How I added £3.5K to my handmade business with an online summit
Image by Greta Hoffman
How i added £3.5k in revenue to my handmade business in 3 days and 1500 folk to my email list while staying pretty firmly on my sofa and trying not to melt in the UK heatwave - AND whilst also helping 10 other artists to make money and grow their email lists too - I know it sounds like clickbait, and it did take alot more than 3 days to implement but it’s honestly true - get the debrief here.
The Paper People Debrief
I’m all about experimenting and trying to find new revenue streams to bring in to my handmade business and this was a great experiment. I’ve never done anything like it before but I wanted to share the results and the realities of it in case it might be something you want to explore for your own handmade business
So what was I trying to acheive with my online summit
In the online business world, online summits are everywhere - every week my inbox has free summits for me to join to learn more about online marketing, selling with email, growing a membership and a million other things- they’ve been around for a while and are mostly for business to business folk but I don’t see them so often for businessses who sell directly to customers and even less often do I see them for handmade businesses so…. I took up the challenge. summits are seen as one of the best ways to grow an email list and get in front of a new audience online - growing my email list is indeed one of my goals this year so this seemed perfect. online summits can also be a way to add extra revenue to your business and that is always everyone’s goal right?
“Paper People, added £3.5K in revenue and £1.7K in profit to my handmade business. I’ll definitely do it again, with tweaks to make it more profitable. ”
How do online summits work and how do they make money?
To host a summit, you gather together a group of experts on your chosen topic and ask them to collaborate with you on the summit - they each run a workshop [can be live but pre recorded is more common and easier to handle] on their particular area of expertise within that topic.
They also have a freebie that they can pitch at the end of the workshop to get email signups. The summit is free to attend with workshop replays available for 24-48 hours.
There is usually an option to upgrade a free ticket to a paid ticket for ongoing access to the replays and a bank of extra resources and workshops that your speakers have also put up. If you run an online summit for your handmade business, what are the benefits for everyone involved?
The attendees get an amazing free few days of masterclasses on a topic that interests them. [many of them will opt to upgrade their ticket to get access to the extra resources and extended replays ]
The speakers get new subscribers on their email list who are actively interested in what they are talking about so they can go on to make sales of other workshops/courses/memberships they already offer— it is also common practice to give your speakers an affiliate commission for any sales of the upgraded ticket that come from their audience. so they too can earn income [ you can also pay your speakers a fee ]
* A note on asking other business owners for things for free - This is really important to me becuase we’ve all been asked to give stuff for free by other businesses and far too often the ‘collab’ is one sided in their favour - this is absolutely NOT asking for free stuff because it will be ‘good exposure’ You need to plan your topics, speakers and marketing carefully but when done well, this really is a win win for both you AND your tutors - i cannot stress enough how important it was to me, to make it easy for the tutors to earn money from upgrade pass sales and to carefully curate and market the event so that my tutors would add aligned email subscribers to their list.
You get new email subscribers from each person that registers for the summit and income from the upgraded ticket sales. A well designed and organised summit is a win win for everyone - if you yourself teach online or have a relevant offer to sell you can also tag on a launch of that offer to supercharge it off the back of the summit. The collective effort of the host and the tutors usually takes care of the marketing [although marketing was not mandatory for the tutors, there is an incentive for them to do so in order to earn affiliate commission ] - I also ran meta ads to get more people in.
So how and why did I choose the theme for my online summit?
If you teach your craft on line yourself, then choosing a topic aligned with your offers makes total sense.
I don’t do a whole lot of teaching online so I chose a slightly different tack. I sell notebooks, sketchbooks and stationery so I want folk on my list who are likely to want to buy those.
The theme for my event was ‘Paper People’
A gentle creative online retreat for people who want to slow down reconnect with creative activities and bring small acts of paper based creativity into your everyday life
We’ll be dipping our toe in to writing, drawing, sketching, mark making, calligraphy, poetry and journaling
I wanted workshops to be based around anything that my customers might do in their notebooks, journals and sketchbooks so that I would be attracting the right folk for my handmade business.
How on earth did I pull this all together?
So.. I didn’t make this concept up and I didn’t go in to it with no idea of how to do it - for years now I’ve been following Krista Miller - founder of Summit in a box [aff link] - Summit in a box is an amazing program that takes away a huge amount of thinking around the logistics of when and how to action all the many moving parts that there are to running a summit.
The thing I absolutely loved the most was the timeline generator - Tell this tool the date of your summit and it will generate a calendar for you with every single task that you need to complete to run a successful summit - all the tasks are also linked to Krista’s brilliant trainings and templates so you really are set up for success if you just follow along.
As a busy woman running 2 businesses already this was non negotiable - I knew that I wanted to run a summit but it’s a lot of work and so I also knew that I didn’t want to run a summit witihout using the Summit in a box framework. so that a huge part of the logistical thinking was taken care of - leaving my head space to dream up and create a wonderful experience for my attendees and my tutors.
Image by Arina Krasnikova
So… How did it go? what was the event like?
