Chelsea Brennan has a successful blog and is scheduled to launch a podcast. She managed to quit her job on Wall Street and feel comfortable with her finances in just about three years.
She has done this by growing the blog, and now by creating an online conference for her followers and community. The steps to creating an online conference may seem daunting at first, but she lays out how she and her team did it and how you can too.
In the time of virtual everything, now is the time to create an online conference.
How Chelsea Provides for Her Family
Chelsea’s blog, Smart Money Mamas, started primarily as just a blog but has grown and is now one of her family’s biggest income generators.
From her blog, she decided to host an online summit. Even though this year was their first summit, it drew over 18,000 moms.
With the blog, the summit and soon a podcast, Chelsea has been able to quit her job while still providing for her family.
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The Summit Was a Success
For their first year, 40+ speakers covering all areas of personal finance spoke at the summit.
They covered topics such as family finance, investing, career and business.
Chelsea is proud of the community that is being built and the benefit provided for those in attendance.
What Chelsea Did Before Being Successfully Unemployed
As a previous hedge fund manager, Chelsea was disappointed with the career she had.
She wasn’t home a lot or had much flexibility. Most of all, she didn’t feel like her career had purpose and that was really important to her.
Giving back to her community and family is important. She had tried different startups but was feeling stuck. Chelsea was a part of a Facebook group with a bunch of moms who had kids around the same age as her kids.
They would all come to her with money questions that they had. She decided to start a blog and try to answer the questions that the group had.
She started by posting in the group asking what their biggest money questions were. With that, she received 60 or so questions which ended up becoming the first 60 posts of her new blog.
The group named the blog Mama Fish Saves, which grew into Smart Money Mamas.
For the first 8-9 months, Chelsea saw no income but she made the career switch once she had a good following.
How Chelsea Handled the Transition
While some of the questions overlapped, she answered all of them. She started posting every day for the first 35 days.
She published 3-4 days a week for the following 3-6 months.
With her previous career, she was only able to see her son for about 10 minutes in the evening before bedtime and then spent the rest of her evening writing on the blog.
Why You Don’t Need a Base Following to Start
Chelsea mentions that you can start without a base following, but it all depends on what type of business you want to build.
At first, Chelsea didn’t know blogs made money, but what she always wanted was the impact of what she was doing.
Finding her community first and building trust was important to her. Now having the group, she is able to bounce ideas off of them before creating the content for the blog.
The feedback she receives is great because it is exactly what the audience wants to know.
Why SEO is Important
Even though Chelsea doesn’t focus too much on SEO, her questions and responses really brought about 50-60% traffic from SEO.
When you find a community and you know what questions they’re asking, you are going to show up in Google anyway because the group members are the ones who are searching on Google.
This is especially true with a good size community and following.
What To Do After Launching
Chelsea’s husband is a stay at home dad so she is solely responsible for the income. In the beginning it was a struggle.
About 18 months ago, Chelsea launched her first product. At the time she did not have ads on the site and only a small amount of affiliate marketing.
She worked with Pete McPherson from Do You Even Blog and together they were planning to do a free email opt-in for the product How to Create a Family Emergency Binder.
There were people in the community that were struggling with estate planning and financial issues so she planned to make a checklist.
It took her seven hours to create and when she was done, a 60-page document was created.
It worked as a worksheet type that you fill out. She called Pete and said she had created a product but it was too big to be offered for free.
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They reached out to people who might want to offer it on their site and within 2 weeks, they launched their first product.
The binder became the base of a digital product. Digital products are great because they create passive income. She set up a funnel for the online sales and has a team of bloggers that sell the product for her as well.
Following the funnel set up for the binder, she considered offering courses but instead came up with the summit.
She wanted to do something different and something that served her community.
Her community wanted a way to connect with other moms while considering a lot of working moms and a lot of stay at home moms can’t travel or stay away for four+ days. So they did a virtual conference and built it from the ground up.
With the safety net of savings her and her husband had saved, she was able to devote the time to building this conference.
