How to Create Your Online Masterclass: Set Yourself for Success

One of the ways to build authority and show expertise is to host online masterclass sessions. You can be an expert in your unique field and be unknown until you take a step to show a more extensive audience your expertise through sessions like masterclasses. By teaching a topic in your niche, you will not only be creating a name for yourself, but you will make money whilst doing so. 

At Bookings Africa, we help individuals or organizations to host their masterclass session by using our online learning platform. Through hosting masterclasses you can build and increase brand awareness to a prospective audience. 

In this blog post, we will outline the essential steps you need to host a successful online masterclass.

Top tips for a successful masterclass 

1. Know your audience 

When planning to host a masterclass session, one of the things to not overlook is finding out what kind of audience you will be speaking to. Many people often assume that all their audience falls into the same category, but that is often not true. There are three categories of audience you are likely to meet.

1. The experts- those skilled like yourself looking for new information in your niche 
2. The learners - those looking to become like you
3. The onlookers- those who just want to know what you have to say because the topic interests them.

To satisfy these three categories, you must be able to share educational information, ingenious ideas and acknowledge them all. With that, you will be able to deliver effectively to all three classes of people. 

2. Choose a high-demand topic or content. 

Have a Masterclass checklist with a list of topics you can choose from (Take note to include value-add topics). Understand the problems you want to solve and have answers for definite questions your audience might likely ask. Going through a checklist would ensure that you have all your i’s dotted and t’s crossed.  

3. Use storytelling to construct content 

One of the significant-end goals of a masterclass session is to reach a bigger picture: online courses or webinars. Hence, if the content of your masterclass is not convincing or exciting, they won't take action on any call to action. A good way to make your content engaging is through storytelling. By telling stories or relating the content to a story, it will help fuel the audience to listen to you more and even refer to your content. 

4. Drive engagement always 

A masterclass session is a live event, which means your audience needs to be captured throughout the lecture to encourage you to continue. During a session, you must ask questions to keep your audience engaged. Sometimes, the level of audience interaction will drop, which is possible if they need to attend to other things. Regardless, you can still keep the remaining people focused on you by throwing in a giveaway that many would love to respond to.

5. Check the competition. 

Without a doubt, your content will not be the first in the market, which means there are competitors to study. Before pushing your content out, look at what your competitors are offering and what they are yet to offer. This will help you differentiate what you bring to the table and that of your competitors. Plus, you can address the topic differently from how others have been delivering. It will be more interesting for your audience to listen to a different method of delivery which is what you will aim at. 

Here are your go-to tips you need to prepare for a successful masterclass session. Need assistance with setting up your first masterclass? Send us an email on the Bookings Africa platform.