. If you have a team you can probably put together a live summit but it’s a lot of hustle and I’ve seen some of the self-publishing summit was pre-recorded and it still worked fantastic.

So it can still work. The results I got from that initial summit I did with the Branding summit, I added about 3,000 new email subscribers for free to my list and now I have close to, I believe, 8,000 people on my list.

Stephen: Yup.

Navid: And it’s growing faster and I have partnerships I got from that summit, they will promote me, moving forward, and I turned some of my initial fans, you know, I didn’t really sell that much to my audience first, turned those fans into super fans and now, life-long customers. So whenever I promote something, they buy from me, I have an affiliate product that I promote and they buy that or they buy my course, my virtual summit program, I’m coming out with. So all these things are just amazing that happened from the summit.

Not only that, I added people to my list for free but I also got about 200 sales for my summit, the Branding Summit, like $20,000 in profit and that was from basically not having any money into just having a lot of cash flow and money coming in the bank and I was able to actually quit my job in the same month I launched my summit.

Stephen: That’s awesome.

Navid: They gave my notification to my boss and quit and then just around the same time, I was like,

‘why should I stay in Sweden?

I don’t have anything here. Just my family and stuff like that.’ So I decided to move abroad. So I first went to Thailand with my mom and brother and then I didn’t like it so much where I was.

So I was like ‘Hey let’s go back to Stockholm.’ There’s a snowstorm there and then I went to Mexico and I’ve kind of been here, just a little trip to the States to network and then I came back to Mexico and I’m loving it. You know I can go anywhere.

That’s the freedom the summit created for me. Whatever that means to you, it could be like spending more time with your family or whatever.

But for me it was being able to travel, being able to run my business from anywhere in the world. So I started to generate more sales while I sleep for the summit which was cool.

You see when I was at the gym, when I was at the supermarket, wherever. I started generating sales, it was super cool. Then afterwards, I got higher end consulting clients as well.

And that’s the interesting part. You know people staying, are ‘okay, so I’m going to generate this much from the summit’.

They get that but if you do it right and leverage it properly, you’re going to skyrocket afterwards, you know, get featured in big publications and so that’s what happened to me. First, in January of this year, 2015, I did some promotions for Amid Safety and I managed to make over $40,000 in January alone in this year and that’s just after the summit ended, a month after.

Most of it came from the affiliate promotion I did for Amid Safety, for promoting his premium online business training here at the launch and I became his number 1 affiliate. Also when I grand cash prize, I had much smaller audience than the people promoting it.

That’s also interesting. You know John Lee Dumas was promoting it, I rolled there, and even Amid Safety’s brother was promoting and John Quirk.

They had bigger email lists, like up to 100,000 people on their list and I want that competition. I got more sales than them like 34 and I had a super high conversion rate. That’s because I focused.

It’s not about how big your list is, but rather the engagement and level of trust. You know you build with that audience over time and that’s what I managed to build up there.

I also sold some coaching that month, pre-sold my virtual summit mastery program. So people already bought into that because they saw, he had success with that and my audience started asking me for training.

So it’s not like I created my summit and then I just decided to become the virtual summit expert. It was actually my audience, when people started asking me the question ‘how did you do it?

How can we put together a similar event?’

So that’s what happened afterwards and also business insight they featured me.

Stephen: I saw that, yeah. That looks awesome.

Navid: Yeah, it’s just novel. It’s crazy like what happened afterwards. I got an introduction from someone to be on there but it was because I had something newsworthy to share and that story, I believe, has over 160,000 views to date.

It got reposted on Yahoo Finance and got me 2,000 new email subscribers and a lot of new revenue coming in my business. Actually I was featured again not too long ago and that article has also 150,000 views.

Stephen: Wow, that’s awesome.

Navid: It’s just something what my summit led to and now I’m helping other people create, promote, and profit from their summit because I believe that’s one of the best ways to grow your email list and they generate more profit than your business build authentic powerful relationships with influencers and that’s a lot for me. I can dive into some things if you know how to do something, how I did that and what changed now for this other summit I’m helping with.

Stephen: Yeah. That sounds like a rollercoaster ride, I love that. That sounds so exciting and I think your audience loves that idea of, like you said, that laptop-lifestyle we entrepreneurs live.

I mean when you’re with the internet marketing on some level, you can really work off the laptop like you said from anywhere, any country, as long as you’ve got your laptop and an internet connection, you can make an income. And I think that’s so powerful and the summit works directly to help that and assist you with that and grow that which is fantastic.

Navid: Yeah for sure.

[14:27] Stephen: So with your summit, the first way I got the summit is I got invited to the WordPress summit. And that was the one Young run as well.

So, you guys have a look at that. If you look at the WordPress summit in Google, there’s one there. Then after that, it led for me as being a speaker as well in the Sales Funnel Summit.

