Step 5. Follow through
Once you pick a specific class, workshop or retreat to run, what follows next is: everything. You will need to:
+ Settle on a venue (home studio, rental space, cyber class, etc.)
+ Research venues (if you need a rental space)
+ Pick a price (if you are running the event yourself)
+ Pick dates
+ Create an effective description of the event
+ Create a website presence for the event (a page on your site where you announce the event, with or without the addition of a store and “shopping cart technology” so that folks can pay right at your site; or perhaps even a whole website devoted to the event)
+ A marketing and promoting plan (who you’ll contact, where you’ll announce, what free advertising you’ll try for, what paid advertising you’ll splurge on, etc.)
+ Execution of that plan (actually contacting all those people, actually making all those announcements, actually going after that free publicity, actually plunking down money for that paid advertising, and so on)
Of course this will feel daunting. It is daunting in exactly the same way that building and maintaining your art career is daunting. It makes you a busy entrepreneur, a detail person, a salesperson, a person of many hats. It is unlikely that there will be anyone to hand all this to: only you can perform many (or most) of these tasks, even if you’ve hired an assistant or a virtual assistant.
Accept this reality. There are many moving parts to this adventure and you are in charge of all of them. Breathe, smile, and tackle them! Of course, you will need to be organized—maybe even super-organized, maybe even organized in ways that you have never been organized before. Accept that reality, too, that whatever your feelings are about organization and whatever challenges you have had with organization, that “this time” you will get organized, for the sake of the great meaning opportunity—and perhaps financial opportunity—that your class, workshop or retreat may afford.
Once you decide what your class, workshop or retreat is “about,” sit down and patiently create a plan for pulling it off. Then work the steps of your plan!
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You may be interested in my low-cost, pick-your-own-price class for artists called The 12 Keys to Creativity; or another of my classes called Overcoming Creative Anxiety. Check them out here:
The 12 Keys to Creativity
https://www.dailyom.com/cgi-bin/courses/courseoverview.cgi?cid=100&aff=
Overcoming Creative Anxiety
https://www.dailyom.com/cgi-bin/courses/courseoverview.cgi?cid=48&aff=