In this episode, guest Liam Austin shares his 5 secrets to why and how you should host a virtual event: • Build your email list and audience (he’s built his audience to 100,000 subscribers!) • Make an impact on the world • Generate profit and revenue • Build a network of influencers • Increase your own creditability and authority
In this episode, guest Liam Austin shares his 5 secrets to why and how you should host a virtual event:
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Imagine, if you had a way to add thousands of new potential students to your email list, you could also connect with the best experts in your space, and you could get the blueprint for exactly how to make all this happen. Well, that's, what's on today's show. Our expert will explain exactly how you can do all of that with your own virtual Event.
Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood. So welcome everybody. I am so excited that you could be here with us today, and we have a very special guest. Liam Austin is here with us to talk all about virtual events and it's one of the very best ways for us to build communities and get in front of the audience that we're trying to get in front of for our future students.
And he has actually hosted 15 virtual summits since 2015. So I know he's going to be fantastic for us. And before we start though, I want to make sure I tell you about the really fantastic free report and blueprint that he's giving away for us. It's called the virtual event blueprint, and you can get that coursecreatorshq.com/12. That will be in the episode notes ccoursecreatorshq.com/12,
and grab the virtual event blueprint. So welcome, Liam, thank you for doing this today and maybe start by telling us what exactly is a virtual event. Yeah, thanks for having me, Julie. So yeah, a virtual event can come in many different forms and shapes, but remember these in-person events that we used to have. We used to go and meet people and network and learn and go to presentations or keynote speeches as well.
That can be a whole hell of now online. So different types of virtual events could be, I mean, we talked about summits, I've hosted over 15 multi-day virtual summits, but also I've done many workshops, seminars, conferences, and many other types of virtual events. Pretty much anything that you could do offline with an event you can host now online,
which is great. Obviously it's a little bit more of a different experience there. It's a little less tactile, right? We've got video, we've got audio, but we can't really necessarily shake anyone's hand. So a virtual event can be one host. For instance, it could be you as the host broadcasting out to your audience, you could have an invited guest speaker where you're interviewing them and there's many different other styles of sessions you could hold as part of your event.
Maybe it's a multi session event multi-day event. So there could be there that training session, a live Q and a panel discussion, a workshop, breakout rooms, presentations, case studies. I mean the list is really endless. I've got my own list of over a hundred different session styles that you can put really your virtual events, A hundred different ways.
Okay. I didn't know there were that many. That's fantastic. So there's lots of different ways we can put this into play to kind of get in front of potential students. Yeah, that's right. And for me it's like, well, virtual events, super powerful, and it's the way that I've enabled to grow my business, live my dream lifestyle,
like I'm Australian and probably tell them about my accent, but my partner, Sarah, who I started the business with she's Swedish. And we started our business because we wanted to generate online income. We wanted to be financially free. We wanted to be location independent. So we could live in, in Sweden or Australia to visit both our families.
Right now, I live in Malta, which is in Europe a little bit warmer than Sweden. I like being near the water and having warm weather. So, so for that, it's just really, you know, been such a high-impact strategy that I've been able to run multiple times in all these different shapes and forms to grow my audience, reach people with my message,
generate, you know, income online and, and live where I want, which is why like I'm sharing this blueprint and why we're talking today, because I just believe with what's happening now. And more and more people realizing that virtual events work, they get great results, even better results than in-person events for multiple reasons, which we can talk about in a moment.
And I want more people to benefit from my system and my virtual event blueprint. Fantastic. Now I know you were telling me ahead of time, there's kind of five different things that you really see as benefits for doing these kinds of virtual events. So maybe you can share some of those with us. Yeah, absolutely. So I always like to think of w w we'll ask asking yourself why.
And so I always ask our clients, well, what is your end goal? Why are you running this virtual event? What is it to achieve? And a lot of the time it's maybe a financial goal or it's creating an impact or reaching more people. But what is that end goal? A lot of our clients sell online courses, coaching programs or one-on-one services,
and then they want to sell more of their, their products and their offerings. So we go, okay, well, let's reverse engineer that funnel to design what type of virtual event would work best for you? What topic, what session styles, whether you invite speakers on or not, right? How many days, the length, all that kind of thing.