So that’s how I first got introduced to all these summits and view the mastermind behind it all, that’s why it’s great having you on to see how it all works in the background and the strategy behind it. So give us an idea. Now you’re working on the Self-publishing Success Summit. That’s your current one.

Navid: Yeah, it’s about to end now actually. The time of this recording, so I have already kind of the results in from what we achieved with it and so on.

Stephen:  Perfect. So tell us, I guess, as people come through, where do you say the Leads flow through?

Is it at the beginning before-hand that you get Leads flying through the door?

Is it that you’re pre-selling it or do you usually half-way through, you start seeing the majority of the people subscribing start listening to the interviews or is it at the end when people realize what they’ve missed out on?

Navid: Yeah that’s a very good question. Most people, they like to put everything in one basket, so to speak, like with the promotion. Specifically, the promotion should not start only 1 week before you’re about to kick off the first interview.

You need to plan this out then be a little bit strategic behind what you are doing especially if you want to have a big splash for your summit. I’m not saying that you will get 25,000 opt-ins if you’re doing the summit for the first time and not have an established business already.

But at least a few thousand people 2,000 – 5,000 people should be very possible for most people to achieve depending on what niche. So most Leads would come in the early stages when people start promoting.

Maybe you start promoting it to your own audience 3 weeks before the summit starts. And then from the second week, like 2 weeks before it starts, you get the speakers and the other affiliates to start promoting.

But if you have, treat it like a real launch, like a real product launch if you’ve been following that and have a launch calendar. So I think you can – I don’t know the exact link now – but I think you can link that up in the show, kind of structured, affiliate page for the Self-Publishing Success Summit and he had an affiliate manager on board just to be clear on that.

We invested on a little bit extra because we knew we could do this really big because Chandler Bolt, the founder of Self-Publishing School had this program, a high-end program in the back end, so he can leverage that. So let’s say people, they sign up for free to the Self-Publishing Success Summit and then the Leads come in there from the speakers from other affiliates.

Afterwards, they buy the All Access Pass. Then the speakers would get a 50% commission on the $97 All Access Pass. For some speakers, honestly, that’s not a lot, like $48 whatever.

Stephen: Exactly.

Navid: If you are making 6 -7 figures in your business, that’s not that much. But if you have a high-end program in the back end, then it’s easier to position it. In this case we said that they would get a lifetime cookie.

What that means is they will get tracked for life. So if someone buys in the future, whenever that would be, their Self-Publishing school, which is a step-by-step program for taking people through writing and marketing and profiting from their books and building their business, then they would get a commission on that lifetime 40%. That was a big incentive for a lot of the speakers and a lot of other affiliates not only speakers to be on board for promoting.

[18:20] Stephen: So just to be clear, sorry, the speakers were able to affiliate—they would be able to promote as an affiliate the high-end program as well as the access pass, is that right?

Navid: No, yeah. So basically they only promote the free events, they promote this as a free event to their audience. Imagine just sharing some free value.

It’s like—I’m sure a lot of people in your audience have seen videos here, it’s a little bit similar but this is even more valued than a video series like 40 plus interviews, in this case it was 40 plus. Maybe you have, on your summit, 20 – 30 speakers, which is typically what I tend to recommend.

Channeling went a little overboard we had like 46 sessions and that’s great because there’s so much value the speakers are sending to their audience for free and they get familiarized, they can send many emails because there’s a lot of opportunities to promote and this started 2 weeks before with the speaker promotion.

But we were very clear on when the best dates to promote and we had the affiliate managers send out reminder emails to the affiliates and speakers and we made it super easy for them to promote. We had swipe copy written out for speakers, we had different ones for the non-speakers so it was not the same, even for different industries I believe, and a banner images and graphics.

We had everything you can possibly need to promote this summit so it was kind of a no-brainer for most people to just promote these. It’s like I’ve been speaking to a lot of people why they promote summits, why they ‘yes’ to be on a summit and a lot that comes up is the professionalism, like the look and feel of your summit, how it’s designed, if it looks great and you’re associated with great names, like we had Brian Tracy on the summit.

Stephen: Yeah, that’s huge.

Navid: Yeah, who doesn’t want to be associated with him?

Like I believe someone had Rand Fishkin on there.

Stephen: Exactly.

Navid: You know, a name like that, of course you want to be associated with someone like that. And same with the sales funnel summit, by Lorianne she had Russell Brunson on there and you do some work with Click Funnels.

So it was not too hard to get you to say yes since you already saw the great name she had on for the summit there.

Stephen: Yeah.

Navid: So I believe that’s key to get him to promote and also having the relationships. So maybe before the interview with the speaker having like a pre-call with them, if they’re not too busy, in some cases it works to have that and you can make a spreadsheet.

So you can estimate the results of your summit in advance. You can make a spreadsheet and have the names there and see who’s going to promote to their list like how many emails roughly they will send.

