5 Ways to Sell Online Courses: Digital Marketing Guide

They do not just come, because you have created it!

You are an experienced specialist who shares valuable knowledge, but not everybody is aware of your online courses or any form of educational content. So, you should also think about ways to reach the target market and let the potential learners know about what kind of valuable material you offer. Analyzing the needs online teachers have and the challenges they face, I decided to prepare this digital marketing guide and help you choose the best methods to make your content available and accordingly, learn how to sell online courses.

In the present article, we will together identify the most common and effective strategies to build and develop your online teaching business.

Where to Sell Online Courses?

Today there are many ways to sell online courses; from YouTube channels to Google Drive and different online course platforms. The choice is wide and this variety confuses some people. However, if you want to start your online teaching business, a personal platform is the best choice. Of course, not everybody is able to afford a personal teaching website, that is why I may recommend relying on website builders, specialized in the educational niche.

Why Do You Need to Rely on Digital Marketing?

If you have decided to sell online courses from your own website, you should have already analyzed and shaped a clear image of MVP vs MLP and what is digital marketing and how diverse it may be. I am going to introduce the following directions of the field:

- Search Engine Optimization    
- Blog    
- Search Engine Advertisements    
- Social Media Marketing    
- Email Marketing

#1 Search Engine Optimization

As I use to mention, SEO is the most quality method for achieving long-term success. Even if some people try to ignore it, this is a very essential point to take into consideration for online businesses. The importance of SEO in eLearning is especially huge as these days people prefer learning online and the volume of searches increases.

Research for the best keywords people search on the engines to reach information or services similar to what you offer. Look for keywords and expressions that have higher volume and lower difficulty so that your content gets an opportunity to be ranked on the engines. To make keyword research you can use tools, such as:

- Google’s Keywords Planner    
- Nail Patel’s Ubbersuggest  
- Ahref’s Keywords Explorer    
- Keywords Everywhere

These tools will provide metrics for the keywords. Some of them are paid.

When choosing an eLearning website consider that it is an SEO-friendly platform you will easily work on. If you may already know, at Uteach we prioritize the importance of SEO and provide all the essential features that will help to optimize your platform. For instance, the pages you create have special fields for SEO metrics (metadata) that will make it easier for the search engines to recognize your content.

Keep in mind: SEO may take time to show real results, but once you reach them and your website is ranked on the top results, the outcome will be continual not just a short-time success.

#2 Blog

The best promotion of SEO is the blog. This is the part of your website that covers a huge amount of content in the form of articles. And content is what the search engines consider when ranking web pages. So, the benefits of a blog in education are great. Write and publish interesting articles that cover the required information related to your target niche.

Share useful tips and pieces of advice that will meet your potential learners’ concerns and help them make decisions, learn something, or just go on in the right direction. This form of content will help to establish a connection with the people interested in the field. Once they learn there are useful tips in your blog, they will come back again and again to find more. You may create a subscription form so that people subscribe and be aware of your content updates. The list of subscribers may be used for email marketing (we will discuss below).

#3 Search Engine Advertisements

In some cases, it is not a good choice to spend much time on SEO because it won’t provide results for the chosen time. For instance, you may have a special offer for a short time and you want the page to be shown on the top results of search engines. For such cases, search engine ads are a better choice. You will immediately reach a great number of target learners.

Of course, you spend money on the ads, but time is also money. If you have to choose between time spend on earning a rank and money that will provide better results immediately, I think, you should focus on the second option. Surely, this is effective for pages that serve for a short time. As for other cases, I highly recommend SEO. Make sure to also always use affordable white hat link building services as it may increase your traffic potential and domain authority.

For the advertisements, you may rely on different advertising platforms. If you choose advertising on Google and their partner platforms, use Google Adwords. Through this platform, you can run advertising campaigns not only in textual formats on the search results but also visual ads, like banners on different websites, video ads on YouTube videos, and so on. It's crucial to ensure TCPA consent in your advertising endeavors, as it establishes a legal and compliant framework for communication and outreach.