And as we're, we're designing our virtual event, taking them on a journey to ultimately want to purchase our high ticket offer on the backend. There's, there's some decisions that need to be made. And, and for me, it's really well, there's five kind of secret benefits of a virtual event that you can maximize and leverage depending on what your end goal is.
So those five I'll go through them quickly, and then I can dive into them if you've got any questions, but those five are building your email list and audience making an impact on the world. Number two, number three is generating profit and revenue building a network of influencers. Number four. And number five is just increasing your own credibility and authority with your ideal clients.
Fantastic. Okay. So the first one really excites me about building an email list. So tell us how that works, kind of, what do we need to be doing and thinking about to make that really work well? Cause I know cause you've had that work really well for you, right? Yeah. I've added over a hundred thousand people to my email list to introduce them to my world via purely virtual events.
My first series might be my first 10 events all had like over 10,000 people attending them since then I've looked at narrowing and niching and going more specific like geographically. I hosted an event recently purely for the Australian marketplace, which is a little bit smaller than this worldwide market. I can reach with my, with your virtual events, right? You can reach anyone wherever they are in the world.
But I really targeted geographically, which meant it was a little bit smaller and it was a more of a niche topic as well. So, so a hundred thousand people have come into my world and got to know like, and trust me via attending my virtual events. So they're not just opting in for some, you know, PDF download, but it's actually,
they're coming, signing up for an event, spending time with me, right. Getting to know like, and trust me. And that's where that credibility kind of comes in as well. So this is where the secrets start revealing themselves as you are creating and I always talk about a high impact high profit virtual event because that's what we want to create high impact high profit virtual event.
And that's what also the, the blueprint is about focusing on that high impact and high profits. So yes, a hundred thousand people into my email list across over 15 virtual summits and many other smaller types of events, workshops, and seminars. But I've also done this for my clients as well, where we've done these big events. One of my clients,
Carl, he did over a hundred thousand people at his virtual event this year. Super, super cool. So congrats to him. He's in, he runs the migraine world summit. So helping migraine sufferers to live and, and, you know, improve their, their life with their struggles with, with migraine. But also we work with some higher end clients who only need maybe a few hundred people at their event in the room to generate tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars from that one event.
So yeah, in terms of reach virtual events are awesome because you can reach anyone wherever they are in the world, your ideal customers, and then yeah. Bring them into your world and take them on the journey with you. Fantastic. So you were also talking about building a network of influencers. So tell me a little bit about how that works when we're doing a virtual event.
How, how do we get in front of the right people or get connected with the right people? Absolutely. So for me, there's, there's different types of events. You can obviously run, right? You can host events, purely just you teaching your audience, or you can invite team members, maybe a co-founder to come in. So it's still,
again, it's still in your internal team, but you can invite external guests to come on board. And this is where you're growing your network of influencers in your niche. You're building relationships with these key influences who, you know, are in your marketplace that you can partner with, you can discuss and grow your businesses together. And my favorite thing about virtual events is bringing on board partners to be involved and collaborate with me on my virtual events and my clients events because yeah,
a rising tide lifts all boats, right? And you can invite them to be several different types of partners for your event. They could be a speaker. They could be a sponsor, a media partner and affiliate, and even potentially your attendees looking at just asking them to invite their friends, family along to your event. So you're really leveraging your, your network,
everyone that you can have involved in this event to share the word, promote the event and their involvement at the event, whether they're a speaker sponsor at attendee. So do you have any secrets you could tell us about how to get really high end speakers, the ones that you, you know, those ones that you'd love to have on your event? Is there,
is there any secrets you can give us? Yeah, I think it's just the, the end goal with, you know, bringing on other speakers maybe you want to build relationships with them? So it does start with the relationship. If you can, if you have relationships, existing relationships with influencers in your market, so easy to invite them onto your stage in front of your audience,
to be part of this event that you're putting on and helping your similar audiences cause you're in the same market. So that's the easy low-hanging fruit. But if you need to reach out to someone that maybe you've always wanted to reach out, maybe a little bit more famous or has a famous big name and a big player in your market, then, well,
how do I reach out to them? And again, it's about building relationships. So do I know anyone currently that is maybe connected with them? So I look on LinkedIn and see this person, are they connected with any of my friends, colleagues acquaintances that can maybe provide an introduction to this person. If I can't get an introduction, then let's go into their world and let's see what's,
what's important to them. What are they working on? What's the big projects they're doing. Maybe it's just like, they've posted a blog post. And you know, you know, when you write a blog post and no one comments on the back of it, or you get no feedback, it's kind of horrible, right? So why not give them some feedback,
just like write a comment to reply to their posts. It could be blog posts, LinkedIn posts, a Facebook group posts. And then maybe as part of that posted really give some valuable feedback. Don't just say, oh great post mate, go a little bit deeper and really talk about maybe what you learned from that post and how it impacted you and what you're going to go and do about it.
