As soon as your put your knowledge into an online format, you immediately open it up to a global marketplace. But too many online educators think that creating an online course and pressing publish is the end point. At the risk of sounding like an entrepreneurial party-pooper, publishing your course is just the beginning.
I have over 40 online courses of my own, and have built close to 1,000 courses for other people. And I currently have over 7,000 students enrolled in my online courses in over 130 countries.
In this article, I will share eleven tips that I have used to grow my global student base, so that you can grow yours too.
Consumers are now in control of their knowledge because they now have the power to jump onto Google and ask ‘How to xxx’. If you want to go global, keep this in mind and start providing your audience with those answers.
If your content appears as the result for every ‘how to’ question that your audience has, then it is your online course that they’re going to buy.
Every video you add increases your chances of being found by your audience as the one ‘who has all of the answers’.
Online course marketplaces are like the supermarkets of online courses. They are big, powerful, have huge reach and big customer numbers. The downsides to them are that you as the course owner don’t own the student data, or have full control over your course pricing. However, many of them have millions of users – all of whom you have the opportunity to get your course in front of, if you have a course on the shelves. Because these marketplaces can highly discount your courses, I advise you to put a smaller ‘taster’ version of your course and use them to reel in the potential millions of customers these huge websites give you access to.
Online course marketplaces have now become so big, they have markets within their own market! There are hundreds of websites and social media groups that are dedicated to sharing discount coupons and promotions for marketplace listed courses. Create a discount coupon and add them to these promotion sites (I have a whole downloadable document of these available in my online course) and you will see a huge influx of international students.
Every online course is essentially a collection of tips, advice and strategies for something.
Pull out every single tip and strategy from your online course and write a short blog post about each one. Not only will your own website be more discoverable in search engine results due to the keyword content and data; but you can also repurpose those blogs as articles and send them to industry relevant magazines. Getting an article related to your online course into a popular online magazine could get your course in front of hundreds of thousands of highly targeted readers.
Webinars are the global classroom. There are endless webinar tools out there that are free or very cheap. Select a small handful of tips from your online course – the most popular tips are the ones to use, and create a free webinar to share them in a sensational way. Then at the end of the webinar, reveal to them that there are ‘X’ more tips just like those available to through your online course. You could even give them a discount coupon and expect to see some significant enrolments if you wowed them.
YouTube has over 1 billion users. You’d be crazy not to tap into that global platform. Add a selection of the videos from your online course to YouTube. You can now schedule the publication of your YouTube videos so that they drip publish over a period of time and maximise your exposure. Create a discount coupon to your course and add it to the YouTube video description to entice the global viewers into your courses.
Just like the deli counter lets you taste a little square of cheese for free, allow your prospective customers to nibble on a piece of your training for free too. This will allow them to be assured that you are the expert that you profess to be, by seeing for themselves.
Create a mini version of your online course and give it away for free as a lead magnet opt-in on your website. Ensure that you let them know that they can upgrade to the full course at the end of the freebie.
Make sure that the search engines can find your course. Write down at least 20 words and phrases that people might type into Google to find a course like yours.
Then go back through all of your course description, lecture titles and module titles as well as the course name itself to make sure that they are optimised for search ranking by including the keywords you have selected.
Then go into the back end of your website and your online school and ensure that you list all of your keywords and phrases into the SEO areas on your site to increase the opportunity for it to be found on Google.
Facebook groups are a fantastic opportunity for you to build strong relationships with your customers. They go way beyond the power of a Facebook page which these days have very little reach without paying.
A Facebook group is a way to make your audience feel like they belong to something. If you can create this in your own global community you will create loyal fans from around the world forever.
Books are another fantastic way to reach your audience at a global level, and these days it’s really easy to self-publish one of the most credibility-enhancing mediums out there. Simply send your online course videos to a transcriber, do some heavy re-writing, filling, editing and formatting, upload your book on to the Amazon platform and you’ll immediately have your content open to over 63 million people.
The added benefit of this is that your book and your courses then begin to promote one another.
I only started podcasting at the end of 2016 and have since always wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner. Create a podcast delivery plan around the content in your online course.
The key here is to remember that everyone likes to consume information in different ways, so you don’t have to work 10 times harder to get 10 times the reach. You simply have to take one single video from your course and share it in ways where more people can find it.
The more you can repurpose your content into every different medium possible the more your global student base will grow.
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