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7 Effective Ways to Manage and Promote Your Online Courses

Updated on by in Business

Okay…you have finally crafted an awesome online course. All those sleepless nights are behind and it’s time to start making money. But how to promote online courses and generate some nice income? Let me be honest with you, the entire success of your efforts depends on these two factors: the quality of your product and the marketing strategy you’ll choose. If you think, your course is not helpful and valuable to your target audience, stop looking for marketing channels and improve your product right away. However, if you love your online course and sincerely believe it’s perfectly done and ready to be launched, then read and implement each and every marketing advice mentioned in this article.

effective-ways-to-manage-and-promote-online-courses

Here are 7 effective ways to manage and promote your online courses.:

1. Record and publish your promo video on YouTube

That’s the very first thing you should do after your online course is released (I hope you already have a website). Forget about expensive promotional videos designed by professional agencies, simply create a script and record a live-action video with your smartphone. Do everything possible to sound persuasive and informative in this video.

Once the video is recorded, create a YouTube channel and publish it. The YouTube channel is crucial here due to the fact that you’ll have to keep in touch with your students by recording and publishing new videos after you start making sales.

Here is an example of a professional youtube channel designed to promote online courses. Looks great, huh?
promote-online-courses-with-videos

2. Build an email list and start doing email marketing

It’s not a secret that email marketing is one of the cheapest yet effective ways to generate leads.

The process is as simple as this: you create a lead magnet page with a free content (e-books, checklists, case studies), reach out to your target audience and exchange this free content for their email addresses.

And there is no need to spend hundreds of dollars on hiring a professional web designers to create a lead magnet page. I suggest using unbounce to create landing pages quickly and easily. The pricing is $79 / month and there is a 30-day free trial.

As soon as your web page is designed and published, connect this page with mailchimp or other email marketing software (you can do the integration on unbounce) and start the lead generation process.

Use social media groups and Facebook ads to drive traffic to your lead magnet page and then convert leads into customers with email marketing.

3. Promote your online courses on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Social media is King.

Thousands of entrepreneurs and marketing professionals already know this fact and utilize social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram to reach out to target audience and consequently make sales.

Here is how you can market your online courses on each of these platforms:

Facebook
Facebook ads are super effective to promote online courses. If you have no budget for FB ads, then join your niche related groups on Facebook, participate in discussions and try to promote your online course there.

Instagram
Instagram might be a wonderful way to make some sales. Create a page and use Instazood to automate and simplify your marketing. Instazood allows you to do mass likes, mass follows, automatically comment, unfollow, send direct messages and do other awesome things there. The price is $14 / month, but it absolutely worth it.

LinkedIn
If you are looking for B2B clients for your online course, LinkedIn is the best place for prospecting.
Here is the strategy you can implement to start getting leads from LinkedIn:

  • Send connection requests (personalized!) to your target audience and follow them up once your connection request is accepted. Since you have to do this daily and connecting & messaging up to 100 users / day might be time-consuming, I recommend to use LinMonster to automate this work. LinMonster is a chrome extension that allows you to automatically connect and message users.
    automate-linked-connection-request-with-linmonster
  • Publish posts and engage in relevant Linkedin groups.
  • Retarget LinkedIn connections on Facebook. You can do that by downloading your 1st level connections’ data from LinkedIn, importing the CSV file on Facebook as a custom audience and running cheap and highly targeted ads. Smart and simple.
  • Publish guest posts on popular blogs

Make a research, find the most popular industry blogs and reach out to them to publish your articles on their blogs. Even though the process might be quite exhausting, you should receive extra traffic to your website without any financial investment from your side.

5. Host a live webinar

Live webinars can become a fantastic lead generation tool and help you effectively market your online courses. Here is how it works:

  • create a free yet valuable 2-hour course specifically for a webinar
  • get yourself ready for the webinar
  • create a landing page with Unbounce
  • generate webinar registrations by driving traffic from Facebook ads
  • register at WebinarNinja ($39 / month) to host your very first webinar
  • convert your webinar visitors into clients

Remember to provide as much value as possible during the live webinar and encourage visitors participate in discussion.

6. Promote your online course on Quora

The entire business world likes Quora. And that’s not without a reason.
promote-online-courses-on-quora
Quora allows you to find questions asked by your target audience and let you give a quick answer. The idea is to find the most popular questions (with the biggest number of followers) and creatively answer them to get as many upvotes as possible. The most “upvoted” answers will rank high enough to get noticed by your target audience. The lion’s share of viewers will open your profile, read your summary and visit your website.

7. Reach out to influencers for recommendations

Influencers are individuals with big names who have an army of devoted followers and the power to affect purchase decisions. Your task is to find a few influencers in your niche, get in touch with them and let them know you have created a highly valuable online course and would be happy to provide them with a free access. In most cases, they will accept your offer and make a recommendation that will consequently bring you sales.

Conclusion

Now you finally have access to the most effective marketing strategy developed to help you promote your online courses online and start making sales right away. The only thing you should do before you start implementing this marketing stuff is to make sure your product is well-done and competitive. If you believe in your product and passionately head over heels in love with what you have designed, then it’s a high time to go forth and get started with marketing!

Author: Alex Fergisson
Alex has vast experience in B2B lead generation and has become one of the most successful LinkedIn experts on the market. He helps entrepreneurs, small businesses and even growing companies to skyrocket their business on LinkedIn with automation tool Octopus CRM.

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