Step-By-Step Guide to Hosting Better Live Workshops

Have you always wanted to host a live workshop but feel intimidated by it? We’ll guide you through the process of building curriculums, live trainings, and webinars that grow your audience and turn them into paying customers.

Just to get on the same page when it comes to terminology, when we say live workshops, we’re using it as a blanket term referring to:

• Webinars: Teaching a topic with a sales call-to-action, like selling a course, at the end.
• Workshops: These could be free with no strings attached OR a paid workshop to bring in revenue.
• Trainings: Teaching to existing customers, like our Wandering Aimfully Coaching Sessions! #shamelessplug

Basically, live workshops are all about teaching something in front of a camera to further your business.

Some of the many reasons we’ve loved hosting live workshops over the past 10 years:

• 🤝 They create a direct connection with our audience
• 🦄 We love teaching things while also having fun
• 💸 Live workshops are an effective way to deliver value and sell products or services

Whether you want to build an audience, deepen your trust with your customers, or sell a product or service, there’s one thing that helps you achieve all three of those things…

… establishing authority.

Live workshops allow you to establish authority because they’re about showing someone you have the skills to solve a problem for them.

Your customers (or potential customers) have a pain point and it’s your job to use your expertise to make that pain point go away.

Think of your customers or your audience like someone who has a specific problem or pain point. Your customer is searching for someone WITH AUTHORITY to help them alleviate their pain.

That’s where you come in!

You use your knowledge and expertise to alleviate their pain through live workshops. Think of your live workshops as if it’s your doctor’s appointment with them and the goal is for them to leave with some relief.

We’ve divided this live workshop guide into four parts:

🔨 Part 1: Creating your live workshop curriculum

This is your bag of solutions to ease your audience’s pain AKA your workshop topic and curriculum.

📽 Part 2: Learning the live workshop tech

You have to learn to use the tools at your disposal to best help your audience. We’ll go over all the tech specs (workshop software, microphones, webcams, etc) to make your workshops top-notch without breaking your bank!

📡 Part 3: Going live!

This is where you actually ease your audience’s pain. We’ll share best practices for running your live workshops and how to set up replays.

💰 Part 4: How to effectively sell during a workshop

We’ll walk you through how to use your live workshop to actually sell a bigger solution to your audience’s pain.

Let’s dive right into it!

 

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Part 1: Creating Your Live Workshop Curriculum and Presentation

First up, let’s talk about a critical piece of live workshops…

You need to have a clear goal for WHY you are hosting a live workshop.

Here are some different ways to use live workshops based on different goals:

Across the top of the table, you have different end goals for your live workshop that depict the journey of your potential customer through your marketing bridge*. Your live workshops can either be set up as Free or Paid, depending on your goals.

Note: We really dislike the phrase “sales funnel” around here so we refer to that concept as creating a Marketing Bridge. You can learn more about how we think about marketing and get 13 free marketing bridge ideas in this related article.

🎯  Live Workshop Goal #1: Brand Awareness (free)

You can have a live workshop that is all about building brand awareness. It could be something you host on Instagram Live, Facebook Live, or even inside a Facebook Group.

🎯 Goal #2: Email List Growth (free)

Then, you can have a live workshop that is behind an email sign-up but you’re not doing any selling. We used to do this in a series called “Transparent Talks” which was just a way for us to deliver value through a monthly training session and get people to sign up for our email list.

🎯 Goal #3-A: Sales (free)

You can also do a live workshop to teach and then sell a product or service at the end. We’ve done various free live workshops to sell our Wandering Aimfully Un-Boring Business Coaching (a $2,000 product). I,👨🏻‍🦲Jason, used to host a weekly free live workshop and sold an online course at the end. Remember, the live workshop itself is free but you generate revenue for your business by landing a few sales of a paid product at the end of the workshop.

🎯 Goal #3-B: Sales (paid)

You could sell a paid live workshop where the offer is the live workshop itself. We’ve done this a handful of times, creating a simple sales page to promote the paid live workshop and selling “seats” to it. This is a great way to get a cash injection in your business AND to validate an idea for a bigger product you might be thinking of building.

