Use the SEO and PR techniques to increase your online course sales
Making your course online is just the beginning. After your course has been designed, the next stage is to register students (easier to put it into practice than said! ).
Do you have a plan to market your business? You may have made the mistake of thinking that simply since the course online is accessible and other users will automatically discover the course.
We're sorry to bring bad news, however, if you wish to maximize the return on all the effort you poured into creating your course it is essential to advertise it.
One of the best methods of achieving this is via the PR (Public Relations) as well as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
There's never a moment when you have to spend money to employ a costly PR firm to aid your company gain exposure. If you're aware of the best way to go about it, then you are capable of tackling the issue your own.
Stay tuned.
Similar to the situation of SEO. You no longer have to pay huge amounts of money to hire experts from an SEO agency. If you can keep your readers engaged by providing useful content, then it is possible to communicate clear messages to search engines.
In this complete guide, I'm going to provide some practical tips on how to utilize the power of SEO and public relations to increase the number of students who sign up for your online courses.
PR Tools and Tips for Increasing Your Course Sales
Step 1. How to Locate Journalists
When you're doing yourself PR, the first thing to do is to locate journalists that specialize in your area. If, for instance, you're a professor of Social Media Marketing you'll want to look for journalists who are specialized in covering social media marketing.
What's more?
Google is as great starting point as any other...
Utilize your search engine Google by clicking on the News tab to locate journalists writing on your subject.
Similar to this:
Then, start looking at the authors of these articles to determine how they might be able to assist you in your PR campaign.
It is worth a moment to check whether the author of the article is a regular reporter for your specific subject.
Based on the results you get in the search results on your computer, you're able to start building your Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Reporter's name
- URL of the article
- The links below will take you to the Twitter profile for the reporter.
- Link to the site or blog of the reporter (if it is available)
- Email address (if there's one)
- Your Notes
If you're in our situation it 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?
- Chief Executive Officer and Founder of AudienceBloom that is a business focused on content marketing based out of Seattle. A regular contributing writer to Forbes.
Here's an example of the spreadsheet I created of reporters I created:
The goal for yourself is to build the 20 journalist list who are in your area.
Google is great, but not all the time. The tough part is to determine what your first conversation will go when you meet these journalists What are the common areas of interest with them which are the most important journalists to contact now and the reasons for that.
JustReachOut assists you in identifying those journalists who are most suitable and give you a reason to reach them. When you enter an search phrase and the program shows you the journalist that you have written an article about your search term and the reasons why you need to contact the journalist. Additionally, it provides email pitch templates to create your pitch. Assistance via email from the staff of reporters to help direct email delivery to journalists through the platform and an expert team that review each email before it is sent.
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Step 2: How To Get In Touch With Journalists
When you've got the journalist list you'd like to connect with, and you're now ready to take next steps, which is c join them.
Below, you will see that this specific journalist is available to receive inquiries for pitches. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
If you don't have the contact information it is necessary to investigate a little more. However, don't fret. Some tools could be helpful.
1. Hunter
It is possible to enter the URL for your business's website in Hunter It will then show you the structure of your website and email addresses.
If, for instance, you attempt to enter it will display:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
If you recognize a pattern, you can confidently guess your journalist's contact information.
When you look up your desired publication by using Email Format, it suggests the one it's most confident to be correct.
Here's what it returns to :
Once you've an idea of the probable email address for the journalist, you are able make use of this tool in order to verify that it is.
HTML1 Step 3: How To Build Connections with Journalists
You've already identified potential journalists in your niche and created a spreadsheet with their contact details.
You may be tempted to make a pitch immediately.
But don't.
It is important to start from the beginning. is essential to establish relationships with the people you have contact with. The best way to do this is to offer before you ask.
Follow these steps:
- Answer journalist questions on HelpAReporter or JustReachOut.
- Ask journalists to write articles for your own blog
- Answer to a question in the Quora community and ask journalists to answer the exact same question.
- Follow journalists that you would like to reach out to on Twitter.
- Tweet relevant content and retweet the tweets.
- Send a sincere response to Twitter or a comment to their website. Start sharing your personality and let them know the way you present yourself.
- Provide them with an idea or story which isn't about the you. That's right, give an item that's important and newsworthy. They're journalists. They're looking for stories.
A while ago I made a video where I provide a simple step-by-step procedure for how to develop relations with journalists. Here it is for you to reference.
Here's the words of Rebecca Grant, a former reporter for VentureBeat spoke about building contacts first:
"If you've got an idea or an idea to write an article that isn't your company, then send it to a journalist. The journalistic community is always seeking interesting stories . "
Step 4. How To Tell Journalists About Your Story
In this stage, you'll be in contact with the journalists you'd prefer to reach out to. The effort of making the first move isn't required to contact cold today.
What are you planning to include in the email you write?
What you do not wish to tell media about your new course.
This is an absolute NO.
Go back to the beginning of this page.
What is it that journalists are looking for?
--- Good Stories.
You've heard that saying in the past: "Stories sell newspapers. "
It's the same in the online world.
The best stories are those that get shared, and they generate shares and traffic.
Now is the time to share your stories with the media. What are the best places to source the stories? The blog you are writing.
In the next part this section, we'll go over the subject of content marketing. However, before we do that, we'll take a look at some tools that can help you to pitch your marketing emails.
The digital marketing firm Fractl conducted a poll of 500 journalists of top magazines including BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch and many more on the items they'd like to be able to see and hear from a pitch.
Here are some of the most important outcomes:
- 81% prefer being pitched over email
- Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed prefer to be pitched in the early morning hours.
- 39% want exclusive research to publish.