Maybe ask a question, get them to reply, start having a conversation, right. And that's all about building that relationship with them. So that's the ideal way that maybe it's a bit slow and it's not the quickest way to do it. You can, but it's the most successful and more high conversion rates. If you go down that track, otherwise you can just send out a cold email and it could be email,
or it could be a cold message via LinkedIn or Facebook where you're again, inviting them to speak on your stage, to be, to collaborate with you and partner with you on your event, that's helping your market and it's their market as well. And just seeing if they're interested in being involved and starting the discussion there, and that's worked really well for us in,
in bringing on board some key speakers for our event, we've had over 400 speakers speak at virtual events. Wow. That's impressive. So I know you also mentioned that it can help with revenue and getting more sales. So is there a trick to kind of doing that conversion from whatever your event is to getting people to sign up? Do you have some ideas for us for that?
Yeah. I always like to look at a tiered offering. So the first tier, I always suggest and not, or not always, but 99% of the time to have a free tier. And it might be just one session at your event that's free or maybe all of the sessions are free, but only for a limited time. And that's so you can increase your reach and build your email list as well.
So you've got that free tier then. Okay. Well, how are we going to make money? We can't just offer these free tier. So next we have our low ticket offer, which may be priced anywhere from $17 to $99, somewhere in that range, depending on your marketplace. And this is where you're, you're giving more access. So rather than just one session,
they get access to with the free ticket, they get access to all sessions with this paid pass, or rather than limited time, they get lifetime access to all the sessions. Maybe there's a, if they purchase upgrade, maybe there's one special session, that's a private networking guest discussion panel discussion, whatever it might be presentation, right? A keynote speaker.
So you can pay to upgrade to be part of that VIP experience. So there's those low ticket offers. And then you've got your high ticket offer, which for our clients, we like to look at ideally being two and a half thousand dollars or more. And it could be, you know, an online course, a coaching program, maybe a 12 month coaching program where you're looking at 10,000,
$50,000, or even more than that, depending on you know, your credibility in your marketplace and your ability to charge that amount. And then, okay, so we've got our virtual event, we've got our high ticket offer on the backend. We've got our low ticket offer that we're selling prevent and during events for that VIP experience. And we're trying to get as many people to purchase that lower ticket offer so we can get them into our high ticket offerings.
So, and that's really our end goal for many of our clients is to sell their, you know, coaching program one-on-one services or online course membership, SAS subscription product, whatever it might be. Right. So we just want to get and identify those buyers within the event, nurture them through the events. They get a great experience to get to know like,
and trust us. They now see us as the expert and authority in the industry. We have credibility with them. They now love us because they've spent time with us during the event and they want to spend and continue spending more time with us and go deeper into this topic and work on this topic specifically to get even more results. So that's where that,
that end author is positioned there. And that that end offer really comes towards the end of your event. And it could be either one of the last sessions of the event that's produced live, or it could be where we bring people onto a phone call to actually sell them this higher price to program. Oh, I gotcha. So it may not be offered to everyone who attends it.
