7 Reasons no one is buying your brand new online course… and how to fix it.

Welcome to the TrainingSite.io open classroom today. And what are we gonna be covering?

Well I’ve put something together that will help you out if your coach or consultant, someone who’s interested in selling or teaching online, and you want to have your classroom, you wanna have a membership site, you wanna be able to create and sell courses.

[00:00:29] So if that’s you, we’ve got some great information for you today. Just going through what normally happens when someone creates a course, whether it be their first course, or maybe they’ve created some courses already. And they’re asking the big question how come this isn’t selling? Why is my course not selling?

[00:00:47] So that’s what we’re gonna cover today. I have about, I think I’ve got 12 or 13 points on things that are probably forgotten. So we’re gonna go over those and they’ll give you a little surprise at the end. Not a surprise, a quick bonus at the end on how you can overcome these 12 pieces. And I’m also gonna talk about kind of the.

[00:01:04] Big problems that start off when people are trying to sell their course. So we’ll cover that material. I’m gonna make a couple changes here on my setup and see if we can. There we go. Get some tracking set up and back onto this beautiful face for today’s live webcast. So, what’s happening? How are we doing this?

[00:01:25] So here’s, here’s what’s gonna happen. I am am gonna show a little bit of some mind map stuff, which I use laying all of this out a little bit later.

[00:01:47] The huge problem most people have when they’re selling courses, and the big problem is, is that there’s kind of a process that starts out when people get started, which doesn’t really help them, like what normally happens when someone does a course. So I’ll go through those kind of quickly.

[00:02:09] And the biggest pro, these are, I got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I got seven actually, that we can talk about today. But there’s seven kind of things that happen normally when people create their course or first course, and they’re wondering how come it hasn’t sold? Or how come I’m not selling any. So here’s, here’s kind of the first thing.

[00:02:29] Most people who are subject matter experts or people who want to teach and they’re not sure, or they’re just doing their first course or they’re, you know, having trouble selling them, is they create a course on an untested topic. So there’s a huge problem for most experts. Again, coaches, consultant, speakers.

[00:02:49] If you’re an expert on something, you are an expert on something. Doesn’t mean that the people that you are teaching want to be an expert or even wanna learn what you’re an expert on. So one of the things you want to do upfront is you want to make sure that before you create any course, Before you create a course, you want to make sure that the topic has been tested and there’s some existing demand for the topic.

[00:03:14] And if there’s no demand, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much you know, how professional the course is, or whatever you put together, it just doesn’t matter. If no one wants what it is that you’re selling or wants to know about what you’re teaching, no one’s gonna buy it or pay for it. And in fact, no one is actually going to even view it.

[00:03:36] So, you know, we’ve talked in the past about doing things where you’re doing something specifically for YouTube or you’re not selling it, you’re just providing a tutorial or some basic education. People aren’t even gonna view it if. They don’t care about what it is that you’re trying to teach. So the first thing is you gotta make sure that you’ve got a tested topic.

[00:03:56] And again, we’ve covered this in a couple other videos on how to test your topic, but just make sure, like tick this one off right at the start and say, yes, I have tested the topic. I understand how it applies to me, and more importantly, I understand how it applies to other people and they want to know or learn what it is that they’re testing.

[00:04:14] So that’s kind of the first thing that, you know, you, you want to make sure that you do. Now, kind of tied to that, is when people make their course. What normally happens when they’re making their course is they make the course based on the content that they, as the instructor thinks is important. It’s a course for the instructor.

[00:04:35] You’re in your head and you go, what do I need to share with people? Like how do I share what it is that I know? And you go through from your perspective ticking off in terms of the course content you’re sharing what you think is important. , you’ve gotta flip that around and make sure that you put together your course content in a way that engages and educates the people who are going to be viewing it.

[00:05:00] So it’s gotta be from their perspective, not yours. You’re gonna have trouble selling any course if it’s not coming from the perspective of the person who’s going. Man, I wanna sell my courses. What do I need to do? Not what do I need to check off to share with people? It’s what does the learner, or the student, or the person consuming it, what do they need to do to figure this out?

[00:05:20] Now, in this part, particular example, I need people to know who are having trouble selling their courses. I need them to identify with one of these and go, Hey, these are things that are affecting me and that’s why we’re going through this part upfront. So it’s gotta be course. Not for you, but it’s for your students and the perspective that they have, not what you have.

