🔠WTF is up with Summits? (& Why I’m Hosting One This Week)
Hello, and welcome to Off The Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And on this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for starting, running, and growing a creative online business without relying on big tech. We are currently in season nine of the show. We passed a 150 episodes recently, so there is so much to explore on this podcast.
Amelia Hruby:And if you're new around here, I would love to point you to the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit, which is a resource that includes the three tools that helped me leave social media and start my business without it. They are a five step plan for leaving any social platform, my list of 100 ways to share your work and life without social media, and a creative marketing ideas database that you can use to plan seasonal marketing experiments. You can get all of that totally for free at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. It's linked in the show notes of every single episode, and I hope that you will go get it because it's a great accompaniment to this show. In today's episode, I am doing one of my very favorite things that I don't get to do all that often, which is I am answering a listener question.
Amelia Hruby:I got an email earlier this spring from the wonderful doctor Kate Henry. Kate is an academically trained productivity coach and independent scholar, and she's also a client of Softer Sounds. We produce her podcast Honing In, which I highly recommend if you're someone who enjoys creative projects and wants to hear about how people from all mediums and walks of life relate to and organize their projects. Honing in is fantastic, and I think I was also the most recent guest on the show, at least when this is coming out. Kate and I recorded a great conversation about my twenty twenty six softer sound sabbatical and what that's meant, what's happened, what's not happened.
Amelia Hruby:So if you wanna hear that, head over and listen to Honing In with Doctor. Kate Henry. And for now, let me read you her question, and then we're gonna get into this episode all about summits. Here's what Kate wrote. Over the last couple years, I've been pitched multiple times by folks who are running an event where they're asking many speakers to contribute free labor to run a lesson and contribute a resource that folks can pay extra to access.
Amelia Hruby:The first time someone asked me to do this years ago, I was flattered. But it quickly started to feel sketchy and MLME to me. Like they're funneling a ton of emails into the list of the person who is leading the summit. And if any payment is offered to me, it's through an affiliate link where people would have to pay to upgrade. I'm so protective of my audience that I very rarely say yes to these things.
Amelia Hruby:How do we know what's a legit ask to collaborate and when it's sketchy or scammy? How does it affect our mailing list to do things like this just to get sign ups? And is it worth it? Are there good examples of this kind of thing being done? Is it predatory for folks who are new to business?
Amelia Hruby:I have lots of questions and would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks to Kate for this beautiful question. And as I told her when she sent it my way, it is perfectly on time because you, dear listener, may have noticed that I am in fact hosting a summit this month, and it starts this Friday or two days from when this episode releases. So I've been thinking a lot about summits. So in this episode, I am going to talk to you about what Summits are, what is the model here.
Amelia Hruby:Then I will break down some of the other marketing strategies that get added on top of Summits that can lead to some of those weird feelings we have about them. I have some thoughts on if or why summits are sketchy, and I'll share a bit about the summits I've participated in, as well as the summit I'm hosting with amazing interweb members that starts this Friday. So I will also say upfront that if you would like to join our free twenty twenty six astrology and business planning summit, you can sign up for that right now. It is happening April. On the seventeenth, there are four workshops on astrology, creativity, and small business.
Amelia Hruby:And then on the twenty fourth, we have a panel on intuitive integrity, and I'm leading a workshop on spring biz planning. Throughout this episode, I will talk a little bit about how I designed the summit to not fall into any of the traps that I see when summits sometimes get sketchy. I've been really thoughtful in how it's set up. We have amazing people from the off the grid community. All of them are in the interweb who are participating, whose work I am promoting through the summit.
Amelia Hruby:And we also have a wonderful sponsor, Lauren at Nine Two Kind Planners. She's created a discount code for off the grid listeners, so you can head to the show notes to grab that as well. And people who RSVP for the summit even get a free gift from nine to kind. So full transparency, this episode is happening because I'm hosting a summit and because Kate asked me this great question before she even knew I was hosting a summit. We love a synchronicity here at Off The Grid.
Amelia Hruby:So let's dive in, shall we? We'll start with what even is a summit. Let me tell you what the summit model is in case you've never heard of this before. On the most fundamental level, a summit is a virtual conference. Or at least when people talk about hosting a summit in the online business, creative business, small business space, they're typically talking about a certain type of virtual conference.
