Marketing Online Courses - How I'd Start an Online Course Business From Scratch

Key Takeaways

if you want the best resource for marketing online courses then this video is for you through my agency i've spent the last six years marketing online courses and over that time i've helped many online course businesses grow to seven figures and beyond and i've also grown my own online course business on the way as well and in this video i'm going to show you everything i would do if i was marketing a new online course business from scratch in fact i'm currently using this system that i'm about to show you for a brand new online course business that i'm partnered in to grow it from scratch and it's working really really well so no surprises there it still works right now just to demonstrate how well it's working in the past seven months we've grown from zero email subscribers to over 14 000 email subscribers and we're currently adding over 200 new email subscribers on average every single day in that new online course business and that's without paying for any ads whatsoever that's all organic so that's all happened in the space of about seven months and now we're about to launch a course that we know the audience really wants and as a result we're expecting to do six figures in this business in the very first year so let's get into it and talk about step one of this process the very first step is to start with an organic channel and start producing content on a regular basis what that means is choosing something like a blog youtube or maybe a podcast or any other organic content distribution channel where you can be putting things out on a regular basis that help your audience the goal here is to attract people who are interested in whatever it is you're talking about so they can come and learn from you and you can most importantly start to build a relationship now yes you can go and buy traffic through ads like facebook ads or youtube ads but the key thing that is missing from something like this is the relationship building because what happens when you create regular organic content that really helps people is they not only start to become connected to you but they start to trust you they start to see you as the person they go to for information on whatever it is that you talk about and that is what's truly powerful building those relationships as well as growing your audience is the key and that's why you really need an organic content piece now the important thing to do here is whenever you release a new piece of organic content you need to provide something for free in exchange for an email address so you release a piece of content and within that content you need to mention something that the viewer or reader or listener can get for free of value so it needs to have some value to the listener but you're giving it away for free in exchange for an email address this is often called a lead magnet that way as you start putting more and more organic content out into the world you're going to be growing your email list then as your email list starts to grow every week you need to be emailing that list with tips ideas stories and sharing the new content that you're putting out there and what that's going to do is that's going to continue to build those relationships with those people who've joined your email list who are now your audience and continue to position you as the authority in your industry for whatever that person is learning about i can't stress the importance of building and nurturing that email list enough it really is at the core of everything else we're going to do and you're going to find out why as we continue to go through each step speaking of which before we move on to step number two if you're enjoying this video please just tap that like button it really does help with youtube algorithm helps me grow the channel and make sure more people see these videos if you want to hear more from me then make sure you hit the subscribe button hit that little bell you'll get notified whenever i release a new video on facebook advertising and digital marketing for online course creators coaches and consultants all right that said let's move on to step number two in this process and that is to start posting regular content to facebook and instagram now you want to start doing live video in particular on facebook i like to do it weekly and that's what i recommend and on instagram as well at least once a week doing an instagram live video can be really really helpful now there are a few reasons why this is important the first one is you're building what we call retargeting audiences meaning that everybody who discovers you on facebook and instagram through this content and through these videos become part of your audience on those platforms that you can then show ads to so later down the track when we get to that stage of running ads you're going to have these huge audiences on facebook and instagram who are already familiar with you that you can run ads to for a very very low cost it's going to be an advantage that you will have that most others in your industry won't and the other reason this is important that not many people will talk about is that if you have a highly engaged facebook page that you are running ads from you actually get cheaper ad costs so by doing live videos on facebook you get more engagement than just about any other type of post you can do on the platform so those regular live videos get lots of engagement they get lots of reach and they tell facebook that this page is a good sort of citizen in the facebook ecosystem people love this page so when you start running ads from that page it has a high quality score which is an internal score that facebook kind of keeps on pages and ad accounts so if that page is seen as high quality by facebook when you start running ads you will actually see lower costs again that's another advantage that you're going to have by putting in the work now and doing these things early on in your online course business all right so after a little while you're going to have grown your email list you might have a few hundred people maybe even a few thousand people you're going to have an audience on facebook and by doing these live videos and by doing those live videos on instagram you're actually going to have had quite a few conversations with people in your audience it's amazing how much engagement and how many conversations you can have by doing those live videos and that's something i didn't really dig into earlier but i just want to touch on a little bit more now because this is so crucial when i mention building relationships those live videos on facebook and instagram are key the interactions that you have with your audience through those live videos are unlike any other interaction that you have in the business they're an opportunity to talk almost one-to-one to audience members to answer questions and to really build and strengthen that relationship i remember when i launched my first online course when i opened