[00:05:42] So if you’re doing that, you got a proven topic, something that’s interested. The biggest problem that I see in creating courses is at the end of the day, the course. is overly produced in terms of the video production or the content production and the way it looks, or you as the instructor, want it to be perfect and professional and you don’t focus on the quality content again that the learner needs.

[00:06:07] So these first courses, it doesn’t really, I shouldn’t say it doesn’t really matter. Put less emphasis on the production quality and more emphasis on the learning experience and the content quality. So don’t focus on the production part, focus on the content and the engagement part. That’s another one. Here’s, here’s the other one, number four.

[00:06:28] That was number three. Number four, I’m gonna touch on this quickly. Number four, the big problem that I run to time after time is that when people are creating a course, I’ve seen some people take six months to create a course, a year to create a course. I remember when I wrote my first book it took me almost a year to write the.

[00:06:49] And I write new content. I had it in my head and it was stuff that I was doing on a regular basis, but I wrote it out as new for your first courses. One of the other problems that I find that most people do is they create new content for a course. . And I think that’s a huge mistake because it takes just too long.

[00:07:10] What I’m gonna suggest that you do, instead of creating new content, what I want you to do is capture the content you’re creating already and turn it into course. And again, that’s something called digital exhaust. I need you to capture your digital, digital exhaust and convert it to courses, not. A course from scratch.

[00:07:30] So another huge problem there, number four, number five, people who create a course, and most notably their first course, and they’re wondering why it’s not selling, is because they’re focusing on creating a course. I’m gonna suggest that you need courses. Courses. That’s right. You’re gonna have to be able to sell some courses or that Hub and Spock spoke model where you have a theme at the center of it and you have multiple courses supporting that theme or supplementing the.

[00:08:01] idea of the theme or the subject matter that you wanna share with people, or the big goal that you’re trying, the big fat claim that you’re trying to be able to provide to people who are consuming your content. So don’t focus on one course. Focus on the theme or the hub and the smaller courses and how they apply to that big promise that you’re.

[00:08:23] and think of it like a a, a wheel, right? You’ve got a hub. If you’ve got one spoke, one course, that’s not a very sturdy wheel. You’re gonna have a lot of trouble. On the other hand, if you have three spokes, four spokes, six spokes, seven spokes, you’ve got a lot more support for that big picture that you’re providing.

[00:08:44] So always think in the background, you’re probably going, why isn’t this one course sell? What often happens is you try and have one course that covers everything, which isn’t a great idea. It’s very, very hard to sell because you have to describe what it is that you’re selling. You long time to put it all together.

[00:09:01] So think of a hub and a spoke model. Focus on one spoke at a time that supports the promise of the hub. Okay. Two other things I just want to talk about, and then I’m gonna go through some of the things that we run into on a regular. And again, if you do run into a situation where there are some questions here make sure to put them in the chat or subscribe to the channel and there’s an opportunity in the description.

[00:09:27] I’ll put all the links below, of course, to the teach online.io site, which is free to join. Where we have hundreds of tutorials available, as well as the ones here that are on YouTube. So you certainly go and subscribe. Hit that like button. Go and subscribe there. So last two, I want you to think about on why your courses are not selling, and these are pretty big ones.

[00:09:49] You have no marketing plan or no course marketing plan, and you put up a content, you create a video, you put it up on YouTube, you put it up on your website, and you go, man, I’m. Send an email out to my list. Great. How come no one’s buying it? The course is only one part of your business. The course is only, again, a spoke in the marketing of your business.

[00:10:16] There’s all sorts of other ways to generate revenue from courses and think of a course not as the only way to, to generate your income for your business. A spoke or a revenue stream that is part of a whole network of revenue streams. So don’t just focus on, I created my big course. It’s got tons of great content in it.

[00:10:36] It took six months to do it. It covers everything. It’s the be all and everything. I’m gonna put it up. and I got it on my site, or I put it on one of the services where I can sell courses. How come no one’s buying? It has to be part where you wanna have it as part of a business model that includes courses and other revenue streams.

[00:10:57] And you wanna be able to sell the course, not just present it. And this is a big problem that I run into with a lot of people who just have great stuff in their head. They want to sell their content. , but they forget to do some selling. You’re gonna have to talk to people. You’re gonna have to follow up with people.