You’re going to make it like super pushy to them or anything but it was like, this event was amazing and you’re doing your audience a disservice if you don’t promote it and that’s what happened. Many speakers like for example Joanna Penn, you have Dane and Maxwell, they had people like Michael Porter all of them, they promoted the event on social media and they drew thousands and thousands of opt-ins to the summit.

So if you have some anchor speakers on board, maybe a couple of them and you get at least 1 to promote, they can do massive difference for your summit and they have some other players left. I call them B-listers and C-listers on the summit maybe some opt-in comers as well with a good size audience, good engagement and then they are more eager to promote.

For example, if you are featured on a summit, you’re like, you know an up and coming entrepreneur, you are doing some great things, you’re hungry, then you’re more likely to share this out like crazy because you haven’t been featured on all these places yet. So that’s kind of how I see it and I had some people on my summit the first one I did, they were not that well-known but their presentation was so good so people loved it and they also promoted their session a lot around social media to their email lists and drew not only opt-ins but also sales for my summit.

That’s what I’ve seen. So be super clear with the speakers build an authentic relationship with them even before your summit starts if possible. If you have been thinking about doing a summit in 4 – 5 months, start now to think about —

Stephen: Oh, I like it.

Navid: Yeah start planning it with ‘who do I want to interview?’

or ‘specifically on what topic?’

or rather goes more niche than specific. Right?

So that’s why Self-Publishing Success Summit did so well. It was specific.

[23:11] Stephen: It was self-publishing.

Navid: It was self-publishing and it was very action-based content. We had 3 phases on there for writing, marketing, publishing and monetizing so people could basically go through this process and get results and obviously, we upsold Access Pass if the people sign up right away.

They got like 600 or something sales before the summit even started.

Stephen: Yeah that’s crazy.

Navid: Imagine before they even watched a session for free, they purchased it because they knew they wanted to own this. Like we had an irresistible offer with some bonuses from speakers and the Facebook group, and I believe we had a Q&A session with Chandler as well and people are getting when they purchased an All Access Pass. So it’s not only the video interviews, there’s also some other additional value they got and for $97, that’s just a no-brainer and people went crazy and purchased that and when the summit started, they took it a little bit easy but they linked up in the email copy everyday and the PS I believe that it was possible to purchase, the All Access Pass and then we did a push at the end of the first week. Our summit is 11 days, and then on the 11th week we did a push for raising the price to $297. They got crazy sales for that. It just went up and that’s when we went to 6 figures.

Stephen: Yeah.

Navid: Yeah, and then we went to 6 figures. People just purchased. We got, like, hundreds of sales in just 24 hours, it’s just amazing.

It’s the first time I’m part of a big launch like that, I’ve helped other people with their summit but this one was like we had my designer on the team and we had the fully manager we had Chaneller we had someone working with InfusionSoft so it was a great teamwork and obviously we used my 7-step system for actually creating, profiting from this summit.

[25:11] Stephen: So that’s awesome. I love that. I mean you’ve gone through it so strategically. You planned it out at the beginning and now executing it and you just see the results.

So that’s awesome. So one question, obviously, from the Sales Funnel side of things, so the way someone would go through it, just to summarize, because I know you’ve given a ton of value there and just hopefully people will keep an eye on everything that’s going on.

So someone comes through, they’ll opt-in to the free summit where they’ll listen to all the recordings as they happen, but they don’t get to keep them. That’s for the All Access Pass. That’s correct?

Navid: Yes. That’s a good point. So they sign up. So we start promoting it. Let’s say you start promoting it first to your own list.

Maybe I’ll build up some bass and interest beforehand. If you have an existing audience, that’s a great way to maybe start asking your email list ‘hey, what speakers do you like me to interview?

I’m thinking about doing this summit, which speakers would you like me to have on?’

That’s kind of what Chandler did and I recommended him do and then we launched it and people started signing up for the free summit but didn’t start until like 3 weeks after we started promoting it. So then if they didn’t purchase, maybe got a few emails, maybe a free gift to something, just for signing up for the summit, that can build more trust with them especially if they are not familiar with you.

So that’s what we did. So they didn’t get anything if they didn’t purchase. If they purchased the All Access Pass, the used wishlist member to protect the content then we put it inside there so all the interviews everything was actually available already so that was an incentive for people to purchase right away.

Stephen: They would access them straight away?

Navid: Yes. That’s why. So basically in the entry email so if someone went to selfpublishingsuccesssummit.com and signed up there–  don’t know if the time of this recording would still be available to them to sign up, but if it’s still there you can just see the process basically with the entry email would be there too.

They could purchase in that first email. So basically a list of a few reasons why they should get the All Access Pass. Let’s say you can watch it in convenience of your home, you can have access to everything before the summit even starts, all these different reasons.

Stephen: That’s awesome.