Amelia Hruby:When you host a summit, you pick a topic that it's gonna be about, you gather speakers by invitation or application, you create a sign up page for attendees, and then you host the event. And some summits happen live and synchronously while others are asynchronous. So sometimes there are summits where it's like, here's the day it's happening. The workshops or sessions are at these times. Come join us.
Amelia Hruby:Other summits prerecord all the material, and then over the days of the summit, they send out those recordings. Typically, it's something like, here are the three interviews you can hear on Tuesday. Here are the three for Wednesday, etcetera, etcetera. Sometimes summits will have a ongoing community aspect like a Slack or a Discord server, but sometimes they won't. It really depends on the summit and what the organizer chooses.
Amelia Hruby:But overall, just think virtual conference. Just think a gathering where people are teaching and sharing, and you can come for free most often. Most summits are free, but then they have these paid upgrades that Kate mentioned. So with that very basic summit model, often there are other marketing strategies added on top of it. So let me tell you about a few of those that I see often.
Amelia Hruby:The first is audience growth through cross promotion. Often when someone's hosting a summit, what they wanna do is grow their email list by getting all of the guest speakers at the summit to share the summit with their audiences. Right? This is how cross promotion works. You share someone else's thing with your audience or they share your thing with their audience.
Amelia Hruby:So in the case of a summit, it gathers a lot of speakers and then asks them to share the summit with their audiences, and that often then grows the audience, typically the email list. When I say audience, I mean email list here of the summit organizer. Now, in essence, I love cross promotion. I teach an entire program on cross promotion inside the interweb because I think it's a really great way to share your work and grow your audience without social media. But when it comes to summits, I see two common issues with the way cross promotion happens.
Amelia Hruby:The first is that with some summits, speakers are required to share the event a certain number of times and ways. So often if you get invited to do a summit, you might have to sign a speaker contract that says you will send two solo emails to your list about this summit. And what solo email means is two emails that are only about the summit. And often they'll specify between these dates or it has to include these things. And for me, I have never found that to be exactly aligned with my email strategy.
Amelia Hruby:I typically don't send enough emails to feel like I can fit two extra emails just about the summit into the few weeks of promotional time for that. So I've never really liked how specific the promotional requirements are for summits. Again, not all summits do this, but I do see it often. And it has been the case in a few of the summits I've been invited to. The second thing I don't love about how cross promotion often works with summits is that there are a lot of questions about whose email list the attendees end up on.
Amelia Hruby:Often, when all this cross promotion happens, it only benefits the list growth of the person hosting the summit. And as Kate pointed out, if you join a summit, you're typically teaching something or you're making time for an interview. You're often offering a resource they can include in the summit bundle. And so it is taking your time, energy, product, but then everybody who signs up for the summit only ends up on the email list of the person who hosted it. And you have to hope that they come through to your list through a free resource or they just really like what you said, so they wanna be on your mailing list.
Amelia Hruby:I think that this often makes summits feel like they don't have shared benefit or like the benefit of the summit is really just given to the person who hosts it. And again, if you feel good about that, if that's clearly communicated and it feels okay, then I think that can be great. I've definitely done summits where I didn't see much email list growth from it, or I didn't hear about new off the grid listeners from that summit, but maybe I got to connect with the organizer of it. I wanted to know that person. We got to have a conversation.
Amelia Hruby:That felt really good and reciprocal to me. So this doesn't have to be a problem, but I do think it can sometimes feel just unevenly distributed. The thing that people do sometimes to try to make this feel like the summit benefits everyone is they might share the email addresses of people signed up with all of the speakers. So sometimes when you host a summit, everybody speaking cross promotes. Everybody who signs up gets put on an email list for the summit, and then that list gets sent to every speaker so they can add those people to their email list.
Amelia Hruby:But if you remember my episode with Dawn from Flodesk, which came out last fall, this strategy really doesn't work that well anymore. People don't like when they sign up for one thing and then they get on a bunch of other email lists. And so often when you do this, it can really tank your open rates or you might see a lot of unsubscribes. And so I don't recommend this strategy anymore. I don't recommend doing a bundle or a summit where attendees put their email in one time and then get added to a bunch of people's email lists.
