UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging

Chapter 48. How and Why I Created a Summit E-Book Instead

ONE OF THE advantages of all of the networking that I have done over the past year or so, especially on Twitter, is that I have gotten to know and build friendships with many amazing speakers, authors, and coaches. Because I am all three, these are the people I often gravitate to. I wanted to do something collectively with a group of people who were also experts in these fields. My goal was to create a high-value item that would share the knowledge of some great people who were friends of mine. The product would expose these experts and the knowledge and experience they had to share to others, and the best part, I would be giving it away for free.

I could have gone the tele-summit route because it was gaining so much momentum at the time, but I really didn't want to do that for a few reasons. In a tele-summit you are limited to a certain number of time slots during the summit. I didn't want a schedule to mean that a greatperson I loved would not be able to share their knowledge with people.

One of the ways that tele-summit organizers get around having their speakers dictated by a schedule is by prerecording seminars and then playing it as "live." Often the organizers will not disclose this and I feel the omission is a little inauthentic, so I was not going to do this with my project.

It was also really important to me that the product I was creating did not have to rely on the contributors to promote it to be successful. To ...