How To Create a Blog For Promoting an Online Course Business

It is unbelievable how much visibility you can GAIN with a blog that is optimized correctly.     
 

In this article, we will discuss how blogs can help you promote your online course business and how you can design a blog to receive a successful outcome. Are you interested? Let’s get into it!    
 

Why is a blog so essential for course creators?

Having a blog on your website is a great way of promoting your online schooling business without spending a penny. It is a completely free marketing strategy that has a lot of benefits. So, it can act as a preview of your courses and further advertise your business.    
 

Blog benefits for your business

As we have mentioned previously, having a blog accompany your online educational business is quite beneficial, but we only vaguely outlined those benefits. How does a blog directly influence the success of your business? Let’s discuss it in further detail.

#1 Get higher rankings on search engines

First things first, having a blog on your website is having another page. When your blog is elaborate and big, you get so much more. Say you’ve been publishing two articles per week for half a year (having 52 articles in total), and you get additional forty-eight pages. Now, 52 pages in combination with other pages of your website have a better chance of being found in a search engine, especially when your articles are written smartly.    
 

And smart, not content-wise but SEO-wise. SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is a system of strategies that allows your website to rank higher in search engines like Google and Safari. One of the most foundational approaches to search engine optimization is keywords. You put keywords on your website, so your website gets discovered when a person searches that combination of words.     
 

Obviously, when having a blog with articles (many articles, as you might have gathered), you increase your opportunities to use keywords. The more keywords you use, the higher you rank. There are other SEO-related things that blog posts and articles can help you with, but we will expound on that later.    
 

What you need to gather here is that blogs increase the SEO of your website. Therefore you are more visible in the search engine. That, in its turn, means that you get more traffic on your website and increase your chances of getting sales. That’s your benefit #1.

#2 Show how reliable you are

You can basically show off via your blog, starting with your own character and ending with your expertise. A blog is a perfect place for showing that you are an expert in the field of the courses you teach, thus gaining the trust and support of your customers.     
 

You can reassure your clients that you know what you’re talking about and that your course is not a scam or something completely useless. By sharing information about your online business, your courses, content creation, and, most importantly, research, you can appear very professional. Besides, you can show how relatable you are by joking and sharing funny stories that happened to you, but they have to be connected to your online course business. People like watching interviews with celebrities or successful people. So, you can use this to become more loveable, which will increase your chances of gaining more supporters.    
 

An online blog is essential for creating a public image of yourself and your online course brand, building up a certain reputation, etc.

#3 Attract new leads

Modern people appreciate and demand that companies are transparent about their processes and resources. The same applies small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. A blog is a fantastic opportunity to make your online schooling business more transparent, and trust us; people will value that. 

Sharing free content that concerns your courses will show how generous you are and that you care about your customers. It will also provide your website visitors with an understanding of whether they need your courses or not. If they don’t actually need your course, but they buy it, they will be angry at you and will write negative reviews, and you don’t want that. Besides, you’d rather work with somebody who is passionate about your subject.    
 

Apart from that, a blog is a brilliant way of making them need you. By creating your blog smartly, that is, using pop-ups and a chatbot that collects customer data (emails), you can lead email campaigns. To source contacts and their emails, you can also use your network and a dedicated LinkedIn email finder that will help you seamlessly get in touch with them. Such campaigns will further advertise your online course and, most importantly, create fear of missing out. Emails containing messages like “3 days left till the end of the discount!” will rush your customers and make them think they need the course more than they actually do. And they will be much more likely to make a purchase.    
 

#4 Keep your old students 

Speaking of your students, you would want to keep them with you for as long as possible. That is a smart way to do business: attract new leads and keep your old ones afloat.    
 

It comes from a clever course design, too. Instead of offering “A complete course in Physics: From Aristotle to Einstein,” you can offer “Mechanics,” “Electricity,” etc., separately. First, that will make them cheaper, more accessible, and more needed. A person who wants to know everything about electricity but already knows mechanics well enough wouldn’t want to pay additionally. But others who need both will need the second course, and you can promote it to them via your blog.     
 

Following this example, you can send them links to your blog posts like “Overview of ‘Electricity’ course” and allure them to take it. Providing additional resources for them, like PDFs with formulas and major laws, short summaries, etc., will help them enhance their learning and show that you care about them.