Amelia Hruby:So because of that, it means that, like, if someone's hosting a summit, probably all the emails are just going to that person who's hosting its list. And if you're going to take part in a summit, I hope that you would feel good about that. So that's the first sort of like sticky things about summits is that summits are in essence virtual conferences, but they're typically about email list growth through cross promotion, and sometimes that has some issues. Another marketing strategy that I see added on top of the summit model is revenue generation through some type of lifetime pass, all access pass, or bonus bundle. So most often in the online business space, summits are free because as I've already covered, they are an attempt to grow someone's email list.
Amelia Hruby:So they want the summit to be free so a bunch of people sign up and end up on that email list. That said, there is often a paid upgrade for access to recordings and bonuses. So often the way that a summit will work is that you can sign up for the summit for free. You can go to things for free or get access to recordings for a limited time. But if you want lifetime access or you want bonuses from the speakers, you need to pay to upgrade.
Amelia Hruby:And a lot of these pay to upgrade plans, I have noticed, will start out like really cheap. Like, if you pay to upgrade as soon as you sign up, it'll be a certain amount. And then if you pay to upgrade during the summit, it will be more. And then if you pay to upgrade after the summit, it will be a lot. And so, you know, those price jumps, there's nothing wrong with that in theory, but it feels like an urgency tactic to me that I don't really like.
Amelia Hruby:I think this is one of the challenges of summits. Like, I feel like summits when they first started were often totally free, and then the organizers were like, but people want the recordings and I wanna make money. And so they started adding in these paid upgrades for lifetime passes or whatnot. And then to me, that adds this other sticky layer of like, okay, if I'm asked to participate in the summit, I have, you know, taught for free or done an interview for free. I have added something to the bundle.
Amelia Hruby:And then now, the host of the summit gets all the email addresses and they can make money by selling this? I think this is where summits start to feel a little off for some people. And I would guess this is why Kate sent me this question. And when Kate was like, it feels a little MLME, multilevel marketing esque, I think this is where that starts to come in. Another layer to the revenue generation from Summits is that sometimes people will ask you to pay to teach at their Summit.
Amelia Hruby:They will say to you, you're gonna get so much exposure. You're gonna get so many email addresses from people who sign up. You should pay to be a part of this because I'm gonna send so much traffic and visibility to your business. And I will be honest, I don't like that, full stop. I have never paid to be a part of a summit.
Amelia Hruby:I don't like paying to speak at things. I don't find that to be a fair exchange. So to briefly recap, revenue generation through a lifetime pass is our second marketing strategy that's often added on top of the summit model. And while most summits are free, many of them will have a paid upgrade for access to recordings and bonuses, and the summit organizer will make money from that upgrade. Now I briefly touched on why that can feel a little sticky or even exploitative if you're, like, giving your time to teach or speak and offer a bonus, and then the organizer is the one making money.
Amelia Hruby:So to resolve that, there's often another marketing strategy that's added on top of the summit model to try to assuage some of those concerns, and that is affiliate marketing for speakers to earn money from the summit. So if the summit host has a sort of paid lifetime all access pass added onto their summit, often they will offer speakers affiliate links or codes so that they can teach or speak for free. But then if they share their affiliate link, they will get a cut of anyone from their list who upgrades to paid. And I'll just add a note here that I've never seen a summit where the paid upgrades were, like, split evenly among the speakers and organizer, or maybe the organizer got a certain percentage and the rest were split evenly among the speakers. It's not that type of equal even distribution.
Amelia Hruby:The only way I have ever seen it done is that the speakers get a cut of the sales that comes through their link. And so that also means, like, if you're a newer business owner or you have a smaller audience, you will likely make much less money from participating in a summit. And people don't tend to say it that way. They tend to act like, oh, you're a newer business owner and you should feel so lucky to be part of this summit with much bigger people than you. But also like those people stand to benefit a lot more than you might if you are new or you have a smaller audience.
