Seminars are a big source of income nowadays. You may now know it but HUNDREDS of individuals, organizations, companies, associations, and giant corporations demand seminars all over the United States.
Seminars tend to focus on knowledge, experience, and growth and it’s the reason why a lot of people demand it.
If you WANT to start a seminar business, we’ve listed the 6 steps you will need for your successful seminar checklist.
6 Steps to Start Your Seminar Business Workshop
#1 Choose a Seminar Topic to Focus On
When you choose a subject, you have an entire list on your hands of what to pick for your seminar.
You have hundreds to thousands of topics to pick from the list, but not all of them are effective in earning the revenue and audience you need.
Among the top subjects you can start with for your seminar event are:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Leadership
- Self-management
These subjects are at THE top because of the impact they can have on people’s lives.
Offering some life skills and valuable knowledge for their careers is the return of investment people look for in workshops.
On the other hand, thousands of people would also be interested in just learning about their passion, interest, and hobbies-you’d be surprised how many people want to attend your workshops for talking about their preferred topic.
Even if it’s just about crochets and brewing subjects, for example, there’s a market for crochet and brewing newbies.
Think of it this way: your audience wants to learn something new, and subscribing to a course that allows them to expand their skillset is a gem they can’t refuse.
In the end, make sure to deliver a clear goal and message to your attendees so that your workshops can grow to a huge success!
#2 Get to Know Your Target Audience
Now you have your topic, it’s time to know what audience you should target for your events.
Take the time to understand your target audience and where you plan to find them. This is very crucial if you want to have a successful seminar.
In this digital age, it’s easier to find likely attendees for your seminar.
You can search for hundreds and thousands of different groups scattered on the web.
With the use of social media, you can search for these dedicated groups or hashtags to help your search further. These can range from:
- C-Suites
- Small business owners
- Managers
- NGOs
- Students.
Although these are your ordinary attendees, you can also look for people in non-corporate settings. These are people in:
- Church groups
- Social groups
- Retirement homes
- Book clubs
They may not look like much but don’t underestimate the benefits that these non-corporate groups can offer your company.
Remember: It’s better to have 1,000 loyal subscribers/followers than a million who don’t truly appreciate what you’re offering whether it’s an event, course, or seminar.
For one thing, putting up seminars for them can cost LESS compared to a big company; plus with the added benefit of gaining traction, reputation, and the required attendees.
Understand what they want from a specific subject and revolve your seminar on the collated results of your research.
Put Yourself in Your Attendees Shoes
To dig further, you need to understand where they’re coming from. These will LIKELY affect your prices, starting dates, and time, as well as the duration of your seminar.
But remember, do NOT overprice your costs for your seminars. This would definitely cause detrimental effects on your business and reputation, especially when you place a high price for low-income earners.
Equally so, do NOT make your seminars underpriced. This would eventually backfire on the primary goal of your seminar-which is supposed to be increasing the sales funnel.
Additionally, a big blow would be dealt with your company’s reputation; being regarded as “cheap” or “low-quality“, should you choose to go for underpriced payments.
This also goes to show you’re not as much of an expert as your audience expects you to be with the topic at hand.
So What’s the Best Pricing Structure, Then?
The ideal price should be EQUALLY FAIR to your audience. No more, no less.
If you’re offering to teach business skills to executives, you need to set the price for executives. If you plan to offer seminars for low to mid-income earners, the price should be right.
It might be tempting to lower your prices in exchange for more attendees but see your product as something worth more. Eventually, it’ll pay off in the long run.
#3 Create Your Seminar Workshop
You’ve already gathered enough data and research with your audience, and now, it’s time to make good use of it.
The knowledge you’ve gained from understanding your audience will come a long way when you start to create your seminar workshop.
When you start creating your seminar, consider variables that can affect the behaviors of your attendees. These variables can be:
- The length of your seminar
- Speakers & Presenter
- Structure of content
- Venue location
- Engagement
Plan Out Your Seminar Timeline
Regardless of the type of seminar you plan to create, if it doesn’t have proper planning, the chances of your seminar being successful and fruitful will decrease dramatically.
