[Transcript starts at 0:40]
Hello, hello, hello my podcast people and thank you for joining me for yet another episode of my
favorite online business podcast. I got Rupert behind me. If you're watching, you see him.
I got Rupert behind me flipping his tail. If you are listening, tuning in, or watching on the day that it
drops, it is Monday, June 8th. Let's pray that June goes a bit slower than May, shall we? So today
we're talking about a trust building tool.
And I've talked about this tool a bunch, a ton in the past. And I'm bringing it back because it's my
podcast and I do what I want, but also because it's the truth and also because it's top of mind
because of a recent experience. So today we are talking about, can you guess it? If you've read
the little blurb thing, then you already know, but can you guess it? What do you think I'm talking
about? Tons of trust building associated with this thing, this specific type of offer.
What is it? Online workshops, folks. So this episode is inspired by a workshop I attended a few
weeks ago. If you're on my email list, you're in my ecosystem that way, you know what I'm talking
about.
I went to an online workshop hosted by a woman who goes by the name of Safana Banana on
Instagram. She teaches media literacy and communication. The workshop was an hour long.
That's it. It was short. All right.
Boom, boom. It was $27 and it was called how to read an ad. There were like five or six of us on
the call.
And my number one takeaway from that workshop was how much fucking trust a live workshop
can build. I absolutely learned things. Don't get me wrong.
I learned a lot. I took notes. I always take notes.
She's organized. She has great flow, great structure. She did class participation, class
participation, but it wasn't required or forced.
We could unmute at the end and just talk. I can use her voice if you wanted, but otherwise it was
just all through the chat. It was interactive, lots of energy.
She was great. And again, that is why the number one takeaway was how much trust is and can
be built from live workshops. I've only been following her for maybe a month.
I don't know. And I have some folks in common that also follow her who I trust, most notably my
twin, Laura Jean. So I was already very bought in.
Admittedly, I don't know her politics, but I can guess them. You can go look at her accounts.
She's a fan of Banana.
Two Fs. And you can see for yourself. But I will say of note with the politics side, I do feel some
kind of way about the fact that all the books that she recommends, and I bought a lot of them,
they're written by what seems to be white men.
But it makes sense on the other hand, because she's in comms and you got to know the game to
be in the game, to be able to use the game for good, to be able to game the game, I guess. So it
makes sense on some level, but I was just like, no women, no brown people. Okay.
But the hour that we spent together, it was slightly longer, but she was done with the content by
an hour. But she was like, oh, we're going to go on over because she was like talking about other
stuff. And we were encouraging her to talk about other stuff.
But that hour was unmatched in terms of getting to experience her, her personality, her thought
processes, her quirkiness, her un, you know, her being, you know, quote, unquote, unfiltered, her
unbound by the confines of a reel or TikTok or social media posts. By the end, even though not
even by the end, halfway through, I was just like, yes, I trust you. I mostly trusted you before and
now I definitely trust you.
I will recommend, you know, I will recommend you, I will buy from you again, if it makes sense, if
and when it makes sense, I will sing your praises. And this is all, you know, all took place within
the confines, the span of an hour. So workshops, webinars, masterclasses, whatever you want to
call them, they continue to be massive trust building opportunities.
And my guess is that you are likely under utilizing them. Now, I am an early adopter through and
through, and I'm often ahead of things. I think I would do a very good job of being like, that's
going to be a thing, that's going to be a thing, that's going to be a thing.
And I think that may very well be the case with these. Now, to be clear, I know they're not new.
Online workshops, webinars, whatever you want to call them, they are not new.
I am largely speaking to the spirality aspect, the spirality nature here. We know webinars, they
had a moment in 2020, 2021, I actually went on a podcast, I went on Claire Pelletreau's podcast
and spoke extensively about how much of my income was made up from workshops and
webinars. They're not new.
