Events: Free vs Paid

Dan Todd
6 min readJun 2, 2019

Live events has become one of the most powerful ways of generating leads and making sales both on the day and the future for almost every business model and niche — from real estate to ecommerce, marketing to self help.

In recent years several different event models have emerged and become the norm when it comes to live events:

  1. Free one day events — 5–6 hours of education with an upsell in between
  2. Paid three day events — sold at the free one day event
  3. Shorter 2–3 hour free events

However as with everything, these norms will soon change as people get too used to them — and there is already a lot of evidence that says people are all to used to the standard free one day event format now, making them less likely to be interested.

But my motto is test, measure and optimise. Not to simply copy what other’s do, and what seems to work. So let’s take a blank canvas and go over the pros and cons of both free and paid events, so you can make your mind up which model is best for you and your business.

Ultimately though, you want to try them both and let the results tell you what works for your audience.

Free — The Pros

  • Lots of interest i.e. leads. Because it’s free, there’s no real limitations for somebody to sign up…

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