Most wellness practitioners have been told there’s one way to grow online: post more, post better, post consistently, and eventually the algorithm will hand over an audience. So they post for two years and end up with 900 followers, a handful of likes, and an email list of 200 people who mostly came from their in-person practice.
There is another route, and it isn’t a secret so much as a thing almost nobody in the wellness space actually does. Michelle Oravitz, a fertility acupuncturist in Florida and a client in the 100K Online program, has used virtual summits to add roughly 1,400 new subscribers at a time — all of them already interested in her exact niche. If you want to know how to grow your email list without social media doing the heavy lifting, this is the model.
Why posting more stopped working
Social media growth is slow because you’re recruiting strangers one at a time, and the platform decides how many strangers see you on any given day. It’s a numbers game where you don’t control the numbers.
A summit inverts that. Instead of finding your audience one person at a time, you borrow 10 to 18 audiences at once from people who already have them. That doesn’t mean you abandon Instagram — it means Instagram stops being the only engine. If your posting is currently producing followers but not consults, the fix is usually messaging before it’s volume, which is covered in turning a quiet audience into paying clients.
What a virtual summit actually is
A virtual summit is a free online event built around a series of recorded interviews with experts in one narrow niche. You are the host. You invite the speakers, you conduct the interviews, and you announce a date.
Anyone who registers for free gets a viewing window — typically 24 to 48 hours — to watch the sessions. After the window closes, the free access disappears. If someone wants lifetime access to the recordings, they buy the VIP upgrade, which usually comes bundled with bonuses.
Two things make the model work. First, every speaker promotes it to their own list, because they want the exposure. Second, speakers sign on as affiliates, so when someone buys VIP through their link, they earn a cut. Michelle pays 50%. She’s seen hosts offer as little as 10%, and her position is that generosity is what makes speakers actually promote instead of posting once and forgetting.
The host does the heavy lifting on purpose — writing the promotional copy, building the graphics, handing every speaker a ready-to-send swipe file. Removing the work is what gets busy practitioners to say yes and follow through.
The numbers from one summit in the fertility niche
Michelle has run summits with 18 speakers and summits with 10. The smaller ones were more tightly focused; both worked. A single summit has brought in around 1,400 new subscribers, and VIP sales have generated a few thousand dollars on their own. Larger summits can also attract sponsors from within the niche.
Note the sequence: the list growth is the real prize, and the revenue is a bonus that covers the build.
The open rate matters more than the subscriber count
After her first summit, Michelle’s email open rate jumped to nearly 50%. Typical open rates sit in the 20s to low 30s depending on list size and industry — you can check current email marketing benchmarks for your own comparison.
That gap is the entire point. Fourteen hundred subscribers who watched you interview 15 experts for two days are not the same asset as 1,400 people who downloaded a freebie and forgot who you are. They arrived interested in one specific problem, they watched you hold your own alongside credentialed peers, and they associate you with the solution.
Why a summit converts better than a cold launch
Most launches fail because the audience is cold. You spend two weeks selling to people who don’t yet believe you can help them.
A summit warms people at scale before you ever pitch. They’ve spent hours with you. They’ve seen how you think, what questions you ask, and which experts trust you enough to appear. By the time you open enrollment, the trust work is done.
This is why the timing matters: run the summit, then launch. And make sure the thing you’re launching is worth their attention — a program with a specific, named result rather than a general promise, which is the standard set out in how to craft an offer people actually want.
Michelle’s online work is coaching and education, not treatment. Across state lines she doesn’t diagnose, prescribe, or practice under her license — she teaches, guides clients on finding the right doctor and asking better questions, and works the mindset side. That distinction is what makes the online arm legal and scalable for licensed practitioners, and it’s worth understanding fully before you build anything, which is covered in making your online wellness business legitimate.
If you’re not sure whether a summit, a group program, or a membership is the right next move for your practice, book a consultation and we’ll look at your audience, your schedule, and what you’re actually trying to sell.
The honest downside: it’s a project, not a post
Michelle is direct about this: the first summit is complex. There are moving parts — speaker outreach, recording, editing, a registration page, the viewing window, the VIP offer, affiliate links, email sequences, and a promotional calendar you’re coordinating across a dozen other people’s schedules.