You could do it individually with having them more, doing a call With you. Yeah, definitely. I mean, when, when you're in person, right? Like if you're sitting down somewhere and having a coffee, you're more likely to close that person. Then you would say someone who just received an email from you, right. It's probably just going to go trash bin,
like spam or whatever. All right. So the more personal relationship you can have with, you know, all these people we've talked about before this person, specifically your ideal clients, you're going to be more likely to convert them into a paying client so you can get them on the phone on zoom, have a video conversation. You can see their face,
see their mannerisms, see where they may be hesitating. So you can address any concerns and help overcome those objections to bring them on board as one of your clients. But there's, there's a multitude of ways of, of selling just depending what you're selling. It could be via a webinar, a masterclass, a phone call, even, even its own event.
There could be a specific event that's purely about enrolling clients into, into your programs. So there's many ways to pull this together, many different types of events, but it just really it's about that end goal and then reverse engineering, the funnel to decide what event is going to work best for you. So if I've got my course creators and they're trying to figure out how to get started,
first of all, I want them to get your blueprint because that'll help lay out the pieces for them. But what would you suggest is kind of the easiest way to get started? The kind of the first way to jump into the pool and do some kind of event, do you have a certain type that you think is a good place to get started, good way to get going?
Yeah. Yeah. I think, well, you know, of course creators, you're probably creating videos already. Right. Would that be actually, yeah. So, okay, cool. So creating videos, maybe comfortable in front of the camera. So that's pretty easy, right? Maybe you're doing webinars already webinar. You can think of as a small virtual event,
right? It's a 9/10 minute event, but perhaps you want to, you know, grow that a little bit more. So maybe it comes into a three session event where you're taking people through a little bit of a journey, a three session event, maybe across the three days, or maybe it's a afternoon workshop for three hours where you're positioning,
maybe the offer two thirds of the way through welcoming some people in during that last third of the event, and then bringing people into, into your world and into your program from there. So, I mean, where, where do you start? If you're comfortable with events, maybe a bigger, longer multi-day event is for you. And I, I kind of look at it at two different ways.
Like if you're selling this online course, you know, people want to experience what you are like as a teacher, what you are like to learn from. So absolutely you want to be doing some specific presentations or master classes during that event. So they get the experience of working with you. Absolutely look at potentially doing a training session, doing a workshop,
doing a breakout rooms and a live Q and a at the end of that. So that could be, just say like a 12 hour session broken up into four 30 minute sessions. Again, selling that high ticket offer off the backend could be a paid event, could be a free event where that the free tier is maybe just the first session, but they don't get access to the workshop,
the, the breakout rooms or the, the live Q and A. So you can play this around. That's probably the quickest and easiest way to get started with maybe a two hour event that's structured like that. Or if you want to really build your email list, reach more people, then invite partners to collaborate with you on your event, bring on board.
Yeah, your speakers sponsors media affiliates to help promote the event and make it into a gala or an expo, a real party for your marketplace know that it is the biggest event virtual event that's happening this year in your marketplace. And people will have that fear of missing out. And that's what the, those big virtual summits or conferences and do really well at because there's 30 speakers all under one roof.
It's across three or five days, and there's a free ticket being offered. It's almost a no brainer for me to, just as an ideal client to, yep I want to grab that ticket, put my name and email address in, and I've got free access to this event. So automatically then we're looking at 65 to, to sorry, 60 to 75% opt in rate.
Seriously. That's fantastic to get that high. Yeah. When, when you creating like a high impact virtual event, it becomes really attractive for clients when you position it and positioning in such a way that it becomes a no brainer to exchange an email address, to get access to this conference. That normally, if I had to go there in person, I'll be paying for flights,
hotel, accommodation, like the taxi, the travel food time away from my friends and family, sleeping in another bed. Without my pillow? Yeah, bring maybe your pillow or your favorite Teddy bear with you. But like now you don't have to worry about packing those things, right? You can do it all virtually. So there's a lot less friction for people to just enter name and email address,
to attend this virtual event that's seen as high impact high value for them. I love it. Well, and I have to say, I I'm positive. I found you through one of your virtual events, one of your partners promoted it and I signed up and, and you're right. You have, because you had done so many of these and I'd gotten to listen to you over and over again,
that built such a level of credibility and expertise in this. I knew you were the right person to help share this with the course creators audience. So I know I want to make sure they get the blueprint from you. That's at coursecreatorshq.com/12, to get that from the notes. And what else would you say is kind of a last suggestion last hurrah?
