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Why would anyone want to create an online course and most importantly, why should you?

Well, the majority of entrepreneurs embrace selling online courses as an additional revenue source. Online courses cost less to create, take less time, and there are no shipping costs involved, while you have a product that can be sold unlimited times.

The growing knowledge economy, where information is power, has also increased demand for online courses! It is without a doubt a booming market worldwide and research statistics prove it. As recent data finds, the global e-learning market is going to reach $325 billion by 2025, and this is evident through the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.5% that shows an increasing demand and interest in online content and digitalization.

Not only that, but businesses from varying industries have started adopting various training solutions that promote the e-learning market further. While the ability to invest in education and lifelong learning is an emerging trend amongst both old and young demographics.

These trends, along with the tendency of people to prefer the comfort and flexibility of their homes, avoiding the complexities of commuting to physical classes has led their undying thirst in personal development to explore new ways of developing their skills online.

And, why not, right?

Free ebook The Ultimate Guide To Selling Online Courses (vol 1) Discover how to make your online courses ready for sales and, most importantly, profitable.

While setting up an additional revenue stream of passive income is the prevailing reason why would an entrepreneur – or anyone for that matter, want to create an online course, that is not the only advantage attached to it.

In fact, an online course can help:

– Enhance your online brand/presence: educating your audience can establish you as a thought leader and a source for new knowledge. This is possible through many ways e.g. perhaps you already have a YouTube channel, a blog, an author site, you are a keynote speaker, you are making podcasts, or you are offering coaching/consultancy services. This is usually a good starting point for industry experts who want to share their knowledge with the public and supplement other services.

– Create a loyal following of your current clients: through marketing/advertising efforts and the promotion of your online course, you can build brand awareness and get more customers potentially interested in what you offer.

– Train your customers into using your products: helping your customers/audience achieve what they want and keep them happy. An online course can be an evergreen onboarding system to your other services. Then you impose higher lifetime values and expectations, you get lower churn rates and can potentially have more referrals coming your way.

Whether you are part of a business or an individual who’s interested in creating online courses, you should know this:

If you have an idea, a skill, a passion, an audience or some content you want other people to see, then create an online course and generate revenue out of doing what you love. All you need to do is offer an answer or a solution that serves a specific purpose to your students.

People will only come to you if they find what you are offering is valuable and life-changing for their own personal or more often, professional needs. So then, your goal would be to encourage them to see your course as an opportunity for development, a journey of transformation upon which you are calling them to join.

The journey of transformation is all about setting SMART goals for the future (Image Source: JPOSC

This is perhaps the most important step into creating online courses, and to get it right you need to plan your course ahead, as well as choose the topic of the course and its content carefully.

Get your fully social, engaging and interactive online school. Launch your school!

CHAPTER 1

WHY IS HAVING A COURSE PROFITABLE

Creating and selling online courses is a booming market internationally. The elearning market is expected to exceed $325Billion by 2025 (see above), with a yearly growth of 5% (Global Market Insights)! Becoming an online instructor means you could be earning from a few hundred dollars per year to a six-figure income.

To make a profitable online course, 90% of your work needs to be on marketing and selling it. This is the reason we are writing this long guide on how to sell an online course, where we present all the know-how on making a profit out of selling online courses.

Having a profitable course involves several factors, from your subject to your audience’s size. Some of the factors that come into play when calculating profitability are:

Personal Brand Recognition

Level of Expertise

Training Content at hand (blog posts, books, videos/vlogs, audio/podcasts)

Size of your Audience / Email List

Audience’s Income

Market Size & Competition

Your Marketing & Sales Skills

Having a strong presence online, an engaged social network or email list are big advantages. They can help you have a great course launch. But, just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, it takes time to attain a loyal audience, and when you do, you will need to invest more in your brand’s recognition.

The more people are aware of your brand’s name and the product you offer, the bigger the profit you will get out of the sales. Gradually, when you start building your own online tutoring empire, you will get a better hold of this.

Investing in education and lifelong learning is an emerging trend among both old and young, and online courses come to fill the gaps of knowledge. People tend to prefer the comfort and flexibility of their own homes, avoiding the complexities of commuting to physical classes.

If you are not already offering your own online course, you are missing out on a big opportunity. Be among the first to get into the online courses in your niche and you won’t regret it.

Course Earnings Calculator How much money can you make with online courses? Take the Quiz

CHAPTER 2

MAKING AN ONLINE COURSE

Whether you are creating an online course to teach a language, coach people or professional certified training, there are some steps you can follow to make it easier.

We are covering step-by-step on how to create an online course to another blog post. Here is a quick overview of what you will need:

1 Decide on a Course Topic

Finding the topic for your course shouldn’t be a struggle at all. If you don’t already know what to teach, then take a look from your everyday reality and ask yourself the following questions:

Do your friends, customers, and colleagues ask for your help in a specific thing that you are considered an expert?

Have you solved a problem that you think others are struggling for?

Are you an expert on a software or a method that others want to use?

You can also:

Get your audience’s opinion through email: if you have an email list, come up with an email advertising your course. Alternatively, send your list of ideas for online courses to your audience and encourage them to pick on a course subject through a survey. This should help you decide which is most on-demand amongst your network.

Ask your followers on social media: another effective way to draw people in and gather feedback is creating a group or a poll on either Facebook and Instagram (or both channels) and ask them directly. You can also create a group with people from your network, asking for their responses and finding out which is the most popular.

Invest in your expertise: if there is a subject that you think you ‘own’ and have expert knowledge on, that could be an excellent place to start. Sharing your expertise, especially if it is for a highly valued niche subject, is the best way to start with online courses.

Think of a subject people ask you for help: have you ever had people coming to you to ask you to help them with something? If yes, there must be a reason why they keep coming to you, but if you admit that you are clueless about it, conduct initial research to see if you develop an interest it in.

2 Research Your Course Subject

Once you choose your subject, you are ready to do your research. Researching your topic can be both online and offline. You can start with your own material, academic and professional books on the subject, looking into your competition or other free and paid material online.

Brainstorming all possible categories and sub-topics that you want your course to include is essential. Then, you should be doing thorough research on each sub-topic.

3 Outline Your Online Course

The categories or sub-themes will need to be divided into themes (or sections). You will need to choose a logical order that makes sense in your course. That can be a chronological, difficulty or logical order, that takes the student from one point of knowledge to the next. For unstructured and self-directed learning topics, the order might be irrelevant, and you only need an introduction and different theme/categories to help them navigate the topics.

2 Setting Your Goals/Objectives

At this point, you will need to write down your learning goals and objectives. Learning goals are the general statements that you create and define what your course is all about and what it can do for your students. Whereas, ‘learning objectives’ or ‘learning outcomes’ tend to be more specific and more measurable in terms of what you expect your students to learn and be able to do once they complete the course.

Apart from helping you to concentrate your efforts, setting learning outcomes can help you come up with great sales pitches for your course, since it gives people the course outline and helps them decide whether to invest in it or not.

Added to that, learning outcomes can also:

Help to organize the course material and establish a purpose on it.

Help to align objectives with evaluation methods.

Set up communicate expectations to your learners, so that you help them evaluate themselves.

5 Creating the Content

The next step is to create the actual content. Based on the course plan and the activities you have planned, you will need a variety of media productions for your course. Experienced trainers and educators can easily create a course from scratch. But, the best approach to launching your online academy is by repurposing your old content.

If you have been creating content, you can look up for some digital material, from informative leaflets to Word documents with valuable information that you can use. For example, do you write a blog? Have you recorded your last workshop, training or webinar? Reusing old content is a good starting idea, especially if this content hasn’t been yet seen by many eyes.

Of course, you can always create new content. Creating educational videos can take a while, but it is the most common and sought out the type of learning online right now.

CHAPTER 3

HOW TO PRICE A COURSE

How much should I price my online course?