Amelia Hruby:So again, I I think the affiliate marketing stuff is a little tricky with summits, and I don't fully trust who it benefits all the time. But again, I think this is where it can start to feel, like Kate said, a little MLME. The whole model of the summit is sort of presented as an opportunity to share free resources, to offer your wisdom or knowledge to the community, to gather together with other people, to do that as a group instead of individually, to share the benefits of promoting to all of your audiences. And that can feel like a beautiful thing. Right?
Amelia Hruby:I think, again, the fundamental model of a summit can be really generous. But when we add on some of these other marketing strategies, when we add audience growth through cross promotion, when we add revenue generation through lifetime pass, when we add affiliate marketing so the speakers earn money too, then I think a lot of attendees or people who sign up for the summit can start to feel really, like, pressured and overwhelmed by the big marketing engine that's kind of happening to them. Right? Sometimes you sign up for a summit and you're like, I just liked this person and I wanted to hear what they had to say. And then all of a sudden, you're getting a ton of emails.
Amelia Hruby:You're being asked to upgrade to paid over and over and over again. You're being pushed onto the organizer's email list or sometimes even all the speakers' email lists. And I think that at this point, audiences are just really savvy to that and none of us want that many emails. This takes me to the crux of Kate's question. Are summits sketchy?
Amelia Hruby:And how do we know if a particular summit we may be invited to is sketchy? Well, honestly, it's hard to answer this question. And that's why Kate's asking me because Kate is a very smart person. And if it was easy to figure out, Kate would have figured it out. Right?
Amelia Hruby:So here are a few things that I think about when I'm considering if I will participate in a summit that I'm invited to. And then in a moment, I will tell you how I designed the ASTRO and Biz Planning Summit to not fall into any of these traps or to not be sketchy by my own standards. So when I'm trying to suss out if a summit is sketchy, I would say that I'm looking at who is running the summit, the structure of the summit, and the intentions that I can figure out behind it. So when it comes to who is running the summit, I do not say yes to summit invitations from strangers I have no relationship with. Primarily because I just don't know them, I don't know what they're about, and I don't yet have trust with them to believe that they will run the summit in a way that feels like I can confidently share it with my audience.
Amelia Hruby:So of the summits I have been a part of, those folks have either been off the grid guests or interweb members or occasionally they have been introduced to me by someone I know well, so I trust them because this other person I already know says great things about them. That's kind of my standard for if I'll say yes to a summit. I have been invited to many summits from complete strangers, and I always say no. I'm like, you know, I don't really know you. I would love to get to know you over time.
Amelia Hruby:Here's my podcast. Here's my community. Let me know if you wanna set up a call, but, like, I'm not interested in joining a summit from someone who I've never had an interaction with before. That's just kind of a policy or boundary for me. Then I look at the intention and the structure of the summit.
Amelia Hruby:So for this, I'm really trying to figure out who the summit is set up to benefit and how. I'm asking things like, will it mostly benefit the person hosting? Like, does it seem to be a big email grab for them? Will it benefit me for teaching? Are they really upfront about how they share my lead magnet, invite people onto my list, send emails with links directly to my mailing list instead of just back into their ecosystem.
Amelia Hruby:That could be a great benefit to me. Also, will it benefit my audience if they sign up? Right? So it's not just about the host or me, it's also about my community. If I'm gonna share a summit with them, I wanna make sure it feels relevant to them and like it will support them in a meaningful way.
Amelia Hruby:And then again, when I'm thinking about those benefits, I'm thinking about audience growth. I'm thinking about shared knowledge and I'm thinking about revenue. So is someone making money from this summit? And do I feel good about supporting them? I've definitely seen summits where all of the proceeds go to nonprofit or mutual aid organizations, and I like that.
Amelia Hruby:That's fun. Right? It's a way to sort of build in a paid aspect of the summit, but then redistribute that money. Is that actually in and of itself can feel like a mutual aid effort? So I like when summits do that, and I might be more likely to say yes if that's the case.
Amelia Hruby:I also again consider, are they asking me to promote a certain amount or to do certain things? You know, if they want me to send five emails and post in stories every day, I have to tell them, one, I don't have stories. And two, I'm not gonna send five emails. Like, there's no way I'm gonna send five emails about a summit that I'm just one of many speakers in. I'm not even sending five emails about the summit I'm hosting yet.