You will not get a yes from every invitation, so you send far more than you need. Plan a runway of months, not weeks.
The other thing to plan for: don’t let the summit eat the practice. Practitioners routinely pull attention off the business that’s currently paying them, and if the new project doesn’t perform immediately, two revenue streams go soft at once. The full guide to launching and selling an online wellness program walks through how to protect your baseline while you build.
Hire a VA who has run one before
This is the single highest-leverage hire in the whole project. There are virtual assistants who specialize in summits and already know the platforms — Michelle calls this a game changer, and you can find them on Upwork, Fiverr, or OnlineJobs.ph. On that last one, the membership doesn’t need to be ongoing: pay for one month, run all your interviews, save the details of everyone you liked, and cancel.
Build it once, run it every year
Here’s what makes the effort worth it. Once you’ve run the first summit, you have templates for everything — the speaker invitation, the swipe copy, the registration page, the email sequence, the VIP sales page. The second one is assembly, not construction.
It becomes a repeatable annual or semi-annual list-building event rather than a one-off gamble. Michelle got asked the how-to question so often by practitioners in her certification program that she built a step-by-step course on it.
There’s a pattern there worth noticing: she taught the thing people kept asking her about, and it became an offer. That’s the same logic behind how free content strengthens what you sell, and behind testing new ideas with low-ticket workshops before committing to a full program, as broken down in this year-end revenue review.
The systems behind a second revenue arm
Michelle runs two arms: an in-person acupuncture practice and an online business serving fertility practitioners. She’s only at the clinic two days a week, because she has associate acupuncturists seeing patients on the other days.
That structure runs on a few unglamorous decisions:
- SOPs for everything. Written procedures are what let someone else do the work correctly and what protect you when circumstances change.
- One VA per function, not one VA for everything. She has a scheduling VA and a separate podcast editor. If one person becomes unavailable, one function pauses instead of all of them.
- A weekly check day. Every Monday she reviews what’s scheduled and what’s posted, and pings anyone who missed something. Even excellent team members forget things. Delegating is not disappearing.
- One place to see it all. She uses Notion for task management and Planoly to see social content queued ahead. The specific software matters far less than picking one you’ll actually open.
Before she built systems, Michelle describes being overwhelmed and biting off more than she could chew — plenty of projects, no structure holding them. Getting organized is what made the second arm possible, and it’s the same shift behind growing a wellness business to six figures without burning out.
Is a summit your next move?
Ask yourself:
- Is your niche specific enough to fill a speaker roster? “Wellness” is not a summit. “Fertility” is. “Strength training through perimenopause” is.
- Do you have three to four months? The first build takes real runway.
- Do you have something to sell afterward? A summit that warms 1,400 people and leads nowhere is a missed launch.
- Can you budget for help? An experienced summit VA changes the difficulty level substantially.
- Do you have 10 to 15 peers you could credibly invite? Podcast guests, referral partners, and people you’ve met in professional groups all count.
If most of those are yes, a summit will grow your list faster than another year of posting. If they’re not yet, the answer isn’t to give up on list growth — it’s to fix your messaging so the audience you already have starts converting.
Ready to figure out which one applies to you? Book a consultation and we’ll map your next 90 days — the offer, the list-building method that fits your schedule, and the systems to run it without adding a sixth workday. If you want a faster starting point, the $27 Instagram Message Makeover fixes the messaging that’s keeping your expertise invisible.
Michelle Oravitz is a fertility acupuncturist, host of The Wholesome Lotus Fertility Podcast, and creator of a fertility coaching certification and the High Impact Summit Formula course. Find her on Instagram at @thewholesomelotusfertility.
Related Reading
- Attract & Convert Your Invisible Audience — What to do with the subscribers once they’re on your list, and how to write calls to action that turn readers into consults.
- The Ultimate Guide to Creating and Selling Your Online Wellness Program — The launch plan to run after your summit, including how to keep your practice full while you sell.
- 4 Types of Online Programs for Wellness Entrepreneurs — Certification programs, memberships, small group, and on-demand compared, so you know what you’re warming your new list toward.
- How to Make Your Online Wellness Business Legitimate — The licensing and scope questions every practitioner needs answered before working across state lines.
- Content Creation for Health Coaches — Why the questions your audience keeps asking are the blueprint for your next paid offer.