This is one of the most common questions every course creator asks herself. Finding that sweet spot where your course price can maximize your profits seems like an elusive quest!

To do this, however, you will need to balance the value of your course based on quality, expectations, competition and your revenue goals.

Pricing an online course is incredibly important and for a good reason. It communicates your value, it affects the profitability of your course, your customers and the quality of your work. Pricing it too high may result in people not buying from you. Pricing it too low and you won’t be making a profit.

This though varies depending on the industry, market sales, and the amount of your own expenses – both timely and financial. Whatever the case, you should know this:

‘Your course is worth much more than you give it credit for. An online training course is the amalgam of your work and life experiences, years of learning and education.’

Despite the fact, that you are not giving out any physical product, you are providing a service for someone and you share your knowledge, which is a highly valued commodity.

To get this right, there are a few factors you need to consider:

a) Course Length: think about how long is your course and how much time and effort you put into it to create it.

b) Competition: if there are other courses offering the same classes as you, are your customers comparing you with them? Should you price low to get more people, or price high and offer more value?

c) Value of the Outcome: what is the purpose of the course and how will you educate your students? Think of the transformation element. How much are you changing the life of someone attending your course? Is it a small or large improvement?

d) Brand, Credibility, and Authority: how powerful is your brand and how credible it is to your audience. Think about how others view your company, how much they trust and respect your authority on the subject.

e) Creating income goals: having an income goal in place helps to calculate total earnings. How much are you looking into getting out of this? Be realistic with your expectations, but don’t undervalue yourself.

f) Setting up a pricing strategy: having a financial plan in place helps to set up goals and expectations.

Generally, there are two pricing models you can use – one time or recurring. The first allows students to pay upfront payment or in installments in order to access your course. The second is the most profitable for online instructors and students pay for it on a regular basis e.g. weekly or monthly.

Perhaps the most important part of pricing your courses though, is deciding upon a pricing strategy. Introducing pricing tiers can help accommodate the varying needs of your customers.

Pricing Tiers for Courses 1 Free

Offering a free course can work for your benefit as it can generate leads for expensive courses or a way to showcase your expertise. Don’t forget, it is the first point of contact to create rapport. We all love good communication, creating relationships and this sense of familiarity is what will help you sell more courses.

Free courses can also get you fresh warm leads you can upsell too. On top of that, offering a free mini-course before your official course launch, for example, can work during a pre-launch, giving out a free course can give the chance to potential customers to review the course and decide whether they want to go full access and pay for more.

Other cases when you should give out a course for free:

When your goal is generating leads.

When you want to attract new customers.

When you want to give out a bonus as part of another purchase.

When you have a testing period.

2 Basic One-Off Payments

Having a set pricing strategy with full access to the course upon payment, is the simplest and straightforward way to offer an online course.

Students then know what to expect and it is simple for instructors to communicate the value and offer discounts at a later stage.

3 Subscriptions

With subscriptions, you offer your students more payment options and you ensure that you get a monthly/weekly recurring income that you can rely on.

Subscriptions also include membership site models, providing gated content that gives access only to subscribers. Instead of selling one-off online courses for example, you allow your students, clients or fans to keep an active (paid) subscription in exchange for accessing offers, deals and a community they can network.

Membership sites work well with subscriptions and they have different levels of access to suit different preferences.

4 Premium

For the premium course. you can charge your customers more and consider using payment plans (installments) where you can either pay once or pay for up to six months or yearly. You can go premium when you offer exclusive content or more extended course offering more features or an advantaged course e.g. towards winning a certification in the medical field, etc.

You can get more information on pricing in how to price online courses article which goes much deeper into the subject.

CHAPTER 4

THE STRUCTURE OF A SUCCESSFUL TITLE

A great course always starts with an awesome title. If this is not written anywhere else, then we should write it down as a no.1 rule. The title is the headline of the course, and it’s probably the most important element it contains.

Why?

Well, a good title can make all the difference when selling a course, but an awesome one will carry you much further. Ultimately, the title of your course reflects the name of your brand, your work or training, and can potentially describe you as the best-selling trainer in your field.

Also, every title determines whether a potential learner will click on the course or not. A winning course title has to be able to catch someone’s attention, encourage someone to click and work well for SEO purposes so that it shows up on Google Results.

Other than that, these are some great advantages that a popular course or training title offers:

Brand Recognition

Differentiation

Learning Objectives & Expectations

Coming up with an effective title is pretty easy as you can start working on it within minutes. However, if you need help, the following formula can help you create yours:

Use popular search queries: conduct your search on Google and see what comes up in terms of keywords, phrases (shown at the bottom of the Google page and the number of times they appear in results).

Specify your audience: make sure you know who you are addressing here. Obviously, your whole course is dedicated to a specific group of people. Think about what are their characteristics and what do they expect to see in your course.

Keep it short and simple: a title doesn’t have to be too long to make a point. On the contrary, short and straight-forward ones that can explain what the course is all about can do the trick better.

You can find the most successful formulas on writing a course title in our relevant blog-post, but, here are some examples to help you get started:

How To [____] in

How To Rock [____]

How To Make A Strong [____]

How To Create [____] That Gets [____]

How [____] Boost Your [____]

The Dummies Guide to [_____]

The Expert’s Guide to [_____]

A Complete Guide To ]____]

Ultimate Guide: [____]

The Secrets of [Your Topic]

[Your Topic] Revealed

[Your Topic] 101

[Result/Goal] in [Amount of Steps]

Find more course title examples here.

All of these course title examples have something different to say and their ‘message’ can get across your audience through a unique way. Whether students will become interested in it or not, depends on their individual needs first and firstmost. However, it also comes down to how you will structure it, and how you will position it in the right context so that it works well with your online school and what you need your brand to project.

CHAPTER 5

A SUCCESSFUL COURSE SALES PAGE

This is the page that will sell your course, by persuading the visitors of its value. It has to describe your course, show its value and pushes them into taking action.

The sales page also includes a series of call-to-action points that are placed through the page and encourage site visitors to complete specific steps that guide them towards action. These CTAs help to drive more people through the sales funnel, bringing them closer to buying your courses, which is also the main purpose of the landing page.

Most straightforward sales pages will push towards buying, other sales funnel might include lead captures, watching a video first or pre-registering to a course.

Depending on what you are after, you can choose what sales page you want to use. There are a few types of sales pages that have basic differences:

Lead generation pages: most common type used for B2B marketing, known as ‘lead gen’ or ‘lead capture pages’ that uses CTAs to collect lead data such as names, phone numbers and email addresses. Click-through sales page: sales page that has a simple button as the call-to-action point.



Image Source: (Left: Lead Generation Page, Right: Click-through Landing Page)Image Source: Unbounce

A How to Create a Sales Page

A sales page requires two things, the copy and the design. To write the perfect copy, you will need to understand your audience, what they are looking for and how to convince them. We will be going through that below.

For the design, LearnWorlds’ pages builder provides ready-made, beautiful landing-page templates that are easily customizable. No need for technical headaches or looking for a web designer to make your landing page.

Before you can go out and write your copy, you will need to answer the following three but basic questions about your course:

Who is this course for?

Identifying your audience is key to writing an effective copy and targeting the right people who are potentially interested in your course.

Answering to this question will force you to think of your ‘Customer Persona’ which can be a powerful instrument in your marketing efforts. A customer profile includes a collection of characteristics, demographics, attitudes and behaviors that create a fictional “average” character for a group of your audience.

Using your customer persona effectively requires that you ask yourself the following:

How to find/approach my audience?

What should I write?

Would this page make sense for my audience?

Would someone buy my course?

If yes, how much are they willing/able to pay?

Once you answer these questions, go back to the customer persona you created and see it as a real person (naming your persona can help). So for example, would ‘Mike’ or ‘Sarah’ buy my course or understand this page? If the answer is yes, then you are going the right way, if it is a no, then you will have to rethink on how to talk to them.