How Chelsea Priced Her Product
The product being 150, fillable PDF pages, it became more of a tool than a book.
So instead of buying a new book every time something new happens in your life, like a new investment or change of beneficiary, you could just print another page.
At the current price point of $39, some believe it is too low, however, Chelsea is happy with the conversion and that it gets into a lot of hands and that it is affordable.
With 30+ real estate properties, Dustin does real estate coaching. He mentions that some of his customers believe his prices are really affordable.
He appreciates that because he wants to help as many people as possible.
He believes the more you help other people, the better their lives and your lives become.
How to Get People to Buy Your Product
Chelsea’s product is something that most people know they need or crosses their mind that they need.
Whether a family member went through something or it is just an issue that keeps you up at night, it crosses your mind at some point.
To begin with, it is more just introducing your audience to the concept without a lot of warm up and just getting people to the homepage.
After they are on the page, Chelsea gets them into an email funnel. From there, get them to buy the product, use it and then be embedded in the Facebook community.
There are two parts to this, the first being Chelsea and her team have some great followup strategies. They offer their community accountability with an email check-in.
This first email asks the customer to say if they are in or not. They use an assistant to send the emails and respond to the emails.
If they open the email and respond that they are in, then the assistant emails again a week later asking if they have completed the task.
This causes a conversation with the customer and the team. When Chelsea and her team are there to celebrate their accomplishment, it is huge for building long term trust with the community.
Then from there they introduce the customer to all of the other stuff they do.
They talk to them about the community and the importance of it, offer other blog posts that are related and then later send a transition email that brings them into the weekly newsletter.
How Chelsea Used a Lead Magnet
Before getting people to the product page, Chelsea used a checklist showing what a complete emergency and estate plan binder would contain.
This was about two pages in length and very straight forward. A lot of her traffic came from affiliate blogs, many of which were bigger than hers.
The affiliates would talk about the product, present reviews of it, and some even had tutorials about how to fill it out.
There were about 50 affiliate blogs doing this which brought her a lot of traffic.
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How Chelsea Transitioned to An Online Summit
Dustin is very interested in the idea of an online summit with Successfully Unemployed and having his community all network together.
He finds there is so much more value with networking with people. He says the sessions are great but really gets his biggest takeaways from the networking at conferences.
Chelsea says that it can be a little overwhelming with all of the technology that goes behind creating an online summit.
She and her team went big the first time and also says you don’t have to do that.
Chelsea recommends using Krista Miller’s approach, who teaches how to create online summits.
Use 12-15 speakers for your first year with 2-3 speakers per day, for three days. She recommends having a way for the community to interact with the speakers and with each other.
Chelsea says it’s important to choose a focused topic in the beginning. She also says that pre-recorded sessions are a good idea all or it could potentially be a technology nightmare on the back end.
However, you can also do some live sessions as well. During her summit, Chelsea said she went live three times a day with training or just answering questions.
The audience got to know Chelsea really well this way. However, she said that the real interaction is with the online community.
During a session, the speaker was available Q&A and had access to the free Facebook group as well.
They really got to know each other well within the community. The way it was set up was it was free to attend and you could purchase an all access pass for 48 hours.
Chelsea recalls that some moms were paying for all access passes for other moms who had said they were struggling financially or didn’t have enough money.
She said it was a really powerful moment.
Another moment she recalled was when they were talking about financial abuse and identifying signs of abuse.
This is when some moms were realizing they were in a situation where they were being financially abused. She also found other moms who had gone through that, were reaching out to them for support.
If you are trying to find a way to get interaction, you just have to facilitate it that way.
It is possible to get great interaction online; you just have to know what is best for your audience.
How Chelsea Recommends Lining Up Speakers
Dustin mentioned that he gets emails all the time to be a speaker and has been a speaker for other people’s summits.
Chelsea said that lining up speakers depends on where you are starting.
She said first you want to figure out a way to get the word out there. In this type of event you want to lean on speakers, and you want to make sure there is something in it for them.
The speakers also have to hope that other speakers bring new people to them as well. Chelsea started with a baseline first.