[00:11:15] You’re gonna have to be engaged with people, be persuasive, and tell people why they even want to buy what it is that you’re selling. You have to sell something. And here’s the big takeaway from all of this, why your course is not selling. and when I first started doing this, it was all about you know, email marketing.

[00:11:33] You could, you know, in, in the early two thousands when I started selling courses, you could just send email out to your list and people would buy courses cuz there weren’t a lot of courses. Now there’s an overabundance of courses and you have to be able to inform and educate people about your course.

[00:11:53] In a whole bunch of different ways. And what is that key way? It’s content marketing. And what we’re gonna do now is I’m gonna go through some of the pieces of content marketing or the other steps that you have to take to sell your courses. So if you were looking at those seven ways that we just went through and you’re going, my courses isn’t selling, and no, I didn’t test the topic or.

[00:12:15] No, I wrote it from my perspective, not my student’s perspective. And oh boy, I spent a whole bunch of money with a video editor putting it all together, getting it fancy. I did that, you know, I. Bid one big course instead of a whole bunch of little courses that all fit together. I don’t have a marketing plan.

[00:12:34] I was hoping that if I put this course together, I’d be able to retire independently or have this passive ins in passive income stream that I’m told about all the time. Not gonna happen. Not gonna happen at the end of the. Today where we are today, it’s all about content marketing. You are going to have to become a content marketer or have someone who’s professional doing content marketing on your behalf.

[00:13:01] And I run into this all the time. We’ve got. You know, a lot of authors and speakers who are really good up on the platform, they may have written a book, they haven’t created a course, and they don’t know how to do all of that follow up or marketing the content that they have to get people to want to buy the course that they’re selling.

[00:13:23] So it’s gonna be about content. Which is, there’s an awful lot to it. There’s a lot to content marketing. And again, I’m gonna go through them. What did I have? I got one. Let me just see if I can open up the screen here. We’ll put it and see if I can let’s go to the screen here. And what have we got?

[00:13:40] Let’s open this up. I think we’re okay here. Oh, open up this one. And it’s untitled. There we go. Okay, so we should have the screen. Let’s make sure I’m on the. And it doesn’t look like that one. So let’s try, is that one? There we go. Let’s try that one. Okay. We’ll go back to there.

[00:14:06] I don’t want to do that one, so we’ll do another one here. And again, this is e camm live that I’m using brand new with it . So you’ll see some glitches and stuff that gets marked up. So I’ll bring that one up and we’ll see if we can get that one working. There we go. Perfect. Okay. So and I actually put a course together on this one about how to use X mine, which I used to put the courses together.

[00:14:28] This is actually what I did just before we got. is I went over some of the pieces on why courses don’t sell and what we’re actually going to to cover here. So, you know, I talked about what normally happens. I spelled it incorrectly, but it’s there. So that’s there. , but content origin. Here’s, here’s the, we’ll go through these pieces and, and kind of why they’re important.

[00:14:52] Content marketing. They’re, again, this isn’t everything. This is just the things that came off the top of my head on what you should consider when we’re doing this. Content marketing is blog posts. Video, podcasts and webinar recordings. And here’s, here’s the whole idea behind content marketing, is that you have to have again, content in the form of one of these pieces that I’ve written down.

[00:15:18] At a minimum, there’s usually text, audio, video that are pieces there. You have to use the content to distribute that as wide as you possibly can with links back to your course and or a way to capture an email to get people to raise their hand and say, yes, I’m interested. And at the minimum you want to capture an email address, so you’re gonna have to produce or use.

[00:15:45] Information or content that you’ve captured, and you’re gonna have to grab onto it, hold onto it. And here’s some of the ones that I recommend that you’re doing and they’re not in any order. And I’ll tell you why. Blog posts, if you are. Proficient at writing blog posts that are good content that people will actually wanna take the time to read.

[00:16:06] I, I envy you cause I hate writing blog posts. I wrote for again, when I first started, I wrote a monthly article for Entrepreneur Magazine. and I can remember those articles. I think were, you know, 1500 to 2000 word articles. It would take me a day and a half to write an article that was of the Quality for Entrepreneur magazine.