What does it help them do?

Next, think about what kind of solution you are aiming to provide to your customers. The more details you give out on it, the better it is for them to understand what kind of services you are offering.

At this point, it is important to articulate clearly what results your course can help your audience achieve. For example, by taking this course, you will learn how to manage your time better and become more productive in your work and life achieving greater balance’.

Why is this course beneficial for them?

Your marketing message should make sense to your site visitors and need to answer why should it matter to take on the specific course. What you include in your sales page needs to be made appropriate to them, including subjects of interest for your potential customers (such as emails, blog posts, online courses and more). This should help you list all the benefits students can get out from it and place these as part of your content strategy plan.

A very good example of a home page created with LearnWorlds by Raincatcher’s Sell By Owner, coming up with a catchy headline, introducing the whole concept with a short video and customer testimonials to reinforce their image.

Visit Sell by Owner to view the full landing page.

Marla DiCarlo – CEO of Raincatcher says: “The copy [of the landing page] should be short but to the point, directing them to other pages to help them understand what we are selling and whether our product is a good solution for their needs. The messaging and formatting should be consistent throughout all pages to showcase professionalism.”

B The Ingredients of a Successful Sales Page

When working on your sales page you need to take certain factors into consideration so as to make sure that no visitor will turn their back on your services, but they would rather stick to it and find out more about what your school has to offer. What you are after is getting their attention through the use of context that has a certain clarity and balance.

Along those lines, it should inspire credibility, and a sense of continuance encouraging people to keep coming back.

For a better result, consider using the following page ingredients:

Brief value-focused headlines:

A good sales page should have a heading at the beginning of it with large and bold text that gives visitors an idea of what they will find on your page. For a course sales page, using just the title of the course won’t suffice. A better approach would be to briefly state significant benefits that the potential learner can receive when joining the course.

A catchy title on your sales page is most likely to stimulate the customers’ interest in wanting to find out more about your services. Your headline must predispose the reader positively based on their needs and wants, as well as promise them an intriguing result if they stick around and read what comes next.

They have to immediately know where they are and what they are getting in return. For example:

“Learn to draw in 3 weeks”

“Get certified as a professional nanny”

“Improve your health with a better diet”

Action words and phrases:

When visitors enter your sales page, they need to be engaged, excited and drawn into your courses. Your best friends in such occasion are action words and phrases that can build their motivation to learn.

Verbs and words that predispose action are working best. Words like “discover”, “emerge” and “explore” are bound to make them feel like they are part of the e-learning experience you are offering, while words like “learn”, “do”, “improve” and “start” can prompt into action.

Social Proof with Testimonials:

Since what you are selling is in digital form (and not a physical object), you need to provide social proof that you are a trustworthy authority on your topic. Your testimonials can really come from anywhere — emails, tweets, Instagram posts or comments, blog posts, etc.

Whenever a customer talks positively about your courses you definitely want to add that commentary on your landing page. Using logos of reputable publications where your school and courses have been featured can be a huge plus.

Landing page testimonials from Sell By Owner

Engaging media:

Any visual cues that direct site visitors to the CTA buttons and images you use on your sales page can get them right into your sales funnel. Visually beautiful graphics, infographics, or any other kind of persuasive media that show insights into the results that your online courses have achieved can offer immense power to your sales page.

Also, the addition of customer badges, color-contrasting CTA buttons, and a 100% money-back guarantee can do wonders.

Images are processed in our minds faster than text, supplementing your course’s sales page with media can enhance your message. Visual representations of the course’s value are very strong!

I Draw Fashion courses promote the learning outcomes in an exciting visual way.

Video:

A short (1 to 2-minute) video that explains who you are and what you do can work along perfectly in your sales page, as this can offer a greater impact. Any type of video ranging from emotional-appeal, news/commentary, testimonial or ‘behind the scenes’ helps to offer a nice preview into your course and explain to people what your school/course is all about.

Different types of videos you can use to welcome students and sell the course:

Emotional Appeal Sales Video: helps potential students ‘hear’ you or ‘see’ you and experience a deeper connection through the message on the video. In this video, you can speak about yourself, your story, your background and expertise.

News, Reviews, Commentary: share up-to-date information, voicing your opinion on industry news. Don’t be afraid to comment, explain or review news to increase the chances of being on top of searches for current events.

Testimonial Video: have some students doing a testimonial video for you explaining how they benefited from your course. In contrast to written testimonials, video can give the ‘real feel’ to it, without the doubt of ‘faking’ recommendations.

Behind-the-Scenes Video: a video that can include cut scenes of possible mistakes in the editing process can give a lighter mood and a more personal feel to your sales page, thus making it friendlier to the page visitors.

Testimonials:

Students testimonials and quotes are a powerful marketing tool and have a proven record of success in the market. These can help you enforce your personal brand and build your credibility in the online world. That’s because students are more likely to trust other students since their opinion is more valuable than yours.

Any testimonial or feedback review can help to position yourself as a true entrepreneur, which is your ultimate goal, proving that you have something unique to offer to the public in contrast to others.

These ingredients along with a simple and elegant design that includes both easy-to-use drop-down menus, and lead capture forms that work and allow site visitors to leave their name and email addresses can strike the right balance on the content and design you need for a successful sales page.

TIPS:

Put the important stuff first

Internet users have the tendency to focus on what they see first on a page and skim the rest of any page’s content. In that sense, your best shot is to put every important aspect of your course and services on the top of your landing page for everyone to see it right upon loading.

Use an About Us page

As part of your sales page, you also need to consider creating an ‘About Us’ page. Ideally, this is another type of landing page that helps site visitors better understand who you are and what you have got to offer to the wider public.

C Examples of Course Landing Pages Built with LearnWorlds

Well Learning Library by Chromatic Content

Providing online courses on health and wellness education for occupants within a building space. Their landing page includes a mixture of benefits, reasons to subscribe and different call to actions.

See the full landing page at the Well Learning Library’s Feature Page

ADK Program

Marcela’s ADK Program is directed to marketing professionals in Mexico and is a perfect example of a multiple-cta landing page. Breaking a page into different sections and starting with a video soon after her title. She includes a call-to-action after each different action – free course, different levels of paying programs, and subscriptions.

Visit the ADK Program for the full landing page.

European Tourism Careers

A collaboration of european universities and local authorities to provide online courses for tourism SMEs. This landing page is an example of a corporate page with high authority partners at the bottom to instill trust.

You can see the full site of European Tourism Careers here.

Start Social

Start Social teaches businesses how to use Social Media, and they know how to create a great landing page for their courses. Starting strong with a video introduction and going forward with the reasons why you need to learn social media to grow your business.

Visit Start Social to see the full landing page.

CHAPTER 6

HOW TO MARKET & SELL ONLINE COURSES STEP-BY-STEP

As soon as you have your course’s sales page ready, you can launch your online academy and start selling!

Marketing is essential for any business as it helps to attract potential customers. This couldn’t be any different for your online school since marketing can increase your academy’s visibility gaining more visitors and potential clients.

The profitability of your course rests upon your marketing & sales efforts. You will need to use all the resources available so that you can promote your course as much as possible.

That is, if you want sales coming your way, you need to go the extra mile and start promoting your course. Doing so is necessary, but you need to learn how to do it methodically. This is where the sales funnel comes in and helps to understand the process of attracting customers and bringing them closer to you.

A sales funnel is a multi-step process that turns visitors of your site, to buyers. The graph below shows how the sales funnel guides your potential buyers-students through a specific path that ends with them making the decision to enroll (or not enroll) in your course.