Navid: And that converts quite well. So emails, that’s really key. So I learned a ton in my first summit. There were just so many different aspects of online marketing you’ll learn by putting together summits.

If you want to do a product launch later it’s honestly a similar process. You have to set up the emails, you have to prepare things in advance and maybe not structure everything so you have to automate all the emails like you can do that but maybe you want to have something changed up along the way.

So you can go in there and tweak things but that’s what we did and for the free summit, we are just using WordPress basically. We had a custom theme and it’s we scheduled the interviews to go live on this specific day.

So that’s a mistake I did in my first summit, everyday I went in there and had to use Vimeo for video hosting. And I use password-protected videos so I was like ‘okay, for the 1^st day I need to password protect for the open public.

I need to remove the password everyday because that published all the interviews beforehand’ and that was a mistake because if you scheduled your interviews to go live, you can have the interviews or be in there like open so you just schedule them and then when they go live, they’re open maybe 48 hours to wash to the public and then you just put it in draft afterwards and remove them.

People can’t access them anymore. It takes way less time; it can even have an assistant do that or something like that so you can stream-line this process a little bit at least. I haven’t found a way to automate exactly how to remove the interviews, I don’t think that would be a good way, yet I found at least but this way of scheduling in advance, works really well.

Then you can just make sure you work during the summit so people are actually getting the content.

Stephen: Yeah, I think it sounds like the easiest way to go about it. Rather than the password protecting route, so not like that of course.

Navid: And we actually use YouTube for this one. But it was because we didn’t have time to put all the videos on Vimeo so I do recommend especially since you’re going to sell and you know you’re going to sell this as a course or the summit All Access Pass you know password protect Vimeo by using Vimeo because you can protect it.

So it only works on your website. People can not embed that on another site which is quite valuable in Vimeo Pro.

I believe it’s just $197 a year or if you’re using Wistia, that’s another option. Just keep that in mind there. For this summit, it could have gotten an extreme experience.

Stephen: It could have gotten out of hand.

Navid: Oh my God it would’ve been thousands of dollars if you used Wistia but if we use Vimeo, we’d just be a flat $197, now at YouTube we’re removing all the videos to Wistia later on here as well.

[30:33] Stephen: Yeah. That’s awesome. And with the speakers you get on, I’m sure a lot of the B and C-listers don’t mind coming on because it’s free press for them and they grow in authority but what about the big guys?

So someone like Brian Tracy, I’m sure even if you’ve got other bigger names as well, do they look for a fee to talk on the summit?

Or are they happy to do it out of their own time?

Or do they have a strict schedule you’ve got to work with? How do you work with them?

Navid: Yeah. So for an extremely big name, I would say you should not look for them really to promote or anything. Just be for you having such a big name like Brian Tracy as credibility to your summit in a massive way.

We didn’t pay any speakers to be on, I know that possibly some people would like you to buy a ton of books to be a speaker on the summit, so there’s always a chance you can get someone like Gary Vaynerchuk or a really big name on your summit, maybe Seth Godin, someone like that. If they have a book coming out and they would like to promote that book in some way, maybe if you purchase a ton of books you can get someone like that on your summit, that’s a possibility. But in Brian Tracy’s case, I think we just basically reached out to, I think it was VS team or something like that and then they finally set up a time for the interview and he got some exposure for his book and maybe turned audience he didn’t have before and I guess that was valuable enough for him because that’s probably some criteria he has for doing some events like this or podcast that they need to get a certain number of listeners or exposure for his brand.

So if you’re not at that level where you can guarantee 10,000 opt-ins which was our initial goal—now we crushed that goal—I would say it’s not that difficult to get an A-lister to your summit. For example, I had Neil Patel on my summit, he says yes to a lot of things. But just because he says yes doesn’t mean he will promote you but at least you get some credibility for having a speaker like that on.

Like John Lee Dumas, he says yes to a lot of things, doesn’t mean he will promote, he might in some cases if you have a relationship with him.

Stephen: Yeah.

Navid: If it’s a win-win situation for him. So it’s a way you frame it to some people is that maybe they can promote if they have their opt-in offer, you can link that up below the video interview on your summits.

So they get a ton of Leads from being a speaker on your summit. Maybe they get hundreds of Leads, a little more in some cases for just showing up, giving a speech, giving an interview with you.

And for some people that’s enough value. If they have a book coming, out as I said, that’s a great opportunity for you to reach out or any event for that matter and that could be great.

Some people, they also let speakers promote on their summit. Let’s say they have a product or something like that, they want to pitch Marissa Meritroit does that with hers speakers so they have slides prepared, extremely professional, and then they pitch at the end.

Stephen: Like a webinar sort of pitch.

Navid: Yeah a little bit like webinars. And I’m like yeah this works but in this case with the Self-Publishing Success Summit, we didn’t want to do it.

Stephen: No pitch?

