How To Sell An Online Course (Online Course Marketing Guide)

The e-learning market is valued at over $200 BILLION these days…

The problem is so many people are jumping on the bandwagon, it’s become near on impossible to stand out and cut through the noise

Not to mention the hundreds of articles online teaching all the hacks (most of which won’t work)

In this guide, I’ll be breaking down the core organic and paid strategies and core principles to grow an online course.

You might not like the answer, but you’ll prefer it to throwing away tens of thousands in marketing spend!

Movie gif. A toddler on Our Gang carelessly tosses a handful of money out an open window.

If you’re more of a visual learner, feel free to watch my overview video below:

Firstly, let’s talk about pricing for your course…

In this day and age, if you’re selling a course for under £200 with no other courses/upsells, you’ll struggle to ever sell profitably unless you already have (or can build up) a highly engaged organic following.

That’s why it’s critical to factor in the overall life time value of a customer when pricing your course. Ultimately, the bigger your lifetime value, the more you can afford to spend to acquire a customer which makes scaling much easier.

And in a world, where costs are only rising year on year, you want to have as much of a buffer here as possible!

If you’re not sure about your LTV’s or CPA’s right now, be sure to also check out my recent blog on creating your digital marketing metrics & KPI’s.

In this day and age, if you’re selling a course for under £200 with no other courses/upsells, you’ll struggle to ever sell profitably unless you already have (or can build up) a highly engaged organic following.

That’s why it’s critical to factor in the overall life time value of a customer when pricing your course. Ultimately, the bigger your lifetime value, the more you can afford to spend to acquire a customer which makes scaling much easier.

And in a world, where costs are only rising year on year, you want to have as much as a buffer here as possible!

Now it’s important to also acknowledge here, that the price you can charge is directly proportianate to the size of the problem you’re solving and who you’re solving it for.

For example, I might be the best chiropractor in the word and charge £10k for a single session because of my renowned expertise.

However, if I’m trying to sell to someone who just woke up with a bit of a bad back, it’s very unlikely they’d be willing to pay for my expertise, when they can just grab a quick painkiller….

No Thank You GIF by The Dungeon Run

However, if I niche down my audience to people who have suffered back pain for the past 10 years and it’s now impacting every single area of their lives (financial, family, health, happiness) they will probably take out a loan if they have to in the hope that my expertise can finally help them!

If the problem you’re solving right now isn’t worth more than £200 and you don’t already have a substantial organic following, you might be better off seeing it a side hustle and selling on something like udemy, as they have a marketplace and as such, effectively handle the customer acquisition for you in exchange of a percentage for each sale.

If you can charge more than that though, let’s talk about how to grow!

The online course growth mindset (selling vs building an audience)

If you’re relying on your course to put food in the table, this is going to be a tough pill to swallow.

But the reality is, 99.99% of people who try to sell an online course as soon as they’ve created it will fail. 

Why?

Because you don’t have the trust and authority…YET

At this stage, nobody cares about your USP or what makes you different. So instead, you need to focus on showing them you’re actually someone of value before we even get into talking about what makes you/your course different.

With that in mind, you ideally want to be spending at least the first 6-12 months building an audience WITHOUT trying to sell them anything

In fact, Alex Hormozi is a great example of this. In a sea of “marketing gurus”, he managed to build over 1 million YouTube subscribers in the space of a year…

YouTube analytics chart showing Alex Hormozi subscriber growth over 12 months

Now he’s a smart guy and has great content…but the real magic formula here, he did NOT try to sell anything to anyone.

In fact, his entire tagline during this initial phase of growth was, “I have nothing to sell you”

And when 99% of other content creators are trying to sell you a course, or a service or a product, he was like a diamond in the dirt! 

He has since launched a book which almost instantly became an Amazon Best Seller, but that was only possible because of the initial work he put in, asking for NOTHING. So by the time he came to launch is book, people were practically begging to pay him to learn more from him

If you can become seen as that in your space, people will flock to you in the masses.

Building an online course marketing funnel

So, now that we’ve addressed the foundations from pricing to building an audience.

Let’s talk about how to start building our your online course marketing funnel. We’ll break this down into 3 core stages:

Awareness -> Engagement -> Conversion

The audience building phase I mentioned above is all about the first two: awareness and engagement.

Awareness is about getting found online – for example where do people find out about us (ie a YouTube channel, LinkedIn, a blog, podcasts, etc…).

Engagement on the other hand about taking that initial awareness and now building trust – or in other words, progressing the relationship with this new audience… are they commenting and engaging with the content, are they signing up to a newsletter or hitting that subscribe button on YouTube.