The ideal starting time to plan your seminar is six months before your target date. Yes, you heard us right: SIX MONTHS BEFORE.
Why six months? This should give you ample time to prepare for everything. This includes:
- Reaching out to your preferred speakers and hosts
- Delegating tasks to your associates
- Planning out the budget and structure itself.
But, things won’t always go according to your schedule and plans. Six months should be able to help you adjust and re-organize everything in your seminar if ever there are last-minute changes.
Plan Out Your Budget
You’ve planned your timeline and now, you need to be practical on what you hope to achieve in your seminars; this basically means planning out your overall budget.
When planning the budget, consider EVERYTHING related to expenses:
- Sponsorship fundings
- Personal products for giveaways
- Donations
- Ticket Sales
- Booth layout and placements
- Food (if applicable)
- Other event spendings.
Always look to balance out the fundings plus the quality of sponsors or service you get. This way, both parties will benefit from the seminar and partnership.
Outline and Organize Your Content
If you want your seminar to be successful, it should contain EVERY bit of information your attendees and others expect in your webinar.
Without any proper organization of your event program, it would be boring and disengaging for your attendees.
With the time you have to plan out your timeline, you can already structure the information that your seminar will have. This way, your audience can take information properly and digest it for their own use.
Find Presenters or Guest Speakers
Of course, a seminar isn’t complete without its guest speakers and presenters. They are what makes a seminar alive and engaging for your audience.
Not every panelist and presenter is perfect for your seminars. You need to have someone who has the right knowledge and experience on your selected topic.
As hard as it sounds, recruiting a seminar professional speaker for your business event is easier thanks to social media.
You can find and recruit potential candidates and speakers in dedicated groups for seminars or by publicly posting applications.
Surprisingly, you can even consider your friends or neighbors as potential candidates for your seminars. You just need to find the right personality and knowledge for it.
If you want to go the old-fashioned way, you can set up some flyers around town or print brochures to give away door-to-door or in a packed mall.
Make It Engaging
A seminar should not only be a dialogue between the speakers and panelists from start to end; it should also include activities and twists that can spark up the excitement in your crowd.
You can include:
- Questions and Answers Portions
- Demonstrations
- Ice Breakers
- Visual Aids
- and more!
A great way to maintain engagement in your seminar is to mix the lecture with a little bit of humor. Humor makes everything lively and interactive as anyone can relate to it.
Moreover, telling a seminar event through personal stories can make it more relatable to audiences.
Even to this day, storytelling is one of the most effective ways to maintain the attention and engagement of an audience.
People are always curious to see what happens next which is the reason why storytelling is an effective method in keeping people active and focused.
#4 Find the Right Venue for Your Event
A venue destination is as important as your primary seminar. It may not matter but your venue can determine whether others will attend or not.
Location is an important factor to consider when choosing a venue. From the data you gathered in choosing your audience, always look to have a venue near the majority of the demographic.
Your attendees will appreciate the proximity of your seminar and will greatly affect your reputation for future seminars and workshops.
When it comes to aesthetics and the venue itself, it should be something new and interesting for attendees.
Sure you can get a hotel lobby or room for your seminar but you can make it even more interesting by getting a venue that’s unique or something new for your participants.
The venue can be held at:
- Art galleries
- Warehouses
- Theatre rooms
Your participants will surely be intrigued and smitten with an unusual feeling of something new, keeping their focus and engagement activities constant throughout the workshop.
#5 Arrange Technical and Logistical Concerns
We can’t say the same for everyone and every seminar out there, but ideally, you need tools, items, and goodies for every seminar you hold.
When it comes to operations and setting up the stage for your seminar, you need to have an idea of what products to get and arrange BEFORE it starts.
These are some of the concerns you need to handle in the day itself.
- Projector. If you want to use visual aids for your seminar, this is important. The projector helps your audience by projecting your visual aid for the bigger screen; with more visibility.
- Cables. Since almost all presentations can be found on your laptop, you will need certain cables to make it work on the big screen.
- Signages / IDs. These are important items so that your host, panelists, and staff are identifiable and be provided with the VIP care they need.
