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Marketing Your Online Courses

In very broad terms, there are 4 sources of traffic and sales to your course page organic traffic from search engines, paid traffic from ads, social media traffic, and referral traffic from affiliates, partners and students.

Organic Traffic

Organic is the holy grail of marketing because its free traffic. I put free in quotations because it takes time and effort to get there. But when youre there, you have people visiting your site because the first search result on Google for learn Excel online was your course. Here are a few ways to build that up SEO Search engine optimization is about making sure the search engines, like Google and Bing, know that your site is out there and is the right site to surface for certain searches.

You start by deciding which keywords you want to rank for. Use a tool such as Googles Keyword Planner or BuzzSumo to identify the most popular keywords related to your course topic. Lets say you want people to find your site if they search for Excel courses or Learn Excel online. The first thing you need to do is make sure your site has these phrases and keywords in it.

Blogging

There are only so many keywords you can optimize your course site for before it starts sounding robotic. Blogging allows you to continuously create new content optimized for various keywords and phrases.

Writing a lot of valuable content around your niche, puts your blog posts in the best position to rank high for those keywords. They attract organic traffic, and some of those visitors go on to look at her course offerings or sign up for her email list.

Using Traineasy, you can also create a Sales Widget for your course and place that sales widget anywhere on your blog.

YouTube

YouTube is the second most-visited search engine in the entire world (after Google). Some videos can even rank higher than websites in search results.

Start a YouTube channel about your course topic and publish helpful videos on a regular basis.

Include a link to your website or course in your video descriptions. Heres a more detailed guide on YouTube Marketing.

Quora

Quora is a crowdsourced Question and Answer site where you can ask a question and have it answered by anyone else in the world. The top answers get upvoted by the community so that the cream rises to the top.

Youll likely find questions related to the topic you teach, which means you can answer them yourself and link back to your site. If your answer is good, it will get upvoted and gain visibility. Quora questions often rank high on Google searches too.

Podcasting

Podcasts have risen in popularity in recent years and many of the top podcasts organically attract listeners and traffic from their podcast directory listings. Think of podcasting as blogging in audio form. Its another way to create content that attracts more customers.

Guest Posting

Writing posts on other blogs that already have a readership allow you to tap into that audience. A simple Google search will show you which blogs cover the topics you cover in your online course.

Reach out to the blog editors and ask to write a post for them.

Guest posting is also a great way to build a backlink to your site, which in turn improves your SEO and search rankings.

HARO

Help A Reporter Out is a great service that connects reporters with relevant experts (aka news sources). By signing up as a news source, youll receive an email three times per day that includes media opportunities in which you could be quoted.

Reply quickly for the best chance of getting selected for a quote in an article, and ask for a link back to your site. This link helps your SEO.

Paid Traffic

Realistically, organic traffic does take time to build up. Youll need to continuously create content in any or all of the formats mentioned above to build up that ranking. So, if youre not patient and have some money

to spare, advertising is a good option. Just remember that advertising is a scientific process. Its common to lose money initially but if you continue refining your ads and targeting you should reach profitability.

Its also not recommended to send your ad traffic directly to your sales page, especially if the people youre targeting have never heard of you. Instead, send them to a webinar registration page, and use the webinar to convert them into students. Read our guide on webinars to learn more about this.

When your webinar is ready, try some of the following channels to send paid traffic to it.

Remember to ensure youve set up tracking correctly so that you can see if your ads actually result in sales of your online course.

Google Ads

Google Ads lets you create ads that show up when someone searches for the keywords youre targeting in their search engine. You can specify exactly which words should trigger your ad.

If you install the tracking code correctly, youll be able to see which keywords and ads lead to sales and cut out the ones that dont.

Facebook Ads

Unlike Google, the targeting on Facebook Ads is based on their specific demographics, interests, behaviors, and affiliations.

Since people on Facebook arent searching specifically for your course, its better to first promote webinar or blog post. You can then collect their email address and promote your course to them via email campaigns.

YouTube Ads

YouTube ads operate under the banner of Google ads but their entirely video based. YouTube allows you to use a combination of keyword targeting, like Google, and behaviour targeting, like Facebook.

A good strategy is to start with an educational or entertaining video that leads to your blog or webinar page.

Banner Ads

Reach out to websites and blogs that serve your target audience and offer to pay them to add a banner ad for your course on their website. Bfore you commit to paying a website owner for a long period of time, ask for the opportunity to test your ad for one month to see how their website visitors respond to your ad.

You can find a designer on Max-migold to create banner ads for you. Create a unique link or coupon code for each website you place banners on so you can track how many sales come from each website.

More of the simple ways to market your online course to be continued in the next post, Dont miss out of the more amazing techniques.