Effective ways to boost the sales of your online course

In the time of home quarantining and self isolation, it is important to stay occupied with something productive in order to stay sane. 

Moreover, if you are not an essential worker, there is a good chance that your income has taken a huge hit because of this global emergency. As a result of the same, many have found ways to generate a stream of income digitally, like an online course.

Creating online courses has emerged as one of the most popular ways of doing so, and rightfully so. With the right approach, an online course can turn out to be a source of passive income, even after the self-isolation restrictions are lifted.

However, creating an online course can be a time consuming process and may require some serious investment in specialised online training tools like learning management systems. Having said that, if you succeed in developing a genuinely useful online course, the rewards will be well worth the effort.

In order to make sure your efforts, money, and time that went into creating that course returns a positive ROI, you will have to overcome one extremely common challenge faced by course creators- finding and retaining paying students/learners. If you are struggling with a similar challenge, read on. 

Here are three ways to boost the sales of your online course:

Generate free and useful content

While it may seem counterintuitive, generating and sharing free content can help you get the visibility you need in order to generate sales. For instance, by publishing videos on Youtube and Instagram, you can become visible to thousands of potential students on two of the busiest online platforms on the web.

By converting the same video into a long-form article, you can gain additional visibility on LinkedIn. All of this, you from just one piece of content.

The best part is, you don’t necessarily need to whip up something new. You can simply take one of the videos from your course and make it public, sort of like a trailer to a film.

This won’t just help you gain visibility, it will be a testament to the quality of  your training material, and your expertise on the subject.

Engage in guest posting

Speaking of building niche authority and establishing your expertise, a great way to do so is by guest posting. By becoming visible on an already established publication, you will benefit in the following ways:

• You will become visible to their already established and engaged audience of a relevant niche.
• You will build credibility for yourself by collaborating with an established industry authority.

The best part is, every time you publish a guest post, you will be becoming visible to a new, possibly previously unexplored set of audience.

There are several other benefits you can derive from your guest posting efforts. For example, a comprehensive guest posting strategy can help you create a strong backlink profile which can in turn, help you attract more targeted traffic to your website from the search engines.

Similar to guest posting, making appearances on other’s webinars and podcasts can help you build not only credibility, but an audience base that follows you and considers you an authority in your industry.

Become visible on relevant social media groups

This one is a no brainer, joining a social media group (relevant to your niche) costs nothing and immediately grants you access to an engaged audience. With that said, most social media groups don’t appreciate self-promotion.

For this reason, it is important to first engage in conversations, start your own conversations (non-promotional) and be recognised as an active participant of the group before you ever mention your online course.

While this strategy may be time consuming, it is one of the cheapest ways to tap into a targeted and engaged audience.

Conclusion

Marketing an online course is no child’s play. In order to generate a consistent stream of sales, you need a comprehensive and multi-faceted marketing strategy. However, if you have limited marketing experience, the above-mentioned steps, when applied correctly, are enough to get you started.