MBA1720 Q&A Wednesday: How do I sell more of my online courses?

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Practical business lessons you can use every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over at omar100mba.net. Today's question is from Sean and Sean asks. Sean writes in says hey Omar, love the podcast. I have a few online courses that I sell on my website and sales have just been trickling in. I'm not really getting the volume of sales that I would like. Do you have any tips or strategies that can help me sell my online courses courses? My courses are all about how to learn a musical instrument like the piano or the guitar and it's geared to adults, not children. Any tips you can offer would be a huge help. Thanks so much for providing so much value on the podcast Sean. Well thanks for asking the question on Q and A Wednesday Sean. Love what you do and this is not an uncommon question Many creators create courses and they create course after course and it just kind of piles up and they don't really have a method to sell the courses they have. Your question is how can I sell more of my courses? But really what I want to offer you today is a system that allows your courses to be sold regularly so you can have a predictable stream of income from those courses. I'm going to share with you some strategies that have worked for me as well as other people in different industries when it comes to selling their online courses. Some of these might be counterintuitive, but I'm going to encourage you to try them and see the results. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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So Sean asks how he can sell more of his online courses. He sells how to play a particular instrument like the piano or the guitar. And this is helpful information as I answer his question first. Let's back up. How do sales actually happen? How do people actually buy anything? Because in sales, everybody that you speak to is not at the same stage, right? Some people are ready to buy a lot more than others. So some people are just maybe interested. Some people are not interested at all. So your job as an entrepreneur is to say the right things to the right people. And you need to identify these people. And the way to identify them is based on their actions. And I'm gonna explain here. If you wanna sell anything, but especially an online course, you have to see if somebody is interested in the content you're about to offer. Just sending out an email to say, hey, everybody on my email list, buy this new course. Or by the way, I have this course for sale. I don't know if you remember I launched it last month, or here's a sale, here's an offer. This is a big mistake a lot of people make. They say the same thing to everybody on their list. So again, we're gonna assume that you are building an email list. If not, this is something you definitely should be doing through your website, through your content marketing, through social media, leading people to your content and I'll talk about how you can do some of that right now. But the bottom line is, is that you want to send your emails or the people on your email list a piece of content that will indicate to you that they're interested in an offer. Okay, this is a step before you actually make an offer. So say, for example, you have a course on playing the guitar. You know, guitar 101. Go from complete beginner to being able to play your favorite songs. Now, somebody who would buy this course would be interested in content that covered, you know, particular problems, particular issues. What is stopping somebody from playing the guitar or picking up a guitar and starting to learn? Why haven't they bought your course yet? There are some roadblocks here probably. Maybe they don't know how to buy a guitar. They don't know which guitars to buy one that they can afford. Maybe they're not sure how to carve out the time to put in the reps and practice and take your course. Maybe they're not even sure if they want to learn the guitar or the piano. They're still choosing which musical instrument they want to pick up. You know, your customer, any one of these three is fine. But try to find a topic that's a roadblock from them buying and you're going to create some content around it. This could be a video. I recommend using a video and this could be a short kind of lesson, like a 10 minute lesson on that topic. So let's choose a topic. Let's say, for example, how to buy a guitar within your budget, how to choose the right guitar. So you would create a video on that topic and you would put it on a page on your website. And the point of this video is that if they're watching this video, they are interested in possibly having lessons or buying your courses. They wouldn't be watching the video if they weren't. And this is a good indicator. So what you're doing here is you're filtering. You're going to send an email to everybody in your list and say, hey, I got this awesome lesson that I just shot on buying your first guitar within your budget. And here it is, here's the link. Everybody who clicks on that link and goes to that page to watch the video, that's an interested buyer, that's somebody who actually is thinking about playing the guitar. This is a good thing. Now what you want to do is that in that lesson, at the end of the lesson in the video, you want to make a very small and subtle offer where you explain, hey, okay, we got to this point. You now know which guitar to buy and how to buy and where to buy it. The next step is learning how to play. I have this special offer for you for watching this video for my playing of the guitar, one on one course. And what I recommend is you add some bonuses that is relevant to that video to the offer. So if they buy your course, they're going to give them some bonuses. Like I'm going to give you my guitar maintenance guide. It's a PDF that you can download that's a free bonus when you buy this offer. I'm also going to give you my guide on the three things to look out for when you're buying guitar. Sometimes they try to offer you this and that. These are things to look out for. The point here is that you're giving them bonuses on the things you know they're interested in because they watched the video and those bonuses are included with the offer of buying the course. So now in your email list you have already kind of segmented you tagged them based on if they clicked on the link to watch the video. And now you know those are interested buyers. You can then send them a sequence of emails or offering them your course with this bundle with these bonuses. And what you want to do is you want to make it a limited time kind of offer for the next few days, three days, four days and then it expires. People need boundaries, they need a sense of scarcity, otherwise they're not going to take action. That's just how it is. People