It's super hectic right now Chez Brodie.

Kathy's annual online summit kicks off in 2 weeks time so we've been “all hands to the pumps” preparing for it.

For obvious reasons, the job of marketing the summit falls to me. And it's actually very valuable for me to keep my hand in marketing a business that's quite a bit different to my own.

Over the years there have been two valuable lessons I've learnt and relearnt from the summit.

The first is the power of having something immensely valuable to offer for free.

In the case of Kathy's summit she usually has about 20-30 interviews with leading experts from around the world on whatever topic in early childhood education she's focusing on that year.

And by leading experts I mean really leading experts. From internationally known authors to professors revealing their latest research to practitioners sharing their innovative practices.

The kind of people you'd normally have to pay hundreds of pounds to see speak, all gathered together and free for a week.

For many of Kathy's audience it's the highlight of their year. And they share details of the summit like crazy whenever it's announced.

We had 34,000 people sign up last year and the vast majority came from online word of mouth and sharing.

And what drove it wasn't incentives or tricks. It was simply that the summit is such an amazing event they wanted to share it.

The second big lesson is about listening to your data and not making assumptions.

When we ran the first summit we didn't really know what marketing would work best. So we tried quite a wide variety and monitored where our signups were coming from.

We assumed that the most effective social media would be Twitter because Kathy had quite a big following there, whereas she barely used Facebook or Linkedin.

But in fact it became very clear early on that the place people were sharing and talking about the summit was Facebook.

So we quickly shifted our focus to posting there and running Facebook ads. A strategy that's worked really well ever since.

No matter how much of an expert you are (or think you are), the real world has a habit of throwing regular surprises at you. So it pays to try different things every now and then, monitor your results and adjust if needed.

If nothing else, it keeps life interesting!