Navid: We wanted to focus around the content. It was extremely good like Chandler also has a program, so it didn’t make sense to pitch in a lot of things along the way there either.

You can also have sponsors. Jan had sponsors for his summit, for example, for the WTE Summit.

Stephen: Yeah, hosting company or something like that?

Navid: Yeah. So just look in your field. It’s not that difficult, it’s just about reaching out and they might feature you on their website, their blog which happened to feature, it happened to major blogs and he positioned himself as the authority with WordPress for online entrepreneurs and that’s what the summit did for him.

You know other things, affiliate commissions like even if you don’t get sponsors, when you have some products you really endorse like a hosting company, you can even link that up and feature that on your summit in some way if it makes sense, whatever you’re offering. If you have a Health Summit, maybe you have some health supplements, whatever.

It makes sense for that. And also the products of speakers, the books, you can make affiliate commissions there so that’s a little extra. Most of the profit or revenue will come in obviously from the All Access Pass if you put together a really good summit.

But then you can have some additional income even before everything starts with sponsors, if you secure them. And also as the summit starts, it kicks off with affiliates. I find that very, very good.

[35:33] Stephen: Yeah I love that. So I guess on an income side, on the breakdown, you’ve got your All Access Pass, which is generally $97, as I think you’ve said and obviously if you want to add scarcity to that as well, you can update it to $197,

Is that what you guys did?

From $97 to $197?

Navid: Yeah, we’re probably going to raise that again, but we haven’t really decided, but around there. It’s all about testing. I’m not saying that $97 would work in every niche.

What I’m doing with Online Marketing type summits, it works well and the health niche, I’ve seen anywhere from $47 to $97 and so. It’s a little bit tweaking and also how much money your audiences pay.

Stephen: So it’s a low-end sort of offer, at some level?

Navid: So it’s a no-brainer. People should be like ‘this is something I buy in my sleep pretty much’, that’s how good it should–

Stephen: Yeah, it’s just something that they’d take on straight away.

Navid: Yes, exactly. That’s the idea with this. And then obviously, we have some other income streams. If you have a high end program as I mentioned, in the back end, if you have a successful business already, that’s a fantastic way to do a summit which can lead to this high end product you have and you can generate a lot of money.

Imagine if you get 10,000 – 15,000 Leads to sign up for your summit, do you make good money from your virtual summit, All Access Pass, and then you also later maybe have a webinar a week after the summit ends at the live hangout and then you sell that high end program. That can just generate a lot of sales.

Stephen: Well exactly. If that’s like a $2,000 program for example and you’re selling it off a webinar, the summit I think is a really good way of looking at it is as a massive Lead magnet as well. I mean all in itself, you’re attracting so many Leads like especially in your case, what was it, 25,000?

Navid: Yeah, I think maybe with bit opt-outs we have 23 but everything was with 25,000.

Stephen: 20,000 very solid Leads and then coming through and a week later after that, you put together a webinar. I guess you guys haven’t done it yet but I’m sure you’ll be able to see the numbers that you get on the webinar to sell a high end program.

I’m not sure what Chandler’s high end program would cost. I’m guessing it’d be probably $1,000 – $2,000?

Navid: $1,000 for the pro-version I think or for the normal version and then he has, I think, a $2,000 version of something. And we’re actually doing that as we said like the last keynote speech because if you don’t have authority in your field already, it’s not easy to do this.

So I’m talking to people who have some positioning already.  Chandler is a 5-time bestselling author, an amazon bestseller and he can do this. He has a program.

So he is the live closing keynote and he will do a summit recap of all the sessions, and he will also talk about his process for doing this Becoming a Bestselling Author in 90 Days or Less” and that would drive a lot of people in because they have consumed a lot of content during the summit and they might not know where to start still. They can do it but with the interview spot, they might need some step-by-step system and then Chandler’s program comes in.

If you don’t have this already, like you are just starting out, you should definitely listen to your audience during the summit. Maybe you pick a topic which you want to become the go-to person in and that’s what I typically recommend.

In my case, I wanted to become a go-to person in personal branding and I did position myself a lot in personal branding. It was just that I niched down even further to virtual summits.

So that’s what I recommend and then launching something. If there’s a possibility and you know what you’ll offer, your audience will start asking a pre-launch or something, basically pre-sell it before you create it, that’s what I was trying to say.

Stephen: Yeah.

Navid: So I sold my summit program 4 months in advance or something like that before I even had a first session, you know.

Stephen: Yeah and I love that pre-selling is fantastic, in any industry I guess, in any niche. So just having that money flow in until you’re safe and then you’ve got that time up your sleeve and you know that whatever happens, you’ve got a bit of a safety net under you.

Navid: Right.

[39:52] Stephen: That’s so cool. I like that. And what percentage of the income would affiliates take overall in those access passes that you’ve sold?

How would that work?

