Use PR and SEO to Increase Your Online Course Sales
The process of creating your online course is just the beginning. After your course has been created then the next thing to do is to enroll students (easier to do than say! ).
Have you got a strategy for marketing strategy? Or have you made the mistake of thinking that because you have a course online that people automatically discover it.
Well, I'm sorry to bring negative news. However, If you're looking to get the most returns on the effort you poured into creating your course, the first step is to advertise it.
The two most efficient ways to achieve this is by using PR (Public Relations) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Gone are the days where you had to reach deep into your pockets and engage a PR agency that is expensive to get your company visibility. If you're aware of what to do to, you can do it yourself.
Be sure to check back.
Same goes for SEO. You no longer have to shell out huge sums of money on an SEO agency. If you are able to engage your customers with valuable content, then you are able to send clear signals to search engines.
In this thorough guide, I'm going to reveal some actionable tips on ways to use PR and SEO to increase the sales of your online courses.
PR Tools and Tips for Increasing Your Course Sales
Step 1: How To Find Journalists
If you're doing your own PR, the initial thing to do is find journalists in your niche. If, for instance, you're a teacher of Social Media Marketing you'll want to look for journalists who are specialized in writing about social media marketing.
What's more?
Google is as good a starting point like any other...
Find the search results in Google and use the 'News' tab for journalists that write on your subject.
Like this:
Start looking into the writers of these articles to determine if they can help you to improve your public relations efforts.
Take a few minutes to verify whether the person who wrote the article of the article is a regular journalist on your particular subject.
From your search results you are able to begin building a Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Name of the reporter
- The URL for the article
- Click here to go to Twitter profile for the reporter
- Link to the personal website or blog for the reporter (if it is available)
- Email address (if there is one)
- Your Notes
In our case it could be:
- Jayson DeMers
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2016/09/28/9-things-social-media-marketers-get-wrong/#5107342a4b2f
- https://twitter.com/jaysondemers
- http://www.audiencebloom.com/
- Email?
- The founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, a company that specializes in content marketing based out of Seattle. Regular columnist for Forbes.
Here's an example a spreadsheet of reporters that I compiled:
>> Your aim for you is to compile a list of 20 reporters in your niche.
Google is good, but not all the time. It is difficult to determine what your conversation starter will be with these journalists and what most popular topics that you share with them and who is your most pertinent journalists to contact now and why.
JustReachOut will help you locate the most appropriate journalists and also provide you with a compelling reason of why you should contact them. You enter a keyword and it will show that you are writing about the keyword, and also why you should reach out to them. It also gives you emails pitch templates for your pitch. It also provides email support from journalists' staff to assist users send direct emails to journalists via the platform and the team of experts who check every email before being and sent.
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Step 2. How to Get In Touch With Journalists
When you've got the list of journalists you want to connect with, then you're prepared for the next step: connecting with them. connecting with them.
The example below can see this particular journalist is ready to accept solicitations. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
For those who don't provide your contact information You'll need to look a little more. However, don't fret. There are several instruments that could help.
1. Hunter
Enter the company website into Hunter, and it'll give you the structure and emails.
For example, if you try entering it will display:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
If you know a pattern, it is possible to guess your journalist's contact details.
2. Email Format
If you look up the publication you want to read on Email Format, it suggests which format it is most confident is correct.
For example, here is what it returns for :
Once you have an idea of the potential email address of the journalist, then you can employ this tool to verify it.
Step 3: How To Build Relations with Journalists
You've already identified potential reporters within your area and have created a spreadsheet that includes their contact info.
There is a temptation to start pitching straight away.
But don't.
First, you need to build connections with them. The best approach is to start giving prior to soliciting.
Take these steps:
- Answer journalist questions on HelpAReporter or JustReachOut.
- Interview journalists for articles on your own blog
- Answer a question in Qora and then ask journalists to reply to the exact same question.
- Follow the journalists you want to contact on Twitter. Follow the journalists you want to pitch on
- Tweet relevant content and share it with others.
- Send a thoughtful response via Twitter or a comment on their blog. Start sharing your personality to help them get acquainted with your personality.
- Provide them with some idea or a story that doesn't revolve around the you. Yes, that's right, offer them something interesting. They're journalists. They're looking for stories.
Recently, I made a video that outlines a step by step of how to develop connections with journalists. It is available for you to refer to.
Here's the words of Rebecca Grant, a former writer for VentureBeat spoke about developing connections first:
"If you've got a suggestion or an idea for a story thatdoes not involve you, share it with journalists. We are constantly looking for interesting stories ."
Step 4: How To Pitch Your Story to Journalists
You should now have established a relationship with the reporters you'd like to approach. The time you spend to make the first move means you don't have to email cold today.
What exactly are you going to say in the email you send?
What you do not wish to share with reporters about your new course.
This is a huge NO.
Go back to the top of the page.
What do journalists want?
--- Good Stories.
You've heard that saying before: "Stories sell newspapers."
It's the same in the internet world.
Stories that are good get shared and visitors.
The time has come to share your story with journalists. What are you going to get them from? Your blog.
In the next section next section, we'll look at content marketing, but before that let's look at some tools to help with your email pitching.
Digital marketing agency Fractl conducted a survey of over 500 journalists on top websites such as BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch, and more about the things they would like to see to hear in a pitch.
Here are some of the key conclusions:
- 81% would rather be pitched over emails
- 69% would prefer to be pitched early in the morning.