[00:16:32] So that’s a day or a day and a half, just to write a one page blog post as an example. It was for Entrepreneur Magazine, but I put it up on my website. It was a blog. , and that was something that people wanted to read that had a particular topic that people wanted to learn about. And I was assuming that they were gonna read all 2000 words.

[00:16:55] Are they gonna read 2000 alt words? I don’t really know. Are they gonna read it today or are they gonna watch a TikTok video or a YouTube short for 30 seconds, 60 seconds or a minute? So if you can do blog posts, that’s fine. You’re proficient at. That’s great. If you have a whole bunch of them, we can repurpose them.

[00:17:14] But blog posts are one of the pieces of content that I suggest that you hold onto. Now, what do I mean by this? The reason blog posts are still important is because. When you have a blog post on your website, it’s a way to direct people back to your website, not necessarily your course. There’s search engine optimization.

[00:17:38] There’s a ability to have opt-ins on blog posts. It’s just a way to have feelers out, to have people come back to your. To start the engagement process to get people involved in your course. So blog posts are a good idea if you, I think you should always have them. What I’m saying is that a blog post doesn’t have to be written.

[00:18:01] It can be created from. The other three pieces of content that we’re talking about here, what is it? Videos, podcasts, and webinar recordings. And these are, for the most part, it’s audio information or it’s video information that can also be converted to text to be turned into a blog post. So you’re gonna have some content origin there.

[00:18:27] You want to be able to go look, I’m gonna go all in on video. I’m gonna create all sorts of videos cuz I like doing it. I like doing Camtasia videos. I like talking to the camera. I’m pretty good doing it. If you can do that, go all in on it, pick one of them. We’re gonna show you how to create a blog post from it.

[00:18:44] If you have a regular podcast where you’re interviewing other people or you’re. Zoom calls or recordings or interviews with video capture all of this stuff. Capture all of that content, and that’s the one thing that you’ve gotta make sure that you do upfront is how do I capture the content? Capture everything.

[00:19:02] This is that digital exhaust that I was talking to. This is stuff you do on a regular basis. You’re talking to customers, you’re talking to partners, you’re talking to supplier. with their permission. Capture it. Capture the video, capture the audio. Okay? So just capture as much as you can and hang on to that content because you’re going to use it to market your course now.

[00:19:27] Okay, market my course again, got these four pieces. I’m starting collect it. What happens from there? And I’ve got a couple pieces here. And let me just do, actually, we’ll do a little zoom here and see if I. Do it a little bit bigger. So we, so we see it. There we go. So here’s some interesting things here. I got this tracking analytics.

[00:19:48] These is just, I was just thinking these, going through them. It wasn’t something that I went, Hey, we gotta do it this way. And I won’t move them around. I’m actually gonna move one of the pieces kind of up here. I’m gonna take this one called transcriptions and we’ll put this one up here. Now, why would I put transcriptions underneath?

[00:20:06] the content origin you can use. There’s a number of tools that do this. I’m going to suggest that the minute you capture some content, That you get a transcription of the content if it’s video or audio. And how do you do that? The easiest way to do that is to use a tool, and I’ll open it up here, is to use a tool called Descript and delete that one there.

[00:20:30] There’s one for Camtasia called a, I think it’s Audi eight for Camtasia text from TechSmith that it used to do screen captures. There’s one there. There’s a little bit of money to it. I’m gonna get rid of that one. We’ll just keep it at Descript, which is inexpensive. This tool takes your podcast, takes your video, it turns it into words.

[00:20:48] So if you have captured some of this content, you have the ability to automatically create text from it, which can be used in all of the different places that we’re talking about. So you got some content, you have audio, video, and now you have text with it. So what’s needed after. We’re gonna have to have some graphics.

[00:21:12] So let’s move that one up. And again, graphics in terms of grabbing people’s attention is the be all and end all right. Now, especially if you’re on YouTube. Same thing happens if you’re doing course graphics or you’re introducing courses. Same thing happens when you’re doing a blog post. It’s really important that you’re gonna have to create some graphics for your.

[00:21:34] So not only do we have to have content to do content marketing, we need all three types of content in this case we need the text, the audio, and the video. The fourth piece that we’re gonna need is we’re gonna need the visual graphics to grab attention. Now, there’s a whole bunch of tools for doing that.

