As you may know, last week I held The Audience Accelerator, my first live workshop. If you think live workshops are run-of-the-mill, easy to put together, or extremely lucrative, keep reading.
I could tell you that I made nearly $3,000 in 90 mins. But that would be gross cherry-picking and essentially untrue.
So today, I’m pulling back the curtains on everything, from the work that goes into a live workshop and how it correlates with the revenue to the potential ways to maximize your revenue.
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The Audience Accelerator — what was it and why did it happen?
I republished the workshop landing page even if you can’t buy access to it anymore, just for reference, so I won’t waste too many words describing it here.
Briefly put, I created this workshop after this survey (that you can still fill in, by the way!) that I sent to my newsletter subscribers revealed that audience building and audience monetization are their biggest challenges.
I did a couple of issues about building an audience and making sure it’s relevant, but there’s only so much you can cover in a newsletter.
So I created a 90-minute workshop, with exercises, worksheets, bonus resources, and a Q&A.
Let’s see how it went.
Pricing and goals
There were two pricing tiers:
- $97 for the workshop alone
- $290 for the workshop + a 1:1 45-min session with me (the 1-hour strategy sessions sell for $350, so this was a sizeable discount).
My long-term plan (I always have one of these!) with this workshop was NOT to make a fortune — a good thing, since I didn’t. It was to validate an idea, gather feedback, and turn it into a pre-recorded, self-paced course with a do-it-together option.
This will be happening in July this year, so if you missed the live workshop but still want to grow your audience faster, join the waitlist and you’ll be the first to learn when it goes live.
My short-term goals to validate this idea:
- A minimum of 5 registrations. Anything below that and I would have refunded anyone and forgot about it.
- 10 registrations would have made it enough for me to pre-validate the idea.
- 20 attendees max, to allow everyone to participate and/or ask questions.
- $2k in revenue.
My list of tactics to meet those goals
- I started a waitlist in late November. I didn’t email the people who subscribed to it until January ← this was a mistake, I should have emailed them regularly and right away.
- Around Christmas, I put together a new lead magnet, a short eBook also called Audience Accelerator, and promoted it on social media. The new leads were also funneled into the waitlist. There was a short CTA in the eBook prompting people who downloaded it from other forms to sign up for the waitlist.
- In January, I announced the date to my waitlist. I gave them a 1 week+ advance before I told anyone else about the workshop.
- One week later, everyone on my list got access to the workshop.
- 48 hours later, I announced it on social media ← to give my subscribers an edge and first dibs on the seats.
- From there on, I email my waitlist and the general list once a week. Another weekly post went on social media.
This tallies up to a grand total of 6 different emails and 5 social media posts.
The immediate results
- 19 total attendees/20 seats → a few people bought a ticket knowing they wouldn’t be able to attend, only watch the recording. Still, I didn’t want to risk it, so I took the page offline two days before the workshop.
- $2,800+ — basic tickets and the workshop + strategy session option.
$2.8k for 90 mins doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
Except it was way more than that. The workshop ran for ±90 mins, but everything else took much longer
- Strategy sessions: 5×45 mins each = 225 mins
- Prep for the strategy session (research into my clients’ audience/market/assets) 5×60 mins = 300 mins
- Slide deck, landing page, bonus resources, worksheet = 1800 mins (estimated, this is very hard to calculate).
- Email campaigns, social media posts, answering DMs and emails about the workshop = 600 mins (also an estimate).
- Post-event stuff: sending the recording and the resources once again, collecting feedback, other misc tasks = 120 mins
That’s 3,045 mins in prep time alone. Add the workshop itself and the grand total is 3,135 mins or 52 hours.
Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?
Adriana, why don’t you go flip burgers for a living? It might pay better
Everything above adds up to $53.8 per hour. Burger-flipping per se doesn’t pay better but this is still a beginner’s fee.
However, I met all my numerical goals and then some. Better yet, I got the results I actually did all this work for.
Long-term results
After 3,100+ minutes, my idea is validated in more ways than one:
- The workshop was almost sold out — 1 seat left, way over my conservative estimation → there is definitely interest in this topic.
- The attendees were engaged and they had relevant, smart, actionable questions → people are willing to put in the work because they know a bigger audience = more revenue.
