Paid live workshops are everywhere right now. And if you’ve been watching the trend from the sidelines, quietly wondering whether you should be doing one too, this episode is worth a listen before you decide.

There are real reasons this format is having a moment. Trust is at an all-time low. Audiences are craving connection with actual humans. And a lot of the marketing tactics that used to sell premium offers reliably just… aren’t anymore. The buying decision timeline has stretched from around 90 days to as long as nine months. People are looking for something that solves the trust problem, the connection problem, and the conversion problem all at once.

That’s what a paid live workshop can do, when it’s done well.

Why the paid part matters

There’s a meaningful difference between a free event and a paid one, and it’s not just the ticket price.

People who buy a ticket show up. Attendance rates for free webinars have dropped significantly, with 15-20% showing up live now considered standard. Paid attendees have skin in the game. They’re present, engaged, and they’ve already proven they’ll take out their credit card for something they believe in. That last part matters enormously when you make an offer at the end.

The paid workshop also works as a bridge. Getting someone from zero investment to a $5,000 programme in a single step is a big ask. Getting them from a $97 or $147 ticket to a premium offer? That’s a much more natural progression.

Should you actually run one?

The honest answer is: maybe.

A paid workshop as a sales tool is an advanced strategy. It takes skill to deliver enough value that people feel they got what they paid for, without solving their problem so completely that they don’t need anything else. That balance takes time to refine, and the refinement process is slower than most people expect because each workshop is usually a different topic, a different audience, a different price point.

There’s also a significant amount of moving pieces involved. The offer, the sales page, the emails, the content, the slides, the post-event offer. Go in knowing that before you commit.

The numbers to run before you decide

This is where a lot of people get caught out. When you put a ticket price on an event, you’ll typically get around one-tenth the registrations you’d get for a free equivalent. So if 100 people would sign up for your free webinar, expect around 10 for your paid workshop.

A good conversion rate into a back-end offer from a paid workshop is around 10%, with 20% being an excellent result. At those numbers, the maths only really works if you’re selling something premium, in the $3,000 to $10,000+ range. For mid-ticket or lower offers, there are more efficient ways to get there.

Also worth knowing: running paid ads to a paid event costs roughly five to ten times more per registration than running ads to a free one. If you have a smaller audience and you’re hoping ads will fill the room, there’s a better approach worth considering instead.

Click here to listen to the full episode.

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