They had an ad budget and a reason for the speakers to get onboard because of their affiliates. They also offered cash bonuses for the top performing affiliate. A sort of “here’s why you want to be involved.”
The return on investment for them came after, in an attachment to the email that was sent with more of the message “here’s why you don’t want to miss this.”
The email talked about the importance of this summit for moms and why they were doing this. This summit was going to make a difference and the email explained why the speaker would want to be someone who is a part of it.
Once you get buy in from your speakers, then make it exciting for them.
If they are feeling excited but want to hit their own targets, then explain the three reasons why they should, which is not only good on an emotional level but also good for your business.
Then they are excited and want to be involved. When they are involved, they want to promote. So instead of contracting them to send three emails, they may send six because they want to help out.
Chelsea reiterates that reaching out to speakers first is really important.
What Chelsea also did was brand her summit differently. The blog is Smart Money Mamas so they named the summit Mamas Talk Money.
Once that was created, they set up a one-page sheet with dates and details, reached out to anchor speakers first, and then used those to flush out everyone else.
Sometimes Dustin will decide to be a speaker for new online summits but usually there is not really a return.
Doing this makes him happy and enjoys helping out.
Listen to the Online Conferences Interview with Chelsea Brennan:
What Chelsea Recommends Doing Next
If you are starting with an existing audience base, Chelsea is a huge supporter of asking your audience what they like and what they want to learn about.
She said to maybe send out a questionnaire or survey and ask about what questions does the audience have that haven’t been answered before, or what does the audience want to learn about or what training would be most helpful to the audience.
Part of running a successful summit is having the confidence and courage to say that you are good at teaching the audience a lot of things, but you can’t teach everything so you want to make sure you can find someone who can teach a topic you can’t.
Next is about building the map of the summit.
Chelsea says this map or blueprint will help with the planning process.
Deciding if you are going to record interviews or do live sessions, are good questions to ask yourself.
Once you build out a map then you can start recording some of the interviews.
She recommends that you create the right marketing, tease it to your audience, or write swipe copy emails and give your affiliates time to get it to their audiences.
She says some people overlook marketing strategies without finding the right voice.
You want to write great copy for your audience but you want to write even better copy for your speakers to send out.
If you can, give them a few different options to send to their audience..
Choosing the Best Platform for Your Summit
This choice is different for everyone. There is one platform that a lot of people use but what Chelsea used was more difficult than it needed to be.
She used a membership plug-in platform, so when you signed up for the summit, you got your own unique username and password.
Once you log in, sessions and their videos are released at their scheduled time. Someone would be on the back end hitting refresh to the system which would then release the sessions and videos.
Something like Hey Summit, will automate all this for you. You can upload your logo and build the summit and interact with your speakers.
It is simple and affordable but it wasn’t customizable enough for Chelsea and her team but a great place to get started.
Other people create a separate page on their WordPress site that they don’t share the link to right away. There is one page for each day of their summit and they just link private YouTube videos.
With YouTube, you can schedule to release videos at a certain time, so you can do your whole conference schedule from there.
Everyday you just send out a thank you for registering, here is your link for today, here is a list of the three speakers today and the audience just has that link.
Since there are a few different ways of doing it, this is part of the planning process of how you want to deliver the summit and what you want the experience to be like for your audience.
Dustin says that using YouTube is actually a really budget friendly way to do this if you are just starting out. You have your WordPress hosting site, which is free, and your domain is about $10 per year.
YouTube is free so it’s really an affordable way to get going.
With this, Chelsea says that while YouTube is free, according to their terms of service, you can’t put things behind a paywall.
So if you want to sell an all access pass, which is really the best way to monetize these events, you’re going to want to use something like Vimeo that is going to be paid to upload the finished videos and give people access in different ways.
Some people use Teachable, some people just use a membership plugin to give people private access.
So you will have to use something else besides YouTube to sell access.
Why You Should Consider An All-Access Option
One of the best ways to monetize these types of events is offering an all-access option. However, Chelsea says it depends on what your business goal is at that period of time.
