If you're thinking about hosting an event, a retreat, a conference, if you're thinking about hosting an event in 2024, start building your list now. What do I mean by list? Start building your list of prospects. Start building your list of at least the people that you're going to initially reach out to. Start building your email list. Start building your Facebook group, whatever it is. The best thing you can do if you don't want to spend a dollar on paid ads is market to your organic list. Organic list is people that you meet, people that you're nurturing, people connected to you on social media. You need to have a database of people that you can reach out to when you're ready to hit launch on your event. I see way too many event hosts lose money because they're trying to fill their seats last minute. Even for small events with 10 or 15 people, I've seen people not able to fill a room with 10 people for their retreats because they launch an event, the duration of the event is within 90 days, and they don't have a list of buyers. And what I get my clients to do as soon as we start working together is we start creating their hotlist.
Hotlist is just a group of people who already know, like, and trust you so that when your retreat does launch, essentially you launch an early bird offer to your hotlist first. You get a couple of retreat ticket sales under your belt. That creates so much momentum in the launch of your treat and what's possible because you don't want to host an event. You don't want to launch your website publicly, and all of a sudden it be crickets. And I see that happen a lot. People launch their events with such good intentions. People tell them, Oh, yeah, yeah, we can't wait to sign up for your event. And then they don't sign up, right? But you need to start building your list now for an event that's 6, 10, 12 months from now. You need to start building that hot list of people right now. The other thing you can start doing is if you are thinking about hosting a retreat, and if you don't have a big audience, plan your event at least a year out. I might get some feedback on that comment, but if you don't have a big social media following, if you don't have a big audience, if you're not known in your space, well, you can't host an event at the same speed as someone who does have audience, someone who does have a following, someone who's known in their space.
Unless you're ready to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on advertising to market your event, sure, then you can get a pool of people. But most of my clients don't want to spend any money on ads when it comes to filling their live events. And again, my clients are looking to fill events with 10 or 15 people at a higher price point so that the event is very profitable. So all that to say, I've been thinking a lot about events lately. I've been thinking about different countries of hosting events in the next 12 months. I have a Greece event coming up, one in Bali coming up, and then a secret event in January of next year that no one knows about yet. But I'm already building my list now. I'm building a list of those people now. So again, do yourself a favor, create your hot list, dig the well before you're thirsty.
