How to use PR and SEO to Increase the Sales of your Online Course
Making your course online is only the first step. Once your course is created then the next thing to do is to enroll students (easier said than done! ).
Are you using a marketing strategy? Or have you been a victim of the assumption that just since your online course is available that other people will magically discover it.
Well, I'm sorry for being the one to share negative news. However, if you want to maximize the return on all the work you put into creating your course, the first step is to promote it.
Two of the most effective methods to do this is via the PR (Public Relations) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
There is no longer a time when you need to dig deep in your wallet and employ a costly PR company to help your business get exposure. If you're familiar with what to, you could take it on yourself.
Be sure to check back.
The same goes for SEO. You no longer have to shell out huge sums of money to hire the services of an SEO agency. When you know how to get your audience engaged with valuable content, then you can send clear signals to search engines.
In this detailed guide, I'll give you some tips for actionable ways to use PR and SEO to increase your online course sales.
PR Tips and Tools for Increasing Your Course Sales
Step 1: How Do I Find Journalists
If you're doing yourself PR, your first step is to find journalists that specialize in your area. If, for instance, you're a teacher of Social Media Marketing you'll want to find journalists who specialize in reporting on marketing via social media.
And, guess what?
Google is as reliable a beginning point as any...
Find the search results in Google and then click on the News tab for journalists that write about the subject of your class.
Like this:
Now start checking the authors of these articles to see whether they could help with your PR efforts.
Take a few minutes to determine if the writer of the article is a well-known journalist in your niche.
After you have viewed your results, you can begin to build the Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Name of the reporter
- The URL for the article
- Click here to go to Twitter profile for the reporter
- Link to the individual site or blog page of the reporter (if it is available)
- Email address (if available)
- Your Notes
For example, you might have:
- Jayson DeMers
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2016/09/28/9-things-social-media-marketers-get-wrong/#5107342a4b2f
- https://twitter.com/jaysondemers
- http://www.audiencebloom.com/
- Email?
- The founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, a Seattle-based content marketing firm. A regular writer for Forbes.
Here's an example of a spreadsheet of reporters I created:
>> aim for you is to compile the list of 20 journalists within your field.
Google can be good, but it isn't always great. It is difficult to determine the topic of your conversation be when you meet these journalists What are their typical topics of interest you have with them and who is your most pertinent journalists you can contact right now, and what is their reason for doing so.
JustReachOut can help you find the most relevant journalists and give you a reason for why to reach them. Enter a keyword, and it will show the journalist who's creating an article on your topic and the reason you need to reach the journalist. Additionally, it provides email pitch templates to create your pitch. email support from staff of reporters to help to directly send email to journalists directly from the platform as well as an automated team that checks every email before being and sent.
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Step 2: How To Join Journalists
Once you have your list of relevant journalists you're ready for the next step: c connect with them.
Below, you can see this particular journalist is open to receiving solicitations. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
For those that don't share the contact information it is necessary to investigate a little more. However, don't fret. There are a few devices that may aid.
1. Hunter
Enter the company website into Hunter, and it'll give you the structure and emails.
In this case, if you try entering it will return:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
When you have a known pattern, you are able to guess your journalist's contact details.
If you look up the publication you want to read on Email Format, it suggests the format that it is confident is correct.
For example, here is what it returns to :
Once you have an idea of the potential email address for your journalist, then you can make use of this tool to confirm that it is valid.
Step 3: How To Build Connections with Journalists
You've already identified potential journalists in your niche and made a spreadsheet including their contact details.
You may be tempted to pitch right away.
But don't.
In the beginning, it is important to nurture relationships with these people. The best approach is to start giving before you start asking.
Take these steps:
- Respond to journalists queries on the HelpAReporter or JustReachOut.
- Interview journalists for articles on your own blog
- Answer an inquiry on the Quora website and then ask journalists to respond to the same question.
- Follow the journalists you want to contact on Twitter. Follow the journalists you want to pitch on
- Retweet and share relevant tweets
- Leave a meaningful response on Twitter or a comment to their website. Start sharing your personality to help them get acquainted with your personality.
- Give them an idea or story which isn't about your own personal interests. You're right. throw them something newsworthy. They're journalists. They want stories.
Not long ago a recorded a video that outlines an easy step-by-step guide on how to develop relations with journalists. This video is here for you to refer to.
Here's the words of Rebecca Grant, a former reporter at VentureBeat spoke about creating relationships first:
"If you've got a suggestion or a suggestion for a story that* doesn't involve your company, then share the idea with a journalist. We're constantly looking for good stories ."
Step 4: How To Pitch Your Story To Journalists
By now you should have established a relationship with the reporters you'd like to reach out to. The time you spend to build rapport isn't a requirement to write a cold email today.
But what exactly will you say in your email?
The last thing you want to do is tell the journalists about your brand fresh course.
That's a big NO.
Scroll back up the page.
What are journalists looking for?
--- Good Stories.
Have you heard of the phrase: "Stories sell newspapers."
It's the same in the online world.
Good stories get shares and visitors.
It's time to start sharing your experiences with journalists. What are you going to source them? Your blog.
In the following section, we'll dive into the subject of content marketing. But before that let's look at some tools to help with the email marketing pitching.
Digital marketing company Fractl interviewed over 500 journalists on top websites including BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch as well as other publications about the things they would like to see in a pitch.