🎯 Goal #4: Customer Trainings (paid)

Finally, you could do a live workshop as a part of a paid program or a course like we do with our Wandering Aimfully Un-Boring Coaching Sessions. Here’s a look at our coaching dashboard we’ve created for our members which features the upcoming live workshop and the past recorded workshops:

Your live workshop goal should be one of these things:

• 📣  I’m doing live workshops to build my brand awareness and email list.
• 💞  I’m doing free live workshops to deepen the connection with my audience and establish trust.
• 🤑  I’m doing live workshops to teach something and then sell a product/service that teaches MORE on that topic.
• 🥳  I’m doing live workshops because I run a paid offering and it’s how I show up for my customers.

By setting a specific goal for your live workshop, it becomes easier to be satisfied with the result of all your effort.

Now that you know what goal you want for your live workshop, let’s talk about building your curriculum!

Remember, this is like your bag of solutions you’re going to use to ease your audience’s pain and build authority with them.

First things first, you have to come up with a live workshop topic

When you’re coming up with a workshop topic, you have to think of your goal and think of your audience (potential customer).

If you’re trying to 📣 build your awareness…

• Where do you see a need in the market or a topic that people seem eager to learn about based on content you’ve already created?
• What blog post or article have you created that people are already attracted to?
• Is there a specific piece of social media content you’ve created that people are engaging with the most?

Answering these questions will give you a range of topics that people want to learn about from you.

For example: If you have a Virtual Assistant Business and you want to target busy entrepreneurs and you noticed that your blog post on Asana is getting a lot of traffic, your workshop topic could be “3 Ways to Save Time in Your Biz Using Asana.”

If you’re trying to 💞 deepen the connection with your audience to establish trust…

• What skill have you honed that’s led you to create your own process/way of doing something?

For example: If you have a Digital Planner Business and you know that one of the pain points of your audience is that they don’t have enough time to customize and personalize their planners, you can create a live workshop on “How to Customize & Embellish A Digital Planner in 15 Minutes.”

If you’re trying to 🤑 sell a product/service…

• What small problem can you solve that leads to the bigger problem that your offer solves?

For example: If you have a course on Selling Printables on Etsy but you know that the initial problem most first-time sellers need to solve is how to even get started on Etsy then it would make sense to build a live workshop on the “4 Steps To Getting Your First Printable On Etsy.”

If you’re trying to 🥳 show up for your customers…

• Ask your customers! What topic would bring the most value to them and what do they need from you?

As an example, we do this a lot in Wandering Aimfully! We have loads of ideas for our coaching sessions so we ask our members which topics are most interesting to them. That’s exactly how we came to one of our workshop topics “How To Use Live Workshops Effectively.” 😉

👋 Caveat: We don’t believe in teaching second-hand knowledge. Teach from YOUR experience or a process you’ve created. If you don’t have enough knowledge, experiences, or a unique process… create one. This is your chance to start learning stuff now so that you can teach it later. Remember to stick to your values and listen to your gut on what feels right to YOU.

Live Workshop Topic Example: Using the “Instagram Algorithm” to Your Advantage

Let’s look at the Instagram live workshop we did to promote our Wandering Aimfully coaching program because our coaching session at that time was all about setting up an Instagram strategy.

If your goal is a workshop that sells an offering, use the “iceberg” concept to come up with your topic.

The topic of your paid product or service is ALL this good stuff beneath the surface of the water. For our case, it’s our 2-hour coaching session where we teach an entire Instagram strategy. It was only available inside our paid coaching program.

The topic of your workshop is just ONE pain point that’s connected to your bigger topic. In our example, we chose the topic “3 ways to use the Instagram Algorithm to your advantage” as our little iceberg on top of the surface. Then, we sold our coaching program that will teach them everything else beneath the surface.

Another way to think of this: your workshop is like a band-aid and your paid offer is the cure.

Now that you have your topic, how do you even begin to make your curriculum?

We have a general formula for running a successful live workshop based on years of experience:

• Problem: Start with the problem you’re solving
• Intro: Then introduce yourself and your experience
• Preview: Preview what they will learn in the workshop
• Teach: The bulk of your workshop is the teaching portion (duh!)
• Pitch: if you’re doing a pitch, give this plenty of time and space
• Q&A: And finally, we love a good Q&A (and so will your audience)

Here’s an example of how the formula works for a 60-minute sales webinar:

Hellos & Welcome (5 mins): Greet people and ask a couple of icebreaker questions as you wait for attendees to trickle in.

