You're listening to the Kajabi Verse podcast. And today's episode is all about bypassing traditional free lead magnet strategies, removing freebie seekers from your list and jumping straight into revenue from day one with paid mini workshops. Now these are an excellent way to deliver high value at a low price point that prepares your students for bigger offers. And a paid mini workshop can lead into just about anything,
courses, memberships, coaching done for you services. Joining us in today's episode to tell us all about how you go about it, the two people who have literally sold thousands of mini workshop tickets have generated multiple millions of dollars worth of post workshop sales, have sold our entire workshop sessions with nothing more than a two sentence Facebook post and less than a thousand followers and all about helping other entrepreneurs implement this strategy the simple way.
So let's welcome to the show the experts in the field, Sarah and Justin from Wake Up to Freedom. Thank you so much for carving some time out to come in and and get our podcast off with a bang and share a little bit about this wonderful paid mini workshop strategy. Just to set the record straight, we're like two, nobodys live very modest lives.
We'll just put that out there. But we appreciate you having us. You guys have had such an impact on so many people and you know, I love that that what you're teaching people out there is a strategy that pretty much anybody can implement. It's very simple, it's quick to get up and running and I'm super excited to ask you all these questions for those people who are thinking how they could implement paid many workshops in their business.
Cool. Well we're an open book. Before we launch into these questions, let's, let's also set the record straight. You guys are not a married couple. Now I came in with that misconception that perhaps Justin and Sarah were married. That is not the case for anybody who is listening at home now. Justin, whereabouts are you located? I am just out of Toronto,
Canada. Ah, and Sarah, you are in, We were talking before this about cold weather and I was like, it's, it's not cold where either of you guys are talking about cold can be, but it Where are you cheating in from? I'm in Nashville, so middle of the US and happy to be here Where all the exciting entrepreneurs live down in Nashville.
That's right. And I am one of them proudly, no. For those at home who are listening, who are thinking like what an earth is a paid mini workshop, can you give us a little bit of a insight into how you, I guess, you know, in two sentences, what is a paid mini workshop? And it might be a dumb question,
but how does it differ from a paid webinar? Yeah, of course. So a paid mini workshop is a short, you know, one hour virtual training that you host live. People show up on Zoom and it's a way for people to check something off their to-do list or learn something new, get something done. And it's like a mini, you know,
similar to a mini course. So it's gonna be something that's an intro to what you do, who you are, what you're all about. And we love doing these cuz I don't know about the rest of you all, but the idea of creating a course or a program often sounds really simple. And then you get into it and you're like, dang it,
do I need a full-time graphic designer and a project manager, an 18 virtual assistants to pull this off? And it sometimes feels like that. And a mini workshop is a really accessible way to create a product that actually helps people. But it's something that you can create within, you know, a week. It's a little bit more doable. You can make money,
you can make sales, you can help people in your audience and it doesn't take six months to create. That's one of the questions we get often is like webinar versus workshop, it's, it's on our ads. People are like, what is the difference between this and a webinar? So we, we get it, you know, for us workshops are action-based and in a world where we are all inundated with more information,
we wanna cut through the noise and actually help people get things done. And so the idea with a workshop being 60 minutes and it literally by the end of that 60 minutes you can get that thing done. It's quite different than webinars where it's like in our experience more information, more like approach or theory but less actually getting, we say getting the dang thing done.
So like our mini workshops help people get the dang thing done, whatever that is. And that's the difference for us. Okay, so you're really giving people like a, almost like a promised outcome by the end of the workshop rather than a higher level information session that doesn't really give them any action items. Exactly. And the other thing is like you could think of,
wow we love mini workshops because they are a great introductory offer to who you are and and what you help people with. They are self-contained. So I can buy your mini workshop and I can get this thing done and I don't need anything else. And I think where webinars are slightly different and again in our experience is like here's the webinar but if you really wanna get this thing done,
you gotta go to this thing. And so for us, we love 'em as an introductory offer because it already sets your relationship up with your customer as like having achieved a win. There's momentum already created and naturally it's like okay, what's next? But they don't need the, what's next to have achieved at least some level of success. And for the price point on a paid mini workshop,
I mean yours sits around the $27 mark, is that the the sweet spot? Because I know a lot of my students in their heads would be jumping to $97, No, $27 is the only price that works. All other prices are bad. We see many workshops. The goal for the price point is that it's an impulse buy. It's not something that people have to save up for or budget for or talk to a partner about.
