Welcome back! And we’re getting close to wrapping things up.
With your pipeline complete, it’s time to talk about the final part of your online course ecosystem: promotion.
So let’s set the scene.
The Question that Ultimately Determines Your Success
If you’ve studied all the lessons and completed all the assignments so far, you’re poised on the brink of success.
After all, you’ve created a kickass course for a well-defined market that helps people with a problem get a highly desirable result in a distinctive way.
And you’ve built a simple, valued-driven pipeline leading people from a free training course or webinar to your sales page and an offer to buy your course.
The truth is that right now the success of your course almost entirely depends on how many of the right people you can entice into your pipeline.
That’s why I want you to shift your thinking from selling your course (the ultimate goal) to promoting your pipeline (the route to that goal).
And since your free training offers genuinely valuable progress for your target audience this isn’t a task of persuasion it’s primarily one of awareness.
So the big question is:
How many of the right people can you make aware of the existence and benefits of your free training?
The answer to that question comes down to the tactics that you choose and your level of determination and consistency in following them.
Reviewing Your Full Launch Tactics
Now is a great time to go back to the assignment in Module 03: Targeting Your Market, where you drafted a recruitment strategy for your students.
Review the tactics you anticipated you’d be using for your first full launch. How do they look now that you’re getting ready to relaunch?
You don’t have to stick to those exact tactics but it’s useful to remind yourself what you originally planned to do.
You can also go back to the list of course promotion tactics from that same module and see if any new ones stand out.
In practice, how you promote your free training depends on whether you are promoting an evergreen course where people can join at any time or an open shut version where they have to join within a certain window.
We’ll start with the evergreen model and deal with the open/close variation in the second part of this two-part lesson.
Evergreen Course: 3 Different Ways to Promote (+ Tactics)
For the evergreen model, I’ve created a simple three-part approach to help you think about how and where the promotion of your free training happens.
(Remember: for an evergreen model, your free training is most likely to be an email mini course, unless you create a pre-recorded webinar.)
Here’s a high-level summary of ways to promote your free training:
- Add promotional links to your existing online “real estate”
- Integrate the training into your regular marketing activities
- Branch out with tactics designed to reach a wider audience
Let’s go into more detail for each one and learn some specific tactics.
1. Add promotional links to your existing online real estate
The first thing you’ll want to do when promoting an evergreen pipeline is to add links to any existing places online where people are already seeing you.
Here are some examples:
- Your social media profiles (some platforms offer a link at the top)
- Your website menu bar (add a item for “Free Course” or “Free Training”)
- Your regular email signature (so recipients can discover your course)
- Your profile and/or signature in relevant communities you belong to
- Your online articles (you can put a link at the bottom or in your bio)
- Your self-published books (add a link next time you update the content)
These “passive placements” are unlikely to fill your course on their own, but they’re easy to do and help build awareness over the longer term.
2. Integrate the training into your regular marketing activities
The next way to promote your free training is to start doing it as part of your regular marketing activities.
For instance, if you already post on LinkedIn every day to promote yourself and your business, you could decide that one or two of those weekly posts will now reference your free training.
One post might talk about your free training directly, while the other talks about a related topic and then mentions the training at the end as a P.S.
The same approach can be used for all the major social networks.
Here are some other ideas for leveraging what you’re already doing:
- Email newsletter – if you publish a regular email newsletter look for opportunities to mention your free course (as long as you change the context each time, it will seem fresh not repetitive)
- Networking intros – if you belong to any online networking groups, it’s common to give a short introduction at the start of each meeting, and this is a great opportunity to mention your free training
- Business cards – if you do a lot of networking in person, you can add a link to your free training course on your business card, or print new cards where the training course is the main focus
However you decide to promote your training, remember this is something that’s valuable and free, so don’t be afraid to talk about it often.
3. Branch out with tactics designed to reach a wider audience
The previous tactics are effective for creating awareness among people already in your network.
And as long as you’re actively growing that network, the awareness of your free training and full course will also grow, leading to new sign-ups.
However, you’ll also want to employ some additional tactics in order to reach a wider audience – people who don’t know you yet.
Here are some examples:
- Swap “freebies” – find business owners who target the same audience as you but solve a different problem and offer to promote their “freebie” in exchange for promoting your free training
- Sponsor a newsletter – email newsletters are increasingly popular and many larger ones will let you add a small ad to one issue for a fee
- Run social ads – running ads can be an effective way of getting in front of a brand new audience and you can start small
- Write guest posts – some popular bloggers accept original articles from guest writers who get to put a promotional link in their bio in return
- Be a podcast guest – many podcasts are always looking for new guests and making an appearance on a relevant show can be a great way to raise awareness (and also mention your free training)
As you can see, there are lots of ways to reach new people in your target market. You’ll need to experiment to discover which will work best for you.
Ready for Part 2?
In the next lesson we’ll look at how your approach changes if you’re promoting an open/close course.
See you there!