- I could have priced it at $25-$50 and allowed for more attendees but → a higher price means more interest and willingness to commit.
Forget the nearly $3k, these are the truly valuable things The Audience Accelerator workshop brought me:
- Idea validation, as described above
- Feedback: I asked people what they liked and what they DIDN’T like (here’s the feedback form, in case you attended the workshop and didn’t fill it in, you can still do it) → I can use it to make the course even better than the workshop.
- I still have to record the course, redo the slide deck, and split it into lessons but many of the assets I created can be reused with minimal tweaks.
- 6 glowing testimonials (with more to come) → launching a brand-new product WITH social proof is a massive benefit. Here’s one such testimonial in a raw format, I didn’t get to add it to my template yet:
All this to say that I can now confidently create the pre-recorded course — I know it will sell and, more importantly, that it will help the students build the audience their business deserves.
Missed the workshop and you kinda regret it now? Join the waitlist, you can still grab the course the second it goes live in July (tentative).
How to use this in your own business
I told you all this because I got many questions about the workshop and expectations vs outcomes. I also told you this for two reasons:
- To give you a sneak peek into what it takes to create a live event. I haven’t even gone through the jitters, the anxiety pangs, and the feeling that everything will crash and I’ll make a fool of myself. A live workshop takes a lot of work, even when the teacher has decades of experience in what they’re teaching.
- To give you a few ideas on how to structure your own offers.
The last point is where I want to linger a bit. One-off workshops aren’t the best revenue drivers because of how time-consuming they are.
There are three ways to use them to pad your bottom line, though:
1. Turn them into evergreen, pre-recorded courses
This is the strategy I’m using because I love the validation the live workshop offered me. This can be a good option for you as well if you have a medium-sized audience (over 10k engaged audience members across channels).
Of course, it’s not the only option:
2. Re-do the workshop regularly
For the second, third, or tenth live session, you will essentially only put in the duration of the workshop. Sure, you’ll make minimal tweaks to your slide deck and the information inside based on feedback from the previous editions but that’s not a huge time investment.
The workshop will get better and better as you keep doing it and you’ll eventually stop being anxious about it.
There are a few drawbacks to this approach:
- You can’t use any FOMO, no matter how real it is. You can’t say “2 more days to claim your seat” because your audience knows there’s another session coming sooner or later.
- You need a fairly large audience to fill in a reasonable number of seats in every session (think 30k+ engaged audience members across channels).
You can also combine 1 and 2 → do a couple of live sessions and then turn your workshop into a pre-recorded course.
3. Use the live workshop as a lead magnet for a more expensive offer
One of the selling points of The Audience Accelerator workshop was that there would be no pitch at the end. This is a personal preference of mine because I sat through one too many webinars and workshops that were glorified infomercials.
It doesn’t have to be yours, though. You can charge less for your workshop and use it as a paid lead magnet for your more expensive offers. A few words of caution, though:
- It’s not just me who hates workshops that are 50% pitches. If you choose this option, don’t spend more than 5% of the duration of the workshop pitching, especially if it’s a paid workshop. I’ve recently noticed that more and more creators choose to forego pitches altogether or downsize them considerably and this is a trend I support wholeheartedly.
- Ideally, pitch an offer that’s NOT a more advanced program on the same topic. You’d essentially tell people you have ALL the information they need but choose to withhold it because they haven’t paid enough. It’s street dealer behavior and it can get very awkward during the Q&A session.
There are ways to upsell without the street dealer vibe: a 1:1 with you, access to a community, a different program altogether, and so on. You can even downsell your audience to a cheaper digital product of yours — there’s no rule that says you have to pitch a more expensive offer.
Well, {{ subscriber.first_name }}, now you know as much as I do about The Audience Accelerator workshop. If you have any questions about it or workshops in general, I’m just an email away. Hit reply, I’m happy to answer your questions.
Adriana’s Picks
- Mark Manson’s predictions about the creator economy. I loved his take on short-form content.
- X might introduce Articles, the feature Facebook nixed a couple of years ago.
- Creators made bank at the Super Bowl, as YouTube and the NFL invited them to capitalize on the event, and their audiences followed.
That’s it from me today!
See you next week in your inbox. Here to make you think,
Adriana