It's something that they see, you know, a single Instagram story from you or a single Facebook post or a single email and they can say that sounds exciting, I wanna get that thing done, I can pull up my credit card right now and sign up without a second thought. So for most audiences can depend on your target market and your niche and you know,
the currency that you work in. But for a US-based audience that's usually between 10 bucks all the way up to a hundred bucks. So if someone's really in love with that $97 price point, you can go up that high for certain offers. But most of our members and students are in the 20 to $50 range. Got it. Okay. And how did you guys end up on the paid mini workshop strategy yourselves?
Did you try a bunch of other things where you were like, oh this is not everything it's cracked up to be? I, I'm pretty sure this other way's better? Well see, it's different for both of us because we were running our own businesses separately for years. Both of us found our way into workshops and ended up partnering to teach workshops. So for me,
my background is in copywriting and the simplest answer is that I hated doing sales calls. So all of the like freelancer recommendations and all of the trainings that I went through were teaching me how to get clients with sales calls and I just hated doing them. And they were really draining, they were really intimidating. And I, for fun a few times had run free trainings and gotten a few clients or leads from them and you know,
on a whim one month was like, I'm gonna charge something for this. I have an idea for a training but it feels too valuable to do for free. I wanna put a lot of work into this. I'm gonna give people some email templates along with this. What if I charge 50 bucks for this? And I ended up running the training. I had I think 15 to 20 people sign up and you know,
a handful of those people became clients and they didn't need a sales call because they'd already experienced me and my work during the workshop. And so they just messaged me and said, Hey you know, that training was awesome. I've been looking for someone to manage my email list, do you have any openings? And I was like, oh my god, I found the holy grail,
they're ready to become a client without me needing to spend an hour on Zoom, like awkwardly stumbling through a sales script. So that became the way that I ran my copywriting business. Once a quarter or so, I would run a paid workshop and get a handful of clients on the back end. Justin's experience is totally different cuz he was working in a totally different niche doing totally different stuff.
Yeah, I have, I've done the in person workshop thing In person. Justin, what's that In person? Yeah, thousands of filmmakers. We even did stops in Europe too. And to me there was, while we were doing these impersonal workshops, we all, we had courses and a membership and, and there was nothing as effective as the workshops in helping people actually build momentum,
see change. And so I had left that company C happened, I think this was actually just before C and I had been just kind of like chilling, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And I just started, you know what, let's just start doing online workshops. And so I took what we, the ideas that I had done in person and I turned it into online workshops and it just kind of took off and then it became like people were like,
Hey what are you doing? How you doing this? And so that's where Sarah and I said, well I'm really good on the tech and the Kajabi side and all that stuff and Sarah's a legendary copywriter and people are asking her about copy and me about these mini workshops and tech and stuff. And that was literally how this all started. It was a live workshop that was the beginning of wake up to Freedom and here we are.
And so it sounds like you guys have both used paid mini workshops to enroll into different things. Like Sarah, you used it for clients, done for you services and I'm guessing Justin, you've channeled people into something else after your paid mini workshops, Same thing, clients, courses, memberships, we've literally used these things to move people into any backend offer you could imagine.
Amazing nowadays you guys use it to move people into a membership and I guess that would be a pretty popular next step for a lot of your students. Yeah, we have a lot of people who've used workshops to get people into memberships but there's people using them for all sorts of models too. So some people are building a Kajabi course or building a program or they do one-on-one coaching.
Some people even have in-person businesses. We have some people who've done mini workshops and they're, you know, a physiotherapist or have you know, a local financial advisory or something like that. And you guys teach people how to enroll into live, paid many workshops as a first stepping stone these days. You've transitioned your model into evergreen paid mini workshops, which sounds wonderful And obviously everyone at home is going evergreen sounds fantastic,
just going to make sales while I sleep and this is gonna be so easy. But do you have any maybe words of caution to those people who wanna jump straight to an evergreen model? Stop right now. Don't do it. Yeah, no. So what is it saying like we our own dog food or whatever it is. Like everything we do is live first and then we go go into evergreen because there's just a ton of magic that happens in doing anything live.