Amelia Hruby:So, you know, I'm thinking about all of that, the intention, the structure, the benefit when I'm figuring out if I will join a summit. I will also say that I prefer summits that don't require me to create or teach something new. Because most of the time with summits, you are being asked to teach or to speak for free or for like cross promotion and exposure. I don't wanna build a whole new thing for free. I'll be honest.
Amelia Hruby:I want to be able to contribute a talk or a recording that I've already done before or to do an interview where I get to be in conversation with the host. I love doing summits where the host interviews people because it helps me, like, have a deeper relationship with that person, and that's valuable to me. That's worth the hour of my time and the one promo email they may ask me to send. Right? There are lots of benefits in summits.
Amelia Hruby:They're not always sketchy, but we have to be thinking about again, who's running them? What is the structure? What is the promo request? Does anyone make money and do I like who's getting that money? Will my audience meaningfully benefit if I share this with them?
Amelia Hruby:And what are the overall intentions here? So those are some of the things I consider when I'm asking if a summit is sketchy or if it feels aligned. Because all of that said, I do think summits are great ways to cross promote, so I don't rule them out full stop. I'm just careful and thoughtful with the summits I participate in. And if you're curious what those summits have been, I can tell you.
Amelia Hruby:In 2024, I was a part of the Cosmic Business Salon with Paula Crossfield. This was called a salon, but the whole model follows the summit model from every other summit I've done or been invited to, and that was great. Paula was on the podcast. We got to have a conversation about social media. I really enjoyed getting to know her work and her community better through that summit.
Amelia Hruby:I'm glad I was a part of it. In 2025, I was also part of the Drop the Mic, a Feminist Podcasting Unsummit hosted by Becky Mollenkamp of the Feminist Podcasters Collective. I'm a big fan of Becky's work. We know each other pretty well over years of collaborating on different things. And so when Becky asked me to be a part of an Un Summit, I was like, hell, yeah.
Amelia Hruby:Sign me up. I'm a fan. And I shared this summit with the Softer Sounds mailing list quite a few times. I did have an affiliate link to invite them to upgrade to paid. And honestly, the sessions in this summit were often just like straight up podcast classes.
Amelia Hruby:I definitely felt like there was so much value in them. It was a gift to get to attend live or be a part of the live week for free, but I felt very good selling the lifetime All Access Pass because that stuff was valuable. And I think in the end, maybe I made a $100 in affiliate sales from that. I'd have to look up the exact amount. It wasn't huge, but I was happy to share it.
Amelia Hruby:And I shared it with the Softer Sounds audience. I did not push this really hard at the off the grid audience because not everybody off the grid wants to make their own podcast. But everyone on my Softer Sounds podcast studio mailing list either wants to make a podcast or has one they want to improve. So it felt very easy and aligned to promote there. And then in 2026, I'm actually taking part in three summits.
Amelia Hruby:Two have happened so far. One is coming up soon. So I was a part of the profitable and preferred service business summit with Maggie Patterson. I really love Maggie's work. I think that she is such a straight shooter, so authentic and direct.
Amelia Hruby:And for that summit, she interviewed me talking about marketing without social media. She had great resources to share it with my audience, but there weren't specific promo requests or demands. So even though the folks who signed up all ended up on Maggie's email list, I felt really good joining her and promoting that, spreading the word, sharing her work, and myself in the process. And then more recently, I was part of the Level Up Summit with Bianca King. This is one that I was invited to by a longtime biz friend of mine, Mel McSherry.
Amelia Hruby:Mel and Bianca are friends, and I guess Bianca hosts this event every year. Mel was putting on a panel of business owners who are breaking up with the status quo and asked me if I would be a part of it. And I immediately said yes because I have a ton of respect for Mel. The event sounded great, and I was happy to be involved. This was another one where there was no promo requirement for the summit, although I do think it was paid to attend.