[00:21:51] I use one called Snap, a s n a P. a.com. There’s Canva which is another one that’s very popular. And again, I’ll put the links in below for you to look for all these different tools. But you’re gonna have to create some graphics, and if you can’t create them, make sure that you have someone can create them for you, because the graphics are really, really important when you’re looking at, of course, the courses.

[00:22:14] So let’s go take a look at, for example, so here’s one here. Let’s just go back and see if I can get this screen on. and I’m getting the wrong screen, which is not what I wanted. So let’s go and see if we can switch that one.

[00:22:28] We got, there we go. Hopefully that one shows perfect. Okay. So this, for example, is a listing of some of my screens, but you have to have graphics to sell your courses. and there’s a whole science behind selling your courses. It’s similar to doing something that you’re doing on YouTube, so you’re gonna be in a position where you’re really gonna have to get good at either creating graphics or making sure that you have someone that create graphics for your courses To start off with.

[00:23:05] That’s right. Just for your courses to start off with, so we have the course graphics, but what are the other graphics we’re gonna need? You’re going to be marketing your content on social media. So if you have graphics for your course, you’re gonna have to have graphics that are appropriate for YouTube thumbnails.

[00:23:28] Anywhere that you’re doing social media posts like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, all of those social media properties that you have, you need a graphic that can be used not only in the course, but in the social media postings that you’re going to be doing. And again, we have a tool that we we sell and market for auto posting to different groups to different social media platforms.

[00:23:50] But you’re gonna have to have some graphics. It’s not only just having a course, content marketing, you have a content that you’re capturing. You need transcriptions, you need graphics. You gotta have those graphics that are available for the course, but also for the content marketing of the course. What else do we need to do?

[00:24:09] I’m gonna put social media up here underneath graphics, cause those are tied together. I’m gonna suggest that if you have any kind of course, you are gonna have to market the heck out of it on social media. Not only you personally being engaged in groups and pages that are related to your topic and or spokes your hub and or spokes.

[00:24:30] But you’re gonna have to be posting on your own. You’re gonna have to post teasers to the courses. You’re gonna have to port post on social media, partial information on it. To get people interested in more of the course. You’re gonna have to give all sorts of value in social media again, to get people back to the sales page for your course to help sell it, or at least capture an email address to get them to do that.

[00:24:54] Graphics, social media posting. Again, we have a tool that automatically posts, and this is a part that again, we’ve covered this in another course, but I want you to just think about this. Some people go, well, why do you focus James on blog posts at the top here? Why are blog posts so important to you?

[00:25:10] The social media posting tool that we do, there’s an automation in it that says whenever you have a blog post, and just think about this. If you have a blog post that has a graphic, that has text, may have a video embedded, may have a podcast embedded on it. if you have that. What this tool does is it will automatically post any new blog on your website.

[00:25:34] It will do a social media post to all of the social media platforms that you are a part of, and all of the links on those social media platforms. They go back to the blog post, which is on your site where your course is, or at a minimum. It’s on your blog post where there is a link to your course sales page.

[00:25:54] So that’s why I focus on blog page. Blog posts. First is content, but this social media and graphics is to get people to go back to your site, to go back to your sales page of your course. So graphics and social media. What’d they put in there? Full posts and repurposed. Yeah. So here’s another one. I put repurposed because when social media kind of first came out, it was all about, you know, the Facebooks, the Facebook pages, the LinkedIn profiles, the LinkedIn pages.

[00:26:27] They were all about what I call full posts. What’s happening now is you’re in a situation where we have what I call repurposed social media, and those are in general the YouTube shorts or the TikTok videos, which are instead of the traditional 16 by nine wide ones, they’re the narrow ones for the smartphones, and they’re usually the length that is appropriate for those video.

[00:26:53] Is either under three minutes or under 60 seconds. So if you have a large video that maybe you captured or an audio podcast that you captured, how do you take part of it and repurpose it so that it can be used on the social media platforms? So you’re gonna have to use some tools. There’s one called repurpose.io that will actually take portions of a webinar recording, portions of a webcast, portions of a video that you created or hung onto, and we’ll repurpose that and make it something that you can use to broadcast or add to these other.

[00:27:30] TOS and YouTube shorts additional formats and restricted length kind of social media content. So you wanna make sure that you do that and, and go from there. What else do I have here next? Tracking and analytics is kind of the next one that I had down. How important is that? Well, let me just do this one first.

