Use PR and SEO to Increase Your Online Course Sales
Creating your online course is only the first step. When your course is completed it is time to enroll students (easier to do than say! ).
Do you have a marketing plan? Perhaps you've made the mistake of thinking that just because you have a course online and other users will automatically discover it.
Well, I'm sorry to be the bearer of terrible news, but if you want to maximize your return on the work you put into creating your course, it is essential to promote it.
And two of the best ways you do that is via PR (Public Relations) as well as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
The days are gone where you had to reach deep into your pockets and hire an expensive PR firm for help in gaining exposure. If you're familiar with what to, you could take it on by yourself.
Keep an eye out.
This is also true with SEO. There is no longer a need to shell out huge sums of money to hire the services of an SEO agency. If you are able to engage your customers with valuable content, then you can send clear signals to search engines.
In this detailed guide, I'm going to reveal some actionable tips on how to make use of SEO and PR to boost the sales of your online courses.
Tips and Techniques for PR for Increasing Your Course Sales
Step 1: How To Find Journalists
If you're doing your own PR, the first thing to do is find journalists who are in your field. For instance, if your course is about Social Media Marketing you'll want to find journalists who specialize in the field of reporting on social media marketing.
What's more?
Google is as good a starting point as any...
Find the search results in Google and use the tab 'News' to locate journalists writing about your course topic.
Like this:
Then, start looking up the authors of these pieces to see how they might be able to assist you in your PR campaigns.
Spend a couple of minutes to verify whether the person who wrote the article of the piece is a regular reporter on your particular subject.
From your search results you are able to begin building the Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Reporter's name
- URL of the article
- Link to the Twitter profile for the reporter.
- Link to the individual website or blog for the reporter (if available)
- Email address (if it is available)
- Your Notes
In our case there could be
- Jayson DeMers
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2016/09/28/9-things-social-media-marketers-get-wrong/#5107342a4b2f
- https://twitter.com/jaysondemers
- http://www.audiencebloom.com/
- Email?
- The founder and CEO of AudienceBloom which is a company that specializes in content marketing based out of Seattle. An ongoing columnist for Forbes.
Here's a sample of a report's spreadsheet that I put together:
>> objective for you to create the list of 20 journalists who are in your area.
Google is good but not always the best. The trick is to know how your conversation opener will be when you meet these journalists and what common topics of interests that you share with them and who is your most pertinent journalists you can contact right now, and what is their reason for doing so.
JustReachOut helps you identify the most relevant journalists and also provide you with a compelling reason to contact them. Enter a keyword, and it will show you who is writing about your keyword and why it is important to contact journalists. Additionally, it provides email pitch templates to use to write your pitch, email support from reporters' team members to aid to directly send email to journalists via the platform as well as a team which human verifies every single email before it's delivered.
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Step 2: How To Join Journalists
When you've got your list of relevant journalists you're ready for the next step, which is Connecting with them. connecting to them.
The example below can see that this particular journalist is open to receiving solicitations. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
If you don't have your contact information, you'll have to research a bit further. But don't worry, there are a few instruments that could help.
1. Hunter
You can enter the URL of your company's website in Hunter It will give you the structure and email addresses.
If, for instance, you attempt to enter it will display:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
If you know a pattern, it is possible to determine the details of your journalist's contact.
In the event that you locate the publication you want to read on Email Format, it suggests which format it is most confident is correct.
As an example, this is what it returns on :
If you are aware of the possible email address of the journalist, then employ this tool to verify the email address.
Step 3. How to Build Relationships With Journalists
In the past, you've identified possible reporters in your field and have created a spreadsheet that includes the contact information of each.
It is tempting to begin pitching immediately.
But don't.
The first step is to nurture relationships with these people. It is best to begin giving before you start soliciting.
Follow these steps:
- Answer journalist questions on the HelpAReporter or JustReachOut.
- Ask journalists to write articles for your own blog
- Answer to a question on Quora and then ask journalists to answer the exact same question.
- Follow journalists that you would like to reach out to on Twitter. Follow the journalists you want to pitch on
- Share relevant tweets and retweet them.
- Send a thoughtful response via Twitter or a comment to their website. Start sharing your personality to help them get acquainted with your style.
- Provide them with the possibility of a story or idea which isn't about you. Yes, that's right, give them something that is newsworthy. They're journalists. They are looking for stories.
A while ago, I recorded video in which I describe an easy step-by-step guide on how to develop connections with journalists. It is available for your reference.
Here's the words of Rebecca Grant, a former writer at VentureBeat spoke about creating relationships first:
"If you have a tip or a suggestion for a story thatisn't about your company, then share your idea with an editor. We are always on the prowl for stories that are worth telling. ."
Step 4. How To Suggest Your Story to Journalists
At this point, you'll be establishing a rapport with journalists that you would like to approach. Making the effort to break the ice means you don't have to write a cold email now.
However, what are you going to say in your email?
What you do not wish to share with reporters about your new course.
That's a big NO.
Scroll back up the page.
What do journalists want?
--- Good Stories.
Ever heard the saying: "Stories sell newspapers."
The same applies to the internet world.
The best stories are shared, and they generate shares and traffic.
It's time to start sharing your stories with the journalists. Where are you planning to get them from? Your blog.
In the next part in the next part, we'll explore the subject of content marketing. But prior to that, let's take a look at the tools that can help you with your email pitch.
Digital marketing agency Fractl conducted a survey of over 500 journalists at top sites including BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch, and more about what they want to hear in a pitch.