The Sales Funnel Process (Image Source: Entrepreneur /Shutterstock)

The sales funnel takes prospective customers through the following steps:

Step 1 – Awareness: when potential students first become aware of the existence of your course, that offers a solution to their problem. If you are new in the market, this is where you will need to focus, getting your course the attention it deserves!

Step 2 – Interest: when you attract the interest of the potential customer. They get to know you, your products and looking more into the offering.

Step 3 – Decision: this is where potential buyers are trying to decide whether to buy or not from you. A sales page is essential to all the previous steps, but most importantly the decision phase, where it helps the visitors to make a decision.

Step 4 – Action/Purchase: this is how smooth your sales funnel becomes after they click on the “buy” button. How compelling your checkout process and page is, as well as how trustworthy your site looks will help them complete the purchase.

Understanding the structure of the sales funnel is essential, because you will have to create yours, introducing marketing tactics that work for your business. A sales funnel in a way describes the whole process from awareness to purchase.

Generally, there are five ways in which you can bring traffic to your sales funnel:

organic traffic from search engines, paid traffic from ads, social media traffic, email marketing and referral traffic coming from various websites mentioning you, affiliates, students and business partners.

Leverage your network

A powerful way to gather traffic is to call upon your contacts and build your network starting from the people who are closer to you e.g. family, friends, co-workers, business contacts/partners, affiliates or students, who can talk about you to others offering you referrals, product reviews or conducting podcast interviews discussing what you do.

Organic traffic

In order to attract more people into your sales funnel, you first need to create content that your audience will find valuable and useful. This could be done through organic traffic – either through a blog, a YouTube channel or creating Podcasts.

If you have a budget you can work with, you can invest in paid traffic. These include Google Ads, YouTube Ads, Facebook Ads, Banner Ads.

Organic traffic and SEO is a long term strategy, while you can invest early on it, you will need months to start reaping its benefits. Creating great content should be your first concern, use the content in your funnel and make it SEO-friendly from the get-go.

Manage your own media for traffic

Alternatively, you can gradually start building your following on social media – Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, other groups or forums or a place where you can easily communicate with them. This is social media traffic.

Also, you can offer them an incentive to sign up on your email list. Your goal is to build trust between you and customers and create an email sequence that leads them to the purchase your course. In your email sequence, you can start by talking about the problem you are solving and then slowly introducing your course.

Alternatively, you can create a webinar and follow a similar format where you start by giving out value before you talk about your online course.

Prepare your offers

There are some marketing tactics that can help you bring potential students closer to making the purchase decision. Psychological tricks like scarcity, FOMO, countdowns/pre-launches, loss aversion amongst others can do the trick when these are used alongside an effective sales strategy.

You can implement these techniques in your sales through a) coupons, b) discounts and c) course bundles or by editing your sales page to work with seasonal offers or discounts you may have.

With coupons you can share a range of discounts and special offers at different percentages and prices. These you can send to your email lists, submit them at different websites for offers/discounts, or share them on your social media pages/profiles or groups.

Also, you have the option to time-limit your coupons and create multiple with the same offer and a different name or occasion e.g. 10% discount for current students and 10% discount for the audience of a blogger/influencer. You can even create super discounts e.g. 90% for the next 24 hours or free courses (100% discount) to collect new leads that will pay for their next course!

With discounts, you can lower the price of your courses. Doing so can help you do the following:

Increase your short term sales

Reward/upsell to loyal customers

Promote new courses or get new students (customers)

While it’s not wise to keep discounted courses all year long, with LearnWorlds you have the option to do what you prefer and control your prices and discounts, but our experience shows that premium pricing is the best option, with discounts being only a marketing/sales tool.

Lastly, course bundles allow you to upsell your courses. Upselling means that you can convince people to buy more than they intend to do so. So, let’s say you want to buy a t-shirt for $20, but the store employee tells you that you can have two t-shirts for the price of $30 instead of $40. If those t-shirts cost the store $5 each, they have just earned an extra $5 because they convinced you to buy both of them!

This is what course bundles are for. If you want to give it a go with bundles, get a few together in a category such as “Life Skills Bundle” at a total discounted price. If you bundle together 5 courses X 50$ each, you can offer them for a discounted price of 200$, and there you have it – you have just sold five courses in the price of four instead of one. If you want to learn how to do this yourself, read our very own guide on How to Create a Course Bundle.

Create effective Call-to-Action:

Call-to-action points are worth all the money because from there, the sales funnel starts the real work. Thus, they deserve some more attention. In order to get call-to-action points right, you need to remember the following:

Identify your target customers

Talk to them in their language

Target their needs and wants (even when they don’t even know they exist)

CTAs are all about conveying your message in a way that encourages an action e.g. clicking on the “buy button” is called Call to Action (CTA). In theory this sounds much easier than putting it in practice, but we have prepared some examples and templates for Call to Actions that are ready to be used in your online school.

Another call-to-action format that can prompt someone to take action could be a short message, a few words or a phrase that encourages site visitors to click on it.

Powerful words you can use include:

Join

Get

Buy

Now

Try

When these words are used followed by your course title and the desired result (what students can potentially get out from it) can work as effective lead captures. For example, you can come up with something like this:

“Get the only course that will teach you how to be rich”

or

“Join the training programme and be fit in 6 weeks”

The desired result is the ideal solution that tells students how they will do something in a given time or deadline and can attract the right amount of attention and action.

Your CTA should be the catalyst from a good sales page. However, sometimes a simple landing page with just the CTA can also work out pretty well. The best way to do is to test what works for your audience. After testing, don’t be afraid to change your text. This along with writing a marketing copy for your course could take a while. Your call-to-action can always be improved and provide better conversions at a later time.

Lead Magnets

Not all customers are ready to buy immediately upon visiting your pages. This is the reason you will need a sales funnel which will push them to go step by step towards the process.

Lead magnets are on the top of this funnel. They are the little “free gifts” you will be giving your visitors in exchange for a lead’s email address. There are a lot of different lead magnets you can use:

Free courses

Ebooks

PDF downloads

Checklists (toolkits, resources, steps into a process)

White-papers

Optinmonster has an exhaustive list of lead magnets you can use. Choose one that makes sense for your audience, and remember that a lead magnet is not only about getting an email address.

It has to solve a problem, be valuable information and demonstrate your expertise at the same time. A lead magnet is a quickly digestible piece of useful information and the first step towards your sales funnel, as it will help you build an email list (see next chapter).

For example, if you are selling a course on a Cooking Masterclass, you might want to create a free course on “How to make chocolate chip cookies”.

LearnWorlds’ Academy is a perfect example of this, why don’t you take a visit to one of our many free courses?

Email Marketing:

According to a 2016 eMarketer report, email marketing has four times return of investment (ROI) compared to any other marketing channel. 2.6 billion people worldwide are still using emails and the reason of this choice is because they are still more direct, personalised, cost-effective and transactional than any other type of communication.

Email use especially in online business can help to generate amazing results. And, to start using email marketing, the first thing you will need is an email list. Building an email list to sell online courses is easy. You can use all the tactics we have already mentioned, and especially lead magnets to build an emailing list and nurture those leads into happy customers!

One thing you should know about email marketing is success depends on the quality of the messages you send rather than the quantity. Your marketing tactics need to be carefully chosen and developed.

One the most effective email marketing strategies is sending out newsletters. When it comes to newsletters, two things are certain: it is the most common and easy type of email marketing to compose, but it’s also the most difficult to get right.

Creating Your First Newsletter

A newsletter is an email containing informative material to your email list. It can range from a new article on your blog, interesting information about your company or information from other sites that interest your audience.

Question Yourself:

Would an email newsletter work for you?

You will need to have something new every week or month and create content quite often. Newsletters require good writers, who like to write, and audience who likes to read. Think about your strengths and your audience’s wants and needs.

Choose the Type of Newsletter:

Would you share your own content (blog posts, thoughts, course updates etc.) or a collection of others’ content?