Problem, Intro, Preview (5 mins): Start with the problem you are going to solve for them and tell them why they are here. Then do your introduction after that and tell them why you are the person who can solve the problem for them. Finally, give them a preview of what you will be teaching in the workshop.

Teaching Section (25 mins): This is the bulk of your workshop! Your priority here is to deliver value and the solution to the problem you introduced earlier.

Pitch (10 mins): Yes, you are going to spend ten minutes selling your offer confidently. You made a thing that is awesome so spend time on pitching it!

Q&A (15 mins): Answer questions from the attendees on the workshop topic or your offer.

💡 PRO TIP: Add subtle reminders and cues throughout the workshop to bring the audience’s attention back to the workshop. It can be something as simple as asking them a this-or-that question or gently telling them to go back to the workshop if their attention has veered off to social media.

Our process for creating your live workshop presentation:

Step 1: Outline:

Create a Google Doc and brain dump all of your ideas into it. Don’t worry about organizing anything, just get your thoughts written down (bullet points are great).

Step 2: Organize

Once your outline is done, go back through your brain dump and organize your thoughts into sections. Try to group thoughts together. Try to break things into three to four “acts” or parts.

Step 3: First Draft

Open up your presentation app of choice and roughly add your slides based on your sections and bullets. DON’T get caught up on the design or formatting yet. This process will go so much faster and smoother if you just take your organized first draft and get them into your slides.

Step 4: Design

Finally, add design and branding to your slides! Format all headings and add slide transitions (get those star wipe transitions!) You can add all the design, GIFs, and transitions but remember that the content should be the star of the show.

💡 PRO TIP: If you are someone who tends to dive into design first, try putting together the content first and show it to a trusted friend before you do any design on it. Ask them if the content is helpful and if they give you the thumbs up, then you know it’s time to move on to design.

Some live workshop teaching best practices:

• Think of the final result you want for your attendee and then reverse engineer your information and sequence based on that final result.
• Structure things in three or four “acts” so it’s easier for people to follow along (think: Step #1, Step #2, Tip #1, Tip #2, etc).
• Studies show people retain information better when it’s attached to a story so it might be worthwhile to think of a metaphor that you can use throughout the workshop.

This could be a separate article on its own but…

Let’s talk about basic slide design for your live workshop presentations

We’re not here to teach you how to move from MS Paint 🎨 to the modern era of design tools but we do have some helpful tips we’ve learned from hosting 100+ workshops over the years.

Basic Slide Design 101

• Bring items in one by one. Do not display everything on a slide all at once, it’s overwhelming. Less is more! Err on more slides with less info.
• Headings are your friend. Vary your font sizes to create headings and body fonts.
• Stick to 3 fonts at most. Just because 10,000+ fonts exist doesn’t mean you need to use ‘em.
• Use photos/illustrations. Services like Unsplash, Over, and Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly Adobe Spark) are great for adding visual interest.
• Do not be afraid to use impact slides. These are simple slides with only one sentence on them and a bold color that breaks up your content.
• Add some fun! GIFs are your friend! If you’re feeling saucy, you could even add video 😱 (but only if that doesn’t overwhelm you).
• Be careful with templates. Canva, Envato, Creative Market, etc offer great templates but don’t go overboard!
• Keep transitions SIMPLE and consistent. Star wipes are wonderful in theory but distracting.

🔥 HOT DESIGN TIP: Keep in mind the design of the page you’re embedding the replay in. For example, if your website has a white background, you might want your presentation to have a different color background or border so when it’s played it doesn’t disappear on the page.

Let’s Recap Part 1:

• Determine the goal of your workshop.
• Understand your customer’s pain points.
• Come up with a workshop topic based on your goal and audience’s pain points.
• Build out a teaching curriculum that helps bring your audience “relief.”

 

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Part 2: Figuring Out Live Workshop Tech

It is soooooooo easy to get distracted by all the technical bells, whistles, and gear that can help you deliver a great live workshop.

❌ Don’t get distracted! ❌

Your content is the star of your live workshop show; the gear and the tech are the supporting cast.

We love gadgets and goodies as much as the next person, but we’ve also used the bare minimum and still had great results. Be willing to upgrade AFTER you gain more experience (and revenue).

We’ve put together a couple of audio, video, and lighting recs whether you’re on a budget or looking to splurge and invest. Most of them are affiliate links and we make a small commission if you buy using these links.

