How To Go From zero to 1000 Online Course Students in a Single Advertise Budget

So you have it all planned out. There's an area that needs to be filled and you've created the lesson plan and you're pumped up and enthralled by it all. It's possible that you're finished in creating your course. But a question looms: How do you get your message to students who might be interested? How do you make it easier for your targeted audience? Which websites should you post links on?

I have good news to share with you: this is a solved problem. Numerous authors prior to they created online courses for all types of content; and I'll teach you the best methods for taking your course from 0 students up to 1000. All without spending anything on marketing.

To begin, however, I will dispel the most common error instructors make when setting the goal of building their courses. This is due to the fact that they choose to follow a build-first method instead of an audience-first method. The reason that the "build-first" method is not optimal is that you're assuming that a number of things will be true. This exposes your course to lots of dangers in your class. Particularly, when it comes to what you should compose and how the class structure should look.

  However, below are the four key components in this mini-tutorial for ensuring constant, steady traffic on your instruction:  

1. Find out where the ideal audience hangs out
2. What can you do to understand your audience's mind
3. How do you earn respect and Reputation in your Audience
4. How do you share your course to an Audience that's Ready to Purchase your Product

  What to Do To Find the Places where your ideal audience hangs Out  

Let's say you're a client consulting with mine. You want to advertise a course on Marketing Analytics.

The first thing that I'll explain to you is you'll have to pose the appropriate query -- you have to first ask "who do you plan to serve" rather than "what you plan to serve". In case of Marketing Analytics case, you must then choose whether you want to target CMOs, Marketing Managers, Marketing Newbies, or Entrepreneurs?

You've decided to concentrate on business owners.

If so The first thing to do is to start googling to find "where the audience is". One of the best ways to accomplish this is to look to find "online lounges". Online lounges are places on the internet where people discuss things related to their topic of interest. These can be forums, blogs, and mailing lists. The way that I do this is to do these steps:

1. You can open your preferred Google or Bing search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
2. Search for a query with any of the following combinations:

Forum - Profession + forum

• Profession + Topic mailing list

- Profession + topic + blog

- Profession + topic + industry forum

- Profession + topic + link-sharing site (Eg. Reddit, stumbleupon)

- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum

Right there, I discover 10+ potential forums that I could target.

There's more to come. Once you select a specific forum, you must explore further, and then create another search query using your chosen topic. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you want to look for is an sign of trouble or pain from the original poster. From the initial query of"just "marketing" within the subreddit. There is no luck.

So how do we refine our hunt to truly look for discomfort? We can add "pain indicators" for example "help" as well as "advice needed". Check out the results. We can see that in only the first page there are a number of interesting threads.

If you've found particular forums that are full of expressions of pain and apprehension, you'll know you're in the correct online club to spread the word to the near future. As you dive in and do more research, you will find that some forums work on specific subjects, while other forums will not. This helps you concentrate on promoting only those the areas where your desired people hang out. This is crucial to the success of your course.

From the above 15 minute exercise, we just got evidence that reddit.com/r/entrepreneur is a great place to promote our marketing course.

Try it out for additional forums! My suggestion is that you need to identify at minimum 10 lounges online. Blogs can also be useful (especially because of its extremely frequent comment sections).

  How to Read your Readers' Minds  

Now, you're faced with a a long list of threads with clear indications of hurt. Let's look at them all and let's really be aware of who the people who are.

When you've collected enough information, you'll start seeing patterns on who your audience is. After you've identified these patterns, you start getting a good sense of how your target audience feels and thinks about marketing overall.

In the above data we can see a few small patterns emerging (we'll need 10+ more difficult threads before we can really understand) that entrepreneurs really want 3 items: a high-efficiency digital marketing approach that is low cash outlay, tips around cities-specific marketing and how one can position themselves for attracting high-value customers.

Earlier, in our hypothetical scenario, you had a desire to build a product around Marketing Analytics. However, it turned out that it may be too advanced (at least for it to be used in the Reddit Online Lounge). Better to take a course focused on low-budget and high-efficiency marketing locally, as well as seeking & closing high-value clients.

My course structure to deal with these types of pain could then begin to look as follows:

1. How to Use Facebook Interest Targeting to find High-Quality Clients at a few dime a time
2. How to Create an Referral Machine through these Pitch Scripts at your next local Chamber of Commerce Event
3. Find out what needs only high-value customers have

Course Description: "How to Get High-Value Customers Using hyperlocal, Hyper-targeted and hyper local Marketing"

If you decide to drop that particular course within the Reddit market, I'm confident you'll see some traction. Do you know what the evidence-based approach to marketing offers us?

  How to build Trust and Reputation with your audience  

In addition to identifying problems, however, you need to establish yourself as an authoritative figure in these virtual salons.

That means giving bite-sized advice whenever you encounter these pains. When I say bite-sized, it means anything that's between 1 and 10 sentences, yet is actionable enough for someone to implement.

In this way you can answer those who say "haven't found FB to be beneficial" as well as "need an effective plan" by saying:

"I realize that you will require an efficient digital strategy given your budget-friendly requirements. I am surprised, however to learn that you consider FB ads to be NOT efficient. I run FB ads a lot in my consultancy, and here's what I would suggest to do with the right targeting for high-quality clicks for $0.40 to $0.80 per click.

1. ONLY make use of targeted interest. Set everything else to default.
2. When you use interest targeting, make sure to use at least 10+ interest and eliminate those with large reach. Reason being large reach per interest will equate to a high costs per click. If I wanted to target entrepreneurs into marketing, I would use interests by using gurus like 'Neil Patel', "Derek Halpern and "Darren Rowse," etc. I would leave out 'Gary Vaynerchuk's' influence is too large!
3. Be sure the total reach is not greater than 800,000 people
4. Start your test! Check that your test is locked to a daily fee of $5. NEVER use the lifetime budgeting option.
5. If you exceed $1/click, then you need to cut off those with the most range and also add more "niche interest
6. If you're looking for suggestions on "niche" interests, search for the right tools, influencers and even software, then test the idea"

If you give advice at such low-level and actionable detail it will be a source of credibility and respect within your field.

  How to Share Your Course to an Audience which is ready to buy your Product  

"Isn't it a bit shady to publish links? !" "What if I be blocked? !"

You probably had these thoughts. These are valid assertions. To solve the issue, all you could do is make use of inline links within your blog posts, and then pair this with other links not related to your website. This will help convey the idea that you intend to be friendly and not spammy. Here's a personal example where I was trying to help people who were having issues using landing pages.

Through these four broad, strategic steps, I managed to grow my website to get about 4k-5k organic visitors per month. 89% of these came from direct link. Take a look at the statistics here from SimilarWeb. There is no advertising budget in any way.

Provide lots of free, actionable value to the world and the world will be awestruck by the world back. I hope you achieve great success in your journey!

  Kenn Costales is a growth hacker as well as an online course creator who loves discovering new methods to market products online without investing a penny.