[00:27:48] I’m gonna go which one will I. Let me just think of this one. I’m gonna do tracking and analytics. Now, why am I gonna do this one? Because even though we’re putting all of these points down, I don’t know which one is the best one for you in your situation. And if you don’t know, you may not have to do all of these in the same order or the same amount.

[00:28:12] You may be able to focus on one or two and find out, am I getting my traffic from seo? Am I getting it from social media? Is it a balance between the two? Am I getting it from joint ventures and affiliates, which will cover in a second. Am I getting it from YouTube shorts or TikTok shorts, or is it only coming from a Facebook page?

[00:28:32] You wanna make sure. just cuz your course is published, you have a way to track and analyze where people that are buying or where people who are finding out about it, where are they coming from and looking at it. And if they’re looking at it, how long are they looking at it? Are they buying it? Are they going through the other, you know, the whole piece?

[00:28:53] Are they opting into the emails? You have to have something in in place where you can start tracking. Which one of these are, so I think it’s UTM or Universal Tag Manager. You have to start tagging where this advertising, unpaid advertising, social media, for example, blog posts. You wanna make sure that you are, are able to tag and manage where people are coming from so that you can analyze it, do more of what’s working and less of what’s not working, and focus on the part that works.

[00:29:27] So you’re gonna have to have some tracking and analytics in place. Again, I’ll put some links in the. For those I’m gonna do this other one too, here. Descriptions. I’m gonna move that one up and seo and I think what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna put this other one here to we’ll do affiliate links in under descriptions and we’ll do yeah, we’ll do this one.

[00:29:49] I’m gonna do these two here. Now, this is a especially important when you’re doing social media posts or you’re using YouTube for your content marketing. And what I’m talking about there is you have to have there’s a science to descriptions, titles, and thumbnails on YouTube. This can be applied to courses and course selling.

[00:30:11] So you want to get really good at putting together descriptions for your courses. Titles for your courses, images for your courses, exactly the same as YouTube content creators are doing that engages people, gets them, toay, gets them to click, and you have to focus on those titles and descriptions and make sure that you have ones that are working and more importantly because.

[00:30:39] Material is public on a blog post? Many cases, are they SEO friendly? Do we have these descriptions and my written content, my transcript content? Is it focused on the topics and the groupings or niches or keywords, phrases, the market that I’m trying to market? With my search engine optimization. So descriptions in seo, you’ve gotta do that.

[00:31:05] Again, it’s not just publishing a course. You wanna make sure that you have a great title, you have great images and and graphics, and it’s SEO optimized. And again, there’s some tools that allow you to do that. Vid iq, for example, on YouTube, if you’re posting to YouTube, it’ll let you know how optimizes the description on YouTube.

[00:31:23] Can I use that? Or rank math for example? Can I use that on my website, my WordPress site? To make sure that I’m writing great descriptions that are optimized for search, so that if someone is searching for the topic on Google, they’re gonna find yours. If someone is searching on YouTube for the little information short that you put on, or the, you know, five tips that relate to your course.

[00:31:48] are they optimized? So again, SEO descriptions really, really, really important. Affiliate links. Here’s, here’s one that most people don’t think of. Remember I talked about multiple spokes and multiple revenue streams? You want to have partners or affiliate links that you can use that are. to your products and services where you can generate some extra income where you’re referring someone and say, Hey, well click here for a discount, or Here’s a tool that I use.

[00:32:19] Click this link. And you wanna make sure that you can create or sign up as an affiliate at these third parties, tools, services that you use or recommend. And hopefully you can earn some commission on people that. . Well, I’m not really interested in the course, but I do need one of the tools that, for example, James was using.

[00:32:39] So if you wanted to go for example and find out about VI iq, you could click the link below in the description, any of the links that I have in the description, if that company or that service has an affiliate program where I can earn a referral income by sending traffic there, I have an affiliate link.

[00:32:57] You click on it. I get a small commiss. if you buy something from their site. So get affiliate links signed up. Again, those hub and spokes that you put together. Think of all the products and services that support what you’re doing, the ones that you use, the ones that you know of that you can recommend.

[00:33:16] Those ones you all want to have affiliate links for to be able to use in the descriptions the seo. , all of those pieces. It’s not about just selling your course. If someone’s not gonna buy your course, you can still earn income from the fact that you are marketing your course by sharing content that is related to the course.

