40: 5 Simple Ways to Find Students for your Online Course (without huge ad spends)

Foreign hi there.

Before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you an important question. Are you wondering why your hard work isn't reflecting in your bank account? If so, I've got something that could change the game for you. With my digital product accelerator one on one coaching program, I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs like you bank consistent revenue without sacrificing your time, time or sanity. Imagine shifting from 90% client facing work to enjoying consistent revenue from your digital products, all while reclaiming your time. You already know that you don't need another course and a one size fits all approach isn't going to cut it. What you need is a strategic long term plan tailored just for you. So if you're ready to build the profitable, freedom giving business you've dreamed of, apply to work with me by going to destinycop.com apply I cannot wait to learn more about you and your business.

Welcome to the Course Creators MBA Podcast. I'm your host Destiny Kopp and in this podcast we're covering actionable tips to grow your online course business. But before I begin, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by my free Facebook and Instagram ad Mini Workshop series which helps you launch a high converting ad campaign in five short days. You can sign up for the free workshop series by going to destinycop.com and I will make sure that this link is in the show notes. And today we're talking about five simple ways to find students for your online course without huge ad spends. So my question for you is do you need more students for your online course? And I bet that you do. And to fill up your funnel you need traffic strategies in place for your business. And basically this just means that you need eyeballs on your lead magnets, whether it's your webinar, your five day challenge, a boot camp or virtual, you know, virtual summit or whatever you are doing to take that online course product prospect on a buyer's journey from the awareness stage to the consideration stage and finally towards making a decision about whether or not to invest in your business. And when online course creators come to me and they wonder why their online course did not sell, most of the time, it's because they did not get enough traffic coming into their sales funnel. It is typical for an online course sales funnel to convert anywhere from like 1% for a cold audience to, you know, 5% or maybe even more if you're selling to a warm audience. This means that for every hundred people that attend your webinar or participate in your challenge or view your video series. Only a handful of them, you know, maybe one to five when you're looking at percentages, will buy. The fact is you need volume to sell online courses, but you're in a crowded market, I'm sure most of us are. And the question is, how do you get the eyeballs on your business? So let me walk you through my funnel fill up formula and talk about various traffic strategies to get eyeballs on your content. And the funnel fill up formula number one is social media. But I want you to avoid this mistake on social media and that is posting your online course all over social media and asking your followers to buy your course. I've had people come to me and say I have, you know, 25,000 followers on social media on Instagram or Facebook, but they are aren't buying my course. Why? And I tell them it's very simple. Your followers on social media are not interested in buying your online course. They are only interested in the transformation that you can help them with. And to demonstrate this transformation, you have to take them on the buyer's journey. Your goal is to get them to click on your call to action from social media and sign up for your email list. And then once you're on, once they're on your email list, then you're going to start your welcome sequence and you're going to start building that rapport with them and start establishing yourself as the expert to help them and then moving on to my funnel fill up formula number two, which is SEO and content marketing. And this is one of my favorite strategies to fill up my funnel and it's mostly free. I am very clear on the goals for my content is to educate my ideal client and to inspire them to take action. Many online course creators, they get stuck in a process where they're super, super busy, but they're not working on what's important to grow their online course business. All of my content is focused on these topics with one goal in mind to help my audience sell their online course. It is important for you to have a clear goal on your content and the action that you want your audience to take after reading it. SEO is a long term game and most likely you're not going to show up on the first page of Google overnight. But one of the things that I have used is Pinterest and Tailwind Tribe to explode my organic website traffic. And I have another podcast episode that walks you through exactly how to do this, what I have done. And I'm going to make sure that the Link for this podcast episode is in the show notes. Moving on to funnel fill up formula number three which is affiliate marketing and here's why I love affiliate marketing and for online course creators who have no audience or maybe they have a small email list, it is a great way to sell your online course and build your community. Affiliate marketing programs are mostly automated and they are super simple to set up for me. I use the affiliate option in Kajabi to pay my affiliates when they sell one of my programs and here is how that works. So I create a share link for my affiliates to share with their audiences and that link places a cookie on the Prospect's browser for 30 days and if their customer purchases from my site using that browser and the purchases made within that 30 day time period, that transaction is counted as an affiliate transaction and they earn a commission. So if you want to find some affiliates to help sell your online course, one of the things you can do is reach out to known authorities in your niche and build a relationship with them. You can follow them on social media, you can interact in the comments of their social posts and their blogs. You can get on their email list and respond to their emails. The key here is to get to know them and allow them to get to know you. And if you feel like they're a good fit fit, then you can ask them to be an affiliate in your next launch. But one of the things that you'll want to do before you go through that process is put together your affiliate program details before you reach out to those potential affiliates. You're also going to want to determine the percentage commission and your pay system. So many affiliate programs pay anywhere from 40 to 50%. The only thing caveat I would give to that if you are providing some hands on type one on one service with your program, and many of us do, your commission percentage may be lower. And don't forget to provide some awesome marketing materials and affiliate education. So just remember that your affiliates, they're not familiar with your online course and they cannot speak to it in the way that you can. So you're going to want to give them some email templates, some social media templates and images and anything that they can just copy and paste. The other thing you may want to consider is some type of Frequently Asked Questions document. The other thing that you can consider as you're putting together your program. You can put together some type of leaderboard or some type of system or incentive for, you know, the people who are selling your online course like hotcakes for example, you could give them a greater commission if they're at the top of your leaderboard. So you can give them 50% instead of 40%. Now moving on to funnel fill up formula number four, which is public relations. So a great way to find students for your online course is through free pr. And my favorite way for free PR is to be a guest on a podcast. It is very simple and it's not as time consuming for me as guest blogging. But how do you find podcast guest opportunities? And one way is to sign up for podcast guests and every week they send out an email with podcast hopes that are looking for guests just like you. Now another way that I find potential guest podcasting opportunities is just to go out and find podcasts that I know my ideal customer are listening to and then build a relationship with that podcast hope, host and pitch them. Moving on to funnel fill up formula number five, which is paid advertising and hands down this is the best way to find students for your online course. But I'm sure that you have heard of stories of ad campaigns with high cost per leads or ones that didn't net any sales. And I will say that there is an art and a science to running an ad campaign that converts and sometimes you just need to do some testing to find the audience and the lead magnets that work for your online course and your business. And if you're on a budget and let me ask who isn't, the key is to start small and test and then scale. I I like for clients to start with list building ads a few months prior to their launch. Then that gives them the opportunity to test various lead magnets. They can test various audiences, ad copy creative without the high pressure and time constraints of a launch. I also like offering tripwires to help offset the cost of Facebook and Instagram ads. And if you're not familiar with what a tripwire is, I do have a post and I'll put it in a link in the show notes so you can walk through and figure that out. But basically what a tripwire is is after your landing page for your free lead magnet, when you go to your thank you page, you're going to have an offer on that page. Like an irresistible offer on that page where somebody clicks on that and said, you know, when they go to your thank you page you say but wait, before you go, I have an offer that I think you would be interested in. And that's when you present your offer. And it's generally a very cheap digital type of offer that they can get anywhere from $7 to $49. Kind of a no brainer type of offer. And there you go. Those are the five simple ways to find students for your online course without huge ad spends. So course creators, thanks so much for joining us today. If you have any questions about Facebook or Instagram ads or your online course sales funnel or traffic strategies, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or DM me on Facebook or Instagram. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. We'd love for you to rate and review the podcast on itunes or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.