You know, if we're, if we're really thinking about adding this in the next few months, what would be the best thing that we should think about doing? Yeah, sure. So everyone's probably attended a virtual event now. Probably people have a bit of zoom fatigue, like, oh, not another virtual event and yeah, it's, it's real, right?
Like it's so many mistakes I'm seeing, being made by people who were just throwing together virtual events without a really strong foundational strategy. And it begins with that end goal, which we've talked about. So really decide, okay, well, what is my ultimate end goal? Why am I creating these business? Or what is the lifestyle, the dream lifestyle dream business that I want to create from this,
that's the kind of the ultimate goal then. Okay. I'm creating this event where it helped me achieve my ultimate goal. Okay. So yes, potentially it will, if it achieves this. So what is that end goal for your event? You know, What are some examples, if you can give people like specific examples, they can pick kind of what their goal would be.
Yeah. So your ultimate end goal would be like financial freedom and traveling the world, living your dream lifestyle, business, drinking, you know, coconuts on the beaches of Thailand, for instance. And that's your ultimate end goal, which may be a few years away or potentially with the right virtual event. I mean, for me, my first virtual event allowed me to go and literally drink coconuts in Thailand with Sarah.
So yeah. So after that first virtual event, I did make $50,000, just from the low ticket offer, serious about $97. We sold over 500 of those low ticket offers and we didn't even have our high ticket offer. So this is where I learned at painful mistake, myself, where like we should've had a high ticket offer and we would've been still,
maybe lying on the beach in Thailand drinking coconuts, right. Because we didn't have those three tiers. So, so what is the golfer, the end of your event for us? It was just like, we need to make, we had a goal for ourselves. I think it was around $20,000 that we wanted to create so that Sarah didn't have to go out and find a job and didn't have to move back to Sweden and then I'd have to decide,
well, do I leave Australia or my family? What, what do I do? So it was a really big thing for us to hit that $20,000 goal. That was our end goal for out event. And we had, you know, three months to, to hit that goal. So to prepare the event to achieve $20,000 in, in profit, luckily we,
we made over $50,000. That was great. But I think if, if you want an idea for it, it should be like, okay, I've got a high ticket offer. Maybe it's a $10,000, a group coaching program, 12 month group coaching program that you're selling at the end of the event. It's $10,000. I'd love to be able to sell five of these five of these at the end of my event.
So let's design the event to sell your 12 month group coaching program. So what needs to go into this event? What type of event does it need to be? What's your share worthy topic idea, which I share in the blueprint, how to find that out, what type of event you should be choosing what's session styles. You should be deciding to get those five sales of your $10,000,
12 month group coaching program. Cool. All right. So everyone's going to grab that and I want to thank you so much for taking the time out to share all this knowledge with us, because you have definitely mastered what it takes to do these virtual events. And so thank you so much, Liam. I really, really appreciate you doing this for us today.
No worries. I'm just excited about bringing more impactful high-impact high-profit virtual events to the world. So thanks for, thanks for bringing me on Julie to help me. I do that. So I really Hope you learned a lot from this episode and from Liam and your quick win for this episode is to go grab his blueprint. There is a, an entire section about the technology around hosting a virtual event.
He also gives you the exact five steps that you need to go through to put your event together, and then make sure you look at page 19, whether he talks about whether or not this is a really good strategy for you to be using. So just go to coursecreatorshq.com/12 that's coursecreatorshq.com/12. And you can grab the copy of the blueprint.
Thank you so much for listening and I can't wait to connect with you again next week. Take care.