Picture this, you’ve built an online course complete with everything your future clients will need to get an amazing end result.
You’re expecting they will be just buzzing to buy.
After building your foundation with a killer offer positioned for success, you’re ready to drop your course on the interwebs and watch the money flow in.
So how can you market your online course so people actually buy?
I’m going to give you some tips on how to get started going from organic sales to paid advertising.
Alright class is in session, let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Hustle With Organic Sales In The Beginning
I have always found you can basically hustle for your first 10 customers without spending a penny on advertising.
Organic sales is a free and solid way of getting started selling your online course while you’re developing a larger full funnel paid ads strategy.
This can be online in Facebook groups, on Instagram, posting on your own social media pages, hitting up people in their DMs.
There’s so many ways you can get out there and get in front of your ideal audience without spending a penny on ads.
Just takes leg work.
Leverage Your Existing Network And Email List
Think about your existing network and how you can leverage that in different ways.
Tapping into your email list is a great place to start getting sales.
No, you don’t need a list of thousands of people to get started. Any list you have is a good place to start.
By soft launching your course over email with your current list or on your personal LinkedIn or Facebook page you can get your first sales.
That will help to validate your ideas and work any kinks out of your offer before going big to paid ads.
Your first students can serve as great case studies and testimonials to use as leverage, and you’ll also get valuable feedback to use.
Combine all this great stuff to improve your sales messaging for when you’re ready to dive into scaling up in the near future.
Get On The Phone With Potential Customers
Ah yes, good ole’ phone sales.
Who needs those anymore?
Well I’ll tell ya, they still have a place especially when you’re selling a high ticket course or program.
So many people these days skip over the traditional phone call straight to selling online.
And I get it, that’s kind of the point of an “online course” right?
But there is something insanely valuable about talking directly to a potential customer.
In fact, in the beginning, getting on the phone with people is one of the best things you can do.
How to do this?
You can obviously talk to your existing network at first to get your feet wet.
You can also run ads to a landing page for example, where they just fill out an application or enter their info so you can get on the phone with them.
Talking on the phone with your potential customer can really help you with the process of dialing in your offer because you’re having real conversations with the people you’re trying to sell too.
You’ll be able to figure out what they were interested in, what got them to pick up the phone with you, what are their objectives, and why they didn’t buy already.
You can learn so much through these one-on-one conversations and take it all to work on improving your unique positioning.
It’s insanely valuable.
Speak At Events
Talking live at local events is a great way to find new customers for your online course.
There is something powerful about being up in front of a group of people and teaching them.
It instantly puts you in an influential position.
Think about it — you are standing on stage above the audience talking about what you know best about, naturally positioning yourself as an authority.
You’re also establishing a level of trust by being physically present that’s hard to achieve over an online sales page.
You can host your own local events by putting on something free in your local community. You can also reach out to companies and groups in your local area and see if they would allow you to come in and speak to their group for free.
I found some good speaking gigs in the past just partnering up with local business associations that were looking for some help with social media and offered to come give a talk if they would let me pitch my course at the end.
Actually worked out great for everyone!
Webinars
Taking it a step further, let’s talk about a sales machine that you can use to pitch your product day and night through building an evergreen webinar funnel.
Webinars are a proven way to efficiently and effectively sell your online course.
You can use the exact same sales pitch you refined selling over the phone and transfer that over to an online webinar.
Try creating a 45 minute presentation about a broad topic your course covers.
Touch on the pain points of your target audience and deliver a clear call to action at the end of it.
It’s super effective and you’ll soon see how powerful a well done webinar can be.
Scale With Paid Advertising
What do they say again? It takes money to make money? Yeah exactly.
Once you’re ready to really scale your business, paid ads are where it’s at.
We’ve found a ton of success running Facebook ads to scale up online course businesses.
Facebook makes it really easy to start in the beginning because you can run basic text ads with images.
It’s also a prime environment to test hooks, angles, ideas, and get engagement from your audience.
YouTube & Google Search
You can also promote your online course with Google Search ads and youtube ads which are great places for more leads and sales.
If you find a winning message from your Facebook ads, you can go create videos and then start running those on YouTube to drive people to your main sales funnel.
If there are some hot keywords that people search for, you can bid on being number one for those too.
Google search ads can get expensive but the traffic can be highly qualified.
Create Organic Content Around What’s Working
Once you find out what content and topics are working with your audience you can start creating organic content around that.
This will help you build up a long-term traffic strategy that doesn’t solely rely on constantly shoveling money into paid ads.
You don’t want to be in a situation where if your ads shut off all your traffic disappears.
Work on reinvesting what you see working in paid for organic so that in the long run you can build up a brand and assets online that can drive traffic to your business for years to come.
Build it on your own site and then use social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to spread your content around the web.
P.S. You can also boost your organic content with paid ads to get even more traffic to your website.
What’s Next?
Combine all of these ideas and you can get a really good long term traffic system in place.
Try using some of these ideas and see where they take you.
The next step will be developing a full funnel advertising strategy for your online course that will engage users at every step of the customer journey.
0 Comments