Navid: Yeah. So in this case with the Self-Publishing Success Summit, we had about 130 people promoting it across all fields, you know, speakers and affiliates and they would get 50% on the All Access Pass and I think—I haven’t checked recent numbers—but I think around 75 – 80%. Something like this is from affiliates in this case.

For my summit, it was smaller. The Branding Summit I did in 2014, it was a smaller summit. So most of the sales came–

Stephen: Straight to you?

Navid: Yeah because people were not really signing up to the affiliate program. I had a lot of different issues–

Stephen: Again, like that was one of your first summits as well so…

Navid: Yeah, it was my first summit.

Stephen: It was your first summit?

So it’s all a trial and error, whereas now you’ve sort of perfected the strategy and you can see that like the affiliates are playing that much more of a role and absolutely helping you dominate.

Navid: Yeah and I don’t think always. Like from my first one, it was a good learning curve for me to set up an affiliate program and do it.

I used AWeber first and then set up an affiliate program with DealGuardian and it was good, you know. But now I’m growing my business and grew it into a 6-figure business and I’m invested in InfusionSoft as it has a better tagging feature, I can track a little bit better, I can have a full CRM so I can have my shopping cart in InfusionSoft, all these things I invested in and if I did a summit again, I would obviously use InfusionSoft. But if you are starting out MailChimp or AWeber is perfectly fine.

[41:43] Stephen: Yeah, exactly. As you grow obviously, you can invest in more expensive software but at the early stages, it doesn’t really matter what tools you use. It’s more about just giving the content and the value.

Navid: An affiliate program like DealGuardian is free to sign up for and they make it simple, ClickBank too. The only thing I would say about a program like this is that you need to have at least some content ready for delivery when people buy.

When I did my summit, I think they changed their policy. But if you use one of them, they just have your content ready when people purchase.

The All Access Pass, you need something in a membership area to access. You can have some bonus Q&A sessions afterwards, but you need to have interviews so people can access that right away when they purchase. So that’s just a side note too.

Stephen: You need to give them their value. Yeah.

Navid: Yeah you need to give them that and that’s the rules. If you’re using InfusionSoft, you obviously have your own rules whenever you’re ready but when people purchase I think it’s great to have things ready.

We didn’t have everything ready for Self-Publishing Success Summit but they got it ready very quickly, you know, when people started purchasing the All Access Pass, they got the value they bought.

Stephen: Yeah, straight away. Look, we’ll start wrapping up pretty soon. But I’ve got a couple more questions before we go.

Navid: Sure.

[43:03] Stephen: One more is what is the cost of setting it up?

I know there’s a lot of time involved, obviously, there’s hundreds of hours that go into organizing it and setting up the automations and the graphics and all that.

So what do you think the costs amounted to for the most recent summit you’re in?

So obviously you guys spent a lot of time. You said you had an affiliate manager, a graphics, website design. How much did all that come to on your end?

Navid: Yeah. So first of all, in the low end of the summit, if you’re starting out, I can say like if you want to do it on a budget, you can for sure do it in a few hundred dollars, that’s possible and you can still have success with it. That’s kind of the way I did it.

The only one I spent on my first one was design and my designer was about $3,000 so that’s what we spent on this summit. But he invested so much more time since probably it was more towards $6,000 in design, we were paying him bonus for all the great work he’s doing because he basically works with me and I brought him on board for this project.

Then we had an affiliate manager that’s kind of on Chandler’s, I arranged that but he’s getting a percentage. He’s helping Chandler also with his main launch so he’s getting a percentage. We have a copyrighter on board that helps us with the copy and we always had the expense for me and partnering with me, it was a partnership, and also the affiliates pretty much paying out all the affiliate commissions so when we count profits, it will be a lot that goes to the affiliates but the email list is worth so much more.

You know I will be doing a case study interview, get a case study with Chandler and you’ve got to see what this does for his business. It turns into a million dollar business pretty soon.

Stephen: Well as soon as you start selling the high end program–

Navid: Yeah he’s already had it before.

Stephen: Oh he had it?

Navid: Yeah for quite some time, actually, for like a year or something like that he had the high end program.

Stephen: So it is webinar a year. I guess, like, are affiliates taking 50% of the sale of the high-end program as well?

Navid: I think like 40% or something like that for the high end program.

Stephen: Well I guess, yeah, if you’re selling a $1,000 – $2,000 program and you’ve got 20,000 opt-ins, it’s all the numbers again. And I’d love to hear about the numbers I guess when you get to that stage of running a webinar however you’re selling. But I’m guessing that if you get full people on the webinar, if you get a full house, I’d love to know I guess how many jumped into it and the percentages because I think, yeah, you could have a 6-figure, 7-figure business straight away and it just shows how powerful the summit is.

