If you’re looking for ways to increase your revenue stream by building on the success of your non-fiction book and you enjoy teaching, then workshops and training classes may be a great option for you. You can develop your programs in just about any way that you choose. The simplest option, and a good place to start, is to create a half-day event, which would be a three- or four-hour workshop. Workshops should be interactive and engage participants, since most people don’t want to sit through three hours of lecture. Include questions and answers with the audience, group sharing of their experiences, and exercises that participants can do either individually or in small groups.
A full-day workshop is a bigger commitment and you’ll need to include plans for handling meals. You can bring food in for your students, or give them enough time for an extended lunch break on their own.
Multi-day workshops can be quite lucrative. Alicia Dunams is a book coach who runs a workshop called “Bestseller in a Weekend,” where participants spend a full weekend writing a first draft of a book. Some additional services are bundled in with the registration fee, including editing, book cover design, and interior layout for the book.
You can also take the workshop concept a step further and host a conference, which usually consists of a multi-day event with several speakers. Conferences can have additional revenue streams when you sell vendor tables and related advertising, plus on-site bookstore sales, and additional offers. I recently attended a Tony Robbins event that featured several of Tony’s own business entities in the vendor area offering all kinds of additional items for attendees to purchase, ranging from books and T-shirts to five-figure coaching programs. There is a lot of money to be made from events.
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