How to go from to 1,000 Online Course Students With Zero Ad Budget

You have everything laid out. It's been discovered that there's an area that needs to be filled, you have made your lesson plan, You're elated and enthralled by it all. You may be even done in creating your course. There is a dilemma: what can you do to spread information to prospective students? What can you do to make the site more known to your target audience? Which websites do you need to post your links?

I've got good news to share with you: this is the case and a solution. 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 to 1,000 students. This is all without any expense for advertising.

To begin, however, I will dispel a common mistake teachers make when they set the goal of building their courses. This is due to the fact that they pursue a build-first approach instead of an audience-first method. The reason the "build-first" strategy isn't optimal is due to the fact that you believe a lot of things to be true, which exposes the course instructor to significant risk in your course. Particularly, when it comes to what you should compose and how the course structure will be.

  That said, here are the 4 key parts to this mini-tutorial to ensure constant, steady traffic on your course:  

1. Find out where your Ideal Audience Hangs Out
2. How to Read your Audience's mind
3. How do you earn respect and Reputation in your Audience
4. How do you share your course with a group of people who are ready to Purchase your Product

  Find Out the Places where your ideal audience hangs Out  

Let's say you're a consulting client of mine and you want to market a class on Marketing Analytics.

First thing I'll tell you is that you'll need to ask the correct questions. You need to ask first "who do you plan to serve" rather than "what you'd like to serve". If you're in this Marketing Analytics case, you need to then make a choice: do you wish to target Marketing Managers, CMOs or Entrepreneurs or marketing newbies?

You've decided to concentrate on business owners.

If so, then the first task is to search for "where this audience hangs out". One of the best ways to accomplish this is to search to find "online lounges". Online lounges are spaces in the internet where people discuss things related to their topic of interest. These can be forums, blogs, and mailing lists. How I accomplish it is to follow these steps:

1. Open up your Google or Bing search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
2. Make a search using any combination of these:

Forum - Profession + forum

- - Profession + "topic" + mailing list

Professional - Topic + blog

- Profession + topic + forum for the industry

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

- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum

Just there, I get to find 10+ 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 with your chosen topic. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you should be looking for is an sign of trouble or pain from the original poster. Starting with the original query of just "marketing" on the subreddit. It's not working.

What can we do to refine our quest to dig for the source of pain? Let's add "pain indicators" like "help" or "advice needed". Check out the results. We can see that in just the first page, there are a number of potentially useful threads.

If you've found particular threads that have a lot of screams and cries, then you know that you're in the correct online space to advertise to in the future. When you start to conduct more investigation you'll discover that some forums will work for specific topics and some forums won't. This helps you concentrate your promotion efforts only in regions where your target audience hangs out. This is essential to the effectiveness of your program.

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

Check out different forums! I would suggest that you must find at minimum 10 lounges online. Blogs are also useful (especially because of its extremely active discussion sections).

  How to Read your Audience's Minds  

By now, you have an extensive list of threads with clear indications of pain. Let's underline all of them and let's truly understand who are people who are.

After you've gathered enough information, you'll start seeing patterns on who your audience is. Once you identify these patterns, you start to develop a clear understanding of what your audience feels and thinks about marketing in general.

From the above, there are some small patterns emerging (we'll have to wait for 10+ painstaking threads to truly understand) that entrepreneurs actually require three items: a high-efficiency digital marketing plan that requires little cash outlay, tips around cities-specific marketing and the best way to present oneself for attracting high-value customers.

Earlier, in our hypothetical example, you wanted to develop a product around Marketing Analytics. It turns out, however, that the idea may be too advanced (at minimum to be used in at least the Reddit Lounge online). It is better to pursue a program that is focused on low-budget, high-efficiency advertising as well as local marketing. finding and closing clients with high value.

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 for just a couple of cents a click
2. How to Create a Referral Machine by using these Pitch Scripts at your next local Chamber of Commerce Event
3. Find out what needs Only high-value clients have

Course Title: "How to Get High-Value clients using Hyperlocal and Hyper targeted marketing"

If you were to change that direction within the Reddit space, I'm sure you'll see some traction. What do you think evidence-based marketing can offer us?

  How to build respect and trust among your Audience  

Apart from identifying pains it is important to make yourself an expert in these spaces.

This means that you should give bite-sized suggestions whenever you encounter these pains. By bite-sized, I mean things that range from one to 10 sentences but is actionable enough to allow the user to use.

For example you can answer someone who says "haven't seen Facebook as helpful" or "need an effective plan" with this form:

"I understand that you need an efficient digital strategy given your low budget. It is a surprise, however in that you believe FB ads to be NOT effective. I run FB ads a lot in my consultancy, and here's how I suggest you do the right targeting for good quality clicks, at $0.40 to $0.80 per click:

1. ONLY use targeted interest. All other settings are left as defaults.
2. When you use interest targeting be sure you select at least 10+ interest and leave out interests with a large reach. A large number of clicks per interest translates to high cost per click. If I was targeting marketers using interests, I would do so by using gurus like 'Neil Patel', 'Derek Halpern' 'Darren Rowse', etc. I'd recommend excluding 'Gary Vaynerchuk's' influence is too large!
3. It is important to ensure that your TOTAL reach does not exceed 800,000 people
4. Get your test started! Check that your test is limited to $5 per day. Never use the life-time budgeting option.
5. If you are spending more than $1 per click, it is necessary to eliminate interest with the greatest impact and then add additional 'niche interested
6. If you need ideas on "niche" topics, look up for the right tools, influencers and software then try this out"

If you give advice at the level of actionable and low-level detail, you will gain respect and credibility in the field.

  How to Share your Course with an audience which is ready to buy the Product you offer  

"Isn't it a violation of the law to share URLs? !" "What if I get blocked? !"

You probably might have thought of these ideas. These are valid assertions. To solve the problem, one thing you could do is include inline links in your posts and add other links not related to your website. This creates the impression that you intend to be helpful and not be spammy. Let me give you a personal experience where I was trying to help someone having trouble in landing pages.

With these four large, strategically-planned steps I managed to grow my site to have approximately 4K-5K organic visits per month. 89% of these came from direct link. See the data below from SimilarWeb. No dollar spent on advertising in any way.

Offer a lot of value for free and actionable to the world and it will love the world in return. I wish you the best results throughout your life!

  Kenn Costales is an growth hacker as well as an online course designer who enjoys discovering new methods to market products on the internet without investing a penny.