Navid: Yeah, exactly. He’s like an evergreen launch but for this one, it’s got to be interesting because now we are promoting it right away at the last day of the summit. We are doing another launch; he is doing another launch at the end of August for the same program.

And then the list, maybe they are not ready to buy it or purchase, then they purchase again at the end of August, they are ready and getting warmed up a little bit. They love the summit content, maybe they bought into that or they didn’t, doesn’t matter but then they purchase this high end program and that’s very powerful.

So I would say we invested quite a bit in this summit. This is probably not what you would do at the first summit you are doing because Chandler had a business and we also had some arrangement like I was a partner so he didn’t have to pay me everything up front.

For example, for my designer he didn’t have to do that and we had a percentage for the affiliate manager and we invested a little bit in Facebook ads, I believe, but it can’t convert well with Facebook ads due to some issues we had with it in the beginning. We were supposed to spend $10,000 on Facebook ads but I don’t think we hit that really.

And most of the opt-ins for the summit came from the speakers the majority, and we didn’t get so much from the Facebook ads we were doing.

[47:05] Stephen: Yup. And I guess paid on here in the form of a summit is sort of like a bonus. I mean if you can get paid traffic to it, it’d be good, but like you said it’s the speakers that deliver the value and then you get the people that are interested in the niche and straight become—well I guess people who are hard to target in self-publishing enjoy in becoming a Lead which is fantastic.

So now you’ve got a hungry tribe of 20,000 – 25,000 Leads ready to go and the next stage is selling them unto a higher end program?

Navid: Exactly. And the paid traffic, I’d recommend, you can learn yourself about it but if you’re a beginner, I wouldn’t advise it, you’d probably waste your time. Its better if you focus your effort in building the relationships and getting speakers and other affiliates to promote and if you have the money to invest in ads, you hire someone to do the ads for you and then you’re better off for success.

You can test it. If you have some money to invest, maybe a few thousand dollars at least, then you can see some great results from the ads you’re in and the money you’re spending.

Stephen: Yeah. I think if you haven’t done it before, I wouldn’t recommend it either because it’s very risky. If you do it well, you can get away with it with a massive success and a big profit.

But you need a little bit of testing like you said. So I think that’s right.

Navid: Yes. That’s powerful and what we did. We had 6 figures without any paid traffic.

Stephen: Any paid traffic?

How crazy is that?

That’s epic. I love it. And then it shows how much of a powerhouse it really was. And like you said, plus the value on the list which is who knows how much now.

So I reckon if you look at it all in all, you’re probably looking at a 7 figure summit right there.

Navid: Yeah, that’s a good way to see it, I think. For Chandler’s business, this was amazing.

And obviously for me to be helping him with such a big project, it’s a great case study and that was kind of what we agreed on in the beginning. So now it looks good for me and he’s just happy about the way it turned out to be.

We just exceeded our goals like crazy.

Stephen: Yeah, that’s awesome. And then now, just quickly before we wrap it up, on your other side, you’re doing all this summit work, what are you doing with your own website because I’ve had a look and you’ve been redesigning it lately and it’s looking fantastic so guys if you haven’t been there, go to navidmoazzez.com. I think I’ve said it right again, I’m trying to practice your surname.

Navid: Yeah.

Stephen: Go to the website and look at it because it looks so fantastic and I know you recently put up a quarterly business report and lifestyle report? That was huge. I think you’ve said about 4 – 5,000 words, something crazy.

Navid: It was 7,300 somewhere.

Stephen: That’s nuts.

Navid: It’s insane. I do it every quarter because I love to give back to the people I meet and link them up and just share my photos and stories and the business lessons I learned.

So you can check that out actually if you want to read that review. It’s somewhere at navid.me/q215 so it’s the quarter of 2015 and we also talked a lot about in this interview how you put together a summit and if you want to have a look inside my process and steps I recommend, I have a 7 step Cheat Sheet for promoting and profiting from a virtual summit to help you skyrocket your business and brand online and you can find that over virtualsummitmastery.com/cheat sheet.

So check that out, it’s also on my website, navidmoazzez.com but that’s the easy way to access it.

Stephen: Yeah, I noticed because I went to your website and it came up with the Cheat Sheet there.

Navid: Yeah, it’s there as well.

[50:51] Stephen: Yeah. What are the numbers you’re getting on that because I think I saw maybe John Lee Dumas or someone else that added recently?

I think he recently redid his website as well and they’ve added a Cheat Sheet or an opt-in on the front end of a website. So obviously when you visit it for the first time and then the opt-in comes up, how are you finding that on your end of things?

Are you finding that a lot of people are taking you up on that offer or–

Navid: Yeah, that’s good. If you have to go on my main website at navidmoazzez.com and navid.me, it’s like no navigation right now and recently I did that was because I wanted to update quickly because I didn’t have time to do a full redesign.

