You’re an expert.
You have a ton of knowledge on a subject.
You want to teach what you know and get paid well to do it.
You heard about these online course businesses and you’re ready to jump in.
If that’s where you are at right now, I’ve got some good advice for you.
After generating millions of dollars in sales from online courses, I’ve got a few things to share.
I recently did an interview over at the Anomalous Educator about how educators can get started marketing their online courses.
Here’s what we talked about…
Table of Contents
A Proven Method For Selling Online Courses
I am going to share with you a proven strategy for selling online courses with the help of webinars funnels and advertising.
I have helped many online course creators do over 6 and 7 figures in sales and you can do the same.
If you’re ready to get started, here’s what you should do
Step 1: Build Your MVP Course
Although it might sound like a huge obstacle to tackle, this can be one of the easiest parts.
You need to have a strong base of knowledge in the topic you want to teach and a desire to deliver that knowledge in an online format.
But you’ve already got that.
You’re already the expert. Teaching what you know is natural.
You can take a look at what successful course providers are doing is great for inspiration, but don’t think yours has to be ‘perfect’ from the beginning.
Your course will go through a number of iterations and improvements over time.
View your first attempt as a ‘minimum viable product’.
It only needs to be good enough to begin attracting your first customers (your going to be working with them closely in the beginning anyways).
That “perfect” course with everything you know can wait until the money starts to come in.
If you’re worried that you don’t have the technical knowledge to set this up don’t worry at all!
That’s because it’s never been easier to make an online course.
There are a number of online tools and platforms to create and sell online courses like ClickFunnels that make it easy for you to build a membership area and build a sellable product.
You just need to be able to fill it with what you know.
Step 2: Set a Viable Price
One of the biggest mistakes I see is people not pricing their online courses for paid advertising. In other words, they’re selling them too cheap.
You might think that a cheap $7 course will be easier to sell, but counterintuitively, that is not always the case.
To make money with cheap courses, you must drive a lot of online traffic into your sales funnel.
And unless you already have a website with a ton of traffic and big following online advertising like promoting your webinar with Facebook Ads will be the fastest way to get traction.
But ads cost money.
With a cheap course you have to have a high volume of traffic and a high conversion rate, which is not cheap or easy.
Avoid this problem by focussing on creating a high-value educational package.
Create an experience that couples information with coaching that you can sell for $250, $500 or even $1,000.
Of course, high-value courses have their own challenges.
You have to work hard to prove the value of what you offer (happy students getting results is where you get the most momentum).
But as long as you can deliver the transformation you’re promising, your course price can be high enough to pay for the marketing and advertising you need to make it a success online.
Step 3: Hustle For Your First Sales
Now you have a great course full of valuable information to sell.
Your challenge now is to get those first customers to try it out.
Don’t be distracted by all the ways to sell online.
For this first round of sales, you aren’t going to touch any complex online sales techniques. You are going to leverage your existing network.
Start small and get people you know are already interested enrolled in your course.
You probably already know these people! They’re connected with you on your social media. They are in your favorite Face group.
This soft launch will get you the first sales without spending on advertising and helps to validate your ideas and the course offering.
It lets you know that you have a viable product to sell.
Based on the results of your first students, you can get case studies and testimonials from real student results.
And most importantly, these first students of your program will give you insanely valuable feedback about why they bought the program, what they want from it, and how well you did.
Then you can use all of this to improve your sales messaging and move to the next step.
Step 4: Build Your Webinar
It is time to start spending some money to bring you a steady stream of customers and revenue.
Russell Brunson says do a webinar every week for a year and you’ll never be broke again.
A webinar is like a sales machine that is always out there pitching your product day and night.
Once you have a webinar that can consistently convert online traffic into leads your business grows rapidly.
There are a lot of ways to get people on a webinar. The method we use the most is Facebook Ads to drive webinar registrations.
There are entire books dedicated to creating the perfect webinar (like this one), but just like course creation, don’t get bogged down in the details.
Use some successful webinars and a model and get your first version out there.
As you are getting people to sign up for the webinar you can get feedback and improve your webinar.
You can continually modify the sales script in your webinar to convert better based on the lessons learned over time.
It’s usually a few versions into the original webinar that you really start to convert at high levels.
Step 5: Upsell
Once you have successfully put some groups through your course, you should have a base of satisfied customers.
More importantly, you will have a far better understanding of what information your target audience is most interested in.
This is the perfect opportunity to create supplementary or complementary educational offerings that you can upsell to your audience.
Course creation is a competitive industry.
So while you can make some good money with a single course, the real money comes from offering higher value products and services to your new customer base.
That’s how you scale from a single course to a business that dominates an industry.
It’s Time To Start Your Course
Everyone has ideas.
What makes a business successful is action.
None of this is easy, but it’s worth doing.
With sustained and purposeful effort, almost anything is possible.
The internet has made it easier than ever to leverage your skills and experience into a recurring source of revenue.
If you would like to find out more about using Facebook advertising and webinars to sell your online course, then reach out to me and learn how we can help you.
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