COVID brought everybody online, that's when they really took off. But as is the case with most
things, when there is a ton of supply, interest and demand tend to go down. Note, I'm not saying
that just because there is supply interest goes down.
No, it's largely the other things around it where we have supplies up because there's market
saturation, everyone's doing it, the novelty is now wearing off as the consumer, maybe the
consumers have had bad experiences because everyone is doing it. Then the demand for it
decreases. We also at the same time have online business coaches that are pushing and
promoting other things and saying that things are dead.
Spoiler, nothing's dead. Workshops, webinars, whatever you want to call them, they are definitely
not dead. Definitely not.
I have a former client, I work with her sometimes on and off now as well, but she's using them
and crushing with them. She has a big audience, very engaged audience and a somewhat
skeptical audience. It's again, massive trust-building opportunity.
She's crushing with them. Are people busy? Yes. I think the online business coaches will use this
as a reason to knock them down, knock a workshop down.
People are busy, they can't get to stuff. Yes, I get it. People are busy.
Absolutely. Self-paced stuff will always have its place. Always.
I'm not trying to replace self-paced things. I am, once again, speaking to the trust-building that is
possible with a live, whatever you want to have it, whatever you want to call it. You cannot do that
with a self-paced offer.
You cannot. You can build trust, don't get me wrong, with self-paced, but it's very different. Again,
it was just an hour.
Fucking five minutes in, I was like, I like you. I, so the same way, you know, speaking to this,
people being busy, right? The same way that people are being busy, people are busy. We also
have been talking about people wanting connection and people wanting human interaction and
people wanting in-person things, right? And I think that online workshops kind of, you know, they
scratch this itch and they speak to that.
Clearly they're not in-person, but they are also clearly not AI. And I think we're going to see more
of that. People are like, God, is this AI? I'm sick of this.
I just want a person. Boom. Gotcha.
All right. They also speak to the human interaction piece, but also add a convenience piece
because you can do it from home. I'm not, I've never been one and I'm saying this like, yes, I'm
also looking at my own behavior.
I've never been one to really sign up for workshops. Even when I was running them, I wasn't
really signing up for them. I signed up for one with James Olivia and that like really exposed me
to them and their ecosystem.
But I've never been like a massive workshop consumer, but the people that I have gone to their
workshops, I'm like, yeah, I trust you. Or I have had a bad experience. I did one, I'm trying to think
when it was, I was in my other apartment and I was like, I will never buy from this woman again.
I am blocking her. I will only say bad things if people ask me about her. I don't even remember
her name because it was that bad.
It was a bait and switch and I was like, never fucking again. But the amount of trust that can go
into it, I do think that some of the things that people are looking for and some of those wants are
being expedited and furthered by the advent of AI. I think that a live workshop can scratch the
edge for a lot of those things.
But back to the spirality piece, I can't say how your people currently feel about live stuff. Maybe
they're really overwhelmed, they're really busy, everything that's going on economically and just
politically and socially may have people feeling some kind of way. It may make them want
community more.
I don't know. But I do think that online workshops in general will come back as something that
folks are more willing to engage with. And I think that online business owners should utilize them.
You should utilize them if you're not already. I am fully proud and this what follows is not at all a
shameless plug. I have a whole ass 90-minute self-paced course called Webinar Wizard that will
teach you how to do the research for it, promote it, sell it, run it, and just crush your first webinar.
And yes, I realize the irony here. It's not live. It's not a live workshop.
It's because I ran it live already. I ran that shit live a few times and this was way back and I turned
it into a self-paced offer. And honestly, I don't want to run it live again.
That is the number one thing. It's not that I don't think that it's worth it. It's that I don't want to run it
live.
And I already have it recorded. So I re-recorded it at the end of last year. So everything is up to
date.
It's 90 minutes long. It is $97, but I'm going to give you a code. If you use the code MOTM, like
the letter O, M-O-T-M, my shirt on the mic, M-O-T-M, you'll save $25.
