40: 5 Simple Ways to Find Students for your Online Course (without huge ad spends)
Need more students for your online course?
In this podcast episode, I walk you through 5 simple ways to find students for your online course (without huge ad spends).
To fill up your funnel, you need traffic strategies in place in your business.
Basically, this means you need eyeballs on your lead magnets such as a webinar, 5-day challenge, bootcamp, or whatever you’re doing to take your online course prospect on a buyer’s journey from the awareness stage, to the consideration stage and finally toward deciding about whether to invest in your business.
When online course creators come to me and wonder why their online course did not sell, most of the time it’s because they did not get enough traffic coming into their sales funnel.
It’s typical for an online sales funnel to convert anywhere from 1% (a cold audience) to 5% (warm audience). This means that for every 100 people that attend your webinar, challenge, or view your video series, only handful (1-5 people) will buy.
You need volume to sell online courses.
But you’re in a crowded market. How do you get the eyeballs on your business?
In this podcast episode, I walk you through my Funnel Fill up Formula and talk about various traffic strategies to get eyeballs on your content.
Mentioned In This Episode:
How to Explode your Website Traffic Using Pinterest and Tailwind https://destinicopp.com/podcast/33
5 Simple Ways to Find Students for your Online Course (without huge ad spends): https://destinicopp.com/blog/find-students
How a Tripwire Works: https://destinicopp.com/blog/grow-your-email-list-with-facebook-ads
TRANSCRIPT:
Today we're talking about five simple ways to find students for your online course without huge ad spends. So my question for you is do you need more students for your online course? And I bet that you do. To fill up your funnel, you need traffic strategies in place for your business.
And basically this just means that you need eyeballs on your lead magnets, whether it's your webinar, your five day challenge, a bootcamp or virtual summit or whatever you are doing to take that online course prospect on a buyer's journey from the awareness stage to the consideration stage and finally towards making a decision about whether or not to invest in your business.
When online course creators come to me and they wonder why their online course did not sell, most of the time it's because they did not get enough traffic coming into their sales funnel. It is typical for an online course sales funnel to convert anywhere from like 1% for a cold audience to you know, 5% or maybe even more if you're selling to a warm audience.
This means that for every hundred people that attend your webinar or participate in your challenge or view your video series, only a handful of them, you know, maybe one to five when you're looking at percentages will buy. The fact is you need volume to sell online courses, but you're in a crowded market. I'm sure most of us are. The question is how do you get the eyeballs on your business? Let me walk you through my Funnel Fill Up Formula and talk about various traffic strategies to get eyeballs on your content.
Funnel Fill Up Formula number one is social media, but I want you to avoid this mistake on social media and that is posting your online course all over social media and asking your followers to buy your course. I've had people come to me and say, I have 25,000 followers on social media on Instagram or Facebook, but they aren't buying my course. I tell them, it's very simple. Your followers on social media are not interested in buying your online course.
They are only interested in the transformation that you can help them with. And to demonstrate this transformation, you have to take them on the buyer's journey. Your goal is to get them to click on your call to action from social media and sign up for your email list. Once they're on your email list, then you're going to start your welcome sequence and you're going to start building that rapport with them and start establishing yourself as the expert to help them and the moving on to my Funnel Fill Up Formula number two, which is SEO and content marketing. This is one of my favorite strategies to fill up my funnel and it's mostly free.
I am very clear on the goals for my content is to educate my ideal client and to inspire them to take action. Many online course creators, they get stuck in a process where they're super, super busy, but they're not working on what's important to grow their online course business. All of my content is focused on these topics with one goal in mind to help my audience sell their online course.
It is important for you to have a clear goal on your content and the action that you want your audience to take after reading it. SEO is a long term game and most likely you're not going to show up on the first page of Google overnight, but one of the things that I have used is Pinterest and Tailwinds tribes to explode my organic website traffic and I have another podcast episode that walks you through exactly how to do this.
