Hello and welcome to this lesson which is called: “How You’ll Sell Your Course”.
After all, that’s what this hard work has been building up to, right? Getting to the point where you can sell your course and keep selling it into the future.
Now, by this stage, there’s a good chance you’ve already sold your course to at least a few people already, when you ran your beta.
But now you’re getting ready to launch a more polished version you’ll need a different sales approach.
You can’t just rely on word of mouth and existing contacts to get people through the door. You need a more robust and repeatable strategy.
And that’s what this lesson is all about. Let’s start with a quick recap.
Quick Recap: Ecosystem of a Successful Course
It probably seems like a long time ago but let’s revisit one of the very first lessons, where we talked about the ecosystem for a successful course.
Remember how we had those four concepts: Promise, Programme, Pipeline and Promotion?
And remember how they stacked up in relation to each other: the Promotion fills the Pipeline, the pipeline sells the Programme and the Programme delivers the Promise?
Well, if you’ve kept up with your assignments, you’ve already ticked off two of those components:
- Defining your target market and your course destination covered off the Promise.
- Building out your prototype content, running your beta, then revising it and packaging it all up into a final product covered off the Programme.
So now it’s time to look at the Pipeline and the Promotion.
Remember:
- The Pipeline is a sequence of manual or automatic steps that takes a potential buyer on a journey that warms them up for a sale.
- The Promotion is whatever you do to raise awareness and get the right people into the start of the Pipeline.
We’ll have a separate lesson about Promotion.
In practice it’s more of a collection of tactics than a single strategy and you’ll choose the tactics that are right for you based on your specific situation.
So for the rest of this lesson we’ll focus on the Pipeline.
How Your Pipeline Will Work
We’ll keep things as simple as possible with a two-part pipeline.
And we can sum it up in the following way:
Free Training + Sales Page
Essentially, you’ll create some free training (based on some aspect of your main course) and then use that as “bait” to get people into your pipeline.
Once inside the training, people will get genuinely valuable content that not only helps them move forwards but also establishes you as an expert.
When the training is complete, you’ll introduce your course and direct people to a sales page that explains how your course works and invites them to buy.
Note: this approach goes back to a key concept from that first module: you’re not promoting your course directly, you’re promoting your pipeline.
In other words, you’re not just posting a link to your sales page on social media and hoping people will bite. That’s too big an “ask” too soon.
Instead, you’re grabbing people’s attention with an opportunity to get some free but valuable training, then using that training to warm people up before sending them to the sales page where you’ll make your offer.
What Does this “Free Training” Look Like?
So what exactly does this free training look like?
Well, we’ll talk about the content in a later lesson but from a practical perspective it’s either a live webinar or a pre-built mini course.
So it’s either a session on Zoom (or similar) where you deliver the training live, or it’s a short sequence of short lessons that deliver the training for you.
And here’s the clever bit…
The free training will have the same structure regardless of whether you deliver it as a webinar or a mini course.
I’ll tell you more about that structure in that later lesson. Right now, let’s talk about how you choose between those two delivery options.
Webinar or Mini Course?
So which is best: webinar or mini course?
Well, it depends on a few different factors.
The first is whether you’re going to run an open/close or an evergreen launch.
Remember we talked about those two different styles of launches back at the start of the programme?
- Evergreen is where your course is available for enrolment pretty much all year round.
- Open/close is where you open it up for a short period of time, enrol people, then close it down again.
We also talked about some of the trade-offs in that earlier lesson but from a pipeline perspective it breaks down like this:
- If you’re following the evergreen model, it usually works best to use a mini course, because the free training is available whenever it’s needed.
- If you’re following an open/close model it may work better to have use a live webinar, because you’re in control of the timing and a live webinar can create a sense of excitement and immediacy.
Here are some other considerations:
- If you’re not super confident on camera, you may not want the pressure of running a “high stakes” live webinar.
- On the flipside, a webinar will take you less time to pull together than a mini course.
- It’s also possible to have a pre-recorded webinar using software that delivers a recording as though it’s happening live.
If in doubt, I recommend the mini course approach. It draws upon the same skills you used to build your course and can be easily adapted to both evergreen and open/close launches.
What About the Sales Page?
So that’s how the free training works, in overview at least.
What about the second part of the equation, the sales page?
Well, that too will have its own dedicated lesson, which is coming up.
But let’s discuss it briefly here anyway. After all, it’s a key piece of how you’ll sell your course!
Your sales page is a carefully structured web page (usually hosted on your course platform but maybe on your main website instead) which does the job of actually selling your course.
And the reason I say “carefully structured” is that it needs to take readers on a deliberate and persuasive journey, ultimately leading them to an invitation to take action and buy your course.
You can think of it like this…
If it’s the job of your free training to grab people’s interest and warm them up then it’s the job of your sales page to close the deal.
That doesn’t mean lots of pushy sales copy and hyperbolic claims, but it does mean you need to clearly describe what your course does, for whom, and how in a way that resonates with your target market.
But don’t worry, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that, and even give you a couple of detailed examples.
See you in the next lesson!