Will it invite your readers to events or webinars?

Is it more educational or informational?

Offer Value Before the Promotion:

Follow the 9:1 rule. Give your readers 9 times more education and informative content than promotional. Give value first, before asking something from them! However, avoid spamming them with too much information. Don’t forget that unsubscribing is just a click away!

Inform Your Audience:

So you have managed to set up a focus point in your newsletter and keep its content balanced. The next step is to properly inform your target audience about your content or the promotion you want to. An excellent way to do so is to have a subscription section in your landing page(s) or a dedicated landing page for it. Your ‘call to action’ needs to set expectations and let potential subscribers know exactly what your newsletter contains.

Come up With Creative Subject Lines:

Let’s be honest, everyone is sick and tired of generic email subjects “Company Newsletter: blah, blah, blah”.

A much better approach is to create a separate, creative and engaging subject line for each newsletter you send. Questions and personalized subject lines for example, can work well, and most email clients will allow you to add the name or company of the recipient in the subject so that it is addressed directly to each one. Controversial, one-sided, or subject lines that take you directly down to the “pain point” of the reader such as “10 Ways to Make Your Cat Obedient” are the best. Now, wouldn’t you open that?

Use a CTA to Rule Them All:

It makes sense that your newsletter will include multiple ‘Call to Action’ (CTAs) points for the various pieces of content you wish to promote. But, in this case, you will need to have one primary CTA that focuses on an action you would like your subscribers to carry out. Your primary CTA will be in a more prominent position e.g. a button “Join our latest course” centered in the end. And, remember, don’t overdo it with the secondary call to actions, you don’t want to confuse your readers!

Create a Copy that is Concise:

The way you choose to write your email has an important significance. Write simple and concise copy. The same applies to the design, which also needs to be minimal and to the point.

Your sales emails might need a better design if they have a minimal copy, but for your newsletter, your best shot is to allow plenty of white space. A readable newsletter is better for all devices and meets the different needs and tastes of people.

Include ALT text into the Images:

Visual content is very important for any marketing effort. But, when it comes to emails, some email clients block images automatically, and visually impaired people might also block all images.

Make sure your images contain alt text. Alt text is the text that appears when images aren’t loaded in an email.

Every business has its own work pace, flexibility, goals, and resources, so you will need to put your newsletter to the test in order to optimize it to the fullest, test after test!

For the best email marketing, we suggest the top 4 email marketing tools in the market – and LearnWorlds integrates with all of them.

Active Campaign

AWeber

ConvertKit

MailChimp

If you don’t see your favorite email service provider in the list, then you can use Zapier to connect and send your capture leads directly to it, automating your email marketing efforts.

Social Media Marketing:

The number of people using the internet and more specifically social media is increasing year by year. As statistics show, in 2016, up to 3,5 billion people were estimated to use the internet worldwide and social media seems to have a huge role to play on the amount of time spent online.

Social media marketing is a big part of digital marketing and cannot go unnoticed as a marketing channel you should consider using. However, there are many social media networks out there, and you should be thinking about where your audience might be and where you can reach them.

Facebook:

In 2018, Facebook, the biggest and most popular social media network reached up to 2,32 billion users. It is probably the largest social network and offers an online environment that can help you connect with your audience in unique ways.

Using your personal account to reach to your network, managing your own page or group can all be great ways to start attracting traffic to your course.

Twitter:

Twitter is smaller than Facebook but with a very passionate audience of over 66 million active users,

Through Twitter, you can reach out to people, post public updates join into conversations with more ease than other closed networks, making it suitable to reach out to new, engaged audiences.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is perfect for B2B courses. It is the top professional network, LinkedIn is perfect for reaching out to the corporate world, promote a course towards professionals and job-related skills.

With LinkedIn, you can optimize your presence in search engines, gain exposure for your brand and establish yourself as a leader in your niche.

Instagram:

Instagram is the new hip kid in the street. It works great for promoting your online school to a younger audience. It is a place of good visuals, video and most importantly, Instagram stories and IGTV (Instagram TV).

Visuals and hashtags dominate Instagram, and you need to be able to provide great content to attract attention … and followers!

Remember, you can only link in your profile description, so plan your call to actions accordingly!

P.S. Check out the article on how to grow your school with Instagram.

Pinterest:

Similarly to Instagram, Pinterest makes use of beautiful visuals and acts as the go-to engine that helps you find inspirational images and quotes. Set up your profile – either personal or business, add your bio, link to your other social media profiles and create albums to share with your audience.

What’s special about Pinterest is that it has high-quality images you can share including infographics.

YouTube:

YouTube has seen an incredible development since 2005 when the first video has been uploaded. Today it is an all-time favorite platform for 1,3 billion users, and this holds especially true amongst online instructors.

YouTube is becoming more popular in e-learning practices for the reason that it offers the best way of transmitting information for educational purposes. With YouTube, you can create a channel promoting your online school and online courses, or create a list of tutorials or instructional videos. Also, you can upload your own live training events – webinars, for your audience to watch and always keep them up to date with what you are doing.

YouTubers trying to monetize their YouTube channel also turn back to create online courses or other kinds of paid content. If you already have a YouTube channel, you can utilize it as a marketing channel, or work with creators to co-host an online course, or even become affiliates.

Apart from these social platforms, you can also use Quora, Reddit, and other online forums to raise awareness about your online school and courses. For example, you can post a question on Quora or answer a question and propose a solution to others. Alternatively, you can start a conversation with other people interested in products or services in your own niche.

Being social in an increasingly connected world is a very important skill, and one that will help you sell more courses.

Running a blog

Blogging matters. There is no secret that having a blog has many benefits. Apart from bringing traffic on your site, a blog can promote your online school and courses in a unique way than any other online tool can’t. A blog builds brand authority by positioning you as an industry leader, it prepares your audience for product launches, helps to support your social media strategy providing you with useful content and brings inbound links that strengthen your SEO efforts.

A blog also creates a loyal following of your current visitors and clients and helps you get more customers potentially interested in what you offer. You can always try a reliable brand tracking tool to better understand your efforts and what your core audience is looking for so you can better plan your approach.

According to a recent marketing report from Hubspot, 80 percent of businesses that use blogging as part of their marketing strategy, claim that they have acquired more customers through blogging.

From blogging to subscription (Image Source: HubSpot

This blogging-to-subscription process helps us to understand the importance of having a blog. The very definition of a blog makes this clear: A blog is a simple and easy-to-use platform that connects with and shares timely and relevant information with customers. Essentially, this explains how a blog can potentially become your direct communication channel with your audience through consistency and patience.

So, why create a blog?

It educates your audience on the subject you teach.

It shares news and updates from your industry.

It creates blog posts to provide content for email newsletters.

It helps to generate inbound links increasing the power of your SEO efforts.

It helps you rank higher in Google searches by providing searchable content.

It increases leads which may convert site visitors to buying customers/students.

It helps to facilitate constructive discussion on industry-related themes.

It creates opportunities to share links on your blog.

It increases online exposure expanding your audience

Blogging is a major part of your content marketing strategy. Content marketing as a relatively new type of marketing aims to stimulate the interest of the consumer in buying your products and services.

As the Content Marketing Institute puts it:

‘Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.’

Ultimately, this can easily be done by sharing blog posts. Combined with the help of email marketing, you can exploit your email list and reach out to a bigger audience!

Producing quality content is important for all types of marketing and especially SEO because it can help your online courses rank higher in google searches. SEO, as the process of making changes on your website to improve marketing efforts, is responsible for increasing your website’s traffic in terms of quantity and quality through free/organic search results on search engines.

Pre-Launch Your Course

By now, you should know your marketing channels and tactics you are going to use. It is time for the sales part. And, a great sales strategy begins before the initial launch.

You have prepared your audience from Social Media posing, blogging on your site, providing free resources and sending emails to warm up your prospects. But, how about selling your course before the initial launch?

