Three easy ways to market your online course

So all those motivational quotes about utilising this time of quarantine got to you and you got started with creating your online course. Turns out, the task is not that easy.

However, with consistency and perseverance, you got through the development process and came out with a beautiful, actionable course.

You’ve placed all the right multimedia, added the gamification elements, and have added enough interactivities, you’ve even researched LMS platforms and made a decision about the delivery method.

Now What?

Creating the course and publishing it is only half the battle won. You still need to find students that would take the course.

The only way to do that, of course, is to market your course. If despite knowing that you find yourself lost, here are three easy ways to start bringing your course in front of the right eyes:

Tap Into Online Communities

This is perhaps the cheapest way to market your online course. Social media is abuzz with suggestions about how one can productively use their time while they save the world by staying home.

Use this opportunity to join in on the conversation. Don’t take this to mean that you can simply join a group and start promoting your course. Go slow, understand the guidelines laid by the group admins, and engage the group members in conversation.

Share tidbits of your knowledge with them, help them out if you can. Remember, if you want your promotional efforts to be received positively in a closed social media group, you have to first make sure you are positively regarded in the group.

Like most things that are free, this strategy will perhaps take quite a bit of time. With that said, if done right, the students that you get out of such communities will have the potential to turn out to be some of your best students, and in due time, advocates of your course.

Content Marketing

While content marketing deserves an article of its own, it is too important to be left out on this list.

Simply put, content marketing is the practice of generating useful content targeted at your desired niche. The objective of content marketing is to make your ideal customers aware about your brand, and in the case of an online course, make them aware about your expertise in your subject.

Having said that, content marketing is a strategic and time consuming process. In short, it can be broken into three steps:

• Understanding your ideal customer and building a buyer persona
• Creating awesome content that is useful or relevant to your ideal buyer persona
• Making it visible on platforms where your ideal buyers hang out

In most cases, content marketing is used to introduce potential customers into a sales funnel. It usually starts by creating a piece of great content and making it available for a free download in exchange for an email address or another piece of similar information.

You can read more about building a sales funnel here.

Affiliate Marketing

Another extremely popular way to market online products is to let others market it for you. An affiliate program allows your associated affiliates to promote your product and in return, they get to keep a pre-decided percentage of the sale amount.

While finding the right (and genuine) affiliates may take some time and effort, if done right, affiliate marketing has the potential of becoming your top source of revenue.

Conclusion

There are several ways to promote online products. However, in the case of an online course, I believe the above mentioned strategies have the best chance of success.

Have you tried any other strategies to market your online course? Share them with me (and everyone reading this article) in the comment section below!

Author Bio:  Costa Lamprou is the head of PPC at The Elearning Industry Network. With experience from everything ranging from product development and sales to training and PPC, Costa helps eLearning businesses reach their full lead gen potential. When he isn’t helping clients succeed, Costa likes to expand his marketing horizons with the help of eLearning courses.