So we will link that in the show notes. Courtney, thank you. But given that that resource exists,
I'm going to let it do the heavy lifting in regards to like the logistics of like, how do you plan one?
How do you launch one? How do you run it? All that stuff, because it's there.
I've already done that. But I will say the following as it relates to running these live workshops.
This is me putting on my coaching hat.
First off, always assess demand, right? Assess demand first. Ask folks if they want it, right? Don't
just make it. Ask them if they want this thing.
Give them all the logistics, all the specs. And then from there, assume about a 10% conversion
rate. So if all the people that said yes on all of your channels, 10% said yes.
Excuse me, 10% of all the people that said yes from across all of your channels, 10% of those
people will actually pay for this thing and show up. Or at least they'll pay for it. I don't know if
they'll show up.
Use that to decide if it's worth it. So if you had 10 people that said, yeah, I want this, that means
that probably one of those people will actually pay. So decide if that is worth it for you.
Which brings me to the next point, lean into small numbers, right? Workshops are great
financially if you have a massive audience, right? But if you don't, don't expect to make much
money and that's okay. Again, we are really looking at, you know, utilizing these as trust building
vehicles, right? Next point, what do you call it? Workshop, webinar, masterclass, it's largely
semantics, doesn't matter, right? Everyone and all of these sites, they're hosting it on Zoom, so it
doesn't matter. I like workshop because it implies that you're going to do something.
Folks tend to use masterclass as a way to like charge more money, but I think it is slightly falling
out of favor. Again, nothing's dead. So that's the difference between the three of those.
Which brings me to the next point, have the people do something. Again, I like calling it a
workshop and if you don't call it that, have them do workshop stuff during the actual event, right?
Don't just lecture at them and then, you know, have them leave, no. It doesn't have to be like
some super participation, unmute yourself, though, like having them participate in some way and
then typing is really good, but have them do something, have them workshop something.
Take a few minutes, literally, it could be 60 seconds and have them workshop something. And
then lastly, don't be afraid to charge, right? It will help with the show up rate and will help attract
folks who are committed. How much you charge is up to you.
Standard is around $27. You can do a pay what you want. It's up to you, right? You can do the
ascending pricing where it's, you know, $27 the first week, $47, you know, close to it and then
$67, whatever the day of before, whatever you want, your choice there.
That's up to you. And then, you know, time-wise, this one that I did was over 60 minutes. I like
this idea of, especially if you're kind of like me in the middle here, if it's like, okay, people are
busy, but they also maybe want human connection, let's make it shorter.
You're busy, human connection, let me not make it three hours or four hours or five hours, let me
make it an hour. In and out, super quick, digestible, single thing that we're going to talk about,
boom, right? It is harder to make it shorter, but it could be a really nice way to meet in the middle,
right? All right. And lastly, with my coaching hat on, send a fucking recording, send it out.
It's 2026, folks, what are we doing? I get some folks use it as part of their like sales mechanism
and things like that, but the rest of the people, like just fucking send it out. Like, what are you
doing? What are you doing? All right. Like, what are you doing? All right.
I'm going to wrap it up there, right? The trust building tool that you are likely under-utilizing is
online workshops. They are not dead, nothing is dead, right? I have big faith that they are going
to, quote unquote, come back. And even if they don't go mainstream, they don't go mainstream
again, it doesn't mean that people don't want them or that you, you know, can't run them.
Go ahead, it doesn't matter. Financially, they may only net you a little bit of monies, but they build
a massive, massive, massive amount of trust. And that is, in my opinion, priceless.
All right. That is all for us today. As always, endlessly, endlessly, one more time, endlessly.
And so is Rupert. He's endless, even though he ran away. I don't know where he went.
He's in there somewhere. We are both endlessly appreciative for every single one of you. Until
next time, friends, Maestro out.
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Use code MOTM to save some monies on Webinar Wizard
Check out @saffanabanana
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