Amelia Hruby:So I'm not sure this was free, but it was a really amazing conversation. I'm really glad I got to be a part of it. I met very cool people and got to know a community I had never encountered before online. So again, another summit with like great mutual benefit that felt really good. And then coming up in May, I'm gonna be a part of the Advanced Freelancers Summit with Austin Church of Freelance Cake.
Amelia Hruby:I met Austin last year when he hosted me in his paid community to talk about my book. And so because Austin had already given me that time, supported my work and my book and was sharing it, like, he invested in me and my work. And so when he asked me to be a part of his summit, I was like, yeah. Happy to contribute. Right?
Amelia Hruby:Because you have already supported me, and I have felt the benefit of that. I am now happy to join in supporting you and your work, giving my time to record a class for this, sharing a resource for your bundle. That feels good because it's someone I have a relationship with. Right? So that's just a quick review of the summits I participated in.
Amelia Hruby:Apologies if I'm forgetting one. If anyone listening to this is like, Amelia, you did my summit. I just have a horrible memory. I'm sure it was amazing. Did not exclude you because I didn't think it was great.
Amelia Hruby:I only do summits that I think are great. And having shared all of that, I would love to tell you how I designed the astrology and business planning summit to feel like a summit with mutual benefit where the host, me, the speakers, interwebers, and the attendees, all you lovely people from the off the grid community, all feel this, like, beautiful reciprocal flow together. The story begins in how this summit even came together. Because let me tell you, I never intended to host a summit. It was not something I was thinking about doing.
Amelia Hruby:It felt like a lot of work, frankly. And because I knew I don't like to do affiliate stuff, I'm not gonna do a lifetime pass, like, I just wasn't quite sure why I would do this. Right? Why would I host a summit? But last fall, inside the interweb, I opened application for people to teach in the community.
Amelia Hruby:And I got a ton of applications from astrologers for astrology workshops that had to do with astrology and business, or astrology and creativity specifically. And I couldn't pick just one to be like the astrology class we had inside the interweb this year. But when I saw all of them together in the application, I had this thought. I was like, this will make a really cool summit. I think this would be great, actually.
Amelia Hruby:All of these people are fantastic. I love their work. I would love to share them with the off the grid community more broadly. I wonder if they would be interested in being a part of a summit in the spring. And so I reached out to them and I said, you know, I got too many astro applications for the interweb, but would you be interested in doing this as a summit next year?
Amelia Hruby:Can we have like a bigger public event sharing your work? I would promote it through off the grid. You would teach it here. You know, we can share the recordings, etcetera. And everyone said yes.
Amelia Hruby:So this summit did not happen because I wanted to have a summit. It happened in this very like emergent way from the community. And so that goes back to intention. My intention for the Astro and Biz Planning Summit is to help people in the interweb get more visibility for their businesses. That's it.
Amelia Hruby:There's actually not a whole lot of benefit for me of hosting it, except that I get to showcase these amazing creators and teachers and mentors and guides. And in fact, some of the people at the summit are also part of the Close Biz Friends small group program that I've been hosting for the first part of this year. And so they've been learning about cross promotion, and now we're practicing cross promotion for them through the summit. So it's a really great way to model the things that I teach, and that is a benefit to me as well. So that's how the summit came to be.
Amelia Hruby:You know, if you remember my step by step of how to have a summit at the beginning, it was like pick a topic, gather speakers, create a sign up page, host it. I skipped the first step. I gathered speakers and then assigned a topic. So we did that. And then once everyone had agreed, I confirmed the name of their session, how we were gonna organize it, what dates it was gonna happen, and I made the sign up page.
Amelia Hruby:So we have just a very straightforward Flodesk sign up page for the summit. And when you sign up for the summit, you are only put on a summit email list. You are not added to my list or to the speaker lists at all. This was important to me because of the many things I've mentioned here. I didn't want the people teaching at the summit to feel like they are giving their time for free, but only I am benefiting with these email addresses.
Amelia Hruby:And I hate when I sign up for a summit and then I'm put on a bunch of email lists, even just one. I just if I sign up for the summit, I just wanna hear about the summit. Right? So it felt very clear and clean to me to have a sign up for the summit where signing up on that RSVP page only adds you to the summit list. And the summit list is hosted inside of my Softer Sounds off the grid Flodesk account.