📹 Best Webcam for Live Workshops

No Budget: Use whatever laptop camera or webcam you already have. Boom, done, congrats to you!

Low Budget: Anivia 1080p HD Webcam ($45). Highly rated and solid price point.

Higher End: Logitech Brio 4K Webcam ($199). This is our webcam of choice these days but we only recently upgraded to this.

🎙 Best Microphone for Live Workshops

No Budget: Any headphones with a built-in microphone are better than nothing!

Low Budget: RODE SmartLav+ ($70). Great lavalier microphone that’s also unobtrusive. We used two of these for years!

Higher End: Sennheiser MKE600 mic with Manfrotto Boom Stand ($560). This is what we use but it’s overkill unless you do a lot of video.

🕯 Best Lighting for Live Workshops

No Budget: Find natural light in your space and sit in front of it! This is what we do 99% of the time for our workshops 👍👍.

Low Budget: Selvim 6-inch Selfie Ring Light ($33). Has a desk clip as well which is neat.

Higher End: Dazzne Desk Mount Key Light ($199). Lots of color range and a ton of light.

⌨️ Misc Gear for Live Workshops

There are so many little items that make workshops easier to run but these are the 3 things that we use MOST often and wanted to recommend:

Wireless Trackpad: This is great for clicking through slides and not having to click keys on your keyboard. We’re on Apple laptops so we use the Magic Trackpad.

Second Screen: Great for keeping up with comments, Q&As, or ensuring you stay live the entire time. We just use one of our iPhones or iPads for this!

Wire-In to the Internet: From years of experience, trust us, if you can hardwire in using an ethernet cable, DO IT. We didn’t know our Apple laptops just needed this USB-C ethernet dongle but now we do.

🤓 PRO GEAR TIP: Do a couple live workshops with no budget or low budget items and make sure you even like doing them. There’s absolutely no point in buying a bunch of gear if you find out you don’t even like the experience of hosting live workshops.

⚙️ Best Software for Hosting Live Workshops

👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍🦲✅ Our choice: Zoom Webinars ($79/mo). Zoom has the most stable connection, has all the features you need, and seems to have the least amount of outages and issues.

WebinarNinja ($49/mo): Full disclosure, we are friends with the creators of WebinarNinja but that’s not why they get our recommendation. This is a solid, all-in-one platform that is extremely robust and always being improved.

Crowdcast ($29/mo): We used to use Crowdcast a ton. They have fantastic customer service and a really nice user interface. The only problem? We would run into some sort of technical hiccup from time to time. They may have sorted this out over the years as we haven’t used them since 2019.

💻 Best Program for making Live Workshop Slide Presentations

👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍🦲✅ Our choice: Keynote (Mac). We absolutely love Keynote and how flexible and intuitive it is. PLUS, you can record your presentation directly in it for great replays!

Google Slides or Canva: If you can’t use Keynote, Google Slides or Canva are robust free slide presentation tools with many of the same features.

Microsoft Powerpoint: Maybe Powerpoint has gotten better since we last had to login to it almost two decades ago?? We have no idea 😂.

🪞 How to create a great recording space in your home

Let’s talk about a few tips to create a visually interesting (read: not-distracting) backdrop for your live workshops…

Move things around: Your plants, furniture, pictures on the wall! Be okay with temporarily decorating a part of your home to ensure your workshop backdrop isn’t too distracting. We do this every month in a corner of our home for our live workshops!

Set a budget: If you are going to buy a few things for your workshop recording area, set a budget and don’t go nuts. You can always upgrade more later on down the road.

Avoid blank walls: Blank walls actually make video backdrops drab and boring. Find a spot where there’s some character behind you. Pro-tip: Do you have a larger painting on a wall somewhere else in your house? Take it down and lean it up against the wall behind you like we do!

Let’s Recap Part 2!

• Choose your video, audio, and lighting options according to your budget/experience.
• Decide on the software you’ll use to create your slides and to host your actual workshop itself.
• Construct a workshop backdrop that’s visually interesting!

 

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Part 3: Preparing To Teach Live and Workshop Replay Tips

Let’s talk about some best practices for delivering an awesome workshop! The biggest tip we can give you while you’re live and presenting…

👉 STICK. TO. THE. BULLETS. ON. YOUR. SLIDES. 👈

You’re going to have bullets in a lot of your slides. Remember to stick to those core points and don’t veer off on a 5-minute tangent.

