How Can You Go From zero to 1000 Online Course Students With Zero Ad Budget
It's all set. You have discovered that there's a gap in your space and you've created your lesson plan, You're elated and passionate about it all. It's possible that you're finished creating the curriculum. There is a dilemma: how do you spread your message to students who might be interested? What can you do to make the site more known to your target community? To which sites are you supposed to share your link?
I have good news for you: this is an easily resolved issue. A lot of authors before you have developed online courses to cover a variety of content. And I'll teach you the best methods to build your class from zero students to 1,000 students. All without spending anything on advertisements.
First, however I'll dispel the most common error teachers make when they set up to create their own course. And that mistake is that they pursue a build-first approach rather than an audience-first approach. The reason why the "build-first" strategy isn't optimal is that you're assuming a lot of things to be true. This exposes your course to lots of risk in your course. Particularly, when it comes to what you should compose and how the class structure should look.
However, below are the four main components to this mini-tutorial to ensure continuous, reliable traffic for your instruction:
- How to Discover Where your Ideal Audience Hangs Out
- Learn to read your audience's Minds
- How to Build Respect and Reputation among your Audience
- How do you share your course with a group of people who are ready to purchase your product
How to Discover Where your Ideal Audience Hangs Out
Let's pretend that you're a consulting client of mine. You'd like to promote a course around Marketing Analytics.
One thing I'm going to state to you is that you'll need to ask the appropriate question -- you need to start by asking "who will you serve" instead of "what you plan to serve". If you're in this Marketing Analytics case, you will then have to make a choice: do you intend to focus on Marketing Managers, CMOs, Entrepreneurs or marketing newbies?
Say that you've chosen to concentrate on business owners.
If so The first thing to do is to search for "where people from this group hang out". The most effective way to do this is to search to find "online lounges". Online lounges are places on the internet that allow people to discuss things related to the subject they're interested in. This could include forums, blogs and mailing lists. How I accomplish this is by following these steps:
- Open up your Google or Bing search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
- Search for a query with any combination of these:
Forum - Profession + forum
- - Profession + "topic" + mailing list
Professional - Topic + blog
Topics + Professionals and a forum for industry
- Profession + topic + a link-sharing website (Eg. Reddit, stumbleupon)
- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum
Just there, I get to discover 10+ potential forums that I could target.
It doesn't end there yet. When you've selected a forum, you must explore further, and then create another search query using your preferred topic. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you want to look out for in this instance is any sign of trouble or pain in the initial post. The original question was just "marketing" in the subreddit. It's not working.
What can we do to refine our hunt to truly search for the source of pain? Add "pain indicators" for example "help" or "advice requested". We'll look at the results. We can see that in just the first page, we get a lot of interesting threads.
If you've come across specific threads with LOTS of expressions of pain and apprehension, you'll know you're in the right online space to advertise to in the future. When you start to do more research it will be apparent that some forums work to address specific issues, while some forums don't. This helps you concentrate your marketing efforts on areas where your ideal target people hang out. This is critical to the effectiveness of your plan.
From the above 15 minute exercise, we just got evidence that reddit.com/r/entrepreneur is a great place to promote our marketing course.
Explore different forums! My advice is that you must find at least 10 online lounges. Blogs are also useful (especially because of its extremely frequent discussion sections).
How to Read the minds of your audience
Now, you're faced with a many threads with clear indications of pain. Let's highlight all of them and truly understand who are audience is.
When you've collected enough information then you'll begin to notice trends in who your target audience is. After you've identified these patterns, you start to develop a clear understanding of what your audience feels and thinks about marketing overall.
From the above we can see a few small patterns that are emerging (we'll need 10+ more difficult threads before we can really understand) that entrepreneurs really require three factors: an extremely efficient digital marketing plan that requires little cost of capital, useful tips on cities-specific marketing and how to position oneself in order to attract high-value customers.
Earlier, in our hypothetical scenario, you had a desire to build a product around Marketing Analytics. However, it turned out that it could be too complex (at least for it to be used in the Reddit Lounge online). The best option is to follow a course focused on low-budget, high-efficiency advertising, local marketing, and seeking & closing high-value clients.
My course structure to deal with these types of pain could then begin to look as follows:
- How can you use Interest Targeting on Facebook to locate the most desirable clients in a matter of cents a click
- How do you build a Referral Machine with these Pitch Scripts in Your Next Local Chamber of Commerce Event
- Find out what needs Only high-value clients have
Course Description: "How to Get High-Value clients using Hyperlocal and Hyper targeted Marketing"
If you were to change that direction within the Reddit space, I'm sure that will get the attention of others. What do you think evidence-based marketing can offer us?
How to build Trust and Reputation with your audience
Apart from identifying pains it is important to be a authoritative figure in these virtual spaces.
This means that you should give bite-sized suggestions anytime you experience these problems. By "bite-sized," I refer to things that range from one to 10 words, but that is practical enough for someone to use.
In this way, I would answer someone who says "haven't seen Facebook as helpful" and "need an effective plan" in this way:
"I know that you require an effective digital strategy due to your low budget. However, I'm surprised, that you find FB advertisements to not be efficient. I run FB ads a lot in my consultancy, and here's the way I recommend you conduct your targeting in order to obtain high-quality clicks for $0.40 - $0.80 per click:
- ONLY use interest targeting. All other settings are left as defaults.
- If you are using interest targeting ensure that you use more than 10 interests, and then leave out interests with a large reach. Reason being large reach per interest will equate to a high costs per click. If I wanted to target marketers, I would use interests through gurus such as 'Neil Patel', 'Derek Helfpern or 'Darren Rowse', etc. I'd leave out Gary Vaynerchuk' because his popularity is far too vast!
- Make sure that the TOTAL reach doesn't exceed 800,000. people
- Start your test! Check that your test is locked at $5 per day. Do not ever use the lifetime budgeting option.
- If you are spending more than $1 per click, you need to cut off interest with the greatest impact and then add additional 'niche interest
- If you're looking for suggestions on 'niche' interests, google for influencers, tools, and even software, then test it out"
If you offer advice in an unassuming level and in a way that is actionable, you will gain respect and credibility within the space.
How to Share Your Course to an Audience that's Ready to Buy your Product
"Isn't it a violation of the law to share URLs? !" "What if I am banned? !"
You probably have had this thought. They're valid claims. To solve for this problem, what you could do is make use of inline links within your posts and pair this with other links not related to your website. This will help convey the idea that you intend to be helpful and not be spammy. Here's a personal example in which I attempted to assist someone having trouble in landing pages.
By doing these 4 general, strategic steps I was able to increase my site to have approximately 4K-5K organic visits per month. 89% of these came from direct links. Check out the stats here from SimilarWeb. No dollar spent on advertising whatsoever.
Offer a lot of actionable, free value to the world and the world will be awestruck by the world back. I hope you achieve great success in your journey!
Kenn Costales is an growth hacker as well as an online course creator who is passionate about exploring new methods of marketing products on the internet without spending a dime.