Even if it means you fumble over your words, even if it means you're awkward a little bit on camera, even if it means it's extra stress on you, we get it. Like those are all the same things Sarah and I feel like we are literally into the process of launching a live offer right now. And we know we're gonna fumble over our words,
we're gonna have tech hiccups, we're gonna have moments where, oh wish I didn't say that thing live on camera. It's inevitable. But we also know because doing it live, we're gonna have this interaction with real humans. They're gonna get to see what it's like to work with us and and hear us and interact with us. We know there's going to be a cohort of people doing it together and so there's gonna be magic that happens there and we know the end product that we will evergreen will be better as a result of both of those things.
And so I think a lot of people, especially in the course world where they just like, I'm just gonna build this huge course, I'm gonna do all the work and then I'm gonna open the doors and there's gonna be a flood of people who like need and want this thing. And if you haven't validated the offer, if you haven't guaranteed that it works,
if you haven't built interest before you've opened the doors, like all these things, unless you have this massive audience, which most of us don't do, like, it's not going to be the reception that we dream about in our head. And so the live thing for us allows us to basically just stack all of that in our favor, including validating and realizing that nobody wants the thing which is a great outcome because it means he didn't spend months or years building this thing that nobody wants.
Which is so harsh to say. But I mean Sarah and I are both guilty of this in the past where we create things that we think people want only to find out that it's not actually what they need. They needed something a little bit different, which would've been so obvious had we worked with someone in a live setting. Yeah. And the win of live is also selfish and that it helps us get the thing launched.
I don't know if there's someone listening who's been, you know, tinkering and building a course for six months and I'm not calling you out cuz I've been there too. I have a Google drive with course outlines or product ideas that never saw the light of day and by launching something live and for us that's a workshop. You know, putting a workshop idea out there saying Hey do you wanna join me for an hour and you know,
learn how to make a cake or learn how to set up your Trello boards or learn how to write this awesome email. You've got a date on the calendar and you're on the hook to show up and actually create the workshop and actually turn it into a money making product, not just a good idea. Now a lot of the people who are listening would be starting where you guys were with no audience and probably a bit bit nervous about putting money into something like Facebook ads to get traffic to this new paid mini workshop.
Can it be as simple as just putting a two sentence post on your Facebook profile? Okay, for this is another thing, this is another thing we get. This is great, I'm glad we're gonna talk with these things cause I guess we could separate the Facebook ads because it is not Facebook ads in in 2022. 2023 is not the same as Facebook ads in 20 17 20 18 where it's like you put $1 in and magically 10 bucks comes back your way.
It is ruthless right now. And so it is not something where you're gonna go to market unless you're an expert. If you're an expert on Facebook ads, I mean obviously this doesn't apply, but if you're like us mere mortals when it comes to Facebook ads, like you're just not gonna put an offer out there and be profitable without having a bunch of money to burn.
It's kind of what we, Sarah and I say when we're starting with ads, it's we got 5,000 bucks, we could either like this on fire or give it to Zuckerberg. It's the same outcome that's like, that's what we're assuming going into this because it's just not going to be, I put $5,000 in and magically $10,000 comes my way. It's just not how it works anymore.
But that being said, we do have people that buy the new workshop Magic and they're like, well darn it, I don't have an audience, no one bought. I was like, well yeah, because you don't have an audience. Like there is no one to buy. And so there is going to be, whether it's a small audience, if you've got a hundred people in a Facebook group or a hundred listeners to your podcast,
I mean we're not talking that you need to go out and build a list of 10,000 people, but you're gonna need a small audience in order to buy this product. I think the disconnect is when people have a small audience and are expecting hundreds of people to magically buy this workshop. We have some amazing stories of members in our membership who launched their workshop and had two people go to their first one and that was enough,
that was enough to say, hey, this idea is worth exploring further. And now they've done that workshop 2, 3, 4 times and now they have 70 or 80 people coming to it. And so the story there for us is like they did it with two people. Sarah's first workshop, how many people are at your work First workshop, three, four. Yeah.
And so we all start there. I think that for us, especially if you're exposed to the online marketing world where these people talk about huge numbers, the reality is that your small audience is an advantage in that you get to connect with humans. So instead of this big crowd, you get to like actually say, Hey Meg, thanks for coming to my workshop.
