How To Go From 0 To 1,000 Students enrolled in Online Courses with No Advertising Budget
It's all laid out. You have discovered that there's a gap in your space You've drafted the plan for your class, You're elated and enthralled by it all. Perhaps you're done with building the course. There is a dilemma: how do you spread information to prospective students? What are the best ways to get it more visible to your intended community? Which websites should you post links on?
There's a good thing for you: this is the case and a solution. Many authors before created online courses to cover a variety of content; and I'll show you the most effective practices that you need for taking your course from no students to 1000 students. All without spending anything on advertising.
First, however, I will dispel one of the common mistakes instructors make when setting out to build their course. This is due to the fact that they follow a build-first strategy rather than an audience-first approach. The reason that the "build-first" approach is sub-optimal is because you are assuming many things to be the case, which can expose your course to lots of risk in your course. Particularly, when it comes to what you should compose and how the course structure will be.
That said, here are the four key components to this mini-tutorial to ensure continuous, reliable traffic for your course:
- Find out where Your Ideal Clients Hang Out
- Learn to read your audience's Minds
- How to Build Respect and Reputation with your audience
- How do you share your course with a group of people who are ready to Purchase your Product
How to Discover the Places where your ideal audience hangs Out
Let's imagine that you're a consultant client of mine. You want to promote a course around Marketing Analytics.
One thing I'm going to tell you is that you'll need to ask the right question -- you need to first ask "who are you planning to serve" rather than "what you're planning to do". In case of Marketing Analytics case, you must then decide if you wish to target CMOs, Marketing Managers, entrepreneurs, or Marketing Newbies?
You've decided to target entrepreneurs.
If this is the case, then the first task is to begin searching to find "where people from this group hang out". One of the best ways to accomplish this is to look to find "online lounges". Lounges online are areas on the web where users discuss things related to the topic they are interested in. These can be forums, blogs, and mailing lists. My method for doing it is to follow the following steps:
- Start your web-based search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
- Do a search query using any combination of these:
• Profession + Topic forum
- Profession + topic + mailing list
• Profession + blog
Topics + Professionals + industry forum
- Profession + topic + a link-sharing website (Eg. Reddit, stumbleupon)
- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum
Right there, I get to discover 10+ potential forums to target:
The search doesn't stop there. After you have selected a particular forum, you must drill down further and make another search with your chosen topic. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you should be looking for is an signs of difficulty or discomfort from the original poster. The original question was only "marketing" within the subreddit. We don't have any luck.
How can we improve our hunt to truly dig for discomfort? Let's add "pain indicators" like "help" or "advice required". We'll look at the results. It is evident that on just the very first page, there are a number of potentially useful threads.
If you've come across specific threads that have a lot of complaints You know you're in the right club to spread the word to the future. If you dig deeper and do more research it will be apparent that certain forums are suitable to address specific issues, while some forums don't. This will help you focus your promotion efforts only in areas where your ideal target audience hangs out. This is critical to the effectiveness of your plan.
From the above 15 minute exercise, we just got evidence that reddit.com/r/entrepreneur is a great place to promote our marketing course.
Check out additional forums! I would suggest that you need to identify at least 10 online lounges. Blogs are also useful (especially because of its extremely frequent discussion sections).
What is the best way to read the minds of your audience
Now, you're faced with a a long list of threads with clear indications of pain. Let's look at them all and truly be aware of who the your target audience.
After you've gathered enough information then you'll begin to notice patterns in your customer base. is. Once you identify the patterns, you begin to develop a clear understanding about how your customers feel and feels about marketing in general.
In the above data, there are some small patterns emerging (we'll have to wait for 10+ difficult threads before we can really understand) that show entrepreneurs actually need three things: a highly efficient digital marketing strategy with low cost of capital, useful tips on cities-specific marketing and how to position oneself for attracting high-value customers.
In our earlier scenario, you had a desire to build a product around Marketing Analytics. It turns out, however, that the idea might be too sophisticated (at at least to be used in it to be used in the Reddit Lounge online). The best option is to follow an education that focuses on budget advertising that is high-efficiency locally, as well as looking for and closing customers with high value.
My course structure for these pain samples will then start to look as follows:
- How to Use Facebook Interest Targeting to identify the most desirable clients in a matter of cents a click
- How to Build an Referral Machine through these Pitch Scripts in Your Next Local Chamber of Commerce Event
- Find out what needs only high-value customers have
Course Title: "How to Get High-Value Clients Using with the Hyperlocal as well as Hyper Targeted Marketing"
If you decide to drop that particular course in the Reddit area, I'm certain that will get traction. See what evidence-based marketing gives us?
How to Create Respect and Reputation among your audience
Apart from identifying pains it is important to be a expert in these lounges.
That means giving bite-sized advice anytime you experience these problems. By bite-sized, I mean things that range from one to 10 sentences but is actionable enough for someone to implement.
As an example you can answer someone who says "haven't found FB to be useful" or "need an effective plan" by saying:
"I understand that you need an effective digital plan given your budget-friendly requirements. It is a surprise, however to learn that you consider FB ads to be NOT effective. I run FB ads quite often in my consulting business, and here's the way I recommend you conduct your targeting to get quality clicks at $0.40 - $0.80 per click:
- ONLY employ the interest targeting method. All other settings are left as defaults.
- When you use interest targeting ensure that you use 10+ interests and eliminate those with large reach. The reason is that a large reach for each interest can translate to a high costs per click. If I was targeting entrepreneurs into marketing, I would use interests through gurus such as 'Neil Patel', 'Derek Halpern' 'Darren Rowse', etc. I'd leave out Gary Vaynerchuk's popularity is far too vast!
- It is important to ensure that your TOTAL reach is not greater than 800,000 individuals.
- Start your test! Check that your test is set to a daily fee of $5. Never use the life-time budgeting option.
- If your earnings exceed $1 per click, it is necessary to eliminate interests with the highest range and also add more "niche interest
- If you're looking for suggestions on "niche" interests, search for the right tools, influencers and then check this out"
If you provide advice at the level of actionable and low-level detail it will be a source of respect and credibility in the field.
How to Promote Your Course with an audience who is ready to purchase your product
"Isn't it a bit shady to publish URLs? !" "What if I get banned? !"
You probably had these thoughts. And these are fair assertions. For a solution for this problem, what you can do is include inline links in your posts and add other websites that aren't related to your site. This creates the impression that you intend to be helpful and not be spammy. Here's a personal example where I was trying to help anyone who was having difficulty in landing pages.
With these four general, strategic steps I managed to grow my site to have approximately 4K-5K organic visits per month, 89% from direct link. Check out the stats in the following article from SimilarWeb. No dollar spent on advertising at all.
Offer a lot of actionable, free value to the world, and the world will love you in return. I wish you great results throughout your life!
Kenn Costales, a grow hacker as well as an online course creator who loves exploring new methods of marketing products on the internet without having to spend a cent.