Kick off 2020: How to Host Your Own Panel Events
Happy New Year Austin!
Let’s kick off this year with talking about events.
Event hosting is like content marketing — it doesn’t result in ROI in 30 days, but ramps up over time to build a solid foundation of authority, market penetration, and customer engagement.
The first panel we ever hosted for The Fire Show podcast was in December 2018, and since then hosting events has led to running a 3,600+ entrepreneur meetup, emcee stages on conferences, and selling our online course 2 Week Content Bootcamp on stage.
Hosting events can’t be the entire marketing strategy for a business, brand, or media company — but it can be an important part that eventually scales to more offerings
If you’re looking to get started, here’s my 10-part recipe for hosting panel events
Panel events have the lowest barriers to entry, bring in a wide variety of people (depending on the topic), and can easily be repeated again and again
- Ask a coworking space/office space/accelerator, etc if you can have space for 20–100 people. Try not to have to pay for it the first time. Work your magic.
- Pick a topic you know your customers base is already asking about. For example, my first topic was “How to Build a Business While Working a Full-Time Job.
- Ask 3–5 people who know how to answer that question to be on the panel. They don’t have to be complete utter experts in it, but they have to be doing the thing you want your audience to get better at.
- Once you have a venue, speakers, and a date/time, make FB event and eventbrite event. Invite everyone you know in that city, and ask 5–10 of your friends to invite people as well. Spread the word!
- Buy beer and/or pizza for the audience. People love free booze/food.
- Show up at least 1-hour before to set up and situate everything.
- For questions to ask the panel, write down 5–10 big questions ahead of time and weave them into the conversation. Make it casual, make it fun.
- Engage the audience by asking them questions.
- Thank everyone profusely for showing up. Try to have fun. Don’t worry too much if something goes wrong — you’ll learn.
- Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Bonus: Turn one offering into more
With our conference Grow Your Business 2020(more details below) coming up, we’re recording the sessions and turning them into a Grow Your Business online mini-course. That way, we turn one offering into 2. You can do the same by:
- Teaching people something in person and live-streaming / recording yourself to make more content
- Live-streaming an event you’re doing to bring value to your customers offline and online
- Recording your panel events (especially if you host a lot) and turning them into videos or gated content for customers / subscribers
- Turn your presentation decks into videos (record your screen while talking about it), or if you have a lot, make an online course about it
- Strip the audio from your video and turn them into a podcast
Timely plug: Get 50% off ‘Grow Your Business 2020’
Conference: Grow Your Business 2020
Our WHY: We’re looking to help people make more money, keep more of it, and run their operations more smoothly in 2020. Video below with more info.
When & Where: Sat Jan 18th, 9:30AM — 4:30PM, Austin Fine Properties
Included in Ticket: Breakfast, Coffee, Chef-made lunch, and Post-Conference Drinks
$50 off code: Moby
Until next time,
Moby