And outlines what I have done, and I'm going to make sure that the link for this podcast episode is in the show notes. Moving on to Funnel Fill Up Formula number three, which is affiliate marketing, and here's why I love affiliate marketing and for online course creators who have no audience or maybe they have a small email list, it is a great way to sell your online course and build your community. Affiliate marketing programs are mostly automated and they are super simple to set up.
For me, I use the affiliate option in Kajabi to pay my affiliates when they sell one of my programs and here is how that works. So I create a share link for my affiliates to share with their audiences, and that link places a cookie on the prospect's browser for 30 days. And if their customer purchases from my site using that browser and the purchases made within that 30 day time period, that transaction is counted as an affiliate transaction and they earn a commission.
So if you want to find some affiliates to help sell your online course, one of the things you can do is reach out to known authorities in your niche and build a relationship with them. You can follow them on social media, you can interact in the comments of their social post and their blogs. You can get on their email list and respond to their emails.
The key here is to get to know them and allow them to get to know you. And if you feel like they're a good fit, then you can ask them to be an affiliate in your next launch. But one of the things that you'll want to do before you go through that process is put together your affiliate program details before you reach out to those potential affiliates. You're also going to want to determine the percentage commission and your pay system.
Many affiliate programs pay anywhere from 40 to 50%. The only thing caveat I would give to that, if you are providing some hands on type one on one service with your pro program and many of us do, your commission percentage may be lower. And don't forget to provide some awesome marketing materials and affiliate education.
So just remember that your affiliates, they're not familiar with your online course and they cannot speak to it in the way that you can. So you're going to want to give them some email templates, some social media templates and images and anything that they can just copy and paste. The other thing you may want to consider is some type of frequently asked questions document.
The other thing that you can consider as you're putting together your program, you can put together some type of leaderboard or some type of system or incentive for the people who are selling your online course like hotcakes.
For example, you could give them a greater commission if they're at the top of your leaderboard. So you can give them 50% instead of 40% now moving on to Funnel Fill Up Formula number four which is public relations. So a great way to find students for your online course is through free PR. And my favorite way for free PR is to be a guest on a podcast. It is very simple and it's not as time consuming for me as guest blogging, but how do you find podcast guest opportunities?
And one way is to sign up podcastguests.com and every week they sent out an email with podcasts hosts that are looking for guests just like you. Now, another way that I find potential guest podcasting opportunities is just to go out and find podcasts that I know my ideal customer are listening to and then build a relationship with that podcast hosts and pitch them. Moving on to Funnel Fill Up Formula number, number five which is paid advertising. Hands down
this is the best way to find students for your online course, but I'm sure that you have heard of stories of ad campaigns with high cost per leads or ones that didn't net any sales. And I will say that there is an art and a science to running an ad campaign that converse and sometimes you just need to do some testing to find the audience and the lead magnets that work for your online course in your business. If you're on a budget, and let me ask who isn't.
The key is to start small and test and then scale. I like for clients to start with list building ads a few months prior to their launch. Then that gives them the opportunity to test various lead magnets. They can test various audiences ad copy creative without the high pressure and time constraints of a launch. I also like offering trip wires to help offset the cost of Facebook and the Instagram ads.
And if you're not familiar with what a trip wire is, I do have a post and I'll put it in a link in the show notes. You can walk through and figure that out, but basically what a tripwire is is after your landing page for your free lead magnet, when you go to your thank you page, you're going to have an offer on that page, like an irresistible offer on that page where somebody clicks on that and when they go to your thank you page you say, but wait, before you go, I have an offer that I think you would be interested in.
And that's when you present your offer and is generally a very cheap digital type of offer that they can get anywhere from $7 to $49 kind of a no brainer type of offer. And there you go. Those are the five simple ways to find students for your online course without huge ad spins. So of course creators, thanks so much for joining us today.
If you have any questions about Facebook or Instagram ads or your online course sales funnel or traffic strategies, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or DM me on Facebook or Instagram. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. We'd love for you to rate and review the podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.