- 39% are looking for an exclusive study to release
In this regard, you need to make sure that you track the development of your email marketing campaign. There are two techniques you could try:
MixMax is a plugin for free that works with Gmail which includes the ability to track emails for an indefinite period of time. You can select whether you want to track all your emails or individual ones:
The lightning icon that has numbers in front of the messages you have sent indicates that somebody has been able to open your email, as well as the number of times they have opened it.
# 2 Yesware
Yesware is yet another Gmail plugin that allows you to track email open and reply rates, clicks on links, and attachment opens. Simply click the "track" button prior to you hit send and Yesware will do all the monitoring. Yesware allows you to try different variations for your email subject line as well as save email templates for later for use.
If your course online is completed or not, then now is the best opportunity to plan the strategies. You should think about the journalists you might be able to meet and begin to build relations. Make sure to give them excellent stories.
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SEO Tips to Increase Your Online Course Sales
SEO is the practice of maximizing the number of visitors to an online site by making sure that your website appears first in the results returned by the search engine. So if someone searches for the subject of your class using Google as an example the presence of your site in the results of a search means free exposure for your business.
How can you make your website to show up in search results for topics relevant to your program?
by publishing excellent information (blog posts, videos, etc.) on your site that visitors can access for free.
You might now be asking: after all your efforts in developing your course material, why do you need to make the content for free?
I'll clarify the reasoning:
Through the creation and promotion of high quality content for free (usually via blogs) You establish trust and authority in your area of expertise. If you can create content that is free that actually helps others, these people will be more likely to purchase the course since they are familiar with, trust and are confident inyou. The free content you offer creates reciprocity.
In the ideal scenario, you'll have a blog or an audience before selling your course. But if not, it's not too late to begin one today.
The most important thing to make your blog successful is having high-quality content. This is the kind of content Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Contentis content that is 10 times better than the best result that can currently be seen in search results for a given keyword phrase or topic.
Journalists and readers would prefer to hyperlink to your premium value content
The process of creating 10x content isn't an easy task. If it were, then every single piece of content will have to be 10x.
You have an exclusive benefit...
- You've just created an excellent online course.
- You've a mountain of content at your fingertips.
- It's already clear some key keyword phrases and themes that people are searching for.
If you are creating content for your blog, you will be able to draw from that library of ideas and then turn into a 10x increase in content.
Be sure to include 10x Content:
- Helps solve a problem, or answer questions by giving comprehensive, accurate, exceptional details or sources.
- It is of high-end, reliable practical, fascinating and amazing.
- Gives users a pleasant experience by providing a user-friendly layout, interface, fonts, and images.
When your content meets those requirements, then your readers, plus the journalists you pitch to is bound to want to spread the word about it.
It is important to remember that all these tasks take the time of a long time! The ability to prioritize your projects and manage your time are essential to getting results quickly. I have recently shared some advice about how you can manage your time while creating or conducting PR outreach. I also found some fantastic actionable stuff there from others also.
10x Content gets more natural backlinks and ranks better on Google
If Google begins to realize that your content is popular It will then increase the rank of your website in the search results. And because it's a high-quality article, other users who are in your area will want to link to it.
and Google loves organic backlinks.
After all your hard work creating the content remember to follow these steps.
1. Check that your site is ready to receive the torrent of traffic
- Go to GTmetrix then input your website's URL and try it with your homepage URL, and then your most ranking or most popular blog page URL. Check out the grade you receive as well as the problems it identifies. You should have a grade that is"B" or "A..
- Make use of dedicated web hosting. Do not use HostGator or a cheaper service such as GoDaddy which makes use of a variety of shared servers and are not designed for hosting and serving up WordPress or blog posts specifically. Consider using services like Flywheel or WPEngine specially designed for hosting and serving up WordPress blog content. It optimizes how your site loads, making load speed faster and also helps to rank your page higher in Google.
- Think about the use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) - it is a service that provides alternative server nodes for customers to download and install resources (usually static content such as images or JavaScript). This speeds up your site greatly, many important websites utilize this. Learn more here.
- You should consider using a caching software - if you ever pushed a back button on a web browser and the page was taking more than 5 minutes to load you've visited an uncached website. Inexpensive loading times could limit your website's traffic, reduce your Google search rank and lessen your website's potential. A caching software will aid in speeding up loading greatly. It is possible to learn more here.
- Optimize all of your images to ensure speedier loading of your website It's a elementary concept that can become somewhat technical because you might need to use CSS sprites to optimize the images. The article below will show you how to do this and why. When you are done with the day you want a grade of A or B on GTmetrix in order to improve the ranking of the homepage of your blog and for all the major articles you'd like to rank in the minimum. I like to make sure the articles for my blog get this grade.
2. Make sure you have applicable CTAs (calls to take) strategically placed throughout your site:
- To buy your online course
If you've not started your blog, then you should start by getting your blog up and running. Begin to think about what 10x articles you could create to ensure that people will be drawn to hear your story.
Add PR & SEO to your course marketing plan
Are you ready to start advertising your online course using these low-cost PR and SEO strategies?
SEO and PR do not have to cost a fortune. When you set your mind towards it, you'll tap into the resources readily available. Develop meaningful connections with influential people and develop valuable content that will increase your online course sales.
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Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io It helps startup entrepreneurs and business owners pitch journalists and influencers without the assistance of PR agencies. In the past, he employed PR outreach to get an enterprise acquired by Google. He blog about PR tricks along with SEO in his blog CriminallyProlific.