How to Use Meetup.com as a Freelance Trainer for training workshops

Page Updated on March 4, 2023

There are different ways in which you can market yourself as a freelance trainer.

You can, for example, build a website presence and blog to draw in visitors to your site and the training you offer.

Or you can directly approach companies and use networking to directly build up a client base that you provide training for.

Another way that some trainers very successfully use is to use a worldwide service such as Meetup.com!

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Why Use Meetup.com As a Freelance Trainer?

A number of people who buy our training materials kits already use Meetup.com as the platform for achieving two key things. And you can also copy this. They use Meetup.com to:

Find and build a group of people who are interested in a specific topic area (and what you will do is make this topic something you can provide training for!)
Use Meetup.com to create the workshops and training sessions and to then take payments and signups for the training directly through meetup.com

So, as a freelance trainer, Meetup.com is a platform that is very cheap to use as a marketing and networking tool and it also provides all of the functionality you will need to offer training workshops.

Meetup.com has been very effective for some of the freelance and corporate trainers we know and you are perhaps already beginning to see how it can work for you too?

Marketing Your Workshops, Courses and Training Days on Meetup.com

There are two vitally important things to understand about Meetp.com.

Meetup.com ALREADY has hundreds of thousands of users worldwide and probably already has a presence in your local area.
You do not need to develop a website or any other presence online unless you want to. You can use Meetup.com as your actual selling platform.

Just do a Google Search for the term “local meetup” and you should see a list of local events near you.

Example of local mindfulness courses using Meetup.com

To get started at the very beginning, as an events organizer, just go to the Organizer page here and just follow the steps you will see on screen.

After you do set up your group and begin to attract followers (people interested in your group and who will be interested in the events you organize) you will have a screen such as you see below.

How to market your training workshops on meetup.com — Image with permission from shahillabarok.com

So, as you see above in the image, you will customize your own group to include a description of your group, an image to present your group, and you can start to add events and accept members to your group.

As a freelance trainer, these group events might include:

training workshops over weekends
night classes
2, 4, 6, or 8 week-long courses on specific days
ongoing weekly or monthly workshops and training days.

Let’s next look at costs and the numbers though for when it comes to using Meetup.com as a focal point for offering training.

How Does Meetup.com Work?

The general public can join Meetup.com for FREE (event organizers are the ones who pay) and the public tends to join groups that they have an interest in.

So Mary Peters from San Diego (made up person), for example, might decide that she wants to socialize more and to learn new things at the same time, in the evenings or on weekends.

She goes onto Meetup.com and comes across the San Diego section where her local events are listed.

Events organizers interface on Meetup.com — Events organizers interface on meetup.com

The Numbers, Costs, and Providing Training

Let’s use an example training program and see how it can all work for you. It will all become clear below.

So let’s price us the potential costs of running a new course as a freelance trainer (and feel free to email me if you think I have missed any costs).

Costs

Meetup.com subscription cost – average USD$16.50 (approx £12) a month (view their subscription rates here)
Marketing costs – to find people for your courses – $0 (£0) because you will do the marketing by building your Meeetup.com group and then run the workshops when you have enough members in your meetup.com group.
Training Course Materials cost – let’s assume you have created a mindfulness group on meetup and thus decide to run an Introduction to Mindfulness workshop. So the training materials from us on this site would be USD$179 (approx. £137)
Venue hire – the prices will of course range greatly according to what size room, town/city, time of day and week, and so on. So, for this exercise, I will use the cost that I know I could rent a suitable training room for, with room for 20 participants and with a kitchen and everything available. For a one-day workshop that would cost me $125 (£95)
Extras – I like to also offer free tea, coffee, printables needed, etc. Cost for a 20-person workshop of $125 (£95).

So that’s a total of USD$445.50 (£340)

Income Potential

Running this course above for up to 20 people, I might charge a rate of USD$85 (£65) each but you can often charge much more!

So with a full course, that is potentially USD$ 1700 (£1300) for a day’s work, although you can charge much more.

Using Meetup as Your Payments and Bookings Platform as a Freelance Trainer

l am not sure if you are a brand new freelance trainer, i.e. someone who has started a business, or if you have been teaching and offering training and workshops for a while and are just looking to expand your reach as a freelance trainer.

Either way, you might find it very useful using Meetup.com as the platform also acts as the system for taking payments and bookings for courses.

You can learn all about taking payments for your events here on Meetup.com

Types of Training Workshops You Can Offer Via a Meetup.com Group

There are some quite specific types of training that you can offer, that can work especially well as they complement what Meetup.com is all about.

These types of training are:

3 Training Courses That Work Well as Meetup.com Events

So what specific training courses might you want to consider? In other words, what types of training do people typically offer that might also suit you as a freelance trainer using Meetup.com to build your business?

1. Introduction to Mindfulness

Introduction to mindfulness teaching package

Courses that are related to wellness and well-being can be especially popular as 1-day or 2-day workshops.

Furthermore, this type, of course, can easily be part of an extended wellness or well-being set of courses over many weeks, if you have followers in your meetup group, looking for monthly workshops.

You can, for example, combine this with workshops on Life Planning & Goal Setting, Time Management, and Digital wellness.

>> Learn more about Introduction to Mindfulness Training Course Materials

2. Starting a Home Business

Workshops that help individuals to build their own small business are perfect for providing on Meetup.

Courses that help people to make money or to improve their own personal situation are perfectly suited to be marketed to individuals as workshops, particularly when broken down into evening classes, or as one or more weekend workshops.

>> A good starting point can be ‘Starting a Home Business’ training.

3. Presentation Skills Training Workshops

Meetup.com is a platform on which individuals join groups that match their own interests. For this reason, workshops that involve personal development are naturally popular and suited to Meetup.com

With this in mind, another great workshop to provide as an event in a Meetup.com group is ‘Presentation Skills.

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Dr Valeria (Lo Iacono) Symonds

Valeria has been involved with education for over 16 years. She has taught in the UK at the University of Bath and Cardiff Metropolitan University (where she got her PhD), in addition to working as a researcher at Exeter University. Valeria additionally has several years of experience of also working with Ofsted and Cardiff University in management roles & is she is the founder of Symonds Training.