I'm excited today, I'm gonna help you do X, Y and Z. Whereas you would never be able to do that if you had 200 people live on this workshop. And so yeah, you're gonna start with a smaller audience. Yes there's gonna be fewer buyers, but now you get to go and actually make sure that those people get results. You get to have this more intimate experience,
you get to validate your idea and then you keep going because your audience will just naturally snowball from there. Yeah. So a lot of times we recommend if someone's truly starting from zero, is there a way for you to do an audience building sprint and get that first one to 500 people into a Facebook group or onto a social media profile or onto your email list And then you have a pool of people who are following you for what you do.
And that's a great time to launch your first workshop. And you know, the beauty of doing the workshop is it's realistic to do it for two or five or 10 people. It's something that isn't taking, you know, six months of your time to create. And so you can really show up for a small group of people and spend an hour on Zoom,
go through a few slides that you made, help them get something done. And then we've had so many cool stories of people who've gone through mini workshop magic and said, I had five people at my workshop and two of them hired me, you know, paid for four coaching sessions for 500 bucks each or bought my $5,000 coaching package. And so there is that opportunity to take even a small truly mini workshop and turn it into something that is profitable.
I love that. A social media sprint. I've never heard that term before Sarah, but I might, I might borrow it in future. When I, when I launched my first paid mini like online mini workshop, I had, I wanna say maybe five or six people I just reached out to who had Facebook groups and I just did that thing, which is like a audience building sprint of like,
hey, I'm doing this new thing and I can add value to these people have Facebook groups and the call to action is, hey, check out this workshop. And so I didn't have an audience, nobody knew who I was. I mean it was just like I had friends who had audiences and this was a value add to their audience. And so it was an easy yes for them.
It was an easy yes for me and the outcome was a bunch of people who sign up for the workshop. And that just, again, this is a snowball, it just goes from there. But I think that other thing that what Sarah just shared is worth repeating, especially as it relates to if you have a higher priced offer or if you have a retainer based offer on the back end is you don't need hundreds of people to come to your workshop.
I mean, Sarah, you have a story that you talk about where it's like, I have this retainer, it's a couple thousand dollars a month and so if I do a workshop every two months and 10 people show up and two people become clients, that's a $24,000 client or more. That's amazing. I don't need more than 10 people. That's only a 20% conversion rate.
So again, it's just that tendency for more, more, more, especially in our world of online digital marketing, it's like well that's not always true. And in most cases it's probably not. And then I think that that just gives, hopefully if you're listening to this, it just gives you a little bit of freedom to be like, you know what,
A handful of people at my first workshop is an awesome win. I'm gonna make it happen. Absolutely. And then it gives you the validation to perhaps consider some paid adss to get the numbers up the next time of course. But I, you know, I think that's such good advice and not so many people feel disheartened and you know, a bit disappointed that oh I only got just a small handful to show up.
But we all started there. I think I had in my first ever five day challenge that I ran something like 12 people join my challenge. You know, it's when we didn't all start with hundreds of people. Totally. And I think the online space is such a distortion, you know, way back when I did a series of paid workshops before I started my copywriting business when I was in college I was doing workshops in person ones to teach people how to save money going through university by taking advantage of some programs and grants and that sort of thing.
And I remember the last one I did was my biggest one and it was in a coffee shop and I had 17 people there and this little coffee shop room was packed and it felt like such a big group of people to me cuz my first one had had three or four and I was like, oh my word, there's 17 people here. This is wild.
And I think it's so funny and sad that in the online space these numbers get so crazy that you might have 750 people on your email list and think, oh this isn't even worth launching anything. I have nobody, everyone's talking about their 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 person list and I only have 750 people. And think of you had that many people in a room with you,
it would feel massive. It'd Be huge. And so I think a reframe like that can help if you're feeling self-conscious about launching or getting started or hosting a workshop and feeling that awkwardness of what if only 10 people sign up? Well 10 people is awesome. The other thing is, especially when you're getting started, we like to not say the word only when people are like paying for something.
So only 10 people because those 10 people actually pulled out their credit card and paid for this thing. And they're not only, they're a human, they're a person, they have problems in things in their life that you can help them with. And so yeah, three people signed up for your workshop, but it's not only three people, it's three people and next time there may be seven people and then the next time there may be 20 people.
But I think that word only is such a just a, again these are people that are literally paying for you to help them. And so I think that reframe and just removing that word and being excited with however many people sign up is kind of the secret I, I can't even imagine a room with 750 people or a thousand think of like what that would cost.
