Now that you have your courses ready and published on your own website, how do you make people buy them? What do you need to do? Well, making the courses and setting up your website is just half the equation. The other half is sales and marketing. In this article, we’re going to discuss how to sell online courses from your own website through five proven-effective marketing strategies.
Five Ways on How to Sell Online Courses from Your Own Website
1. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool that you can use to increase your website’s visibility, traffic, and authority score. All these will lead to a better conversion rate and sales.
Now, we can’t cover everything about SEO here as it’s an extensive topic. However, a quick overview of the processes involved as follows:
- Researching for commercial keywords that your target audience is looking for. You will need to know how your audience thinks and what they search for online. You need to use these keywords on your website. With enough effort, strategy, and execution, your website will rank for these keywords, making you the answer to your target audience’s queries.
- Creating content revolving around the keywords that you want to rank for. That means writing blog posts and creating pages that talk about said keywords. If you’re selling courses about photography, writing topics about “the fundamentals of photography” may lead to getting organic traffic.
- Acquiring backlinks (incoming hyperlinks) from authority or relevant websites. Your website should get backlinks as these work as signals that tell search engines your website is an authority or credible source of information in your industry or niche.
With an effective and well-planned SEO strategy, you can ensure that your courses are seen by prospects, which will eventually lead to converting them into students. The best part about this strategy is that you get organic traffic. You also do not have to pay for ads.
Although it may take a lot of work initially (paying content creators and SEO consultants), it all pays off in the end, as SEO requires very little maintenance once you gain traction.
2. SMM – Social Media Marketing
While SEO is about making your website visible, social media marketing (SMM) is about building connections and nurturing a community. It is a powerful strategy to help you reach more potential customers and drive sales for your online courses. However, it does require you to be consistent.
SMM is about:
- Understanding your target audience (massive general research)
- Choosing the right platforms to be active in (knowing where most of your prospects are – you can’t be on every social media platform unless you have millions to spend)
- Crafting compelling and highly tailored short pieces of content to engage your audience
- Analyzing the performance of whatever content you put out
To sell your courses on social, you must be active in communities like Facebook Groups or LinkedIn. You need not sell – but educate. You want people to see you as an expert that they can lean up to. And what’s they you as that person, they’ll be warm enough to trust you and try out your courses.
3. Content Marketing
Now, here’s another solid answer on how to sell online courses from your own website – content marketing. This strategy is more of a general term that works with all the other strategies mentioned in this article. However, the key emphasis that we want you to understand is that content marketing is about creating content (videos, articles, infographics, etc.) that people care about and would want to share.
There’s no real point if you’re creating content that doesn’t lead to conversion and reach. Think about content marketing as a means to build authority. That means being the choice among thousands of online content pieces for searchers.
Again, if you’re selling courses about photography, wouldn’t people prefer if you have the content to back your claims up? Think about it. Who do you think people will buy from:
- An instructor with a website that offers ebooks, webinars, free educational videos on YouTube, and has a massive following on Facebook (due to being active and consistently helping out people)
- An instructor who just has a website with a bunch of courses
4. Influencer Collaboration
Influencers can be powerful allies in marketing and selling your courses on your website. By leveraging their existing networks (and if you get an influencer that’s recognized and respected in your niche), they can help you reach a larger audience, build brand awareness, and ultimately, drive more sales.
Here are some ways that influencers can help you sell your courses:
- Message them on social and ask if you and the influencer can work together.
- Share your course information and let them create a post on their social media platforms.
- They can also mention the course on their videos or live stream.
Now, the thing with influencers is that it’s not free. No one wants to do things for free. However, it doesn’t have to be an upfront payment. You can always negotiate by giving them a cut or commission whenever one of their followers buys your course.
It’s up to how creative you are at convincing influencers to work with you. Some course creators just pay upfront. Some would do a retainer setup. And some will offer profit sharing. Choose whatever works for you.
5. Paid Media (Running Ad Campaigns)
Last on our list is the most obvious one of all – running ads. Now, ads are our last recommendation because it is quite risky. The biggest reason is their cost. Running ads can be incredibly expensive, especially during the initial stage when you’re still learning your audience, knowing the course they want, and the price range they’re actually interested in.
That’s why we put this as your last option. Ads are powerful, and they can bring in a lot of money. However, it’s best to use ads once you know your niche inside out.
You Can Also Leave the Marketing and Selling to Experts
If you’re confident that your course sells like pancakes, one of the best things you can do is leave the marketing and selling to agencies like us – Upstack Media. By doing so, you get more time to create more courses and work on what you love doing while getting better results.
If you need help with eLearning web design and development and marketing. Let us handle your project. Have an idea? Email us at info@upstackmedia.com for a FREE consultation.