Also I saw that Bryan Harris of videofruit.com, I liked his. Also Jeff Goins has been doing it mixer G, so I kind of looked what they were doing and I also looked at some other ones like Derrick Harper but I didn’t have the time to do a full redesign yet so we just decided to add—because I took new photos in New York, so we wanted to add that in there and I’m getting 50 – 60% conversion rate–

Stephen: That’s really good.

Navid: Yeah it’s pretty good. I just need to drive more traffic because I haven’t been blogging as much as I used to before because I’ve been working so much on creating and putting together my course and I’ve been travelling a bit.

But when I get back more to content marketing, getting featured like on podcasts like this one or bigger publications again like Business Insider, you know I’m going to be on Huffington Post very soon, so that’s just going to drive more people there and that’s when I’m going to see what the real benefit of just having a home page without navigation. Then I have some testimonial there for credibility and they can read my blog or go to my start here page or whatever I link up there.

I think it’s a great way to test it. At least have 2 versions of your home page, it’s always great to split test how things are working for you.

So that’s kind of my idea why I created this now. I’m also going to create a little bit longer form, like social triggers, you just update it. I like the way that looks.

Also Lewis Howes has a great home page was like that before it looks great. So Chris Ducker is also a great example of a very clean site.

[53:08] Stephen: Yeah. It looks awesome.

Navid: Yeah. He recently redesigned his site. Its amazing branding. I love what he’s doing with his brand and I think the guys sort of had the Rainmaker like StudioPress? I think they helped with that and they’re just brilliant.

Stephen: And I think another one which I really like is Charles Ngo. I think I saw you mention him in one of the posts as well. I love his blog design as well–

Navid: Yeah,

Stephen: And there are a lot of good looking ones out there.

Navid: He was inspired by me actually. Speaking like that, like a millionaire, like Charles Ngo is like big in affiliate marketing, he was inspired by my blog design and different sites and he let me know about it.

His site looks good and he has some amazing content on there as well. He’s a great guy, I’m really inspired, and I actually interviewed him twice.

Stephen: Yeah, same here. He was on the podcast not too long ago, so it’s interesting–

Navid: He shares crazy value.

[54:00] Stephen: Yeah, his value is awesome. I mean its funny how even in the affiliate world, which neither of us is really deep in; I think he’s in paid traffic affiliate.

So not sort of affiliate as in just recommending things but actually running $10,000 – $5,000 a day campaigns.

Navid: Right. Now he has a personal brand too and a crazy following there and he’s the authority in affiliate marketing but one of the people I follow, like Chris, I love reading his blog even though I’m not interested in the kind of affiliate marketing that he does.

Stephen: Yeah. I think it just shows how transparent you provide value. You just get such a big following regardless of what it is as long as you’re transparent.

I mean look at Gary Vaynerchuk, look at a lot of the other guys who are just so real and transparent in what they do and they just provide value and then people just flock to him. People love it.

Navid: Yeah, you’re consistent.

Stephen: Yeah, there you go. You took it out of my mouth. If you’re consistent with it was well, you just dominate.

So it’s interesting and there’s a lot going on in the industry. I think in the next 12 months, we’re going to see a shift, like the bar sort of gets higher and higher to how much you’ve got to put out, how quality your content has to be because otherwise, people spend time on the other blog who’s doing even more content and better interactions.

Navid: I completely agree. Like it’s all about in creating this epic content, building authentic powerful relationships with people before you actually need them.

Stephen: Yeah, exactly.

Navid: That was exactly the reason we succeeded so well with first my own summit, you know I did the Branding Summit and then the one I partnered up with Chandler with. People loved it.

We were so real with people. We wanted to help them out, we wanted to do a really amazing experience for them and that’s why people share things.

That’s why people share things with their audience and that’s how you grow and you help each other out. That’s the beauty of online space, it’s a small world.

Stephen: It is. It’s interesting how you can be anywhere, that’s the other thing as well. I mean a website you can do from your home, or the office, or from the beach.

So I think regardless of what you do, all you need these days is a selfie stick, a video on your phone and you can be the next internet marketing sensation creating that value. So it’s awesome.

Navid: Yeah, definitely.

[56:14] Stephen: Now thanks so much for jumping on the podcast today. I know we’ve gone past the hour mark so I think you’re one of the longest podcast episodes I’ve had which is fantastic.

I appreciate you coming on and sharing everything to do with the virtual summit world.

Navid: Yeah. For sure. I had a lot of fun and I hope your audience took away some great, valuable information here and let me know on Twitter at navidmoazzez if you listened to this show.

I’d be happy to chat with you some more if you’re interested in summits or just let me know about it there.

Stephen: Yeah, sounds good man. And then yeah. Head over to his website, we’ll link everything up in the show notes as well so you can find out how to reach Navid and go from there.

It’s been a pleasure having you on today and I’m sure we’ll all catch up and speak to you soon.

Navid: Sure. Thanks.