[00:33:34] So here’s a couple other ones I’m just gonna talk about and we’ll move up. I’m gonna move up emails before joint ventures. Now what are the emails that you have to send when you are marketing a course? There’s tons of them. And if you don’t do this, your course isn’t gonna sell. You have to have these courses, the, these emails, not only to get people to buy the.

[00:33:58] But you wanna make sure that they enjoy the course and they finish the course. So there’s a ton of emails that you have to be put into place. And these are automations that should happen automatically and they should be pre-written before you start marketing your course. What are they? Well, let’s look at some examples.

[00:34:17] Launch series, again, when we started off, we didn’t need a launch series. We would just say, Hey, we got a brand new. Here’s the course. It’s this. Go check it out. Oh, here’s your last chance. It was one or two emails. It was done. Oh, if you missed the link or you didn’t get the email, here’s the link to the course.

[00:34:34] It was nothing that was fancy. It was just one or two emails. Hey, I did this. I did this. Now you want to have a launch series. We have launch series that are anywhere from seven to nine emails that introduce a course over a period of week or two weeks, for example. But it’s a, a prolonged series of emails because it’s much harder to get people’s attention now for any new courses that you’re putting together.

[00:35:00] So, you know, you’ve, you’ve gotta be in a, in a, in a situation where you have these written ahead of. And you are able to have them written, get people that are on your list, be able to send them out, hands off and have them gently guided towards your course. And again, we’ve put together, I think we’ve got one in seven, sort of a template of seven or a template and I can’t remember on that one.

[00:35:26] So there’s lunch. . There’s also the onboarding series. So they sign up for the course. You wanna make sure that they’re taking the course that they got logged in. Okay? What to do if they have questions, how to get around the course. What are the additional resources that they should know about? You have to have an onboarding series of messages that go out automatically after someone has purchased.

[00:35:49] So it’s, you gotta do this upfront. You can’t do it. And then sell your court. Like sell the, just sell the course and do this after you want to have this. An offer or an upsale series, or a lost sale series, if someone, you know, signs up to the, the signs up to your newsletter, checks out the sales page, but doesn’t buy anything, you want to have a lost, you know, you want to have a follow up series, whether it’s, you know, they leave something in the shopping cart or they visit the pages and then they don’t buy.

[00:36:16] You wanna make sure that you can follow up with those people and hopefully be in a position where you can, you know, kind of rewind the sales and then follow up series. If someone has taken the course, follow up with them, get some feedback, you know, get them to refer people. Ask them to be an affiliate if they aren’t already, promote it to their list.

[00:36:40] You wanna put these pieces in place, and that’s just an example of four email series. There might be 25 or 30 emails that will need to be written at some point here just for those four. Okay? So there’s a lot of work that goes in it, and if you’re not doing this, You’re not gonna be making as many sales as you could, or you should if you have a topic of a course that is well put together, that is in demand for here’s a couple other ones.

[00:37:07] I’m just gonna put these ones in, in place here. Joint ventures and affiliates, and again, the, this is one of the ones that most people forget about is that if you have partners or existing customers or suppliers or people that you recommend, Reach out to them and say, Hey, I’ve got a brand new course, and would you mind referring people to the new course?

[00:37:33] And if you have an affiliate program, you can offer them a referral fee. and, and hopefully get more people in to those blog posts where you can capture their email address or the sales pages where hopefully they’re gonna purchase your course. And there’s always two kinds of traffic, right? There’s a traffic that you have or you generate yourself, and then there’s everyone else’s traffic.

[00:37:55] And I can guarantee you that everyone else’s traffic is much larger than your traffic alone. So at the start, if your course isn’t selling, you may have a small group of people that you’re marketing to, but there are opportunities with joint ventures, again, with these complimentary businesses and complimentary marketers.

[00:38:14] And affiliates that you have or that you can gain and give someone a reason to promote your course. And think about this as a strategy, because especially if you’re starting out, if your course isn’t selling, you might not be getting in front of enough people, just on, not enough people. You’re not gonna make the sales.

[00:38:32] Okay? Sponsorships. Sponsorships is something to think about if you’re teaching about or sharing a lot of information. Other particular tools or services that are included in yours. So there’s an opportunity to earn some money there. The cool thing about sponsorships is if people are sponsoring your material, they’ll often send their traffic.