This is called a pre-launch, and it is one thing most top course sellers agree on – and would probably advise you to do, is to promote individual courses or even your whole school before releasing them. This follows the idea that from the very first day you create your course, you need to share your ideas with the rest of the world.

So, here are some valuable tips to remember when pre-launching your business:

a. Don’t waste your time: The sooner you start promoting your courses, more and more people will hear about it and your target audience will anticipate eagerly for what you have to offer.

b. Get feedback: When promoting your courses before launching them, you give your audience the opportunity to decide which features look promising and which don’t.

c. Make it a deadline: For the most effective pre-launching, all you need to do is set a deadline upon which leads will anxiously wait for your brand’s new course release.

d. Improve the final result: When it comes to preselling (like pre-launching, but instead of gathering leads, you sell) you can use the money that you earn from pre-launching subscriptions on your online course, to improve the quality of your final material and content.

Discounts, Coupons & Bundles

Price is always a strong motivator. A high price can signal a premium product and a discount can push for a quick sale. Using discounts, coupons, and bundles you can drive more people towards your online academy.

Coupons & Discounts

Coupons are great tools to use when you put on your discount prices. With these, you can attract new clients or encourage old ones into buying new online courses through upselling.

They also work incredibly well with pre-launches. Why should someone buy a course before it is launched? To get a VIP seat, extra benefits … or get the advantage of preferential pricing, what we call an early bird discount!

Creating a coupon is an excellent way to offer special, limited deals to specific audiences, share with your affiliates and send to people who did not buy on your initial launch because they couldn’t afford the price.

Coupons can also:

Encourage learners to keep coming back for more (repeat purchases).

Gain a competitive advantage in the market.

Provide urgency, exclusivity, and timing.

Before you set up your coupons ‘up and running’, make sure you think about other practicalities that are equally important, such as coming up with a smart and catchy name, decide on a good percentage discount and calculate your numbers (profits/losses), and set up an expiration date and limited-time offers.

Once you are ready to distribute your coupons you can then share them on social media or websites that specifically promote coupons from CouponGreat, Groupon and PromotionCode amongst many others.

You can easily create a new coupon or set discounted prices on your LearnWorlds school:

Bundles

How many times have you seen a ‘Buy 3 – Pay for 2’ offer in a store? It seems like a timeless tactic and for a very good reason!

Let’s take the example of t-shirts. When you pay 15$ for a t-shirt, the actual cost to the story could be as low as $2, making you buy one more even for a reduced price gets the store a nice profit while selling you more products. This is called upselling.

It can also work together while paying for various different items that go together. Even McDonald’s uses the same tactic and they call it meals. Let’s say you buy a Big Mac for $4 and you want fries with it for $1.5, McDonald’s convinces you that paying $5.99 for a meal that also includes a soft drink, which will cost $1.5 makes you save some money. In reality, it has sold you one more item for 50c, which costs them a few cents.

So, what would happen in an online course?

You have a high initial cost to create a course, which includes your time, equipment, services you might pay, etc, but there is no more cost in creating more of them.

For example, you have 5 courses with a price of $100 each. But, you have decided to offer them in a bundled offer for buy 5 pay 3 ($300). Most of your customers will think about spending $500 in one go, but offering them at a discounted price will make them think of the $200 they are saving, and you are getting them to buy more courses where initially they were going to get only one.

With LearnWorlds, you can easily create a bundle of courses and start upselling!

Referral & Affiliates Traffic:

Referrals have always been a powerful tool in marketing because it usually comes from a person that values and highly trusts your brand. If the referral comes from someone with a large audience and has a big and positive influence on them, it gives you a huge boost in your sales.

Partnering with other businesses, companies and influences – big personalities in your industry, is a powerful way to market your product and bring more people under your wing. Getting affiliate partners is all about allowing other people to promote your course in exchange for a commission percentage of each sale or lead/click to your site.

This requires that you set up an affiliate program for your course. To do this, you simply reach out to people who are interested in your products – including your students, asking them if they want to become your affiliates.

Reviews & Testimonials:

Apart from asking your students for referrals, you can also request a review or a testimonial for your course. Other people such as writers and bloggers can help as well since they have a huge influence over the net, and finding some in your industry to review your course should be easy.

Getting a good review posted on a popular blog and then linking this to your site, can help you get more traffic, increase your sales and brand awareness.

Bloggers can become your affiliates to do this, or you can offer them other advantages like giving them free access to your course or other incentives to entice them in giving a review.

And, both testimonials from influencers or your own students can be showcased in your school’s sales page. Testimonials can influence the decision of a visitor to buy and have been shown to work pretty well.

Public Speaking:

Giving presentations is another effective way that helps to connect with and expand your audience with the prospect to get more course sales. Simply, come up with an interesting subject (preferably what you do and know best), and use your public speaking skills at local events – seminars, conferences or Meetup groups. But remember, you will need to come up with a speech that inspires and speaks well to your audience.

The focus of the presentation should be on the audience and the need you are trying to provide solutions for. Most events allow for some self-promotion in your presentation, but, even if they don’t people will look you up. All you need to have is a good looking website, LinkedIn profile and social media directing them towards the course you are selling.

Run a Podcast:

Podcasts are becoming more and more popular as a way of attracting interested listeners and building a dedicated audience. Podcasting is all about creating audio content that people will love and can easily engage with. What’s great about podcasts is that they are very easy to create and easy to consume.

Through a podcast, you can give pointers as to where they can reach you, or include links in the podcast’s description. Breaking down the subject of your course into small chunks and having an episode on each of the topics you are teaching is one of the best ways to get engaged podcast listeners to buy your course.

Perhaps the only downside to it is that as the host, you are going to have to put some good amount of time and money into it at the beginning. For more information on creating a podcast, check out The Podcast Host that goes through the 8 basic steps you need to take.

Guest on Podcasts:

Speaking at a podcast hosted by another person is an excellent way to gain awareness of your online school and generally explain what it offers to people. Even if your host only has a few hundred listeners per month, it can help you bring free traffic you would otherwise pay and maybe land an interview into bigger podcasts!

However, you will need to choose your host very carefully. For starters, you will have to be a genuine listener of the podcast show and know what that person can really do for others and potentially you.

Do your research and find a relevant podcast with an engaged audience. Drop the host an email to introduce yourself and your brand before discussing the possibility of becoming their guest. Make sure to point out the benefits they can get from doing so, e.g. you will talk about them and promote their business as well.

Finally, give them a URL which can track back to your business site, and thank your podcaster for the time they have given you. If you want, you may discuss any opportunities for future cooperation.

Tip: Podcasts are great for partnerships and affiliate/referral deals. If they don’t do interviews, they might promote products for a fee or for a share of the profits.

Understanding Paid Traffic

The first step to sales is getting your potential customers to notice you. Bringing visitors to your site is called traffic, and there are many ways of achieving that. Us, marketers, refer to the different ways of attracting users as channels of traffic.

You can send an email to invite someone to join, a personal message on Linkedin, Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp/Viber, or wait for your site to show up on Google results. All those and many more free channels, take a large investment of your time and need the patience to work.

But, if you have the budget to spare, then you can work with Paid Traffic channels. A piece of advice here, if you are new to paid advertising, spend only the money you don’t care to lose or ask for expert help.

Unlike organic and owned channels, paid traffic can bring immediate results and can give you a quick boost. You can easily start with a small budget, test your results, and if any paid channel works for you, invest more to bring more traffic from there. Let’s take a look at the different paid traffic channels for selling online courses:

Google AdWords:

If you want to move on the very top results of Google pages and start getting your first customers, you can promote your online course with Google AdWords.

With the help of the Keyword Planner, you can search for keywords and ad group ideas, enter or upload and multiply keywords to get estimates on the bid numbers they get, as well as their popularity.