will procrastinate till the last moment. And you'll notice that most of your sales are going to come from that last email that says hey, last chance to buy this offer because it's ending today. Now you might be listening to this lesson and saying omar, this is great, but I don't have that big of an email list to invite them to watch this video. Well, guess what? Now you have this video. You can repurpose it to bring in people to your email list. So this can be an opt in. You can post it on social, you can run ads to it, you can put it in the signature of your personal email, you can mention it on your YouTube channel or on your podcast. The point here is now you can create an opt in for people to watch this video. They can just give their name and email address and the next page reveals this video they already have. They already created a page and everything for your list, built your list that already gets access to because it's already opted in. So this becomes your list building machine. And again, you can build a sequence for those who opt in to get the offer that you have shown them, because, hey, they watched the video, they're interested. This is a sales sequence that has worked for me for years. Many of the elements of it I've learned from different marketers, people like Dan Kennedy, copywriters like Gary Halpert, people that are in direct response. And I've kind of modernized it for the Internet. Another strategy you may want to consider altogether is an open close launch. So you don't have your online courses open all the time. You have them open for a period of time and you have a cohort of people join again because, hey, this is the only time our enrollment's open. And you better grab it now while it's there. And you have to close it when it closes. So when people miss it, they feel regretful and they're on the lookout for the next time you open it. This works especially well if you have a community of people. Like you have a forum or you have a Facebook group or something where when everybody joins, they introduce each other and there's some camaraderie there. And it makes sense that you're bringing in a new cohort. It has that community feeling and that support. It's really, really a good bolster to your actual course because they can help each other out, ask questions, all that kind of stuff. So the purpose of this is again, giving people an opportunity to only sign up during a period of time. And I know that a lot of big course creators, they do this maybe about three or four times a year, maybe five or six. Sometimes I've seen it as much as every six or seven weeks they'll open it again and then they'll close it. Personally, I think four times a year, every quarter, is kind of the minimum, I would say. Obviously, it all depends on how many people enroll. If you have, you know, thousands of people enroll every single time, maybe four is more than you can handle. But if you're getting like a hundred people enrolling, there's no problem you doing an open close every six or seven weeks. And this again creates scarcity. And again, they have the opportunity to join. And you might want to give some special bonuses for joining. A third strategy is add ons or upsells. It's much easier to sell to a customer, somebody who already is bought in and is buying from you, than somebody who's absolutely new. So it's a lot easier to sell actually two courses to somebody than to sell two courses to two separate people. So what many people do is they add on courses where they offer hey, you bought guitar 101. You might be interested in singing lessons or how to improve your singing voice. People that play the guitar often sing, so you might want to couple these or bundle these types of courses together or offer that second course when they're in checkout. It's really important to actually bundle it or have this offer during the checkout process as an add on versus offering it after they buy. When they're in the buying process and they are in that mode of buying, it's like when you're in the shopping mall or you're in the store, this is when you're most likely to buy. This is why they put all those small confectionary items like gum and candy and things like that right by the cashier because it's where you're most likely to pick it up and just buy. You're right there. If you offer something afterwards, the momentum and the energy dies down and they're less likely to buy or be interested in buying something. Now this really, really does work if it's discounted. Say for example, that second course is 30% off when they buy it with another course. So that incentivizes them to buy them buy them together at that moment when they're checking out the all new five.

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To wrap up today's Q and a Wednesday question from Sean what's great about the things I shared today is that you have a system. You know what to do month in and month out. You have an opt in system with that video so that you automatically give them an email sequence with an that way it's an ongoing thing. It's scheduled, you know exactly when you're doing what and you can predictably kind of see how much money you're going to make every month because you could say hey, when my email list is this number, I get X amount of sales when I do this offer. And basically you just reverse engineer it you say, hey, if I have a thousand people on my email list, I get 20 sales. That means if I get my email list to 5000, I'll get 100 sales every time I make an offer. Then it becomes trying to get qualified leads and growing that email list because you know it will result in sales with your system. Thanks so much, Sean for asking today's Q and A Wednesday's question. If you have a question you want to ask, you can email me anytime over@omar100mba.net and your question might just appear right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you have a moment, give us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Stitcher Radio or Spotify. Let us know what you think of the show. We'd love to hear from you. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sales and marketing is something you have to do every day. It's like showering. You can't stop doing it. It has to be a system. You have to continue to do it over and over and over. Sometimes we kind of give up when we don't get the results we want and kind of stop marketing or stop selling. I'm, you know, guilty of this in the past. That's not what you want to do. What you want to do is that if things are not working, try something different. Try something different, keep doing different things. But you have to keep doing things. You got to keep marketing. You got to keep selling these courses, these products, these services don't sell themselves. You have to do the work consistently. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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