#4 Social Media Marketing

When people decide to create and sell online courses, first of all, they tend to think about sharing these courses on social media channels. This is because social media has become an inevitable part of our daily lives. We check them out to learn about the latest news or get in touch with friends. So, this is a great chance to reach the target market as people are everywhere on social media. That’s why many people use social media to support online teaching.

Social media is a wide platform that covers different channels. You are the one to analyze and choose the best ones where your target market is more likely to be found; whether it is Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any messenger. In particular, you can make eLearning Work with Facebook Groups. In the chosen platforms you should create business pages and establish a form of communication with the audience. This may be in the form of textual or visual content presented as a usual post or advertisement.

Yes, you got it. You may also run advertising campaigns on social media. If you know your target students are more likely to be found on social media, rely on these platforms instead of search engine ads.

Keep in mind: Advertising methods of digital marketing assume paying in order to show ads (or make people click on them) across various websites. For example, Google’s Display Network, on which ads are shown, reaches 90% of the global internet. When done well, paid advertising is a reliable and cost-effective way to reach new customers.

#5 Email Marketing

When people subscribe to your blog or register on your platform as students you get an opportunity to keep in touch with them through email and share useful information, how-to material, the latest articles, or any form of special offers and updates. This form of promotion is mainly for those people who want to learn more.

Instead of just sending email letters to people, you can create online forms of newsletters that will cover tips and tricks about how to get the maximum out of the knowledge, skills, and experience you share. People who subscribe to these newsletters get emails, where you get an opportunity:

- to share tips, pieces of advice, and present strategies for achieving success    
- to promote your content material and drive traffic to the website

- to present new courses and pieces of training    
- to encourage the subscribers to sign up for your online courses or pay for a membership plan    
- to evoke the students’ interest in going deeper and getting more detailed information

These approaches help to increase brand awareness and reach potential learners who may need your quality knowledge. You can link email marketing with customer relationship management to get the most out of your marketing campaigns. CRM software can help you improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by tailoring them to the interests of your consumers.

How Digital Marketing can Support in Growing Your Knowledge Commerce Business?

It is important to understand that digital marketing works better when you follow all the related promotional methods and they are interrelated. For instance, you can give away some free tips or present a simple guide to learning the basics of your course topic. It will be logical to announce this freebie via social media advertising to attract people and drive them to your website. The next step should be using your email list to encourage the interested people to provide their names and email addresses in exchange for getting the guide. 

This will help you go on promoting the online course. Writing and publishing SEO-friendly content for quality blog articles on required topics you can also build your organic search traffic. This brings your digital marketing full circle and helps to grow your list of customers and subscribers at the same time. 

Learn 25 ways to promote online courses.

Being active in promoting the material through digital marketing services, you continue to promote your online course, membership, or other knowledge commerce offer. You can consider hiring a digital marketing company to help you effectively reach and engage with your target audience. Accordingly, you go on building your customer and subscriber base. From there, you can choose:

- to build upon your course    
- to offer additional membership packages    
- to create and offer upsells 

The choice of whether or not to rely on digital marketing is yours. This is just one of the many reasons that fully support education providers. And, that is why so many people turn to the knowledge economy, being sure that they have all the opportunities that will help them build an online business and achieve success. 

Ready to Get Started with Digital Marketing through Uteach?

As you may already know (or even have tried on your own) you can create eLearning websites with Uteach. Besides providing various advanced features, and eLearning automation tools (such as, for instance, test checking automation), Uteach is also functional in regards to the digital marketing services.

Highlighting the importance of digital visibility, we prioritize SEO. The websites created with Uteach, are SEO-friendly. There is an opportunity to add metadata to the website pages.  Accordingly, it becomes easier for the search engines to find and show the created platforms in the search engine result pages when interested searchers look for related information or services.

It is also possible to integrate marketing analytical tools on websites created with Uteach as well as use the website URLs to use in advertising campaigns on different platforms. So, you are one step back to your success. The first step is essential, start today!

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