If you’re nervous about hosting a live workshop, we’ve got your back!

This is especially for all you Nervous Nellies! To fend off nervousness during your live workshop:

1. Just read your bullets. Don’t go off track.
2. Have some emphasis slides to create impact and break up the bullets.
3. Practice, practice, practice, so you know your slides really well.
4. Show your personality but don’t try to deliver a comedy routine if that’s not something that comes naturally to you (be yourself but bring some energy!)
5. Did we mention sticking to reading the bullets on your slides??

This is where all the work in Part 1, where you wrote and organized your workshop content, comes into play. Make sure you craft your slide bullets in a conversational tone so that when you read them during the live workshop, you won’t sound stiff or like a robot.

💡 PRO-TIP: If you’re hosting your first-ever live workshop, ask a friend to watch a practice version. Tell them you want their honest feedback and wear your feedback-armor when they tell you what needs improving. Additionally, you can do a dry-run of your workshop, record it, and watch it back… what did YOU think needed improvement?

Create a GO LIVE Checklist you can refer to before every workshop

✅ 🔋Are all your devices charged, in Do Not Disturb mode, and ready to go?

✅ 🐹 Are your kids, dogs, cats, okapis, all wrangled-up and away from distracting you?

✅ ☕️ Make sure to have ample fluids available.

✅ 🎵 Queue up your favorite pump-up jam and dance around a bit 10-15 minutes beforehand! (This sounds silly but it’s actually very useful for getting your adrenaline going so you can dive into the workshop pumped up and energetic!)

• 👩🏻‍🦰 listens to Taylor Swift or Whitney Houston
• 👨🏻‍🦲 listens to Outkast, Lil Dicky, or Daft Punk

✅ 📝 Have your GOING LIVE Checklist written next to you (what buttons do you need to push, what things need to be recorded and how, is your second screen setup, etc).

Don’t forget to set expectations for your viewers – you’re their guide!

How should people interact during the live workshop? Tell them how to use the chat and really guide them on how they should behave during the workshop. We like to do this in the Hellos & Welcome portion of our workshops. We tell people exactly where the chat is, how they can interact with one another, and that we like to answer questions at the end using the Q&A box.

Tell people when they should get ready to pay attention. When you’re getting into the meat of the teaching portion, tell your viewers to get ready to take notes or get ready to answer live questions from you. Remind them multiple times throughout when you’re making an important point.

If there’s a sales pitch, make sure you give people a head’s up! We don’t like to bait and switch our live workshop viewers so we always tell them, in the beginning, there’s a pitch at the end. We also give a head’s up when the pitch is about to start so people can leave if they don’t want to be sold to.

Reminder: Something WILL go wrong during your live workshop 😩. Prepare for this. You’re probably not a pro at live workshops so give yourself permission to mess up!

We’ve hosted enough live workshops over the years (100+) that we can unequivocally tell you unfortunate things WILL happen. Your workshop software craps out. Your dog barks wildly. Your slide presentation won’t load. Just do your best to explain to your viewers what’s going on and they’ll appreciate the honesty and realness.

What about live workshop replays??

🔥 Hot take on live workshop replays: We don’t believe in expiring or limited-time replays.

Someone may have taught you otherwise or you’ve seen this practice in action time and time again. However, we simply don’t believe in expiring replays (“The webinar replay is only available for 48 hours!”)

We get it, people need urgency and scarcity to make a purchase but use the countdown timer to take advantage of a limited-time offer not watching the replay.

🔄 There are two main live workshop replay options to choose from:

Option #1: Live Platform Hosting

Let your live workshop software (Zoom, WebinarNinja, Crowdcast, etc) host the recording for you and simply link to it.

• Pros 👍 Almost zero effort on your end and the replay is probably immediately available.
• Cons 👎 Harder to add a limited-time offer to the replay “page.” Watching environment usually isn’t great or branded.

This option is HIGHLY recommended if you are A) a beginner at live workshops and/or B) not very technically savvy. It’s not the lesser of the two options, it’s just less customizable.

Option #2: Self-Hosted (this is our choice)

Download the recording from the workshop software, upload it to your video host of choice, and put it on a page on your site you can customize to your liking.