Here are some tips when using the Keyword Planner:

Don’t use obvious keywords that are too competitive. But, search for keywords that communicate intended e.g. “learn to cook”, “painting courses online” etc

Specify your keyword search through carrying out a) broad match, b) phrase match and c) exact match. Each search has its own advantages/disadvantages. Broad matches have higher clicks and can achieve more ad exposure, but are usually low on conversions. You can get a phrase match by putting your intended keyword in quotations marks e.g. “online courses” to appear in searches as part of a phrase e.g. “creating online courses”. Finally, you get the exact match when using your keyword in brackets e.g. [online courses], and the results will come out using only the specific keyword.

Use negative keywords effectively controlling the searches your ad won’t appear in. This can help you avoid wasting money on poor-value clicks. For example, if you are not offering any free courses “online cooking courses for free” would bring you bad traffic, having “free” as a negative keyword will save you from this.

Pro tip: Be sure to have Google Analytics connected to your school to monitor and evaluate results. If you don’t get any sales from your paid ads, and you can try and identify the problem.

Paid Social Media:

Facebook

There is a lot you can do with social media to bring more traffic and get more sales, and more specifically on Facebook. For example, you can connect your Facebook Ads with your LearnWorlds to easily track the ROI of your social media campaigns. This can be done by linking your Facebook Pixel to your LearnWorlds school and creating your first retargeting campaign.

Facebook Ads work because they are based on specific demographics, interests, behaviors, and affiliations, and collect contact information e.g. email addresses. To get their attention when using the Ads, you can start by sharing relevant content e.g. a blog-post or a webinar, and then collect their email addresses to promote your school through email.

As you try Facebook Ads, you will find out that creating a Lookalike Audience can help your marketing efforts at large, as it helps to create a network of people who are most likely to be interested in your products.

The last, but most powerful tool Facebook offers is Remarketing. It will allow you to follow up on visitors who came to your school and bring them back again. Most people don’t buy on the first visit, showing them the same ad or a specific offer a few times will increase the chances of them buying from you.

For more detailed information on this, check our published ebook on Facebook Ads.

Free ebook The Ultimate Guide To Selling Online Courses (vol 1) Discover how to make your online courses ready for sales and, most importantly, profitable.

Instagram

Just like Facebook Ads, Instagram Advertising can help you get more traffic and achieve better brand exposure. Boosting your Instagram posts with money can be beneficial considering that you can invest on the effectiveness and quality of your media – images and videos, accompanied by a small text.

Instagram’s ads can be managed in the same place as Facebook ads, you just enable your ads to also run on Instagram and reach more people!

CHAPTER 7

OFFLINE WORKS

When speaking about elearning, we tend to focus on the digital and forget the offline world as if it does not exist. When you will be marketing your online course, you might be focusing on digital marketing strategies, but, don’t forget there are more ways to reach people and sell courses.

In some cases, especially in the corporate world, it might be easier to connect offline to achieve better results.

Here are a few ways to go offline and sell online courses:

Speak About Your Courses

You will find yourself in many situations with friends, family, and business contacts, where you can speak about your new courses or training. Your extended social circle can be interested in your new offering or introduce you to potential customers.

Let them know what you are doing, how someone can buy from you and who is your target market and they will become your best promoters!

We are social creatures. Never underestimate the power of a friend who knows a friend 😉

Join Events and Network

Whether you are the speaker or not, print a few business cards with an interesting call to action and join events of your industry. Get connected, get to know new people and connect with old acquaintances, introduce yourself and see which new opportunities will present themselves.

At industry related events you can find the most interested and engaged people of your industry, and collect business cards for calling out potential customers.

Events are the perfect opportunity to meet with company representatives and arrange a meeting to present your services. Selling course access licenses (bulk coupons for free access) to corporations is the most profitable way to grow your business!

Phone Outreach

Are you selling B2B training?

Then you should be picking up the phone to connect with potential customers.

Ideally, you should already have some industry contacts you can reach out, if not, then consider going to a relevant event (see the previous point).

When you are out of warm contacts, you can go into cold outreach. Find a business listing of companies that could be your customers, find the right person and take note of their contact information at a Spreadsheet.

Then, send them an email first introducing yourself, your company and what you can do for them. Be professional and get to the point as soon as possible. Then, follow up the next day with a phone call letting them know you have emailed them first. You will be amazed by the results, but be prepared for both negative and positive reactions!

Schedule Meetings

The next step in offline sales is scheduling a meeting or a presentation. Of course, it’s not worth it to schedule meetings for low-value courses. Scheduling a presentation is about selling multiple licenses or offering expensive training.

Most high-paying customers will expect a more personal approach, and if you are reaching out to local customers, you can afford to meet some of the most prominent and present your services.

Accept Offline Payments (Bank Transfers, Cash)

Some of your customers might be more comfortable buying offline. This is, of course, an exception to the rule.

Cash Payments work if your work is focused on the local community and you have a physical presence, for example an office. It will be easy for you to collect payments offline and register students manually to your school.

While Bank Transfers are a usual way for big companies buying in bulk. So, if you are having a meeting with an executive to offer a company-wide training, expect to be asked if they can pay with a card or a bank transfer.

There are many more ways where you can advertise your services locally, from local shops, posters, door to door, newspaper/radio/tv ads, sending letters and many others. Think about your audience and how you can better reach out to them and choose the right one for your business.

CHAPTER 8

HAPPY STUDENTS ARE THE BEST REFERRALS

As an online educator, you are not only offering a service but a promise as well. You have a responsibility for the success of your students, and they will return your love and dedication by speaking out for you.

Have you heard of “word of mouth”?

It is the strongest form of marketing, and you cannot force it. Word of mouth is when your customers speak nicely for you, suggest your services to their friends, family, and colleagues.

A happy customer will always suggest you as the go-to expert. Keep your students happy, go the extra step where it is needed, and you will be rewarded with engaged students who will spread the word for you!

What does that mean for you?

Communication

Delivering education can take many forms, but it is a form of human communication. Be open to communication with your students, welcome their questions and encourage social interactions between your students.

In LearnWorlds, you can encourage your students to use the discussion board on the left of the course to share their thoughts, questions or opinions and answer them publicly:

Or you can open up a private channel of communication with them with personal messages through the inbox:

When you see a student getting stuck into an activity or haven’t finished a course, reach out to them. A personal email to identify the reason someone hasn’t completed your course can give you insights on what you can improve, and an opportunity to personally help someone achieve their goal and converting them into a loyal customer who will get back for more!

Student Engagement and Interactivity

Learning does not happen passively, it is an active process, and engagement in class plays a huge role in it. Give your students different activities to learn, some prefer watching a video, others prefer reading.

An online course is more than that, you can create quizzes to reinforce knowledge, exams to test your students and help them see their progress towards learning and you can also encourage them to do other activities.

Example of a Quiz

You can also give them assignments like reading, writing or executing on your teaching – it could be a painting, an excel file or a physical exercise, anything that makes sense for your specific course.

Encourage them to highlight important parts in the ebooks you provide and come back to your teaching whenever needed.

Or let them know they can take notes.

Active learning happens when the student engages with your teachings, and is not passively passing by the text.

This is why we have created a unique Interactive Video for LearnWorlds, where you can take your teaching to the next level by adding quizzes, notes, pop-ups and more on top of your videos.

Success in online courses is measured in learning, and learning is achieved with highly engaged learners. Teach them to succeed, and they will be your evangelists!

Goals & Certificates

You should have already had your courses’ learning goals and objectives in your sales page. It is a promise of the results your course will provide.

Your job is to push the students towards the path to achieve those goals. Unit by unit, activity by activity, every step should be getting them closer to it. Whether it is learning a new language, improving their writing or becoming better managers.

