You Ask, I Answer: Tips for Offering Workshops and Trainings?

In today's episode, Geordie asks, What are your experiences in offering workshops and trainings? I'm looking to craft and launch workshops myself. So I'm super interested to hear how you didn't are doing. So good question. Um workshops and trainings are definitely a core part of what I do.

Uh so there's definitely a logic and uh process to it. Um when we're building these things, there's a lot that goes into them. Uh first and foremost, figure out if we've got something that that is a good fit for a workshop. So uh one of the things that I always find tricky is there's a lot of workshops out there where you know people are asking you to pay money for something that frankly you can Google, right? And my hesitation in offering a workshop like that is uh what's the extra value?

What's the added value that I could put in a workshop that you couldn't Google, right? Is there a unique methodology, a framework, something that uh isn't just recycled hash, right? Uh if you look at you know, there's so so many workshops on like Instagram strategy and and they're all the same, right? It's like you should comment on people's videos and and posts. You should, you know, post a story every day.

Like that's pretty commonplace. Like what's what's new, what's unique, what's something that would be worth paying for? Um, what would be valuable? And the bench test for that is always will it save somebody time? Will it save somebody money?

Will it make somebody money? If what you're offering in a workshop or any kind of of uh content doesn't answer one of those three questions, it's not worth paying for. It might be cool to learn, but it's not worth paying for. Second, um, with whatever topic that you come up with, uh, you gotta figure out how much of it there is. So I've seen people with varying degrees of success take something that's very uh tactical and atomic and blow it out into like a full hour and a half workshop.

But the reality is uh what they were teaching could have been taught in 10 minutes, right? I've seen other people, and I'm guilty of this one, who will take a topic that honestly should be a six-hour course and try and cram it in 30 minutes. Um, you know, I when when somebody asks me to deliver a talk at a conference, like, oh yeah, can you do like um marketing ROI measurement in in you know 18 minutes? Like, yeah, uh I suppose, but it's like saying, Can we do neurosurgery in 30 minutes? Like, you can, uh, but you're gonna have to take some shortcuts.

So figuring out does the content fit the time available uh is important. Um, and then third is building the actual workshop. And there's three things you need. We're gonna follow Bob Stone's 1968 framework for direct marketing, right? His thing was list offer creative for workshops, for courses, for trainings, it is uh marketing, platform, and content.

Same exact thing, list offer creative. So starting with marketing, do you have an audience? Right? If you have not built an audience, building a workshop is kind of putting the cart before the horse, right? Because you don't really have anybody to sell it to.

I mean, if you've got a big pile of money laying around and uh you want to spend a whole bunch on advertising, then yeah, for sure, uh you can uh get a workshop out there and even get some ROI on it because if you can spend a dollar but get a dollar twenty back, you're gonna do okay. But it's easier, it's a lot easier to have a platform, to have a a decent sized newsletter, to have a decent sized social media following, to have um you know repeat uh a good number of repeat readers of your blog, whatever it is, um, you need to uh have that platform in advance in order to make it easy to sell. By the way, this also applies to books too. Um all this stuff. Second is uh in the original framework was offered for us in workshops, this platform, how are you going to do this thing?

There are so so many different ways to deliver a workshop. There are LMS systems, learning management systems, uh where they have like you know, quizzes and all these things. There are just stock downloads. Um for a lot of my stuff I use a service called Gum Road. Uh Gumroad is just an e-commerce delivery platform.

Um you pay the money and you download the files. And in the in in a lot of my workshops, it's a video file, it's an audio file, it's PDFs of uh the content, uh it's typically a transcript of some kind, uh just to make sure that at least for me, I'm delivering the workshop in as many modalities of learning as possible. Some people are are video watchers, like you are right now. Um some people are readers, some people are listeners. Um, and so whatever format people consume information and try to give it to them.

And then finally, of course, is the content, and a lot of the workshop stuff is gonna follow, it's gonna follow um the what why how framework, right? So what is the thing, why is it important, how does it work? And so when you decompose your workshop topic into you know all the little subchapters, each of those is gonna be what is it, why does it matter, how does it work? And I find that that format for me tends to uh tends to best convey the information because in a lot of cases, you know, there's there's a big question like what is the thing? Like what what do these words even mean why does this matter uh and then how does it work um so something for example like uh doing regression analysis what is that like if you're not familiar with it uh I can't launch right into why it's important if you don't even understand the words coming out of my mouth so that's that framework for putting together the content and again same as the direct marketing framework list offer creative gotta do the platform first doing that building your platform first also gives you a sense of what the audience cares about right when you look at what you're getting traffic to on your blog on your newsletter uh you know what gets clicks uh what gets engagement on your social media posts you can very quickly tell some topics are are made for a workshop right there's a lot of interest in them other topics not as much I have given I've lost count of how many workshops at different conferences and I've had some workshops where yeah there's three people in the room right it was just not a topic people were interested in and like well you three are gonna get like the deep dive and as far as I know everyone walked away having gotten some benefit from it but at the same time it's one of those things where other workshops I've given you know packed a room a hundred people like okay this is this is actually too large for a uh a classroom style so you've got to be very focused on building your research to know what it is people want.

One of the ways that I recommend doing this is building question lists. So going to sites like ask.com and Quora and Justanswer.com and all these different companies that run these QA sites and again just make it, you know, select all on the screen, copy and paste it to a text document, and then look at the questions that keep coming up over and over again. So a Reddit is another phenomenal source for this. What are the questions that keep coming up over and over again where people clearly either they don't want to or they don't know how to Google for the answers? And that's a great place to build your workshop from because you know these are perennial problems.

And you also know that if you need to, you can uh answer the questions lightly in those forms and um gently encourage people to take your workshop if they really want to dig into it. Um so that's the methodology for for building out that workshop content and for building out your platform is figure out what people want. Um look at search data too. Go into you know Google Trends or the SEO tool of your choice and start digging in. Like what are the common things that people keep asking?

Use uh services like uh keyword spinner and stuff to uh uh to copy the uh you know people also uh ask or uh auto-suggest questions from Google. Those are fantastic ways to build that list of questions um that you can build an entire workshop around. So how is it working? Um pretty well. It's it is more than beer money, it's less than mortgage money, let's put it that way.

Um and that's with not the world's best marketing um yet. I do put it in my newsletters, I do uh share it on social media, but for the most part, um I don't promote them as heavily as I promote my company because my company is and all the services and products we offer are much higher ROI uh than the workshops. The workshops are there if you want to learn a specific topic. Um and I need to put together a list of um all the workshops that are available and probably take down a couple of the ones that are a little on the old side. So long uh lots of detail as to what as how these things uh work.

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