• Pros 👍 Gives you total control of the replay watching experience and is especially great if you have a limited-time offer to add to the replay page.
• Cons 👎 Takes longer and requires extra effort and technical know-how.

Let’s Recap Part 3!

• Stick to your bullets and keep your slides moving.
• Make sure you write out a checklist ahead of time for exactly what you need to do when you go live.
• Check-in with your audience periodically during the workshop.
• Don’t sweat it if something goes wrong!
• Make sure you have a plan to deliver your replay.

 

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Part 4: How To Use Live Workshops To Sell Your Product or Service

As a friendly reminder, we use “workshop” and “webinar” fairly interchangeably around our household. We’re going to refer to your live workshop as a webinar for this section.

Your webinar: This is the temporary relief you offer your viewer for their pain point. It’s the tip of your iceberg.

Your product or service: This is the CURE to the problem! It’s not just a band-aid/quick fix, it’s the solution and the entire glacier sitting below the water.

Your quick, 3-bullet summation of using a webinar to sell a product or service is as follows:

1. Create a webinar registration page and drive traffic to it.
2. Teach a few helpful things on your live webinar, then sell your product or service that fully solves the problem.
3. Have a limited-time offer and sales page + sales email sequence.

Pretty straightforward, however, there are many steps that go into those three bullet points. Don’t worry, wegotchu!

A simple step-by-step process for creating a webinar that actually sells

Step 1: Create your webinar sign-up page.

The purpose of this page is to get people to sign up for the webinar and get excited to learn something from you.

Here’s a very simple registration page layout we mocked up to show you the main components you need:

Keep it simple: The page needs to be incredibly straightforward (no distractions, no social icons, nothing but the register button!)

Don’t hide the time/date: The time and date of the webinar need to be crystal clear. Bonus points if you want to use a timezone converter to help your registrants.

Post-signup thank you page: There should be a thank you page after registering that tells them to add the date of the webinar to their calendar. If you want to add social sharing icons for the webinar, put them on THIS page.

Reminder emails: Your registration system should send reminder emails about the webinar (most platforms offer this as a built-in feature).

Step 2: Promote sign-ups by driving traffic to your sign-up page.

Use your existing email list and social media accounts to get people to sign-up for the webinar!

Send multiple signup emails: We recommend sending multiple emails, at least 2-3 weeks ahead of time, getting people to sign-up.

Create your social promo content: Create multiple social media posts that promote the webinar, but also give people actionable tips to intrigue them to want to learn more (link in bio!)

Be descriptive and entice people: Whether it’s email or social, don’t just say “sign up for my webinar” − address the pain point you’ll solve and tease people with helpful info.

Here’s an example webinar promotion schedule:

Step 3: Create your curriculum/presentation.

Bust out your presentation tool of choice and create an awesome and helpful webinar!

Webinar structure and timing: Follow the structure we outlined in Part 1. Here’s that image again for ya…

Practice your little buns off: Run through the presentation LIVE with a friend and watch the recording back. Make notes on how you can improve. Practice, practice, practice!

Be proud to sell your product or service: Do NOT skimp on the sales pitch part of the webinar. You did all this work, don’t shortchange yourself and undersell your offering.

Here’s an example of webinar slides we’ve used in the past during the sales portion (these all have bullet by bullet or sentence by sentence slide-builds so it isn’t just one giant slide with too much info on it):

Step 4: Create your Replay Page.

If you’re going with Replay Option #1 (hosted by the webinar software), make sure to grab that URL and add it to your post-webinar sales email sequence.

💡 PRO-TIP: You’ll get traffic to your webinar registration page well after your live webinar has already happened. Think about updating this page to deliver the replay to someone if they still want to “sign up.”

If you’re going with Replay Option #2 (self-hosted on your website), make sure you:

• Have your replay page designed and ready to go
• Have your process in place to download the replay from the webinar software and then upload it to your video host
• Have your sales section on your replay page with your limited-time offer
• Have double-checked all links, buy buttons, etc!

And, some additional tips for you if you’re creating a self-hosted replay page:

• Remind people of the outcomes they will learn by watching the webinar replay (30-40% of replay watchers don’t attend live).
• Include the slide presentation as a PDF they can download. Use smallpdf.com to compress PDFs.
• Make your call to action (your limited-time offer) VERY CLEAR to get someone to the full sales page for your product or service.
• Add a countdown timer for the limited-time offer (not the replay). Just remember to remove the limited-time offer buy button on the replay page when the countdown expires.

