Selling Online Courses: Most Effective Techniques Everyone Should Know
Online courses and e-learning are taking over the academic industry as businesses grow and expand into topics that traditional teaching mediums do not breach or do not cover fully. As more and more people realise the exponential cost savings and other benefits of upskilling themselves through online courses, digital academies gain more followers, subscribers and eventually income.
Do you want to create online academic content or courses with other brilliant ideas?
Are you looking for methods using which you can perfect your online academy?
Unsure about the platforms or mediums through which you should try to sell your online academy?
Worry not, this article focuses on providing you with all of the details that you don’t know about. If you are looking forward to creating online academies and selling your courses to e-learners then go through the sections of this article where we focus mainly on how to make your courses “sellable” and which platforms to target so that you can achieve maximum growth and profits.
What are the ways you can sell courses online?
Ideas are the foundation of a great online course. However, some courses do not ‘sell’ as well as others. In this section, let us uncover some of the classic ways in which you can sell courses online and capture your target audience. Let us go through some of the steps you can follow to popularise your online course:
- Diversify your content: The course content, formatting and graphics ultimately make or break the success of the course. Online courses have to be tailored to fit the needs and likes of the target audience in order to gain popularity with them. You can diversify your content to fit the user behaviour of your target demographic and also create multiple copies of your content to suit the viewing device used by your target users.
- Stand out from the crowd: The internet is filled with a large number of platforms and academies offering online courses about literally anything and everything. This doesn’t mean that your content cannot stand out. In fact, you can focus on marketing and create ideas that appeal more than your online competitors.
To hook your target demographic, you need to offer them the best deal with respect to content as well as prices. If you’re a beginner then you shouldn’t rush forth to create a number of videos and launch them overnight. Rather, you should consider the learning path carefully, analyse your content from a student’s perspective and grow your online academy slowly.
- Use good affiliate marketing tools: There are a number of online platforms which focus on offering great learning management systems and the proper tools necessary to sell courses online. CreateOnlineAcademy is one such platform that allows you to sell courses through social media plugins as well as other avenues.
The built-in social plugins come along with the package and do not involve any extra charges. Using these tools along with the analytics tools offered on the online platform, you can not only reach out to untapped markets and target e-learners but also analyse their reactions and tailor-fit your course to correct any negative aspect.
- Tap into SEO and lead generation: Just publishing your online course and tapping into social media is not enough. You need to make sure that you appear on searches of your target audience. To do this you need to employ top-notch search engine optimisation to link your content with the top keywords and search topics that your target demographic is likely to enter. Lead generation is another key action that you can focus on.
Hanging around on forums where your target learners frequently visit or guest-posting on famous course forums helps to generate leads by attracting e-learners to your website or online course link. Using this introduction to your course, the learners get to know your course and the learning path which interests them to try it out.
- Launch your courses on good e-commerce platforms: If you intend to sell your courses to e-learners, then you need to ensure that your transactions are safe and secured through good merchant websites.
Platforms such as COA have their own links with secure merchants which helps you to sell your courses online without worrying about the safety of the transactions as well as the safety of your customer details. Another added benefit of launching your courses using platforms such as COA is that you can gain more e-learners through the plugins and tools as well as other marketing gains to expand your online reach.
Where can you sell online courses?
With the advent of the internet, a lot of avenues have opened up for the growth of businesses online. In this section, we’re going to hook you up to different platforms and channels through which you can sell your courses online. Most of these consist of social media channels, e-learning platforms, online academic websites, blogs and certain unique universities looking for online courses as an addon with their traditional curriculum. If you have already curated your content and are ready to launch your online academy, then this section is crucial because it details the various platforms that you need to focus on to bring out the best of your courses to the e-learners.
- Social media platforms: Social media has a great influence over e-learners and often, they will prefer to begin a course that people are discussing on social media than some random course that they have been emailed about. As an online academy, you need to launch your profiles or channels across platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Popular methods of engaging learners on such platforms are through offering peeks into your course content that is meant to attract learners and introduce them briefly to your online material. Instagram and Facebook also offer a number of analytics tools as well as an opportunity for reaching untapped markets which makes them a special tool that you can use to popularise your online academy. An added benefit of having your channels on these platforms is that people get to search your courses and familiarise themselves with your business and brand before investing. This makes them more likely to finish the course and recommend to others using the same platform.
- Websites and academic forums: Having a strong presence at Q & A forums as well as academic channels helps you to establish your authority over the subject matter and it interests the users visiting those sites to come and check out the courses offered by you. Online user behaviour suggests that 82% e-learners stumble upon relevant courses and online academies through guest posts and online forums where relevant subject matters are often discussed.
- Blogs and websites: Your online courses can ell more if you link to your target demographic easily. For example, if you are trying to sell cooking courses online then you would probably make more headway if you guest post your tips and peeks into your lessons on websites and blogs that focus on such content. The benefit of using these avenues for marketing your course is that the website or blog does most of the work. They already have an existing fan base and users who regularly subscribe to them. You can simply tap into them and create leads with ease.
- Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is one of the most passive methods of reaching out to e-learners. However, it has a high success rate of nearly 90%. This is because of AI aided study of internet users and the materials that they regularly search or go through. The stored information about their interests and shopping trends allows for simplified marketing efforts. For example, if an internet user buys lots of cooking ingredients and has a known search trend of looking up a number of online classes for cooking then marketing to those users is pretty easy. Platforms such as CreateOnlineAcademy offer a number of online and offline affiliate channels and tools that allow your digital academy to achieve maximum reach and growth. Other platforms may not offer such tools and gains or they might charge you to give you access to such amazing tools that allow you to market across online and offline channels. Thus, you need to choose your LMS carefully and align with platforms such as CreateOnlineAcademy which offer all these amazing addons with the basic package at no extra cost or hidden charge.
How can you sell online courses?
Selling courses online is not easy. However, in this section, some of the basic steps of selling courses online have been described here. Now that you know the platforms that you need to target and the channels where you need to tap into to grow your presence, let us now look at how you can use all of that to sell your courses:
- Step 1: Analyse your content and create a target audience or identify the demographic that would be ideal for your content, For example, if your online course is all about coding then you need to classify your content and identify your audience as users who have a marked interest in such topics. Adding age gender and other such statistics also helps you to tailor-fit your content to be attractive to the users belonging to that category.
- Step 2: Stalk your potential clients. To understand user behaviour and the quirks that attract their interest, you need to study individuals belonging to your target audience. You need to ask yourself questions such as “What attracts people to coding tutorials?” or “what made these users click on the given link and move to the courses or videos offered on various platforms?”. Social media, as well as online platforms, will allow you to easily stalk your potential clients and create a profile that sums up their interests and quirks. This information is crucial for formatting and marketing actions.
- Step 2: Stalk your potential clients. To understand user behaviour and the quirks that attract their interest, you need to study individuals belonging to your target audience. You need to ask yourself questions such as “What attracts people to coding tutorials?” or “what made these users click on the given link and move to the courses or videos offered on various platforms?”. Social media, as well as online platforms, will allow you to easily stalk your potential clients and create a profile that sums up their interests and quirks. This information is crucial for formatting and marketing actions.
- Step 3: Pitch, attract, sell. Online courses need to be pitched to the target audience. Statistics identify that without a proper pitch that is approachable and user-friendly, less than 13% of online courses get noticed by their target audience. Focus on marketing tricks and pitch your content to the proper audience using the channels and platforms that we have discovered in the above sections. Social media plugins and presence on various online platforms help you to perfect your marketing plans.
- Step 4: Create the perfect bait. Some users are undecided and tend to ponder over a number of similar courses before choosing one to buy. Thus, you need to make sure that your proposal has a hook with which you can bait them into choosing your course. The bait may be offered in terms of sneak peeks into the courses or discounts and cashback. However, you need to make sure that the bait fits the quirks and attractions of your target demographic in order to be successful.
When should you sell online courses?
Selling your online courses is only possible if you are absolutely confident about your content and it is finetuned to suit the needs and quirks of your target audience. You shouldn’t jump to marketing and launching your courses on e-commerce platforms till you have finished curating your content and finetuning it.
Platforms such as CreateOnlineAcademy allow you to not only perfect your layout and graphics but they also provide you with a number of online and offline marketing tools as well as analytics to study the market and grow exponentially in terms of the customer base as well as revenues. Some platforms also assist you with social media campaigns and other marketing tricks which are very essential especially when you launch your online course for the first time. So choose your LMS wisely and sell your courses only when you’re confident about the content as well as the market demand for similar content.
Which are the alternate ways that help you sell online courses?
One of the major marketing tricks that businesses rely on for growth is the affiliate marketing programs. Have you ever wondered if you could continue to reach your targets and grow even when you are sleeping or not working on your online platform? The answer is yes. You can indeed continue to interact and engage with potential customers through this passive but powerful concept of affiliate marketing.
Before launching your online courses, you need some solid benefits from the e-commerce platforms or digital academy creators so that you can absolutely rely on them for all your needs. Keeping this in mind, you need to ensure that your LMS has the option of integrated plugins or other tools such as email marketing tools or social media analytics tools so that you can launch affiliate marketing programs as a part of your marketing campaigns. Platforms such as CreateOnlineAcademy offer you the best of both worlds. Not only do they allow you to use tools that help your online affiliate marketing campaign but they also allow you to hire resellers.
The resellers would then focus on curating customers and making them buy your courses which would generate more testimonials via word of mouth and offline marketing. All of these benefits and other tools are addon benefits offered by COA with no extra costs or hidden charges. It is included within the original charge for the package and allows you the wholesome experience of creating, launching and selling your courses online without being hindered due to the lack of any of the necessary tools.
All of the above sections include tips and tricks that will help you to flourish and grow your online academy. However, the most important action that you need to be careful about is your choice of LMS or platform. With a lousy LMS or platform, you may not have all the tools you need or it might not be available across all devices and countries. Some LMS are also rigid so that changing the formatting or graphics of your content becomes a nightmare for you. So you need to weigh the procs and cons and decide which platforms offer you the best deals. At CreateOnlineAcademy, there are a number of channels and tools that you can utilise to perfect your marketing campaigns. The packages offer different benefits and advantages that most other platforms lack. So keep these factors in mind and choose wisely.