- Ticket Booths and RSVP. It’s not wrong to prepare for the possibility that a lot of guests will join your seminar. The booths will surely have long lines for registrations and confirmations.
- Catering Area. The catering area should be at the back or the far side of the venue. You need a lot of space for them since they will bring in tables and equipment.
Once you get a hold of these concerns before the seminar, you have fewer things to worry about.
A good practice to do before the day of the event is to rehearse things thoroughly; the arrangement of who will speak first, run through the courses to see if they are working, and map out designated areas for food, line, and the booth itself.
Do these things and your workshop seminar will be on the road to being successful.
#6 Promote and Market Your Seminar
Promoting and marketing your seminar takes careful strategies to bring in the hype and excitement it will have for your target audience.
Thankfully again, we have social media to use to our advantage, making promotions and marketing advertisements of seminar workshops EASIER and FASTER than ever before (plus it’s cheaper!).
You have various social media platforms to use like Facebook, Linke dIn, Twitter, & Instagram to promote and advertise your workshops.
You can also make use of your personal website. With a personal flair, this could influence your potential participants to attend your seminars
They can easily spread the buzz and make a huge difference in the outcome of your advertisements, as well as the result of your seminar.
Additionally, you can also use email marketing as one of your strategies to advertise your seminar. This is effective when it comes to reaching out to dedicated and interested learners and people about various topics.
All of this information may seem a little too much, plus the added pressure of the calendar and planning timeline.
We’re here to tell you that with a little bit of planning, faith, and following a step-by-step procedure, you can easily launch out your first out of the many seminars on your list.
What Should You Do After Your Seminar?
You’ve finished your seminar and you’re happy it was a successful first run in your list of future topics.
But, what’s next after you do your seminar?
Let us tell you: A LOT! Here are some ideas:
- You can get feedback from your participants on their thoughts on your seminar event; if it was a success or needs improvement for the 2nd one.
- You can also use whatever files or video recordings in the seminar and use them to post on your personal website or social media pages to let people know your expertise and skills on the said topic. These would definitely bring in more interested people for your future seminars.
- Moreover, you can connect with your speakers to have another branch of experts in a subject to your database. This would shorten the amount of time and effort needed to find something new and unique experts for your next event. This also helps you have an expert center for your business seminars inside the company.
Every after your seminars, ALWAYS evaluate its success and points of improvement. Look to track research ideas, new topics, to improve your target market experience in your seminar
Why Hold a Seminar Program as a Business?
Entrepreneurs, educators, leaders, and a lot of people hold a seminar event for a lot of reasons. They hold seminars to:
- Inspire
- Motivate
- Share knowledge
- Give experience
- Teach
- And a whole lot more
So if you’re asking yourself “Why should I hold a seminar program?“. The answer is entirely dependent on what you want to achieve in it.
As mentioned earlier, seminars and workshops can be conducted to impart knowledge from an experienced person to a non-experienced person. It can also be a starting point of interest and lessons for other people.
Moreover, a seminar event is sometimes used as a business plan to gain more sales, brand awareness, and reputation for companies and personal websites.
It also serves as an avenue to elevate and raise your knowledge, network, and expertise in various fields, expanding what you currently know of topics and strategies.
Additionally, this will gain you traction for sponsors and investments in the future, further strengthening the foundation of your business.
How Can You Make Money With a Seminar Business?
What Type of Events Make Money?
There are different types of seminar events you can do for your followers.
Event #1
At one end, you have seminars that last for a couple of hours or takes up a whole day. These can be the traditional one-way presentations or a lecture for huge crowds compared to small and more actively engaged seminars with their audiences.
Event #2
Then there are Bootcamp workshops. These types of seminar events typically last for 1 to 3 days, which will train you to do something specific such as software development, digital marketing, and even website development.
These Bootcamp workshops are typically small, around 25 people, and done in a studio space. This makes sure each participant can ask questions to stay engaged and active throughout the session.
Event #3
Lastly, conferences are multi-day seminars that combine the activities and concepts of both traditional seminar events and boot camps.
These conferences are usually done a day apart or once a week to block off and let the audience digest what they’ve learned so far in the subjects they took.
