How to Grow Your Audience Using Online Workshops: Part Five

Online workshops are a great marketing tool. But we don’t want to just hop online and yell, “I’m going live in 10 minutes! Join me!” Uh, noooo, that’s not how we do it.

Instead, we want to invest time “warming up” our audience via email so that when it’s time to promote our free workshop, readers aren’t taken unawares. Once we deliver it, we can develop it into a paid product next time. But right now, our goal is to grow our email list through free service. We’ll use our online workshop (often called a webinar) to do that.

For this series, we’ve chosen an unusual topic: ice fishing. What??? If we can learn the process for a topic unfamiliar to us, we’ll know how to adapt it for our current and future topics.

Here’s our breakdown of this series so far…

In Part One, we chose our topic.

In Part Two, we identified and researched various title resources.  

In Part Three, we chose our title (it’s a dandy!).

In Part Four, we discussed priming our audience for our upcoming webinar using what’s called “pre-launch” emails.

Part Five

It’s time to invite them to take an action. We’ll do that within a series of “launch emails.” We’ll discuss that task next month in part six.

Today, let’s double-check the goal we set for this workshop. Why? It’s so easy to get off track! It’s good to regularly confirm we’re on course before getting too far afield.

We’re still committed to our initial goal…to grow our audience. And we’re still planning to offer our workshop for free. Consider both decisions as two sides of the same marketing coin. 🙂

Note that we could always change our goal and charge for our workshop instead. Free and paid are both valid options. Either way, now’s the time for a final decision. After today, it will be too late to change our goal. Why? Because once we begin marketing the workshop, our marketing message must be clear and consistent.

Let’s continue with our initial goal of offering our knowledge for free so we can grow our audience base. This will show us not only IF our audience is interested in this topic, but WHICH readers are interested in it, and since workshop attendees need to give us their name and email address, we’ll have MORE readers after the workshop than before, which was our plan from the beginning.

Some marketers are discouraged when offering free content; they want to be paid for it instead. Understandable. But remember…

We ARE “paid” for free webinars. Just not in dollars.

Each time a new or current subscriber enters their first name and email address in those little magic “opt-in boxes,” they’re giving us something of value. How so?

They’re raising their hands and saying, “I want to know more about this subject!” That information, my friend, is gold. Once we know who in our audience wants which parts of our message, we can offer them more of what they want and when we’re ready to, create a paid product that they’re more likely to buy. YES!!!

So onward we go!

Let’s talk more specifically about the content for our launch email series next month.