#5 Resources

What resources does having a blog on your website require? Your time, your effort, and that’s it. Since you already have a website, you won’t have to pay additionally for your blogging website; you can just create a page titled “Our Blog '' or something like that and put your blog posts there. Actually, you’d rather include your blog on the same website that you're using for your online business since it would be more beneficial in terms of SEO. Uteach provides you ready page for Blog. So if you conitune with Uteach your work will be very easy.    
 

But yes, all you need to do is to dedicate some time and some effort to writing articles, but we will show you the shortcuts and things you need to consider beforehand.

Consider these tips before starting a blog

Now while creating blog posts won't cost you a dime and are completely free, you will have to put in a lot of effort, and it’s not guaranteed that you will see results immediately. There are a lot of factors that can influence the success of your blog, so consider our tips and advice before starting your blog.

Length

We have mentioned that in order for your blog to bring full success to your online business, you need to optimize it for the search engines. That can be done through keywords, but you also have to write long articles. Long articles rank higher in search engines. Therefore it is more beneficial for you to write longer articles.

Schedule

Another thing to take into account is that you have to post your articles or blog posts very frequently and consistently, so there is a need for a schedule. Since the articles are long, you’d rather post two to three articles a week. Are you ready to take up that responsibility and dedicate that much time and effort to blogs? If yes, then you will see the results eventually.

Advertising

You need to promote your blog somehow, don’t you? Do it everywhere: on social media, in your emails, in your blog posts too, and in your course lessons. In courses, for example, you can insert “Check this article for a recap before the test” or “You can find the list of formulas by this link.” Increase the traffic to your blog posts, rank higher in search engines, and get more new leads.

What?

Before you start working on your blog, think about the content to post. Make a rough schedule of your content so your posts are coherent, write down topics you want to discuss, and schedule the time that you’re going to use for writing your articles. Before posting your first article, make sure that you have articles for one to two weeks ahead.

7 steps to start an online course blog

Finally, we are going to take a look at the Top 7 Essential steps you have to take to create a successful and efficient blog on your website. So, let’s start! 

Step 1 - Find A Platform

The first step is finding a platform for your blogs. It won’t be too hard if you are using a website that you created yourself, whether it was programmed or built upon WordPress — you can just create subpages on your website and be done with it. If you are using a hosting platform, you’d rather check if they provide you with opportunities to write your blogs. Some platforms do — like Uteach, and some platforms don’t. If your platform does provide you with the function, then go ahead and read the instructions, but if it doesn’t, you need to find another platform for your blogs.     
 

Alternative platforms can be your social media: you can post on Instagram or Facebook, and you can share content on your YouTube channel and Pinterest. For a more nuanced strategy, consider optimizing your website with social media integration, which can further complement your on-site sales.

Step 2 - Prepare Your Material

As we have mentioned, you need to prepare your material ahead. Not only does this mean that you have to outline the topics ahead, but you also need to have finished articles one-two week ahead in hand and ready. Things happen sudden plan changes, unrealistic time management, etc. — things that won’t let you sit and write 1800 words for the upcoming Tuesday. It is very convenient to have the material beforehand, especially when you’re just starting.     
 

Also, you need to think about what you are going to include in that material. You can follow templates like a newspaper outline or a blog format trend. You can write just descriptions and summaries — chatty things — or include additional media. Usually, when you write an article, it is preferable to include vector images to help your readers with attention management and give them breaks (the articles must belong, remember). But, additional media that we just mentioned are not images — they can be short videos, PDF materials, documents, ebooks, etc. There are a lot of things to choose from, and you know what will suit your blog more.

Step 3 - Schedule Your Posts

Now, you need to organize your posts in a certain chain-like sequence so the material is coherent and not out of place. Knowing your content ahead is very helpful here, for example:    
 

• Monday: Why do you need a second language?
• Wednesday: How to choose your course for language learning on my platform?
• Friday: Everything about language knowledge levels: From A1 to C2.    
   

Articles in the example go from the widest and most general topic to a more specific topic. The week has a theme that unites these three articles (apart from being language-related). That can apply to any course, so you’d rather follow this example. 

Step 4 - Write 

You can start with the writing part when you know the topics and the content. First, you need an outline; make sure that it consists of the three major parts: the introduction, the main body with your content, and, of course, a conclusion.     
 