Larger audiences are usually fitted for this type of seminars, as well as a lot of sponsor clients. A variety of speakers are usually invited to talk about different parts or subjects in the conferences.
Best Seminar Business Ideas To Make Money
Your seminar event will entirely depend on what your niche and product are. Normally, seminars make money from ticket sales solely, but you need MORE than that to reach the target that you’ve set.
Here are some ideas that can help you with your seminar production business make money for you.
Small Businesses Seminars
Start-up businesses are a great way to get your income flowing in.
Business owners and entrepreneurs usually take it upon themselves to be a jack-of-all-trades type of leader. As such, they need to learn anything related to what makes a great business owner or CEO.
Money-Making Seminars
Simply put, you’re teaching your target audience how to make money.
Everyone loves to have information on how to make their own money, especially if you add the benefits of a steady passive income for their life.
Have the right credentials and expertise for this workshop and before you know. A lot of enthusiastic and interested people will line up for it.
Investing Seminars
Similar to money-making, investment topics are another great idea to start a workshop.
This is because smart budgeting and spending ARE NOT taught in schools nor before we go transition to employment.
As a result, people tend to have a habit of spending too much rather than saving.
If you have already experienced this and have learned from it, you can share the experience with your audience for it to be passed down from one generation to the other.
How Much Money Do You Make From a Seminar Workshop Business?
How much money you can get from a seminar depends on the types of events you are going to execute and
Generally, the money you will receive will depend on these factors:
- The number of attendees
- Food included
- Booth / venue rental
- Speaker Costs
- Marketing Costs (Ads, sponsorships, etc)
However, there are other startup costs to consider that affect the cash flow of your revenue from your seminar business plan.
For one thing, speaker costs and accommodation are only the tip of the iceberg. You need to pay unique fees for each speaker and host, plus for their hotel rooms (if applicable) and travel costs from and to the venue.
And at one end, there are different types of seminar events that were previously mentioned.
The clear winner for a budget-friendly seminar is the Bootcamp type.
You can easily do it inside a house or studio space; minimal rental costs, plus little to no accommodation since there will be no speakers and everyone will be coming willingly. When it comes to food, delivery can be utilized since the group is small.
You can still give out your own products such as books but it’s not required.
As for traditional seminar events, you can hold them in a hotel lounge or room, which MAY cost more than a studio space but less compared to a big venue for larger audiences
However, an additional cost will come from technical equipment, materials, and booth stand. You may even have your own printed books or materials that will add to the costs.
But the biggest spending you will probably have will be on advertising your event.
Other than emails and friends, you may need to spend for paid advertisements on social media pages, as well as get clients from magazines or publishing sites to get publicize your seminar hype.
Clearly, conferences are THE biggest spending event type that you will ever have.
You’ll need a good number of speakers, venue rental cost/s will be multiplied, as well as combining the costs of catering, accommodation for VIP guests, operations, and logistical concerns.
Generally speaking, all of the costs can be covered through clients, sponsorships, and registration costs. But, most seminars depend on additional products such as books, video courses, and important materials.
Do research on how you will price your costs and products. You can set up a low registration fee, but compensate with a lot of additional products that will be beneficial for people in the long run.
Some additional courses and products you can sell are:
- Training packages with a video course, skills book, and course materials
- Membership Access to mastermind groups webinar sessions to be held at a given time
- Coaching, Training, or consulting services
- Premium subscription to your website materials and training course
- Goodies such as t-shirts, notebooks, and even mugs.
Conclusion
Starting seminar events can be a daunting task at first for others, especially if you’re new to the field; a lot of planning to do in terms of timelines, format, and even sales budgeting. It’s a fairly young industry!
These can be intimidating and uncontrollable factors for your business plan if not handled well.
We’re here to tell you that with motivation, dedication, faith, and careful planning, you can achieve a fruitful first seminar.
It’s okay to start small at first and invite a few people. Once you have the right credentials, network, skills, and expertise in the field, you can become a seminar professional in no time.
You can try starting with creating online courses in one of the best e-learning platforms! Most successful seminars start this way.
How about you? Can you tell us how your seminar events went? How do you educate others? Let us know in the comments below!
