Generally, the organizer will contact 10 to 20 experts in a certain field to speak on a common topic. The tele-summit is marketed to potential customers in a really smart way. Many of these events allow you to sign up for the event for free, under the condition that you have to phone in and listen to the live calls. Of course, over the course of a three- or four-day tele-summit, most people will not have time to listen to 20 or so one-hour phone calls. At this point, they are usually offered an upgrade. Either on the sales page, or after they sign up for the free access, a gold or platinum or another fancy metal name will show up to offer an upgrade to various packages.

These upgrades vary. One option would be access to the MP3 recordings of all the sessions. Another upgrade can be PDF transcripts of all the sessions. The top-level upgrade would be getting all MP3 recordings, PDF transcripts, and everything on CD and a printed binder. I actually really like this method. It allows you to give content away for free but also allows you to make some revenue for people who want to digest the information on their own time. If you end up wanting to run your own tele-summit, which is something you can put together once you build relationships with other experts in your industry, this would be the best way you could sell it.

Bringing in great speakers is the most important part of creating a great tele-summit. When you are organizing one, you need to think of the value points you offer to speakers. In a tele-summit, one of the selling points to speakers is that they can do the talk from anywhere that they like—they don’t even have to leave home. It’s a pretty good deal—calling in for an hour they do their little talk and become aligned with other experts in the field in this great project. This is also true for many of the conferences out there where speakers are asked to contribute for free in exchange for exposure and the ability to potentially pitch something at the end of their talk. Some will also include the always wonderful incentive of earning a commission for every person the speaker refers to the event.

Even though the medium has changed from in-person to virtual, most of these seminars fall into the same problems as live ones. Lack of great content, too much pitching, and content where the person sounds like a robot reading a script all happen in tele-summits and seminars as often as they do at live events. The difference with online events is that here, unlike in live events where there are costs to rent venues and travel, the organizer now inherits almost no risk when running the event. Short of having to put up a web page ad and the time to organize speakers for the event, there is little to no risk to the advertiser.

This is further complicated by the low barrier to entry to running one of these things—really anyone can do it. Many of the organizers are using the mentality of the in-person event, bringing in many speakers, taking a percentage of sales, and making speakers promote it.

To demonstrate these expectations by organizers and how speakers can be treated, I would like to share with you an experience I had. I recently got an e-mail from the organizer of a tele-summit that I had agreed to be a part of. The e-mail felt underhanded. Here is a part of it:

As you can probably tell, I blew a gasket about this one. They are pretty much saying, “Hey, we’ve been doing all the work here, you need to pull up your socks and start promoting. You are asked to speak at this because you have a lot of followers on Twitter and a big mailing list; we expect you to make sales.”

My reply to the organizers stated my disappointment with the e-mail, and the sentiment kindly expressed my feelings toward speaking at their event. In their further reply they mentioned I may have misinterpreted what they had written, so apparently it was my fault again. This was the last tele-summit I ever agreed to be on. I used to think it was a compliment to be asked to be on somebody’s seminar but sadly I realized that these events are a dime a dozen and most organizers are hunting for the sales that I can generate. I will still do them from time to time but only for people I know, trust, and like. You see how that comes back again? Know. Trust. Like.