For Chelsea, everyone who signed up gave their email. They cross referenced their existing list to weed out duplicates.
After registration, their list grew by 15,000 people in that week.
There are all kinds of other ways to monetize the email list so that was valuable to her. For their all access customers, they offered an upgraded experience.
They had access to summary notes, videos, and transcripts.Chelsea hired a PhD student to go through and watch all of the videos and record the key takeaways from each session.
They designed all of that information into a fun, one-page sheet about the session. There were numerous additional perks to buying the all access pass.
For the first year, Chelsea and her teams set the goal to break even while building a community and covering costs., and that goal was met.
Considering Future Summit Types
The goal for Chelsea is to stick to the online platform. It worked really well for her audience.
They have considered hosting more of a retreat in the future, which is much smaller and more intimate, for people who can travel and be away.
It would be a more exclusive setting, capped at about 50 people.
The summit itself will remain online because of how well it serves her audience. In the coming years, their goal is to monetize better through sponsorships.
Now that Chelsea knows more about sponsorships on an online platform, it is much easier to do and monetize.
How it works is to offer levels of sponsorship, just like an in-person conference. Depending on their level, they can have their logo or their advertisement right on the page of a session or a link to their site.
Additionally, they could contribute to an online swag bag or various giveaways. Since the online platform may be new to some of the sponsors, it is all about learning how similar it is being in person.
Instead of having the guest go on their phone and look at their site, there would be a link already in the session. There is a lot of evidence that shows there are more people taking action on an online summit because it is a lot easier to do so.
Having sponsors do this, they are realizing that it is much more direct marketing because they know the people at the summit
are the exact audience they want to market to in the first place.
How to Scale Your Summit
Next year, Chelsea hopes the summit will be bigger.
They want to just keep growing the audience. They are trying new things like doing themes every month. They are using their YouTube and blog posts to promote and their podcast is coming soon.
The way the themes will look is having an opt-in and mini course every month. During the month for $19, the customer gets video based training with Chelsea.
Some courses are $29 but all still affordable. So over time, the scaling is access to that, and all access to all of the products they have.
Successfully Unemployed Rapid Fire Round
Chelsea’s Advice to Get You Started
Think about what you want to talk about.
Find something that you just cannot shut up about and decide on a topic, is what Chelsea recommends doing first. Then, she says just get started.
Start by blogging, doing a podcast, or whatever platform you choose to talk about the chosen topic.
She adds that whatever you do, your first 10-20 posts will be terrible but you have to go through that. Dive in and figure it out on the way.
There is too much advice out there about consistency in posting on specific days and times but she says to just get out there and test your idea and find what works for your audience.
She says until you find your true audience, they aren’t going to notice that you are making changes along the way.
What Chelsea Would Tell Her Younger Self
Chelsea would tell her younger self that you don’t have to have it all figured out right away. Chelsea struggled with perfectionism and wanting to be the best at everything.
This created a lot of pressure to chase what she thought was her golden ticket. She recalls the privilege and financial opportunities she gained from working on Wall Street.
She also says to let yourself try things and not worry about what other people think you should do.
How Chelsea is Giving Back
Chelsea being able to help all the moms in the Smart Money Mama’s community is making a big difference.
The group has people who are struggling or have a bad mindset and want to do better which is a positive change for them and the world.
Chelsea is happier and more present with her kids now while still trying to break the workaholic cycle. When she is home she is happier and not stressing about the job or her boss like before.
The Technology Tool Chelsea Swears By
Chelsea and her family use Wunderlist to keep on top of things. Her kids like to use Monday.com as well.
She loves Wunderlist, it helps with longer term goals, different stages and has many players able to be involved.
The Non-Fiction Books Chelsea Recommends
Chelsea’s absolute favorite business book is Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. 
She recommends this especially for those who want to learn how to avoid the perpetual cycle of not paying yourself.
Where to Find Chelsea
You can reach Chelsea through her blog, smartmoneymamas.com and on all social platforms but uses Instagram mostly.