the cart i'd been doing facebook lives every single week and the majority of people that bought that first day when i opened the course were people that i recognized from these facebook lives that i've been doing for several months beforehand to say that that time was a good investment is an understatement it really really did help and also while i was doing it and i was answering my questions i was taking notes you need to be paying attention to what they're asking how they're describing their problems and that's going to feed into the course that you create which is a great little segue into step number three in this process which is surveying the audience you're going to have that email list now you're going to have that audience you can send out a survey and get them to tell you exactly what it is that you want this is something that so many people fail at when it comes to marketing online courses they will go create a course and then try to sell it and what they find is that their course is a square peg and they're trying to fit it into a round hole doesn't work nobody buys and then they wonder why but if you send out a simple survey to a pre-existing audience that you've worked hard to build they will tell you what they want we actually just did this with that new business that i mentioned we got 400 responses to our survey and there were very clear patterns and trends that we saw in terms of what people actually wanted so guess what we did we created a course based on what most of that audience asked us to create now this is surprisingly easy to do there are lots of tools out there i like to use a tool called type form simply create a quick survey in type form send it out to the email list you can post it on social media as well and you will get responses now if you want to see exactly what questions we ask it's just a few simple questions but it's really important in terms of the way we word that and the way we word the email when we ask people to complete the survey i'll pop a link down below in the description where you can get the exact questions that i like to ask in my surveys plus a little tutorial on how to set that up in typeform and how to send it out you'll also see the email template that we use to get people to open the email and to actually click and complete the survey another bonus of sending out a survey is you get quite detailed responses from your audience you'll be surprised by how much detail people will go into when they're describing their problems and what their ideal solution would look like and you can use that then in your marketing copy when you're writing your sales page when you're writing your emails you can pull the verbage and the content from those survey responses and actually use it to help you sell the program now we move on to the fun part step number four is to actually create your first course so take what you learn from the survey and use that to build a course that's going to help them solve the problems that they've told you they really want solved what i encourage you to do is actually start with a small product don't go all out and create something that has 50 videos and 10 hours of content and everything else start small create a minimum viable product something that solves their problem in the shortest amount of time possible and then create it and get it out there on the market your first course isn't going to be a masterpiece it's not going to be perfect because this is probably the first course you've ever created right so you want to create something that is going to help your audience create something small with a relatively low price point so you can get it out there fast am i saying create something low quality absolutely not create something that's really high quality but solves a very small or narrow problem so something that doesn't have to take a ton of your time to create and then what you're going to do once you've created your product package it up put in an online course platform i like thinkific pop a link to that in the description below as well if you want to use a platform for creating your courses and then you're going to sell this course to your existing email list and that audience you've built on social media again that's another benefit of step one where you start creating that organic content from day one and building that audience once you've created your course you've already got people there ready to sell to and this is also the first time i recommend starting to use facebook ads and the way that i start using facebook ads at this point is simply with retargeting we're going to retarget that email list we're going to retarget those social media followings with ads that tell them about the new course that we're releasing okay the reason we do that is because these facebook ads are going to convert well because we know that those audiences that we're targeting the email list and the social media following they already know like and trust us meaning those ads are going to be low cost they're going to convert really well because we're not going out to brand new people and trying to sell them something as a person that they've never heard of we're putting our ads in front of people who already know who we are who've already consumed our content and who already trust and see us as an authority all right step number five is to smash the like button below this video no no just kidding uh but if you are enjoying this video please and you haven't done it already hit that like button as it really does make a huge difference now number five is to simply iterate and improve on the program so get some feedback from that first group of people that go through your course and improve on it make the changes that you need to make to make the course even better that was a lot of makes but i got through it all and just make it even better really polish it to make the best product you possibly can once you know you've got a great product and your students love it and they're getting results from it that's when we move on to step number six which is building out an evergreen sales funnel in case you don't know what an evergreen sales funnel is it's simply a sales system or a process that is automated that allows you to sell your course on an ongoing basis you've probably seen these in terms of webinars where you can sign up go through a free online training and then they'll pitch the course at the end of that training and there's a series of sales emails afterwards people can buy at the end of that that's an evergreen funnel so that's what you want to do here once you know you've got a great product you can then go and set it on evergreen and every time someone comes in through your organic content all of that content you've been putting out whether it's on youtube your blog or a podcast people are downloading your free opt-ins or your lead magnets they're getting on your email list and you have an automated system there that then moves them into your evergreen funnel and pitches your new course what that's going