For you to be sure that you're aware of this that in mind, ensure that you monitor the development of your pitch. Two tools could use to track your pitch:
MixMax is a no-cost plugin to Gmail with the capability to track emails for an unlimited period of time. You can select the option to monitor all your emails or specific ones.
The lightning icon with an inscription on your emails indicates that someone was capable of opening your email and how many times the email has been opened:
2. Yesware
Yesware is a different Gmail plugin which allows you to track email open and response rates, clicks to links and opens to attachments. Click on the "track" button just before you click send, and Yesware handles all the tracking. Yesware allows you to test different variations for the subject line of your email as well as save emails as templates for later usage.
Whether your online course is finished or not, now is the ideal moment to begin planning the strategies. Take note of the journalists you would like to meet and then begin building relationships. Make sure to give them excellent content.
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SEO Tips to Improve The Sales for Your Online Course
SEO refers to maximizing the number of visitors to a website by making sure your site appears first in the results for a search engine. When someone searches for the subject of your class using Google, for example the presence of your site as the first result of a search means free publicity to your company.
How do you get your site to appear in the results of searches on subjects that are related to the course you are teaching?
By publishing incredible content (blog posts, videos, etc.) on your site that visitors can access for free.
You might now be asking: after all your efforts in developing your course material what is the reason you're required to produce content for free?
Let me explain why:
Through the production and marketing of quality content absolutely free (usually via the blog) and establishing credibility and trust within the field you work in. If you can create content that is free that actually helps people, those people are more likely to buy your program because they are familiar with your course and have faith ofyou. Content that is free builds the reciprocity.
Ideally, you'll already have a website as well as an audience before advertising your course. However, if you don't have one yet, you don't have to put off starting your course until now.
One of the most important factors in success with your blog is to have highly valuable data. This is the kind of information Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Content. Thisis material that's 10 times better than the most relevant result that can currently be found in the search results for a specific keyword or subject.
Journalists and readers will prefer to hyperlink to premium-quality information
The process of making 10-fold content is not easy. If it were, every item of content would need been 10x.
You enjoy an exclusive benefit...
- It's a great online class.
- An abundance of information is available to you.
- There are some key phrases and subject areas that the people you are targeting to know about.
Once you begin writing posts for your blog, it's possible to draw inspiration from this collection and then turn it into 10x content.
Include 10x Content
- Aids in solving a problem or answers questions, by providing comprehensive, accurate, exceptional details or references.
- High-end, trusted, useful, interesting as well as remarkable.
- Provides users with a comfortable experience through a simple interface, layout, fonts, and images.
If your content meets these standards Then your audience, plus the journalists whom you approach will surely want to spread your message.
Remember that all of this will take amount of time. This is a long time! Writing down the tasks you are working on and coordinating your time is essential to getting your work done quickly. Recently, I shared some suggestions on how to organize your time when you write, or performing PR outreach. I also found some fantastic valuable advice from fellow bloggers, too.
10x Content is more attractive to natural backlinks, and is ranked more highly on Google
If Google becomes aware of the high quality of your website's content, it'll boost the position of your site on the search results page. Because it's a top-quality article, other people who are in your area are likely to want to share the site.
Additionally, Google likes natural backlinks.
When you are done with your work producing the material, make sure you complete the steps below.
1. Check to see if your website is prepared to handle the rush of visitors
- Go to GTmetrix for your website's URL. Test your home page URL, as well as the top ranking or most viewed blog's URL. Review the scores you receive and the issues it finds. The grade you should get is either B or A.
- Utilize dedicated web hosting. Do not use HostGator or an alternative like GoDaddy that uses an array of shared servers. These do not have the capacity for hosting and serving up WordPress or blog-related material specifically. Look at services such as Flywheel or WPEngine specially designed to host and deliver WordPress blog-related content. It improves the speed at which your site loads, and also makes loading speed faster and also helps to improve your site's ranking on Google.
- Consider making use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) CDN is a server that offers other options for customers to download and install their resources (usually static content such as images or JavaScript). This means that your site will run faster substantially, as most big sites utilize this. Learn more about HTML0 here.
- Consider using a caching plugin If you've ever clicked a back button on your website because it took more then 5 minutes for it to load, then you've visited a page that has no caching. This lengthy loading time may slow down your site's traffic, reduce the Google ranking and reduce the potential of your site's. The installation of a caching plugin can assist in making your load times faster by a large quantity. It is possible to learn more about it here.
- Optimize your entire image for quicker loading. This is a elementary concept which can get a bit complex since you may need to make use of CSS Sprites to enhance your images. In this article, we will show how to do this and the reasons. Once you're done with the day, you should have a score of B or A for GTmetrix for your homepage of your blog and for any other major posts you'd like to rank at very least. I always make sure that every piece I publish on my blog gets this score.
2. Check to see if you've got the right CTAs (calls to action) strategically positioned on your site:
- To buy your online course
If you've never launched your blog yet then you must ensure that your blog is running. Begin to think about what 10x content you'll have the ability to develop so that people will desire to share the story.
Include SEO and PR into the strategy of marketing to promote your course
Are you prepared to begin marketing your online course by employing the most efficient strategies for SEO and PR?
SEO and PR do not have cost a great deal in money. If you put your mind to it, you'll make use of all the tools at your disposal. Develop meaningful connections with influential people and produce valuable content to improve the number of sales you can make from your online course.
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Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io which assists start-ups and entrepreneurs reach out to influential journalists and media without the help of PR firms. He has utilized PR outreach to have an enterprise acquired by Google. He blogs about techniques for public relations and SEO in his blog CriminallyProlific.
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