A book makes you an authority. A podcast amplifies your message. But a virtual summit does something neither of those can do on its own: it helps you create a movement around your message.
I’ve hosted six annual virtual summits, including:
- Power of Your Voice — 2021
- Power of Divine Alignment — 2022
- Power of Your Words — 2023
- Power of Your Message — 2024
- Power of Your Story — 2025
Every single one has reminded me of just how powerful virtual summits are for gathering people online — and I want to share both the case for hosting one and the story of how I went from skeptic to someone who’s built a real part of her business around them.
I Wasn't Always a Fan
I’ll be honest: I didn’t start out believing in virtual summits. My early impression of them was that they were too long, with too many speakers, spread over too many days. It felt bloated — more content than anyone could realistically absorb, let alone act on.
That changed in 2019, when I was invited to speak as part of my business bestie, Carol J Dunlop’s, summit. I showed up expecting to do my one session and move on. Instead, I ended up staying for the whole thing — listening to the other speakers, taking in far more than I expected, and walking away having genuinely learned something from nearly every session.
That experience flipped my entire perspective. I saw firsthand how much value a well-run summit could deliver, both to the audience and to every speaker involved. It’s the reason I went on to start hosting my own the following years.
What a Virtual Summit Actually Does for Your Business
Since hosting my own summits, I’ve experienced the benefits directly — not as theory, but as results in my own business:
- It builds your email list — fast. A summit gives people a compelling reason to opt in that a generic “join my newsletter” button never quite matches. Multiple speakers each promoting the event to their own audiences means your list can grow at a pace that would take months through regular content alone.
- It drives real traffic to your website. Between the promotion leading up to the event, the registration pages, and the replay access afterward, a summit creates sustained traffic — not just a single-day spike.
- It builds thought leadership like nothing else. Hosting a summit puts you in a fundamentally different position than being a guest on someone else’s platform. You’re the one curating the conversation, choosing the speakers, and setting the theme. That positions you as an authority in the space, not just a participant in it.
- It generates real revenue. I’ve gotten actual clients directly from my summits — people who found me through the event, engaged with my session or the summit as a whole, and moved into working with me afterward. The summit isn’t just visibility; it’s a legitimate business-development channel.
- It creates community, not just content. This is the piece that separates a summit from a book or a podcast. A book is something someone reads alone. A podcast is something they listen to alone. A summit gathers people — live, in the same space, around the same message, at the same time. That’s what makes it feel less like content and more like a movement.
From Skeptic to Host
Looking back at the arc — from thinking summits were bloated and unnecessary, to speaking at one and being genuinely moved by it, to hosting five of my own — I’ve come to see virtual summits as one of the most underrated tools in a thought leader’s toolkit. Not because they’re easy (they’re not), but because of what they make possible: an email list built faster, traffic sustained over weeks instead of a day, real revenue, and a genuine reputation as an expert in your space.
If you’ve been on the fence about hosting a summit — maybe for the same reasons I once was — I’d encourage you to reconsider. The format that once felt like “too much” turned out to be exactly the vehicle I needed to build a movement around my message.
Curious about building your own summit or event strategy into your marketing plan?
Download my Aligned Marketing Plan guide — it walks through two powerful ways to plan your marketing with ease and flow: nadinemullings.com/power