Building an Audience for Your Course

You’ve created your course but do you have an audience to sell it to? Creating a course is just one part of the process – some may say it’s the easiest part. Building your audience is of course important if you want to sell your course. But how do you build an audience? It all comes down to marketing. 

There are many ways to market your course, and we’re going to touch on just a few of them, giving you some ideas of how you can use various types of marketing to build an audience interested in your course subject. 

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are a great way to build an audience for your course, simply because the people who are attracted to your lead magnets are already interested in your course subject. So what type of lead magnets should you consider using?

Free webinars are a great educational marketing tool, where you can run a short webinar on a snippet of your course, or even a webinar on an area you don’t cover in your course that is still of interest, for example, let’s say your course is on marketing for beginner real estate agents. You may run a free webinar on how to cold call potential leads to get their listing. The webinar shows your expertise in the area, and it touches on the whole process, but it doesn’t give away your great course information for free. 

Free PDF’s and mini eBooks, free templates, cheat sheets, and discounts for your course (sign up within the next 24 hours and receive a 20% discount for example) are all ways to build your audience. As long as you are capturing email addresses and names, these lead magnets allow you to build an audience that you can market to. 

Social Media  

Social media platforms are another great way to build an audience, and this can be done either through building a page organically or utilising advertising on the social media platforms (a mixture of both is best). 

It will take some time to organically grow your social media accounts; putting out regular content and sharing your page with your contacts is a good way to start building your audience.  Remember though that not all your posts need to be selling your course. You need to sell yourself as an educator, and you need to develop trust with your audience. Let yourself shine through in your posts, share behind the scenes images, share short videos and really focus on building an audience of people who trust your knowledge. 

Word of Mouth 

We often forget about word of mouth marketing, but it can be one of the most effective ways to build your audience. There are a few ways to go about this – the first is to mention it to everyone who asks what you’ve been up to, the second is to have your friends, family members and colleagues mention your course when the subject comes up in conversations, and the third is to interact with your potential audience on various discussion boards. 

Podcasting

Podcasts are a fantastic way to attract an audience, whether it be your own podcast or guest appearing on someone else’s. Again, podcasts are a great way to get your knowledge out there, and allow your potential students to get to know you, and build a relationship with you, where they come to trust that your knowledge is what they need to educate themselves. 

Guests Posts and Blog Posts 

If you’re stuck for things to share on social media, why not turn your hand to blog posts or even guest posts on other websites. Blogging on your own website allows you to share various information, tips, hints, industry updates and more, while guest blogging allows you to share your knowledge with a wider audience. 

Evergreen posts are a great way to have content year round, while utilising programs such as Missing Lettr which can spread your blog posts out at various points through the year, giving you all year round content. 

Developing your course is just one side of the equation. It doesn’t matter how good your course is, without an audience you won’t get sales. You should be focussing on building your audience while building your course so that you can hit the ground running with sales. 

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