Break down those activities into sections acting as short-term goals or checkpoints. Then, you can offer a higher level of achievement, using a course completion certificate. A certificate can push a student toward a goal that looks achievable, with visible steps towards it.

Certificates offer this sense of achievement and sharing them will boost morale (and earn them some boasting rights), which in turn will become a free promotion for your course!

Help Them Succeed

Your students are here for a reason, and their success is your main mission. Whether you go the extra step and coach them personally, running regular webinars to supplement your courses or a Q&A session every week, it will increase the value of your course and elevate you into their eyes.

Your success lies in the success of your students, they are your pride, your word of mouth and the positive reviews & testimonials.

Your students is your most valuable asset!

CHAPTER 9

INCREASE THE VALUE OF YOUR COURSE

After creating your online courses, it can get old and common pretty easily, especially if you hold on to the same content and learning material for too long. To get past this, there are many ways to add that little something that gives more credibility and value to your courses.

As an online instructor, you need to keep asking yourself what you can do to make your courses better, improve the quality of your teaching and increase the chances of standing out from the competition.

An obvious way to do this is increasing the price of your courses. However, if you do so, this means that you will also need to justify your decision to put up your prices.

Here are some ways on how to do this:

Offer one-to-one coaching: consulting your students and providing personalized feedback adds another valuable service to your online school. Not only that, but it shows your students that you are genuinely interested in their learning progress. Treat this as a VIP offering of your very valuable time and expertise!

Offer downloadable resources: anything that includes learning material such as ebooks, checklists, templates, worksheets, and resource can help to supplement your method of teaching and give that extra guidelines their students were missing and had to go out of their way to find.

Offer a payment plan: introducing a higher price isn’t the best scenario for students, but offering a payment plan gives them an extra option. In this perspective, it offers the chance to your customers to spread the cost of a course over an extended period of time rather pay it up-front.

Tip: Offer an incentive for a one-off purchase, for example, 10% off, and give the option for a payment plan.

Offer a completion certificate: getting rewards is always fun and gives an incentive to students to continue learning and completing your course. A completion certificate can increase student engagement and show that their efforts didn’t go to waste. If it is also something they can use for their professional life like getting CPE credits, or a promotion, it can be a good reason to raise your price for this opportunity.

Form partnerships to offer resources: apart from creating your own material, offer to your students more resources designed by other sellers who are relevant to your niche and can help to implement your teaching.

Create pricing tiers: a pricing tier can offer more options to potential students instead of wholly relying on just one fixed price. Along with what they choose, you can decide what features and help they get from their courses package.

Providing More Value to Current Students:

Give praise to your students: appraisals aren’t only suitable for workers but students as well. Whenever you get the chance, give a thumbs up and show public recognition to those students for the great work they have been doing.

Teach something more specific: Instead of ‘sticking to the schedule’, make some variations to your lessons and present something different to your students. This could be a small change in your teaching or delivering a lesson in more detail – depth in a chosen area of the subject.

Conduct Webinars or Q&A Sessions: you have the possibility to create a webinar or a series of Q&A sessions where you allow your students to raise their hand and ask you questions about the lessons in an open and more relaxed environment.

Offer help on assignments: you can provide your students with written transcripts to accompany your instructional videos or alternatively, hire someone to help students with their learning e.g. study skills session, grammar check, CV writing, auditing, etc.

Share experts’ advice: once in a while, make the effort to reach out to other experts in the field – preferably someone you and your students admire or is popular, and incorporate this in your own method of teaching. Bringing them in for a talk, to conduct a webinar or share their advice directly to your students can count as an advantage.

Create a community: When it comes to online learning, people want to feel as close as and relate to each other since they can’t meet physically due to geographical boundaries. A community-based learning environment though, is always welcomed by students. The community should be the place where they go to share their inquiries and exchange their ideas.

CHAPTER 10

RESOURCES TO HELP

In order to help you out in the process of creating and selling your online courses, we have three basic resources. These include ready-made checklists, ebooks, online courses that are specially designed to supplement the training of online instructors, and a newsletter that informs LearnWorlds members about news and updates of the platform as well as educating them on e-learning matters and trends through a dedicated blog.

Ebooks

If you enjoy reading ebooks, you can check out the following:

Sell More courses (Checklist)

This checklist gives you a handful of ideas on how to position your business in the right way so that you interact with your students better. It also points out the importance of creating important pages for your online business such as the landing page, the ‘Thank You’ and ‘About Us’ page. Also, you can get tips on how to leverage social media networks and other types of marketing to promote your courses.

Free checklist The Complete Checklist To Selling More Online Courses A comprehensive guide to selling more online courses and suceeding with your online business

Ultimate Guide on Marketing & Selling Online Courses

This e-book offers a complete outlook to what creating and selling coursers is all about. In a few steps, it describes the process every online instructor should follow to effectively create, publish and sell online courses, whilst looking at all the stages and factors that need the most attention.

Free ebook The Ultimate Guide To Selling Online Courses (vol 1) Discover how to make your online courses ready for sales and, most importantly, profitable.

Sell Courses with Facebook Remarketing & Custom Audiences

This e-book focuses on the importance of paid marketing and how you can use Facebook Ads to meet the needs of your online marketing campaigns. More specifically it explains how you can use Facebook Pixel connecting it to your LearnWorlds school and making the most of the features Facebook offers including Customer and LookAlike audiences.

Academy Courses

On our LearnWorlds Academy, we have a variety of online courses you can take to increase your e-learning knowledge and expertise. Most of them are free, and LearnWorlds’ users of the Pro and above plans get VIP access to the paid courses on how to market & sell their courses.

How to Market Your Online Courses

This course introduces you to all types of marketing, including email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, paid advertising and affiliate marketing. Each section is specifically designed to give you all the guidelines and advice you need to effectively gain brand awareness, promote your online courses and ultimately increase your sales. In doing that, it lists a number of tips and suggestions on methods and advertising techniques that you can implement to your online marketing strategy.

The Ultimate Guide to Sales-Ready Online Courses

This course helps to pinpoint down the steps you need to take to get your online courses ready for sale. Starting from the very basics, it explains how you can set up your target audience, identify your unique selling point and come up with good content. Also, in terms of publishing your own course, you will learn how you can pre-launch and then launch your online course, taking into account important factors such as pricing, student analytics, and online business performance.

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CHAPTER 11

MOVING FORWARD

Creating and selling courses could be more than just an online business you started one or two years ago. In fact, years from now, if you are committed to it and truly believe that you can make a strong impact through teaching your favorite subject, you could be the next Chris Anderson – the curator of TED (Technology, Education, Design) conferences, in the eyes of future generations!

But even if you don’t manage to hit up to Anderson’s mountain success level, that reached worldwide influence across 130 countries, the fact alone that you are teaching the subject that you love and know best, opens ups countless and unbelievably awesome opportunities for your personal and professional development. All of this you do online, whilst meeting and connecting with people who live at the other end of the world every day!

What’s best out of creating your own courses however is that you have the ability to share your expertise but also equip others with your unique vision and inspiration that offers a different perspective on current industry issues that could help to shape future trends. This along with your ‘digital’ signature right below it, would be difficult to get out of people’s heads and the legacy you leave behind, will be by far bigger of what anyone’s expecting from you, or as a matter of fact, for yourself!

Now, how awesome would that be?

Get your fully social, engaging and interactive online school. Launch your school!

Further reading you might find interesting:

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Nick Malekos Senior Digital Marketer at LearnWorlds Nick Malekos is a Senior Digital Marketer in LearnWorlds. He is a results based and well-rounded Digital Marketer with years of experience in the education industry, writer and digital literacy trainer.

Kyriaki Raouna Content Creator at LearnWorlds Kyriaki is a Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team with more than three years of experience in digital marketing. Graduated from the University of Huddersfield with a Guidance degree, she has equipped herself with hands-on experience in education management and career guidance.