I will admit i was so nervous - can I pull this off? can i put on a good online event? [ i have experience of running handmade markets but this is a different kettle of fish] can i get a whole bunch of tutors who don’t know me to trust me with their valuable time and resources. and super crucially - can I deliver them results that mean it was worth their while taking part?
I went small for my first time so I gathered 10 tutors [I actually gathered more but 3 pulled out pretty close to the event which was a little hair raising but the amazing tutors I had, rallied round and we put on a couple of live sessions too to give a good schedule]
What happened during the event?
I had an amazing time during the event - honestly I thought that I wouldn’t be that glued to my laptop since all the hard work of getting the workshops live, the marketing and getting people signed up had largely been done but boy oh boy - I was glued to my lapt top the whole day [ok I prolly didn’t really need to be but i was loving interacting in the facebook communitiy group with the attendees and the tutors]
I was also answering support tickets, making sure the workshops went live when they were supposed to and keeping an eye on my meta ads.
What did the folk who attended the event think?
The feedback from the attendees was wonderful. the Facebook group was alive with convos, folk sharing their work and many of the tutors were also in there supporting them and having fun too - on each workshop page there was an opportunity to leave a love note for the tutor so you could let them know what you thought of the workshhop - these were amazing!! hundreds of love notes came through and I loved collating them in to a beautiful document for each tutor so they could see the feedback for themselves.
And the tutors?
Feedback from tutors was also great [and this was the feedback I was most nervous about] - many added 150-200 subscribers to their email lists and sold other offers that weekend too directly from having those new folk land in their world.
They truly were a wonderful bunch of humans and I really enjoyed working with them. some tutors were completely new to this kind of event and totally reinvented or created freebies and email flows so that they could make the best opportunity of being in front of so many new people.
I felt so proud of those tutors - they pushed themselves past stuff they’d been procrastinating on and had amazing results. They also earned money from selling the upgraded ticket - I wanted to be super generous so gave them all 50% commission. betweeen them they earned £820 in commission with the highest earner at £226
Shelley Skail’s workshop for the event
Results
How many - how much did i take? did I increase my email list?
So…. drumroll please- for my first ever online event I had
1505 folk register to attend my free summit and sold
106 upgraded tickets
Which was a total revenue of £3.5k
email subscribers - So i obviously added 1505 new folk to my email list [although I’ll be careful about segmenting and cleaning my email list as not all will be perfect customers for my handmade business. ] that’s a result I’m super chuffed with.
social followers - I gained a modest increase of 170 followers although that wasnt’ a focus so I wasn’t particularly directing folk to follow on my socials.
How much money did the event actually make?
Revenue £.35K
Costs [including affilate commission] £1636
Profit £1750
Costs included - website hosting, video hosting, upgrading my email plan, meta ads, affiliate commission, tutor gifts and payment processing fees.
These costs should have been much lower but I forgot to switch my website plan to get lower payment processsing fees [DOH!!!] so that’s annoying! I also could have chosen to gift my tutors something that didn’t need £120 postage bill as a thankyou - or not send them a gift at all but that’s deffo not how I roll.
What would I do differently?
~ Well, I’d deffo switch my plan sooner to get lower payment processing fees
~ I’d gather more tutors to begin with to allow for anyone that may fall away.
~ I’d approach tutors sooner - I knew i needed to do this but imposter syndrome meant that I procrastinated this a good 2 weeks longer that I should have done
~ I’d make it a little bit bigger for my second event - either by adding on a day, or adding 1-2 more sessions each day
~ I’d change up some of the sytems that I know were affecting the conversion rate of my upgrade ticket sales.
£3.5K is not huge for an online summit - I deliberately went small with a view to grow - so really looking forward to see what I can do next time :)
And should you do it?
I thoroughly enjoyed hosting this event and will deffo do it again next year with a few tweaks. It acheived my goals of increasing my email list AND bringing in a new stream of income in to my handmade business.
If you teach a lot on line then it deffo would be great fit for you because not only will you be able to bring in revenue from the event but you’ll have hundreds of new email subscribers who are specifically interested in what you teach so will make sales from your other offers naturally - you can also use an event like this to supercharge a launch of one of your offers. Just make sure that the tutors you invite teach topics that are adjacent to what you do - not the same thing exactly - you need a collaborative spirit for this, not competittion.
Choose the theme, tutors and marketing carefully for your event - this is the most important part and ditctates the success for everyone. Think about your ideal customer for your handmade business and choose a theme that they will find valuable but that also makes sense as an introduction to your handmade business, or your teaching
Check out Krista Miller [aff link] She has lots of free and low cost resources to help you - she knows everything there is to know about running a successful summit including tonnes of advice on how to pick a good theme. And I would highly recommend joining her Summit In a Box course - It drastically reduces the mental load and once you’ve done it once, you can rinse and repeat every year or even more often, knowing that most of the work is already done.
I’ll be doing it again. Will you be giving this a go? Let me know… email me at michaela@handmadebizclub.co.uk and let me know your thoughts or if you have questions
Warmest
Michaela