Step 5: Create your Limited-Time Offer sales page.

If you want to sell using a webinar effectively, you want to create some sort of urgency in your limited-time offer for your product or service.

🚀 Launch offer: If your sales webinar is part of an open/closed launch, cool − there’s your urgency (although you might want to throw in a bonus to sweeten the deal!)

🌱 Evergreen offer: If your sales webinar is for a product or service that’s normally evergreen (available all the time to purchase), think about a bonus you can throw in to really make the offer feel time-sensitive. This does NOT have to be a discount and could be something like a 1-on-1 call, group Q&A, or another product you throw in the mix.

Step 6: Host your webinar.

Use what we already discussed to prepare for your webinar, interact with your audience and nail your sales pitch!

• Keep in mind the pain point of your attendee − what problem are they seeking solutions to?
• What is the “band-aid” solution you’re offering in your webinar? Make sure your teaching content delivers on that promise.
• And what is the “cure” solution your product or service promises? Make sure your pitch communicates that clearly.

Step 7: Send your post-webinar sales emails.

For every one that registered for your webinar (attended or not), you want to queue up and send a series of sales emails. You gotta pay your bills!

For example: Let’s say you want to leave the cart open for one week after the webinar…

1. You’ll send 4-6 sales emails starting the day after the webinar.
2. Each email should be helpful in some way and not just a pitch to buy. You want to always be delivering value.
3. Each email should have a very clever call to action to go to the sales page AND mention the deadline to buy.
4. If you can avoid it, don’t send any “normal” email newsletters to this group during your sales sequence.

This is what your post-webinar email schedule could look like:

Step 8: Wrap it up and shut it down!

Shut everything down and make sure any pages that have countdown timers are no longer available for purchase.

• We like to turn any sales pages into email capture pages after the limited-time offer expires.
• When doing email capture, make sure to have a Welcome Email that lets them know they’ll get your normal email newsletter moving forward.
• Take time to decompress, relax, and reflect on how everything went.
• Think about using your webinar replay as an evergreen marketing bridge in the future!

Let’s Recap Part 4!

• Make sure your sales workshop topic is the band-aid to your offer’s cure.
• Know your sales strategy before, during, and after your webinar.
• Don’t shortchange yourself on the pitch!

 

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Live Workshop Wrap-Up: Let’s Not Forget About Mindset! 🧠

All the tactics and strategies in the world won’t help you if you don’t have the right mindset! Running a live workshop is A LOT of work (as you’ve read) and it’s important to get your head in the game ahead of time 😆.

🧠  Mindset Tip #1: Increase live workshop confidence with practice.

You are going to be nervous if you don’t host live workshops often. That’s normal! We even get nervous and we’ve done 749 live workshops at this point. The more practice you have, the easier it will be to “go live.”

🧠  Mindset Tip #2: Have realistic goals based on YOUR audience size.

Depending on the size of your email list and social media following, you should expect 3-5% of your total audience to sign up for a webinar.

Example: If you have 500 email subscribers and 500 followers on social media, 5% of your audience would be 50 webinar registrants.

🧠  Mindset Tip #3: Something will go wrong.

We’ve done this enough times and almost every single live workshop we do has some sort of hiccup. Mentally prepare yourself for this. It’s not the end of the world. Just roll with the punches and do the best you can.

🧠  Mindset Tip #4: You can always host another live workshop in the future.

If you have a live workshop that flops, especially one where you tried to sell a product or service and didn’t get any sales, don’t give up! We’ve had complete flops and then six months later had a super-successful workshop.

🧠  Mindset Tip #5: Remember your marketing bridges.

Live workshops are just ONE marketing bridge on your journey of getting strangers on the Internet to buy from you. Live workshops may be a bridge to another guidepost on a customer’s journey to find your castle!

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Phew, that was a lot to throw at you! We know that live workshops can be intimidating if you’re not used to being on video but trust us, once you’ve gone live again and again, it DOES get easier.

We enjoy incorporating live workshops into our business because it’s an incredibly effective way to grow our audience, deliver amazing value to them, and convert them into happy, paying customers.