How to go from zero to 1000 Online Course Participants With No Ad Budget
It's all set. It's been discovered that there's an unfinished space and you've created your lesson plan, and you're excited and passionate about it all. You may be even done creating the curriculum. There is a dilemma: how do you spread the word to potential students? What are the best ways to get it more visible to your intended community? What websites are you supposed to share your link?
I have good news for you: this is an easily solved problem. Many authors before created online courses for all types of material. I'll show you the most effective practices that you need for taking your course from no students up to 1000. The course is free of advertisements.
In the beginning I'll clear up the most common error educators make when setting up to create their own course. The reason for this is because they follow a build-first strategy rather than an audience-first approach. The reason why the "build-first" method is not optimal is that you're assuming many things to be the case, which can expose you to a lot of dangers in your class. In particular, it is about what to compose and how the course structure will be.
That said, here are the 4 key parts of this mini-tutorial that will ensure steady, consistent traffic to your instruction:
- What to do to find out where Your Ideal Clients Hang Out
- Learn to read your audience's minds
- How to Build Respect and Reputation among your Audience
- How to Share Your Course to an Audience that's Ready to Purchase your Product
How to Discover the Places where your ideal audience hangs Out
Let's say you're a consultant client of mine. You want to advertise a course on Marketing Analytics.
One thing I'm going to explain to you is you'll have to ask the appropriate query -- you have to first ask "who do you plan to serve" instead of "what you'd like to serve". For the Marketing Analytics case, you will then have to decide if you wish to target Marketing Managers, CMOs or Marketing Newbies, or Entrepreneurs?
You've decided to target entrepreneurs.
If this is the case, then the first task is to search to find "where the audience is". One of the best ways to accomplish this is to look for "online lounges". Online lounges are places on the internet that allow people to talk about things that are related to their topic of interest. These can be forums, blogs and mailing lists. The way that I do this is to do the following steps:
- Open up your Google or Bing search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
- Search for a query with any of the following combinations:
Forum - Profession + forum
• Profession + Topic mailing list
- Profession + topic + blog
• Profession + forum for the industry
• Profession + topic + link-sharing sites (Eg. Reddit, stumbleupon)
- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum
Just there, I get to discover 10+ potential forums to target:
There's more to come. After you have selected a particular forum, you must go deeper and create another search with your preferred topic. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you want to look out for here is any indication of pain or trouble from the original poster. Starting with the original query of only "marketing" in the subreddit. There is no luck.
How can we improve our hunt to truly search for discomfort? Let's add "pain indicators" like "help" or "advice required". We'll look at the outcomes. It is evident that on just the very first page, we get a lot of threads that could be useful.
If you've found particular forums that are full of expressions of pain and apprehension, you'll know you're in the correct online club to spread the word to the future. When you start to do more research, you will find that some forums work for specific topics and some forums don't. This will help you focus your promotion efforts only in areas where your ideal target users hang out. This is essential to the effectiveness of your program.
From the above 15 minute exercise, we just got evidence that reddit.com/r/entrepreneur is a great place to promote our marketing course.
Try it out for other forums! I would suggest that you must find at least 10 online lounges. Blogs are also useful (especially thanks to its highly lively discussion sections).
What is the best way to read your Readers' Minds
Now, you're faced with a an extensive list of threads that show clear signs of suffering. Let's look at them all and truly understand who are your target audience.
Once you collect enough data then you'll begin to notice patterns on who your audience is. When you recognize these patterns, you'll begin to get a strong instinct of how your target audience feels and thinks about marketing generally.
Based on the information above we can see a few small patterns that are emerging (we'll have to wait for 10+ difficult threads before we can really understand) that entrepreneurs really need three items: a high-efficiency digital marketing approach that is low cash outlay, tips around the local and city-friendly marketing and the best way to present oneself to get high-value clients.
In our earlier example, you wanted to build a product around Marketing Analytics. However, it turned out that it might be too sophisticated (at minimum to be used in it to be used in the Reddit Lounge online). The best option is to follow a course focused on low-budget and high-efficiency marketing, local marketing, and looking for and closing customers with high value.
My structure of course for these pain samples is going to begin looking as follows:
- How do you utilize Facebook Interest Targeting to identify High-Quality Clients at a few cents a click
- How to Create the Referral Machine by using these Pitch Scripts in Your Next Local Chamber of Commerce Event
- How to Discover the Needs only high-value customers have
Course Name: "How to Get High-Value Clients Using with Hyperlocal and Hyper targeted marketing"
If you dropped that course within the Reddit area, I'm certain that will get the attention of others. Do you know what the evidence-based approach to marketing offers us?
How to build respect and trust among your audience
In addition to identifying problems, however it is important to be a authority within these online lounges.
This means that you should give bite-sized suggestions whenever you encounter these pains. When I say bite-sized, it means something that's from 1 to 10 words, but that is practical enough to allow the user to use.
As an example, I would answer the person who said "haven't found FB to be helpful" or "need an efficient strategy" with this form:
"I understand that you need an effective digital strategy due to the budget you have. However, I'm surprised in that you believe FB advertisements to not be effective. I do FB ads a lot in my consulting business, and here's what I would suggest to do with your targeting to get good quality clicks, at $0.40 to $0.80 per click.
- ONLY make use of the interest targeting method. Leave everything else at defaults.
- When you use interest targeting, make sure to use at least 10+ interest and do not exclude interests that have huge reach. Reason being large reach per interest will equate to a high price per click. If I wanted to target marketers using interest with gurus like Neil Patel', "Derek Halpern' 'Darren Rowse', etc. I'd recommend excluding 'Gary Vaynerchuk's' reach is way too big!
- Be sure the total reach does not exceed 800,000 individuals.
- Begin your test! Make sure your test is locked to $5 per day. Do not ever use the lifetime cost option.
- If you exceed $1 per click, it is necessary to eliminate those with the most impact and then add additional 'niche' interests
- If you are looking for ideas about 'niche' interests, google for influencers, tools, and even software, then test this out"
If you give advice at an unassuming level and in a way that is actionable, you will gain respect and authority in the field.
How to Promote Your Course to an Audience who is ready to purchase your product
"Isn't it a bit shady to publish hyperlinks? !" "What if I am exiled? !"
It's likely that you've had these thoughts. They're valid claims. In order to to solve the problem, one thing you can do is include inline links in your comments and you pair this with other websites that aren't related to your web site. This creates the impression of being useful and not to be a spammer. This is a real-life example of when I tried to help people who were having issues with landing pages:
Through these four general, strategic steps I managed to grow my site to have approximately 4K-5K organic visits per month. 89% of these came from direct hyperlinks. Take a look at the statistics below from SimilarWeb. There is no advertising budget whatsoever.
Provide lots of value for free and actionable to the world and the world will love it in return. I wish you great results throughout your life!
Kenn Costales is a growth hacker as well as an online course creator who loves discovering new methods to market items online, without spending a dime.