Those are not school essays — you don’t need a thesis to argue for. So, in your introduction, you include a short description of your blog post. Ideally, your reader should understand from the introduction whether they need to read this article or not. It is the “why”: why do you need to read this article? The title and the starting sentence/paragraph should intrigue your reader. In the main body, you include the content of the article. The conclusion must include a short summary of the article and what your reader should remember after reading the whole article. You use it to refresh the readers’ memory and indicate the main points.     
 

Remember, when you are writing an outline, you want to make it as detailed as possible. Add subtitles one after another. Not only will it give you a better understanding of your course, but you will use it later in the article. Yes, online articles, very similar to academics, commonly feature the outlines. The reason for that is obvious: convenience. You should also add hyperlinks to the outline so that when your reader clicks on the title in the outline, they get redirected to the part of the article they need. This is especially helpful since your articles are quite long. 

And just like in academics, you must give credit where credit is due. If at any point you’re using someone else's content or quoting another person, even if it’s paraphrased, you’ll have to use one of the many citation generator tools like Quillbot to provide proper credit. Not only does this preserve academic integrity, but it’s also a nice thing to do.

Step 5 - Optimize

After you write your first draft and edit it, and you are sure that it is as good as it gets, you must optimize the article. There are many strategies you have to employ to increase the SEO of your blog articles, but we will have a look at the two main strategies:    
 

• Keyword strategy. You need to include certain keywords and a certain number of them in your article. The keywords are words that users type in search engines to find something that they need, and depending on your topic, you will need to use different keywords. You don’t get your keywords from thin air, you use tools that are specifically designed to find keywords that fit your topic. For example, Semrush Keyword Research allows you to find the needed keywords. It analyses the popularity of the keywords and shows you which keywords are more useful to you. There are many other tools for that, so you definitely are not scarce with the material. 
• Backlinks. Backlinks are equally important for your SEO. They are basically links on a website page that link to another page, and you can link to pages on your own website, etc. The more backlinks you have on a page, the more valuable it appears to search engines. Therefore they rank it higher. You can include backlinks to other blog posts, to your social media, etc. But make sure to use a backlink monitoring tool to track the performance and effectiveness of your link-building efforts.

Step 6 - Publish

Time to publish your article! Make sure that you optimized it, and recheck your content — does it make sense? Add pictures, links to your contacts, and the outline. You can additionally put it through Grammarly or Hemingway App to check whether you made some mistakes and typos. Add alternative descriptions to the pictures, and you are almost done.

Step 7 - Promote

Your article is ready and published, which means it’s time to advertise it. First, you share it on your social media. You promote both your blog in general and the separate articles. So, you can put Instagram Stories something like: “Hey guys, check out my new article about …”. You also put links in your course lessons to your article and send emails to your students about you publishing an article, as a weekly newspaper would do. When you need extra promotion, applying for a Facebook ads agency will help.

Do you need extra tools? 

In order to increase the effectiveness of your blog, you may need some additional tools. We have separated them by the function:    
 

• Email Campaigns. To lead an email campaign, one needs to collect the emails first. For that, you can use pop-ups that will suggest your users share their emails with them. You can embed a chatbot to your blog that will also ask your website visitors for their email for the same purpose. A popular and effective chatbot is Crisp.
• SEO. Tools for SEO optimization include Google Analytics, Keywords Planner, Semrush, and others. They will provide you with stats on your website traffic and ideas on how to increase it.
• Promotion. For promotion, you may use your social media, including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and others. For the most effectiveness, you can use all of them at once.     
   

And luckily for you, we offer a platform that has all of those. Uteach is an incredible website builder for online course creators and coaches that will allow you to build a full-features website in less than 3 minutes. You will be able to design and customize the header, footer menus, pages, the overall appearance, themes and publish to sell your courses.     
 

Besides, it is not just a website builder, it is an all-in-one platform that works great for CMR, promotion, and marketing as well. You can manage marketing, payments, and everything else from the same dashboard.     
 

Also, when you create a blog with Uteach or decide to publish a course, it offers SEO boxes that will guide and help you better optimize the content to rank higher.     
 

Choose the automation that works best and saves your time; choose Uteach.