I can go back and say, you know, we used to host in person workshops and we put two or 300 people in a room and that literally would cost cost us 20 or $30,000 in hard costs. Now I could put 200 people on a Zoom and it cost me 50 bucks. Like talk about that. Like that's amazing, right? I think Justin,
if I had 750 people in a room, I'd probably be out the back vomiting cuz I'd be like oh I don't have to get on stage and talk in front of 750 people, do I? This is so much easier. It's perfect. So much easier. Now you guys on your sales page for mini workshop magic, you do say look, it can grow a business.
It's simple. This is an easy to implement strategy without like freebies and lead magnets and all the other things that are out there. Do you honestly believe that people could just do this strategy and not have other funnels like operating in parallel? You know like if someone's starting with no list, would you say you can just do this and grow your business? So would you probably recommend that they also implement a freebie on the side?
I think that's a great question. So like Justin said, we eat our own dog food, we don't have another funnel operating like everyone on our list came through one of our mini workshops and that's how we've chosen to grow our audience. Now that being said, we don't think that's the only way. And if you are starting truly from zero where you're like I have a brand new business idea,
I've never done anything online before, you do have to start somewhere or you're just gonna be shouting into the ether, right? So you need some people to talk to and sometimes the easiest way to get those first few hundred people is by doing some free content. So I don't know that I would personally, if I was in this position spend tons of time building a huge lead magnet funnel.
I think some people that project in itself could take them a month to build out 80 page PDF and have it all, you know, beautifully designed and have a huge landing page for it and this huge welcome sequence for it. I think that can become a massive thing. I might start a Facebook group and do a live training in there every week for 20 minutes.
Or if I grow a Twitter audience and post a valuable thread three times a week, you know, I think there are ways to do free content in a way that feels light to you. So if doing a lead magnet and getting people on your email list, if that feels like the lightest way to get the first 500 people do that. If you're like I love creating a free training or a free PDF and sending emails to people feels like the most fun way to nurture my audience then do that.
I don't think it's the only option for getting those first 500 people and for some people doing a Facebook group or growing an Instagram audience by being really, really active on stories or something might be a better way to get those first 500 people. So in your own funnel guys with mini-Workshop Magic, how do you find, if you happen to know, and it can be a thumb suck if you don't know,
but but the conversion from mini-workshop magic into that membership offer that you present afterwards So we can go back because ultimately right now our membership is actually closed so we have no one joining our membership because they're just buying many workshop magic right now. But historically the goal, again, I think this is one of those questions where it really depends on your offer because for us we're selling a low cost membership.
So it's a different thing than saying hey I have a $5,000 coaching program or I have a $3,000 a month retainer or I have a thousand dollars course, whatever it is on the back end. For us our membership is 50 bucks a month and so our conversions is probably gonna be quite different. I think what matters for us though is the conversion that someone goes to the sales page and signs up and the percentage of people who actually get the result that they paid for because then the next offer becomes a lot easier.
And the reason I say the next offer is we don't actually look at conversions as in here's a linear, they bought this, then they bought this because we have multiple backend offers. We are literally in the midst of launching a new offer right now. And when I click on that person that purchased and I see that they've literally, they have like a lifetime value of $2,500 or a lifetime value of $4,000 and they came from a $27 product.
That's what we're looking for. We're looking for are people actually getting the results of the workshop because then the next offers become a lot easier When it comes to the actual membership, it's tough because we have the workshop that goes to a closed membership and then we do an actual open doors. So that conversion isn't necessarily directly correlated between they've upgraded in seven days and it's X percentage type thing.
I went and bought your course, your mini workshop magic cause I was like, oh I need to go and study this closely before I get the guys onto the podcast. And then I noticed you, you brilliantly transition to upselling to the membership from inside of your Kajabi product. So when people do buy mini workshop magic, they get the product and they log into Kajabi and then just over in the sidebar is this little video from Justin that tells you all the reasons We've turned that off.
So you you have a little bit of like secret intel that is no longer, that was, that was only for a very limited amount of time. We could talk about that though. That was a fun little experiment. I must have just logged in at the right time and I thought this is really strategic guys. This is like a a back door entry into your membership when no one else can get in there because for the rest of the world it's at wait list right now.
So if people want in on mini workshop magic, sorry, on the mini workshop Sailor Day, that's what it is, isn't it? Sailor Day membership. Yeah. They sort of have to do it before the deadline funnel is up, otherwise they miss their opportunity. Yes. So that was a little window of time cuz we had the doors open for sale day for a little time.
