Best 11 Tips to Market Online Courses to Boost Your Sales

As an entrepreneur, it is not enough to create an online course and wait for the participants. Having a marketing plan is essential to promote it, boost your sales, and attract more learners for your online course. Although marketing seems a complex process for many people, it is not so overwhelming to increase your audience through an effective and profitable marketing strategy for online courses.

If you decide to create a course marketing strategy to increase enrollment, you need to keep up with the latest technological developments because the digital world is constantly changing. Frequent adjustment is required because what has worked one year ago may not give the desired results at present.

Especially if it is your first time in the e-learning industry, you need to keep specific goals and objectives in mind and structure your online course with the best practices. Creating an online course is easy, but promoting it is the challenging part. Regardless of the content, selling online courses requires some effort in marketing to attract participants.

Best Ways to Promote Your Online Courses

Here we put together the best 11 tips for marketing online courses that will help you boost your sales with strong and sustainable growth.

1. Create a Website or Blog and Optimize It

You should have a website page or blog to introduce your online course and give detailed information about it. It will help you funnel traffic to your online courses because people first look at your website when they hear of you through other channels.

Your homepage should be attention-grabbing and informative enough to keep people engaged while visiting your website. You can include brief information about you referring to how qualified you are and why they should join your online courses. You can also add comments of testimonials who attended your online courses before and witnessed your successful work.

A well-designed website for your online course should include pages with:

Information about you: Show them why you are qualified to teach the course and how you can help them reach the objectives.

Courses: List your course(s) with detailed descriptions and the targeted objectives that will be achieved after completing the course(s).

Sales: Give brief information about each course and also course bundles with a discount to convince them to buy more.

Reviews of testimonials: Add in some comments of the previous or current participants to prove that your course will be beneficial for them.

Contact information: Include multiple ways of contacting you such as e-mail address, phone number, or contact form.

2. Pay Attention to Social Media to Market Your Course

Social media is now the top way of digital marketing with millions of active users to reach prospective customers. When you create social media accounts on the most popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, you will have a chance to boost your presence and promote your course.

Especially if you are new to this business, social media can help you announce your online course to people who are likely to be interested in it. For example, Facebook is the most popular social media platform with almost 3 billion active users and the number is constantly increasing day by day. Your potential customers are also included in this group of people, so why don’t you take advantage of this opportunity to reach them easily?

3. Compile an E-mail List for Marketing Online Courses

Among various digital marketing strategies, e-mail marketing is one of the most effective tactics that can help you get a high return rate. It is easy to automate messages via e-mail and you can reach lots of potential customers just in a second.

Before people decide to participate in your courses, they need to hear from you several times. Therefore, you should inform them about your course and promote it wisely by building a list and sending regular e-mails with attractive content and structure. To build your list, you can invite your target audience via other websites, blogs, or social media. 

4. Get Reviews of Testimonials and Influencers

To prove that you can teach the best through your online course, it is crucial to publish verified reviews of testimonials who appreciated your teaching ability and style based on their experiences in your courses.

If you just structure the course and have not taught anyone yet, you can contact influencers to ask for support because they literally influence people who are following them. If they recommend you, many prospects will probably search for you and buy your online courses if they are interested. This is a great way to promote online courses through spreading by word of mouth.

5. Utilize Partnership with Other Entrepreneurs

Especially if you are new to the market, it would be useful to get into a partnership with related entrepreneurs. In this way, you can get access to each other’s customers and combine your skills for a better learning outcome.

You can find other websites or instructors having online courses that are complementary to yours and even create another course or a course bundle together. Four eyes see more than two.

6. Create Course Packages with a Discount

If you have more than one course, you can bundle several of them and create advantageous packages offering more courses at a lower cost. This strategy will allow you to sell online courses with a discount to more people who would like to attend more than one course. It will be an incentive for the customers and more profitable for you. That is a win-win negotiation.

For example, you have four online courses selling for $100 individually and if you bundle all of them together for $300, people will be encouraged to buy them all together. It is a great way of promoting online courses with a discount.

7. Invest in Online Advertising for Marketing of Your Course

Although creating accounts on social media and other social networking sites is functional for marketing, professional advertising is always the best for a higher return rate. There are many online advertising programs offering paid search, paid social media ads, and banner ads space on websites that will help you become more visible and boost your online presence.

Paid ads programs provide you with a direct connection with your target audience who are more likely to buy your course. You can either work with an advertising agency or learn how to use advertising platforms through resources on the internet and advertise your course online on your own.

8. Take Advantage of Guest Posting

To have some reputation online, you can publish some guest posts on blogs, websites, or podcasts. Write an article for other websites or make a video for a YouTube channel with many subscribers who are potential customers for you.

There are also websites including various lists for their readers and suggesting online courses with brief information about them. For example, Dan Institute is an independent e-marketplace for learning providers and it guides the marketers to select recognized online courses and reach a variety of digital marketing resources. It also provides lists of online courses with best practices. Being included in their suggestion lists can be helpful for you to strengthen your online presence by reaching more prospects.

9. Host Free Webinars 

To introduce your course to the target audience, you can host free webinars for people who are interested in your course content and give detailed information about what you offer them with your course plan. The main difference between YouTube videos and webinars is that listeners can interact with you, ask questions, and give feedback. It’s a great way to 

Hosting a webinar will also add a valuable social and online presence to you. It can be on a weekly or monthly basis according to your schedule. It is better to start with a presentation based on what your course covers and what are the targeted outcomes after completing the course. You will see how easy marketing online courses through live webinars is.

10. Create a Mini-Course as a Free Trial

Publishing a teaser will inform people about the content and structure of your online course. You can create a mini-course quoted from the main lesson and invite the audience to your course at the end of it. In this way, your potential students will see the way you teach and what is offered.

You can choose an interesting concept or section to involve in the teaser as a course marketing strategy to attract attention. Submitting a free trial will make it easier to ensure reliability for your potential students who are willing to purchase your course after they learn from the teaser.

11. Translate Your Course to Other Languages

Translating your course to other languages is a great way to increase your sales as a marketing strategy. It will give you a chance to grow your business across the world with a great number of participants from different countries. When the target audience increases, the number of potential students are also increasing correlatively.

If your course content is international and can be desired to learn by people speaking other languages, here is an opportunity to address them as well. You may not be fluent in other languages, but you can get help from native speakers of those languages to translate your presentations and record their voices if needed.