Here are some key findings:
- 81% of people prefer to be marketed by email
- 69% of respondents prefer being pitched in the morning
- 39% of respondents are seeking exclusive research to release
To ensure that you are aware of this it is important to make sure that you track the progress of your email pitch. Here are a couple of techniques you could try:
MixMax is a free plugin to Gmail which includes unlimited email tracking. You have the option of choosing which emails you would like to be tracked all your emails or individual ones:
The lightning icon with numbers next to your sent messages indicates the fact that someone read your email and the number of times they have opened it:
#2 Yesware
Yesware is another Gmail plugin that allows you to monitor email reply and open rates, link clicks, as well as attachment open. Just click the "track" button before you click send, and Yesware handles all tracking. Yesware also lets you try different variations for the subject line of your email as well as save email templates for later for use.
No matter if your online course has been completed or not, then now is a great moment to begin planning these strategies. Think about which journalists you can establish connections with, and then begin building relations. Remember to offer them great stories.
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SEO Tips to Increase your Online Course's Sales
SEO is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to an online site by making sure that your website appears first in the search results returned by the search engine. So if someone searches for your course topic using Google as an example, having your website appear in search results means free exposure for you.
How do you get your site to appear in search results for topics relevant to your program?
by publishing excellent content (blog posts, videos, etc.) through your website, which people can consume for free.
Perhaps you are thinking: after all your hard work on developing the course materials, why should you share the content for free?
Allow me to explain the logic:
By creating and marketing top-quality content at no cost (usually through blogs) and establishing confidence and credibility in your area of expertise. If you can create content that is free that is actually helpful to individuals, they will be more likely to purchase your course because they know, like and trustyou. Free content creates the reciprocity.
Ideally, you'll have a blog or an audience before selling your course. If not but you're not far off to begin one today.
The most important thing to make your blog effective is having high-quality material. This is the kind of content Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Content- content that's 10 times more valuable than the top results currently found in the search results of a particular keyword or subject.
Journalists and readers would prefer to hyperlink to your premium value web pages
The process of creating 10x Content isn't an easy task. If it was, every single piece of content will be 10x.
However, you've got a distinct advantage...
- This is a fantastic online course.
- There's a wealth of information in your reach.
- There are a few primary terms and subjects which your target audience would like to know about.
When you start writing content for your blog you will be able to draw from that library of ideas and then turn into a 10x increase in content.
You must ensure that you have 10x Content
- Solves a problem or answers a question by providing complete, precise, and exceptional details or sources.
- It is of high-end, reliable and reliable, as well as interesting, and remarkable.
- Gives users a pleasant experience by providing a user-friendly layout, interface of the site, fonts, images, and layout.
If your content is in line with these standards, your target audience, plus the journalists who you've pitched to are bound to share it.
It is important to remember that all these tasks take the time of a long time! Making a list of your work and managing your time is essential for getting results quickly. I have recently shared some advice for managing your time while creating or conducting PR outreach. I also found some fantastic useful advice there from other bloggers too.
10x Content gets more natural backlinks and ranks higher in Google
If Google starts to see that your website's content is well-known It will then boost your site's ranking within the search results. Since it's an excellent piece of content, others within your field will want to link to it.
And Google loves naturally-generated backlinks.
After you have completed your work producing the content, be sure to follow these steps.
1. Make sure your website is ready to receive the floods of traffic:
- Go to GTmetrix and type in your URL into the site, try your homepage URL and your top placed or top blog page URL. Look over the grades you get as well as the problems it identifies. You should have a grade of"B" or "A..
- Make use of the dedicated web hosting. Beware of HostGator or something cheap such as GoDaddy that uses an array of shared servers. They don't have the right features specifically for hosting or serving WordPress or blog posts specifically. Take a look at options like Flywheel or WPEngine that are specifically designed for hosting and serving up WordPress blog post content. This optimizes the way your site loads, making the speed of loading faster in addition to helping your site rank higher on Google.
- Consider using CDN (Content Delivery Network) - it is a service that provides different server nodes to users to download content (usually static files like images and JavaScript). This speeds up your site greatly, many major sites use this. It is possible to learn more here.
- You should consider using a caching software If you've ever hit the back button in a web browser and the page took more then 5 minutes to load, you've encountered a site without any caching. Excessive load times can limit your traffic, lower your Google ranking and reduce your website's overall potential. A caching software will help with load speed significantly. Learn more here.
- Optimize your entire image for faster page loading This is a basic concept but might get somewhat technical because you may need to employ CSS Sprites to make the images. This article will show how you can do it and the reasons. In the final day you want a grade of A or B on GTmetrix in order to improve the ranking of the homepage of your blog and for every major article you'd like to rank in the minimum. I make sure that the articles on my blog have this rating.
2. Check to see if you've got the right CTAs (calls to action) strategically placed on your website:
- To buy your online course
If you haven't yet started your blog yet, you need to get your website online and up and running. Start planning what 10x articles you could create to ensure that your audience will want to hear your story.
Include SEO and PR to the marketing strategy for your course
Are you prepared to begin promoting your online course with these low-cost PR and SEO strategies?
PR and SEO don't have to cost you a lot of money. If you put your heart towards it, you'll tap into the resources that are available to you. Establish meaningful connections with influencers and create valuable content to boost the sales of your online courses.
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Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io that helps start-ups entrepreneurs and business owners pitch journalists and influencers without the aid of PR companies. A few years ago he used PR outreach in order to have an enterprise acquired by Google. He blog about PR tricks along with SEO in his blog CriminallyProlific.