And so what we wanted to do was, so in the offer right now that we're actually launching, we have that same little widget on the right side for an upgrade that people can do. And ultimately that comes from, well first things first, Kajabi and technology is really easy for me. So I don't want this to be the norm and this is definitely not prescriptive.
Like everyone should have multiple things the same way that emails and beautiful copy from Sarah is easy for me when I look at a page, it would literally take me weeks to write an email. She's like, I'm done. And it's like four minutes later we just wanna make sure that people, again expectations. But for us the reason why we have, we had the deadline funnel with that little widget on the right,
we also reminded people in email is just multiple touch points because it's so easy for people to be distracted or to forget or to think I'm gonna sign up for that and then oh I gotta like go search my email and I gotta find the link or whatever. So for us it's like how do we make sure that if you're going through the material and you're,
you're getting a win, you see what's next. If you open an email from us, you see that oh here's what's next and if there's a timer or something related to a deadline that's included as well. For us it's just make sure that people have no surprises and know that if there is a follow up offer or an upgrade offer or something, it's available.
So you guys have moved then almost to a bit of a hybrid model where people now can go in through your mini workshop magic all year round. But the membership itself is currently a wait list. So I'm assuming a couple of times a year you're going to run the workshop live and enroll people into your membership. Yeah, so I think what's cool about having a signature workshop or workshop that people can buy all the time is that it's always prepping people for the deeper work that you do.
So our mini workshop is the first thing that people do with us. But then throughout the year we do a handful of launches for different products and all of them are applicable to people who've gone through mini workshop magic cuz we know that there's, as much as we'd love to have like this perfect linear funnel where it's like step one, step two, step three.
And I think a lot of internet marketers teach things that way. The reality are humans are gonna be humans and they wanna do things in different orders or they have different needs or some people love memberships and wanna jump in right away. Some people want one-on-one live work. People have all different sorts of preferences. So people go through our workshop and then at different times throughout the year we have a course that we launch or we have a challenge that we launch or we have some kind of live intensives that we do where it's like,
hey, join us for five days and we'll help you write your workshop sales page or turn your workshop recording into an evergreen product or create the backend offer for your mini workshop and that upgrade process. So we have kind of different options for people and we do, yeah, open those throughout the year. So people are always, you know the workshops for sale 24 7 all the time.
We've got emails after that. If one of our offers is open, you might get a deadline funnel for that or you might get a promotional thing for that. If our offers are all closed, you'll just get a content sequence. So you'll just get emails that point you back to the mini workshop magic content, share a few stories and it's kind of more of a nurture sequence.
And in that case you'll just get our live launch emails whenever one of our other backend offers open up. Got it. Do you guys have a lot of students within your membership who perhaps don't have a signature course or anything big to offer at the end of the workshop and just maybe they just create mini workshop after mini workshop on related topics and string them all together?
Yeah, I can think of a handful of members or past members who have kind of a library of workshops that they've created where they have all of these little different topics that they want to focus on and people can then buy bundles of their workshops or buy access to the whole library or something like that. We have others who they're just getting started and the mini workshop is the first thing that they create and they're still not a hundred percent sure what that backend offer is going to be.
And so in that case, a mini workshop is an amazing first product to launch because you don't need a massive sales page or a funnel with 18 different moving pieces or seven modules of course videos to record. You can start with just this mini product and then you can see what questions people ask, see where people get stuck, see what people are emailing you about a week after the workshop and create an offer around that.
And oftentimes we'll just encourage people to do a really simple light back end offer for their first workshop. That's literally as simple as pay a hundred bucks to book a one-on-one call with me. So if someone goes through the workshop and just wants to then get on a call with you and ask you some more questions or get your help implementing the content or customizing it to their life,
they can do that and you get to dive even deeper into your target market and the types of questions that they're asking. And that info might help you create an awesome course or program or membership in the future. I've often thought in my own business about taking my big signature program and breaking it down into little mini courses because I find that there's so much content inside my big program that it can be overwhelming for people.
The complete A is Ed and I often look at all the modules and just think each one of these modules could be sold as a standalone course. Do you have people who sort of also got to that point, you know they created the kitchen sink and just went, yep, now we are just going to rake it all back down again. That's us in some capacity in that like we are consistently chiseling and chiseling away anything that's not needed.