[00:38:59] To you just to, as a valuable asset for them. They’re gonna tell people, Hey, here’s something that we promote. Here’s a service. Here’s a course that we promote. It’s there. And I’m gonna talk about press releases. Press release is a kind of an interesting thing that doesn’t get used in the more traditional internet marketing.

[00:39:18] realm. Realm. But if you are selling courses corporately or business to business, there is still value in doing traditional online press releases and news related posting. And I know for me personally you know, LinkedIn I use Flipboard. There’s a number of services that I use that are. News related stories, and if you are doing business to business specifically, or you’re doing a little more upscale courses, there’s nothing wrong with adding your content to traditional news sources.

[00:39:50] There’s a lot of value in still doing that. And then up sales. I want to just talk on up sales. And again, this is, if you get this thing, it makes a world of difference. It’s not about one. There are all sorts of different business models where you can have multiple courses where you sell the courses individually.

[00:40:09] You sell them in order, you sell them in groups or in bundles. You sell them as memberships. You bundle every team together as memberships. There’s a whole bunch of different business models. And if you have this in place, the fact that you get someone to purchase one course, or even if they don’t purchase, you still have these other courses to offer them to upsale them or to get them engaged in your business model, in your business system.

[00:40:36] So think of the big picture here. Why are my courses selling? Well, maybe it’s not just this one course or one answer that you’re providing that they need. It might be one of the other questions they have that you can answer with a course you’ve already created. Okay, and the last one I have here is tools.

[00:40:55] Now, why did I put tools? Now we take a look here and there’s what, 12 different things. That’s a lot of work and no one’s gonna do all of it, , and as much, I would love to say, Hey, here’s all the stuff you need to do. You don’t need to do all of these. You have to think about them. Pick the ones that you can and automate as much as possible.

[00:41:17] You need to have a system or a process. You say, if I launch a course or if I create a course and it’s good quality content that I know people want, and it’s produced enough that I’m comfortable with it to share the outcome that I’m promising with people. I don’t have to do all these, but I’ve gotta do some of them.

[00:41:36] In the ones that you do, you’re gonna have to automate. So you have the course creation on one side, you have the content marketing on the other side. It’s getting them together in the form of getting a customer to share their income, with you, share their pocketbook. With you in order to get the promise that you’re making and some or all of these things are gonna be required, you want to automate as much as possible or even outsource it and get a partner to do this for you.

[00:42:05] And this is one of the things that we provide to people is content marketing. Because what I found personally is that there are a ton of really smart people who have great courses or great ideas for courses that people want to buy, but they don’t have time for content. And these are all things that you’re gonna want to think about.

[00:42:23] The important ones that I want you to focus on in my in my kind of the way that I look at it and what I’ve seen with myself and other people selling courses is it’s that content marketing, capturing your, your digital exhaust, creating social media posts from. and at the bottom, you know, the minimum.

[00:42:44] Make sure that you have emails to follow up with people. Email is still powerful if it’s done over the longer term in sequence and it’s automated so you know these other pieces while they’re important. If you at a minimum, make sure that you’re capturing the content, creating social media posts, creating email posts, that’s an absolute great way to get started, and it’s going to dramatically improve selling courses , If you’re just not selling courses, you’re in a position where you’re not doing enough marketing or content marketing to put this all together.

[00:43:22] When you’re asking for money, content marketing makes it a lot easier and it’s something that you’re just sharing more information and you’re excited about. You’re passionate about. You know, you deserve to get, to get paid for that. So I wish you guys all the best when you’re selling your courses or not selling your courses and want to sell your courses.

[00:43:41] You know, try and think of these steps. I’ll put a little checklist together at the bottom for you. Again, if you haven’t subscribed, please subscribe, hit the like button. We’re providing or creating content on a regular basis here on YouTube if you haven’t already.

[00:43:52] Make sure to visit visit teach online.io. That is our community site where we have hundreds of video tutorials, and I think there’s five or six mastery courses now. 

[00:44:03] We’ll see you soon. I hope you enjoyed it.

[00:44:05] And again this is James Mick speaking from Teach online.io. Our other site is training sites dot I. And that’s our digital marketing agency where we help subject matter experts like you start and build and grow your own training site so that you can teach online. Take care, expect the best.