All of which are signs they’ve received value and actually WANT to learn more. This will require you to analyse the data over time and optimise your content/approach in order to accelerate your growth.

You’ll see this executed masterfully by e-learning company MindValley below where we dissected their acquisition strategy

Organic marketing strategies for your online course

Now whilst it is possible to blow up on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram organically, it is a highly unpredictable road as you’re very much at the mercy of the algorithm and hoping it shows your content to the right people.

It’s also worth saying that from all the data we’ve analysed… whilst brands can blow up and get millions of views on TikTok, that doesn’t necessarily lead to loyalty and trust (the key ingredients we need early on).

In fact a large amount of people can’t remember the last TikTok video they saw because they see so many, whereas most can remember the last YouTube video they saw, because it’s a longer form more intentional piece of content to consume.

That’s why we’ll be focusing primarily on search platforms like YouTube and Google for organic marketing.

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Dominating Search

The beautiful thing about creating Blog articles and YouTube videos is once you’ve started ranking and getting views/visitors, those rankings can often stay for years!

We have blogs and videos we created years ago, that have been ranking since 2018 and still bring us thousands of visitors a month to this day!

As such, the content you create here, essentially becomes evergreen, thus compounding and accumulating over time – compared to the constant waves you’re riding when relying on organic social

In fact, MindValley get over 90 MILLION views a month on their YouTube content.

Now it’s important to note that they have a huge library of content that took them years to build, but it’s easy to see how when building an organic search strategy through content, it can become a tangible asset and organic acquisition machine for the business that essentially runs on autopilot.

Graph showing how many views Mindvalley get from YouTube every year

This video dives into how you can start building an online course organic marketing strategy for a search-based platform like YouTube:

If you prefer written content, you’d essential follow the same principles of search optimisation but using a blog on your website.

Partnerships & List Shares

Another approach in the awareness stage is to find a list of complementary companies or even industry-relevant blogs who you can reach out to about potential partnership opportunities.

For example, the majority of blogs out there will have an email list and are usually monetised through ads or sponsorship. 

Let’s say you have a yoga course and can find a yoga blog that has an email list of 100k dedicated yogi’s who fit your ideal customer perfect, you could potentially speak to the publisher about them about becoming an affiliate for your course, so they can email their list and bring in an additional revenue stream from the affiliate commission! The key with any partnership like this is to make it a win-win scenario

Season 7 Reaction GIF by The Office

Podcasts

If you (or someone in your team) is a true industry expert and can provide genuine value, another good strategy can be to find a list of podcasts that your ICP would listen to. And put together a 1-pager sheet to send to potential podcasts shows with a view to becoming a guest and delivering value to their audience.

Ideally you want to have some form of CTA here so you can transition that awareness into traffic for your own website.

If you have budget to invest, we’re going to use the same awareness and engagement approach but we’re basically paying Google/YouTube to show our content for certain keywords instead of waiting for them to rank organically.

We can even use socials here with more confidence, as we don’t have to rely on unpredictable algorithms showing our content to the right people, as we can manually target them through paid ads. Here are just a few examples:

Examples Of Facebook & Instagram Ads For Online Courses

The reason most social media ads for online courses don’t succeed, is they try to sell to soon without any established trust/authority.

It’s like trying to propose marriage on the first date!

How I Met Your Mother Marriage GIF by Laff

If we take MindValley again as an example here with their online course Facebook Ads strategy, you’ll see they spend a lot of money on purely education, value-driven content at the top of funnel (this is what goes out to a cold, yet highly targeted audience)

Mantra meditation keywords for Mindvalley ads

This serves the purpose to build massive trust with their audience and warm them up before making an ask.

They then in the MOF invite people on a “first date” as such, by inviting them to a free masterclass (the topic of the masterclass being offered will be linked to whatever topic they engaged with at the top of funnel so they know it’s relevant to the audience)

Mantra meditation keywords for Mindvalley ads

Then, finally at the bottom of the funnel, they are making offers, and showcasing testimonials and success stories from other students, this is where they’re now finally looking to drive conversions. This audience will likely also be on there email list by now and may be consuming their content daily, so it’s fair to say this is a very warm audience that has a lot of trust for the brand.