Sarah and I, well actually this is Marc, Sarah and Michelle ruthless about is this actually helpful? Is this actually just, it's helpful, obviously it should be helpful, but is it actually kind of a distraction in people getting to that ultimate goal, whether that's launching their workshop or making a sale a day or 10 sales a day? We've done mini workshop version one,
which 7,500 people had purchased and then we launched a mini workshop version two and mini workshop version two is it's an hour and we trimmed so much that was in version one out to present version two. Again, just whittling it down, chiseling it down to be just the most impactful, helpful content that actually helps people get the result of the workshop. And so that's one way to get your big program is to think about,
well, what's actually needed versus what's just fluff or not needed. But the other thing to keep in mind, and this is something that Sarah and I talk about regularly, is yes, you could have each module be it's own mini workshop or mini course, but then you have so many different SKUs to manage. You have so many different upgrade and email sequences and tagging and all that stuff.
And so you're removing one problem and adding another potentially series of problems, consequences, first order, second order, third order consequences of this decision. So it's, it's tricky. But we do have people that have done like here are different entry points to my big program. So not necessarily taking their course and just turning it into a series of workshops, but thinking about,
okay, this big program helps people accomplish a lot, especially in like personal skills or things, soft skills, things that aren't necessarily like prescriptive step by step, but more like this. This helps people do a lot with whatever it is that this person helps. So I'm gonna create a series of mini workshops for different people to meet them where they are and then introduce my course and then they may come into my course and maybe they only really need module seven or module four cause they don't have to do the whole thing to get the success,
but that entry point meets them where they are and shows 'em that Module seven is the great next step and another entry point shows 'em at module four is a great next step. For example, Right? It makes me think about Catherine who has a parenting membership and that's a big topic and there's parents who have questions and are looking for support in tons of different areas.
And so she created different workshops, one on homeschooling during the pandemic, one on sibling rivalry, one on raising resilient kids. And each of those workshops is going to appeal to a slightly different person or a parent who's at, you know, maybe has different ages of kids or is in a different stage of parenting. And so people can come into her membership from multiple different places and they're all ending up in the same,
you know, back end offer. I feel like a quiz funnel sits really well in front of that guys. I'm like, oh yes, we should all go and create a quiz that leads to the correct mini workshop. I love that. That would be very fun. Now for those people who go and put this into action, they're like, I'm gonna create a paid mini workshop and they get the people in and it doesn't convert.
Is the biggest mistake you find people making that they just gave away too much? I mean do they put so much content into these mini workshops that people feel like they don't really need the next bit? I think yes, but it's not for the reason that you think it is. So often we see a problem where people try to fit too much information into their mini workshop and are teaching tons of strategies and skills and giving away all of this knowledge and then when people don't upgrade to their program or their course,
they're like, dang it, I should have withheld more information. But really the problem isn't so much that they gave too much information and that people don't find the next thing valuable. The problem is that people got overwhelmed and didn't get anything done. So the big appeal of a workshop is the idea that, oh my gosh, I'm gonna finish this hour with something checked off of my to-do list or with the exact tools in my tool belt to go get this thing done in a couple days or a week.
And if you are dumping everything you know in 60 minutes and just sharing this fire hose of information with people who aren't experts at this, so they have much less context and experience than you do, there's gonna be this sense of overwhelm and they may say things like, this was so valuable, I had so much many light bulb moments, I need to go process this.
And those are whole positive statements, but they also typically don't lead to a lot of action. Someone might take 18 pages of notes and still feel like, dang it, I don't know where to start. This feels really big still. And so the biggest reason we recommend really chiseling down that workshop and focusing on giving people one action step or one hack or teaching them to get one specific thing done is so that people can actually do the thing and they finish the workshop saying I did it,
that was awesome, I'm ready for what's next. Because they've built that momentum and they have that quick win. It's not just that, wow, I just drank a fire hose of information and I need six months to go implement before I'm ready for the next thing. Is it typical that people, because you are expecting them to take action on what's delivered in the workshop,
obviously they're not gonna do that in the space of an hour. So is it typical that there would be a bit of a delay before people go on to enroll in the next bit? You know what actually depends. So for many workshop magic, we see that as if people go through our own workshop, it's like a seven day implementation period. If someone wants to launch a workshop and they're ready to,
you can realistically get that done in seven days and we have a seven day launch checklist, we give people the materials for that. And so we know that a lot of people, it's going to be a week before they say, okay, that worked. I'm ready for what's next. We do have other people who do teach things where people are actually getting something done within the hour.