to do is create a system where you're getting sales every day without having to actively market and sell that program this is also where i have ongoing ads running retargeting people inside the sales funnel so my facebook ads are going to tell people when the product is available and share what it's about they're going to be testimonials that i'm going to be showing people in order to show them results that past students have had and also ads around the cart close or any particular points of urgency if those points of urgency are real okay nothing fake here if there is no cart close or the offer doesn't expire or you don't have a special deal that runs out in a certain amount of time don't fake it don't run out of it say that it is going to disappear when it's not okay but if you have a real deadline if you have a real expiring offer that's where we run some ads to emphasize that urgency the other facebook ads that i'm running at this point are ads to my warm audience in order to get them onto the email list if they're not already so i'm running ads to people who engage on social media or who visit my website promoting whatever it is that gets them into my evergreen funnel so if it's a webinar i'm promoting the webinar to them if it's a challenge i'm promoting the challenge and getting those people who have discovered me through my organic content to then come take the next step join the email list and move on into the evergreen funnel this is where things are getting really good at this point you're getting regular sales coming in through your organic content you've got ads running now on an ongoing basis that should be running a nice profit two to three maybe even four times return on ad spend and now it's time to move on to cold traffic and now you can start to think about really scaling so what we want to do in step number seven is to improve the sales funnel so what you should be doing here is looking at your sales funnel and really optimizing everything to turn more of your leads into customers you're going to be getting a certain number of people going through your sales funnel every day a week and a percentage of them are going to turn into customers you want to increase that percentage as much as you possibly can for example let's say we're doing it for a webinar so we're offering a free training and at the end of that free training we're pitching our course in that case i'm going to be looking at how i can improve attendance rates so maybe the emails that go out before the webinar to get people to join how can i improve those i'm going to be looking at how can i improve the webinar itself or the training itself in order to get more of those people to stick around and watch the whole training and then get more of the people to actually purchase the product i'm going to be looking at the follow-up emails and how i can improve those follow-up emails to get more people to open them more people to click and of course more people to buy the course things like improving the sales page as well are really going to help i'm going to optimize and tweak every single piece of that funnel to really get my conversion rates as high as i possibly can and once you do that it's time to move on to step eight and that is running ads to cold traffic to bring them into the sales funnel cold traffic simply means people who have never heard of you before they don't know you that like you they don't trust you just yet this is the hardest traffic to convert into a customer and that's why we leave it until we've done all of those other steps before we start doing it because it's the most expensive traffic to get and it's the most difficult to turn into sales so we want to minimize risk here but once you really get this figured out it is how you can scale up in a big way a lot of people that i see who tell me facebook ads didn't work we'll do something like this they'll create a course that they think is going to resonate with their audience but they haven't done a survey they don't have an audience they've simply created a course and then they go and run traffic to cold audiences and expect it to convert into sales but if you follow the process that i've just outlined here you can see how you can significantly reduce risk and by the time you actually start running ads to cold traffic you're in a much much better position to run profitable ads and then from there you can actually scale those ads up and really grow the business so that's it that's the eight steps let's quickly recap what those were step number one was start with organic content and start posting organic content regularly whether it's a blog youtube or a podcast choose what suits you best and start creating organic content every week part of that is to also start adding free downloads in exchange for an email address into each piece of organic content that you create so you're growing your email list and then emailing them every week to nurture them and to continue to build that relationship step two was to start posting regular video content and doing live videos on facebook and instagram so you can build those retargeting audiences build those relationships and have those conversations with your audiences and so you can lower your cpms when it comes time to run ads step number three was to survey the audience ask them what they want get them to tell you in their own words what their problems are and how you can solve them step number four is to create a course that your audience actually wants based on the survey results start with a minimum viable product something small that you can create and get out to your audience quickly step number five is to get feedback and improve your course step number six build an evergreen sales funnel start converting that organic traffic and those organic emails that you're collecting into evergreen sales then once you've got that evergreen funnel up and running and you start converting those organic leads into sales then start to improve that funnel tweaking it and optimizing it as much as you possibly can then step number eight is to start those ads to cold traffic optimize those ads get them running really profitably and really grow and scale your online course business now i'd love to know if you're new to online courses what type of course are you thinking of creating or what industry are you in and if you've already got an online course and you've just been trying to figure out how to sell online courses but haven't been too successful with it yet have you skipped any of these steps that i just mentioned are you going to implement or add any of these steps to your existing online course marketing process if so let me know in the comments i'd love to hear about it and if you've enjoyed this video remember tap that like button click subscribe click that little bell you'll get notified whenever i release a new video on facebook advertising or digital marketing for online course creators coaches and consultants all right thanks again for watching i'll see you soon bye [Music] [Music] you