Amelia Hruby:I built the landing page there. Like, that's what I'm contributing. Right? As the host of the summit, I'm building the infrastructure in which the speakers and teachers can come and show up and lead their sessions. So they don't have to worry about any of that.
Amelia Hruby:They just get to come do their thing. They get to come teach. They get to come speak. I handle all of the logistics and communication with attendees. And for the attendees, honestly, I've built this summit, so it's just all benefit to you.
Amelia Hruby:Right? You're not being put on anybody's email list. You get to come to all of these great free sessions. Recordings will be available through the April, and you also get gifts from our sponsor. So another really beautiful synchronous thing that happened is that earlier in the spring, Lauren from Nine to Kind Planners reached out to ask about sponsoring an episode of Off the Grid.
Amelia Hruby:And what I said to Lauren was, yeah, let's do that. And also, would you like to sponsor our summit, which would put your planners in front of so many more people, I think, than just the episodes? And so I created a very, like, affordable and reasonable sponsorship package for Lauren to sponsor the podcast episodes, to do a mini interview for the show, to be included in all of the summit emails. And then Lauren created discount codes for off the grid listeners, so you can head to the show notes and grab those to get a digital or paper planner from nine to kind with generous discounts. And then also everyone who RSVPs for the summit gets a free digital daily notepad download, which is actually like my favorite thing of Lauren's product suite.
Amelia Hruby:I use it regularly, and summit attendees get it totally for free. So again, this is just like all benefit to Summit attendees. It's a lot of benefit to the speakers because I am linking their stuff everywhere. And because of how I function with cross promotion, I'm not just like naming them and then linking back to my site. I am linking to their sites.
Amelia Hruby:I am sending out their lead magnets. I am putting their podcasts in front of people. Like, I am really trying to help people who sign up for the summit connect directly with the speakers because I want the speakers and teachers to benefit from this. And then because of my sponsorship relationship with Lauren, I have been able to feel like my time spent doing a lot of logistics, a lot of hosting, a lot of coordinating is compensated in some way. Right?
Amelia Hruby:And that's how I've designed a summit that I feel is mutual benefit all the way around and avoids some of the sketchy strategies that I see other summit hosts using. Or even if they're using them in a way that they feel really good about, they just feel sketchy to me when I sign up for a summit or get asked to speak at one. And the power or the money or the energy or the time just feels really unevenly distributed. So I think that's everything I have to say about summits. And I'll just repeat again, come to the Astro and Biz Planning Summit.
Amelia Hruby:I would love to see you there. It starts this Friday, April 17, if you're listening when this podcast episode comes out. The second date is April 24. If you missed the first day, but you wanna catch the second date of the summit. And if you're listening far in the future, head to the show notes and check out the link anyway because there will be more information for you there and probably still some benefits Even if it's not full access to everything in the future, I'm sure we can get you some gifts and connection with speakers whenever you're hearing this and signing up.
Amelia Hruby:I wanna thank Kate again for the question and you, dear listener, for listening. I also wanna thank all of the amazing people who are taking part in this Astro and Biz Planning Summit with me. So thanks to Maz George, Miana Melendez, Ray Serafina Barker, Rachael Amber, Verena Borell, Sarah Arantza Amador, Natasha Levinger, Lisa Jara, Cassandra McCall, and Lauren from Nine to Kind. The summit wouldn't be happening without their brilliant offerings, practices, sessions, workshops. So I'm really excited to experience their work at the summit to showcase it to and with all of you.
Amelia Hruby:And I think that's it for today. So once again, you can sign up for the summit at the link in the show notes. That's where you can also grab the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit, which will put you on the off the grid mailing list. That's clearly communicated there. And until next time, friends.
Amelia Hruby:You can find me off the grid and at the summit. Okay. That was an abridged version of Social Media by Surfer Boy and Wreck Tangle. To hear the entire song, find Surfer Boy on Spotify or head to the link in the show notes. Thanks so much to them for sharing the song with us, as well as to Melissa Kaitlyn Carter, who sings our theme song that you hear at the start of every show.
Amelia Hruby:I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will download the free leading social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. Until next time, I will see you off the grid.
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