So there are workshops where it might be organize your calendar or do an hour of meal prep with me or outline your novel and it's literally step by step, okay right now you know what's chapter one or right now dump the chicken into the bowl and add the marinade or whatever and that sort of thing. So there are workshops that are literally quite step by step and people finish the hour with something done and other workshop topics are a little bit bigger.
And so there might be a little bit of that delay. Yeah, I also think it depends on your backend offer. If the backend offer is support driven, so hey, I just bought this mini workshop and technically I could do it myself, but here's this offer to do it with people or with this person, then it's different. If the backend offer is like,
okay, now that you've done this, now here's this problem or so then you may have a slightly longer delay. I think it really is, in our case, we have a support driven offer. When we had the doors open, some people would literally buy many works on magic and say, oh this is awesome, but I'm just gonna join the membership because I don't wanna have to figure this out on my own.
Like I'd rather have Sarah and Justin's help and hundreds of people helping me versus do it my own. And then we have other people that are like, let me just make sure this works. Let me just test this to see if it works. And it's not some magic theory. And then once they've gotten success, hey I just did my workshop, I had 20 people sign up,
then I'm gonna join the membership because my workshop paid for the membership. So I just kind of works both ways. Everything you guys have spoken about this past 40 minutes, it just strikes me as such a versatile strategy that can be implemented in just about any online business. And it is a matter of just keeping it simple, not overwhelming people with too much content,
starting with small numbers, just having it grow organically, maybe bolstered by some ads eventually, but but grow organically over time. And I think there's plenty of people listening to this who just feel like this is a strategy that they could do because there are so many strategies out there and obviously most of them work, but they're executed correctly. But some of them are so complicated,
this one is pretty straightforward. Yeah, I think we're really passionate about helping people run a business where they mostly get to do the things that they love doing and they mostly get to help people with the thing they like helping people with. And so many other strategies. You nailed it Meg, they absolutely work. There's people crushing it with amazing webinars or huge fancy product launches and that requires a lot of your time to be invested in building out the funnels or scripting the webinar or doing the really complicated video tech or tagging or automation.
And if that's your jam, go for it. And if it's not, maybe you wanna consider a strategy that's a little bit simpler. So for those people who wanna give it a go guys, where do they need to go? Have you got an easy link that we can send them to? I mean wake up to freedom.com, it couldn't be any easier.
I'm, I'm pretty sure everyone can remember that I will put the links below this episode and for those people who do wanna take the next step and join you guys in sale a day inside of the membership, when are we expecting the doors to open again for that One? Go through mini workshop magic first and then you'll be on our list. Sarah's got incredible emails so make sure you read those emails cuz even,
even I read them, I don't, I don't even have to read them and I read them and I'm like, dang, that's a good email. And you'll hear about it when the doors are open. They agree with me Boston, I've started taking them out of my inbox and putting them in the Sarah folder. I'm like, just keep That email.
I dunno how many times on Facebook I was like, Hey, we just sent an email, I'm honored and It's not me saying like, go check your email so you can buy something. I'm like, go read that email cause it's dang good. But yes, if you're on our email list, you'll here about, we give people plenty of time for when we're doing either we call 'em lazy launches,
so like one day launch or full blown promotion. Awesome. Well thank you so much guys for coming in and you know, pulling back the covers on the strategy and just giving us the real truth of the matter, the no roast tinted glasses, look behind the scenes. I really appreciate, you know, just your down to earth approach to everything that you've shared over the past 40 minutes.
It's been really amazing to have you guys on. Yeah, thanks for Having us. Thanks so much, Meg. This is a blast. We will link to everything below and those of you who are listening at home, make sure it's a minimum you go and get yourselves into mini workshop magic just so that you can get Sarah's emails and you too can store them away in the Sarah folder in your inbox.
Absolute pleasure guys, and I look forward to talking to you again. I hope you've enjoyed our podcast episode on paid mini workshops as a simple strategy to immediate revenue and quality list growth. If you'd like to learn more about the wonderful Sarah and Justin, you'll find a link in the notes over to Wake Up To Freedom. And the best place to start is with their own paid mini workshop,
mini workshop magic. And if you'd like to learn the step by step of building out your own paid mini workshop funnel over on the Kajabi platform, be sure to head on over to Funnel Club to join us on the next live masterclass.