How to promote and sell online courses fast?

For selling online courses well, you need a detailed payment plan and well-thought-out strategies that help you reach out to your prospective customers who get to know about your online courses, like them, and buy them from you. The technique of selling online courses relies heavily on creating an amazing online course with great content and then marketing the course well.

Table of Contents

In this post, we share with you some quick ways to make sure you get the traction you need to sell your course. The steps mentioned below will help you sell quickly and in a very cost-optimized manner to get the maximum bang for your buck.

First things first: Who can sell online courses?

The Answer is anybody. Really! You don’t need any certifications to sell online courses from your website, but what helps in selling faster is a pre-existing audience and credibility about your niche skills or expertise. A well-designed landing page can quickly help do that. Additionally, some courses lend well online more than others.

However, with the growing popularity of video-based online courses, you don’t have to depend on text-only courses. The reason why online courses sell more is due to the incorporation of multiple media like video, PDF, Prezi, and text, as well, which engages learners more by helping them visualize the learning and apply the knowledge as compared to traditional classroom-type of learning methods.

Landing Page: Your Sales Enabler

One of the key benefits of using Knorish’s platform is that it allows you to create a landing page for your course. What that means is that you get to use the landing page to promote your brand with your domain name. A landing page is crucial as it shares with the audience a clear description of the course and why it’s essential for prospective learners to take up the course.

It can be used to share the most important information directly with prospective customers, which helps them to learn more about your course and decide if the course is going to be worth their time and money. Besides, when done correctly, landing pages can also be great for generating leads for email marketing.

Next Up: How do you sell online courses?

So once your online course and the landing page are ready, the next step is to start selling. Contrary to popular belief, selling online courses is not so complex once you understand it. Once your course content is ready and uploaded on knorish’s platform, you must complete the steps listed below to start selling the online courses. While some may be obvious, others are unique and may take time to set up, but once you get going, there’s no looking back:

Promote your course on your blog

If you don’t have a blog, create blog posts that are well-written. Even if you use social media-based blogging sites like LinkedIn or Twitter, that’s fine. But have a blog where you can share the highlights of your course. And regularly engage your target audience through well-written content that will also help you in getting higher up in the SEO rankings. You’ll also be able to engage your audiences better by sharing this content in various formats on your social network handles, reposting it in multiple formats.

Start a YouTube channel

To prepare the course’s content, the number of hours spent in front of a camera by now should have made you pretty comfortable with it. Use this newfound ability and create a YouTube channel to share video content with your audience. Backlink it to your course every time. Those who like your videos can sign up to take your course.

Create dedicated FB, LinkedIn, and Instagram Pages

A dedicated FB Page is great for acquiring prospects all on one page. It makes it a lot easier to target, it’s cheap as it’s free, and it allows for direct messaging to your page followers to help them get the latest updates about your course. Additionally, the social media-related steps mentioned below can be easily directed toward increasing traffic on your page.

Promotional Video

Nothing gets clicked on more than a video. The most-watched content on social media is, for that reason, video content. Hence, it makes sense to promote your online course via promotional videos. If your promo video does well, you can also use social media channels like FB, which allow targeted marketing, ensuring that your content gets viewed by the right demographics.

Share Live Videos

Internet data consumption is highest with Video. Knorish has the option of conducting webinars straight from your online course site. Similarly, Facebook and other platforms have added Video and live video interfaces to their platforms. Once you have built a fairly strong audience for yourself, you could also start sharing live videos about your course. These could be conversations with other peers about your course, unrehearsed student testimonials, expert comments about your course’s value, etc.

Build an Email List

Emails can be a powerful tool for capturing leads and selling more. Several courses have done extremely well purely based on the optimal use of email marketing and remarketing. So how do you build a list?

A direct benefit of joining online communities and creating social media handles that generate traffic is that it helps you build an email list that you could utilise to market your course. These are valuable emails of people who have the same interests and hence have a very high probability of converting to customers who buy your course.

Student Testimonials

Student testimonials are a great way of influencing prospects to purchase your course. Plus, video testimonials do better than text-based testimonials. However, If you don’t have any available, you could release the course to a select few, ask for feedback, and tweak the course accordingly. Those who do like the course could collect their testimonials and use that for the landing page.

You could also ask for testimonials from customers, clients, peers, or other similar professionals who may have worked directly with you. This can be used to showcase your expertise in the subject matter. Make sure the participants understand the purpose of the testimonials.

Become more active on social media

Get more active on social media pages and groups discussing your subject matter. Give free advice if you need to. YouTube, Quora, FB, Twitter, and even LinkedIn are great channels for promoting your course for free. Share advice, and ask people to leave a comment. Those who do leave comments behind, you can capture their email addresses for marketing later.

A large following on social media is key for success in online course sales. It makes it just that much easier to market your course since you already have a target audience ready. Plus, this direct marketing to your target audience will be free and more responsive as compared to a larger target audience size that ads can get you.

Discounts for your course

Another way of promoting your course is to offer discounts on the price. Under your Knorish account’s publisher dashboard, you have the option of creating coupons for discounts plus the payment option to limit the number of times the coupon can be used and assign a time limit for it too.

Everyone loves to save money, and running limited-period discounts is an excellent way of generating attention toward your content. These discount coupons can be distributed on various social platforms under dedicated campaigns.

Guest blogging

Besides social media promotions, writing as a guest blogger for popular guest posts can be a great way of increasing a fan following plus, that’s free promotion for your course. Many blogs allow promotional content as long it’s centered around the overall theme of the blog and is not spam. Hence, it is key that before you start writing, research the blog’s outreach and guest writing policies, and only then should you go ahead with it.

Facebook/LinkedIn groups

Starting a dedicated Fb/LinkedIn group is another excellent way of building a community of similarly-minded learners. Facebook can be great for a general audience or specific demographics, and LinkedIn, on the other hand, is great for acquiring professionals in your community.

Besides, LinkedIn is a great platform for networking with professionals, which can lead to exposure to speaking events, conferences, and the LinkedIn learning platform.

Another group can also be created for the students already taking your course to engage them further, address their queries, and build a community around your course. Ideally, this type of group should be closed, where you only approve requests of students enrolling in your course.

So far, all the steps listed above are actionable tasks that can be performed from the comfort of your home. Not only are they easy to set up and launch, but these would also probably require you to invest a maximum of 3 hours daily for fruition.

However, an organic increase in traffic needs time. Time means patience. If you would like to increase the outreach of your course faster, you need to look at one more step.

Promote your course with Ads

If organic outreach of your course is taking more time than expected and you have the funds needed, you could also look at advertising the course not only on FB, LinkedIn, and YouTube but also on blogs with similar target audiences.

Make sure to research your target audience well and how to target them on these platforms to ensure optimal returns on your investment. While there are no fixed prices for the pay-per-click ads on social media, depending upon the specifications like age, location, interests, hobbies, & number of days, an approximate budget can be identified. Remember, the larger the number of specifications.

Google Adwords & Display Ads

Google AdWords & display ads are a great way to accelerate sales faster than organic growth. AdWords primarily work in two ways – Search Network and Display Network. Search network ads are shown on google search, whereas display ads are shown on the websites we visit, also commonly known as banner ads.

Both are set up differently however are easy to master. Google has even released a free digital marketing tools course that one can undertake to understand AdWords better. The key for the ads to be effective is to ensure that the overall ad spends for customer acquisition should be lower than the course’s breakeven price.

Know of any more methods that should be added here. Let us know in the comments section.