Mantra meditation keywords for Mindvalley ads

Examples Of Google Ads For Online Courses

Now instead of doing what most people do and bidding ONLY on the super expensive commercial search terms like “XYZ Online Course”

We’re instead going to focus on scaling and accelerating the awareness and engagement phase mentioned above. Here’s an example of MindValley where they’ve created a super detailed blog on meditation, and they’re now bidding on paid search terms to make sure they appear position 1 (even if they’re not ranking organically yet). You’ll also notice because this is an informational search it has a pretty low CPC (£0.66) because there’s far less competition.

Mantra meditation keywords for Mindvalley ads

The genius of this strategy is that instead of fighting over scraps for people already looking for an online course in your space (and just getting crushed by bigger, more established companies with bigger budgets…)

They’re able to get in front of people who are struggling with the problem your course solves, before they even realise they need a course.

This blog then builds trust, and positions them as an expert, so they’re now associated as the go-to people for this topic. 

They then have a call-to-action at the end of this blog, for people to sign up to a free masterclass, where they deliver MORE value and build even more trust and credibility before they even think about asking for a sale

The genius of this strategy is that instead of fighting over scraps for people already looking for an online course in your space (and just getting crushed by bigger, more established companies with bigger budgets…)

They’re able to get in front of people who are struggling with the problem your course solves, before they even realise they need a course.

This blog then builds trust, and positions them as an expert, so they’re now associated as the go-to people for this topic. 

They then have a call-to-action at the end of this blog, for people to sign up to a free masterclass, where they deliver MORE value and build even more trust and credibility before they even think about asking for a sale

Lead generation strategies for your online course

Lead Magnet Examples

Now we’re getting to the conversions stage, the model you go for here will depend on various factors such as you’re selling price, and other variables around your offer

Mindvalley and Masterclass used to charge per course but now offer subscription, but they can get away with this due to the sheer credibility and amount of content

If you’re more niche higher ticket, webinars can still work well here

Mindvalley Webinar Lead Magnet For Online Course

Quizzes, assessments or scorecards can also work extremely well when paired with a relevant next step. This Mindvalley quiz on sleep targets people who have engaged with their sleep related content, and allows the user to learn more about their chronotype (establishing further, trust and credibility) before then transitioning them into a course offer that helps them use their chronotype to improve their sleep.

Mindvalley Sleep Quiz

The key even with everything else we’ve done don’t sell people straight away…

On a very fundamental psychological level, trust building is exactly the same in relationships as it is in sales and marketing

Imagine dating, and after months of flirting and facetime (your content), we’re now back at your place (your website), the last thing you do is propose marriage straight away!

First, you might make it official, before you pop the question.

This can be done either with lead magnets and getting people onto your email list to nurture them over time, or having an initial entry point offer…

Self-Liquidating Offers & Low-Ticket Courses

The idea behind a self-liquidating offer is that you’re effectively splintering out part of your main offering into a smaller bit size chunk that you can sell to your target audience at a lower entry price.

This allows you to increase your overall conversions and reduce the cost of an initial acquisition because you’re effectively lowering the barrier to entry

The ultimate goal of course is to then sell them into the main course or a higher priced offer. 

Generally you’ll see a higher conversion rate into your main offer by using this approach because the “mini course” is just another opportunity for you to build further trust with your audience and give them a taster of what the full course could be like. With the added bonus that this initial offer may have even covered the cost of that initial acquisition.

The hardest part to any marketing campaign is acquiring the initial user and getting them to spend their first $1 with you, once that’s done, all subsequent purchases become wayyyyy easier (not to mention far more profitable)

So let’s say we’re spending £10k per month to bring 10,000 visitors to the site into into a £2,000 course and we’re currently getting a 0.1% conversion rate = 10 purchases (totalling £20,000)

 = £1,000 CPA and a 2x ROAS

If we then introduce a self liquidating offer, we can assume a higher front end conversion rate due to reduced cost to get started

So let’s say we’ve now got a 1% conversion rate on 10,000 visitors since we’re only sending them to an initial £27 offer – that’s 100 sales from the same ad spend (totalling £2,700) but now 10% of those also go into buying the main offer as we’ve built significantly more trust now – so 10 additional sales of the main product (totalling £20,000)

= £100 CPA and 2.2x ROAS

It’s also worth noting here that a lot of your returns may not coming in the same month, and there will likely be a lag effect here is people go through the initial offer. But these means any subsequent sales are far more profitable and not to mention, easier to convert after the initial purchase.

This is where the focus now shifts to maximising your LTV by continue to create more value and making more offers to your customers base over time.

This is how this most profitable businesses scale, by lowering the front-end CPA, whilst simultaneously working on building a larger and larger LTV to expand the overall profit.

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Tom Peyton
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