In-person workshops are an amazing way to scale your creative business. Whether you're teaching weaving or watercolor, these creative afternoons are trending like crazy. Eight years ago, when I started teaching, it helped me scale my own creative business quickly. And if you're asking if it's possible to still do this? The short answer is YES. The more people who teach, the more popular it becomes! Here's some insight on how I was able to scale my creative business through workshops…and how YOU can too:

Workshops are a great way to add cushion while you're learning

In the early days of my creative career, I was struggling to make ends meet between client work. The dips and valleys of doing one-off client jobs are not only time consuming but can make projecting income and saving for times of famine very difficult. Along with that, in the early days, most of us are making mistakes (and paying for it!) with client jobs.

It wasn't until I started teaching in-person workshops that I was ACTUALLY able to scale my creative business, grow my audience online and rely on more consistent income. Teaching workshops made it possible for me to fill in those gaps between invoices.

Social Media woes? Workshops are a hey-day for IG growth

When I first started teaching workshops, I had a whopping 1,000 followers on Instagram. I attribute a TON of my growth on this platform to workshops. Before I had a ton of followers, I made sure to partner up with venues that had a built-in following. This way, people would sign up for the course! Not only that, everyone in these workshops would share their creative afternoon on the Internet! If you put together a great class with share-worthy handouts and kit supplies…people will share!

One thing that was VERY helpful in allowing me to continue to book workshops in the early days, was starting a workshop hashtag! This acted as my portfolio of reviews on my workshops! Other venues and potential students could stumble on it, see how fun it was, and want to join the next one! Along with that, I would share this hashtag in every class, mentioning that I would love to see their posts. Sometimes all people need is a little nudge…the classes where I forgot to mention this hashtag had a significant drop in the number of people sharing about the class!

Spreads your web of contacts

We're all aware that networking is incredibly valuable. From going to meet-ups and creative events, to sliding into people's DMs, networking is huge for word of mouth growth. Teaching creative workshops acts the same.