Here are a few of the most important results:
- 81% would rather be pitched by email.
- 69% prefer to be pitched during the morning.
- 39% want exclusive research to publish
To ensure that you are aware of this it is important to be sure to track the progress of your pitch. Here are a couple of techniques you could try:
MixMax is a no-cost plugin to Gmail which includes the ability to track emails for an indefinite period of time. You have the option of choosing whether you want to track each email or only the specific ones.
The lightning symbol with numbers in front of the messages you have sent indicates that someone has opened your email plus the number of times they have opened it.
2. Yesware
Yesware is another Gmail plugin that lets you track email open and reply rates, clicks to links as well as attachment open. Click the "track" button prior to you hit send and Yesware does all the monitoring. Yesware allows you to test variations of your email subject line, and save templates of email for future for use.
If your course online is complete or not, now is the best opportunity to plan the strategies. You should think about the journalists you can connect with and start building connections. Be sure to provide them with great content.
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SEO Tips for Increasing your Online Course's Sales
SEO is the practice to increase the amount of people who visit the website through ensuring that it appears on top in the search results returned by a engine. If someone is searching for your course topic using Google or Yahoo the presence of your site in the results of a search means an opportunity for exposure for you.
How do you get your website's page to be visible on search results when you type in topics that are related to your subject?
Through publishing amazing content (blog posts video, blog posts, etc.) through your website, which people can consume for free.
You might now be asking how you can go about putting in all that efforts in developing the course materials, why do you need to make the content for free?
Let me explain the logic:
Through the creation and promotion of excellent content on a budget (usually by way of blogs), you establish trust and authority in your area of expertise. If you can create content that is free which actually aids people, those people are more likely to buy the course since they already know, love and believe inyou. Content that is free creates trust and reciprocity.
Ideally, you'll have a website and an audience prior to marketing your courses. However, if you don't but you're not far off to start one now.
One of the keys to making your blog a success is having high-quality material. It's what Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Content- content that's 10 times better than the most popular results currently located in the results of a search for a given keyword phrase or topic.
Journalists and readers prefer to link to your high worth web pages
Producing 10x content is not easy. If it was, every single piece of content will be 10x, right?
However, you've got a distinct advantage...
- It's a great online course.
- You've a mountain of content available to you.
- You've already identified some primary keywords and topics which your target audience would like to know about.
Once you begin writing content for your blog you will be able to draw from that collection of content and transform it into 10x content.
Be sure to include 10x Content
- Solves a problem or answers an issue by offering complete, precise, and exceptional details or sources.
- It is of high-end, reliable practical, fascinating and amazing.
- Creates an enjoyable user experience via the user layout, interface as well as fonts and images.
When your content meets those criteria then your audience, plus the journalists who you've pitched to is bound to want to spread the word about it.
It is important to remember that all of this takes time, a lot of time! Making a list of your work and managing your time is crucial for making progress quickly. I recently provided some tips for managing your time when creating or conducting PR outreach. There is some excellent actionable stuff there from others also.
10x Content attracts more natural backlinks, and is ranked more highly on Google
When Google begins to realize that your content is popular and it is able to boost your site's ranking in the search results. And because it's a high-quality piece of content other people within your field will desire to hyperlink to it.
And Google loves organic backlinks.
Following all the hard work you put into creating the content remember to do the following.
1. Make sure your website is prepared to handle the floods of traffic:
- Go to GTmetrix and input your URL on the site, try your homepage URL and your top ranking or most popular blog post URL. Check out the grades you get and the issues it reports. It should be a grade either C or B.
- Use dedicated web hosting. Avoid using HostGator or something cheap like GoDaddy which makes use of a variety of shared servers. They don't have the right features specifically for hosting or serving WordPress or blog posts specifically. Take a look at options like Flywheel or WPEngine that are specifically designed to host and serve up WordPress blog content. It optimizes how your website loads and improves your page load time faster, in addition to helping you rank better on Google.
- Consider the use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) It operates by offering different server nodes to customers to download and install resources (usually static content such as images or JavaScript). The result is that your site will be faster significantly, and the majority of major sites use this. It is possible to learn more about it here.
- You should consider using a caching software - if you ever pushed a back button on a web browser and the page took more then 5 seconds to load you've experienced an uncached website. Excessive load times can limit your traffic, lower your Google index and decrease your website's potential. A caching software will help with load speed a great deal. You can learn more here.
- Optimize your entire image for faster page loading It's a simple concept, but it can get more technical as you might need to use CSS sprites to optimize the images. This article will tell you how to do this and what to do. When you are done with the day you'll want to get a mark of either A or B GTmetrix to rank your blog's homepage as well as all the major articles you'd like to rank in the minimum. I like to make sure all articles I have on my blog have this grade.
2. Check to see if you've got the right CTAs (calls to actions) strategically placed on your site:
- To buy your online course
If you're not yet launching your blog, then you should make sure your site is up and running. Plan out what 10x-quality contents you'll be able to create in order that your readers will desire to share your story.
Include SEO and PR to your marketing plan for your course
Are you prepared to begin marketing your online course by using these cost-effective PR and SEO tactics?
SEO and PR do not have to cost you a lot of money. When you commit your thoughts to them, you'll be able to utilize the resources available that are available to you. Develop meaningful connections with influential people and develop valuable content that will improve the number of sales for your online course.
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Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io It helps startup entrepreneurs and business owners pitch journalists and influencers, without the help of PR firms. He employed PR outreach in order to have an enterprise acquired by Google. He writes about hacks for PR along with SEO in his website at CriminallyProlific.