3 Marketing Principles I Wish I Knew Earlier

If you want to learn how to sell online courses, you're going to need to dial in the 3 things that we're about to cover in this video. Because if you don't get these 3 principles right, you're not going to be selling anything. And I'm not just saying this, I'm speaking from experience. I built 6 online courses that left me shamefully spooning a pint of Häagen-Dazs in front of my computer with a big fat $0 staring back at me. And once I learned these 3 things and really put them into practice, I was able to make my first $200, then $300, and so on passively without ever meeting the people that bought my course. I've learned a lot over the years, and I'm pumped because today I'm sharing with you 3 things that you must know if you really want to make this all work for you. Well, there are a lot of tactics out there to sell online courses, like Facebook ads, podcasting, blogging, email marketing, social media— the list goes on. If you don't get these 3 things right, you're going to be left spooning your own pint of Häagen-Dazs. Now, if you're interested in creating real and legitimate passive income by teaching stuff online, but you don't even know where to start or what your business idea would be even, I put together a 5-step guide that walks you through how to earn your first $500 per month of passive income. There's a link in the description, or you can always go to profityourknowledge.com/guide. It's my gift to you. Just promise me that if you download it, you use it. Now, nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ah, I just, I want to buy an online course today. People pay for things because they're looking for a result. An outcome or a specific transformation that they want to experience in their life. It doesn't matter what the vehicle is, if it's a book, online course, a workshop, a coaching program, whatever it is, people pay for transformation. And if you can't clearly explain the outcome that they can expect by taking your course, they're not going to buy. Confusion kills sales. The more streamlined you can be in speaking to the desired outcome that people should expect from this program, the better off you're going to be. In fact, sales pages that showcase the benefits more than the features outperform pages where the features are talked about more than the benefits. So what's the difference between features and benefits? On my sales page, I can say something like this: this online course has done-for-you action steps. That would be the feature. So you know exactly what to do first, second, and third. I've done the thinking for you so you can relax and shortcut your success. That's the benefit. The features are the tangible deliverables of your product, and they're necessary, but the benefits are why those features matter. So as you're writing out your sales page and you're rereading it, ask yourself, so what? Why should I care? The more that you speak to the result and the transformation that people can expect by going through your course, the better off you're going to be and the more sales you're gonna make. But even if you've created a course and you have a great outcome and you're clear on it, you know it's something that they actually care about, and you're still not making sales, it's most likely because of this next piece. If people don't believe that you are the right person to teach them and help them get that desired outcome, they're not gonna buy. So the question is, how do we build that trust and that belief? Ideally, before people ever find out about your product, they should already have a certain level of trust and belief that you're the right person to teach this material. Now, there's two great ways that you can do this. The first is to create consistent, free, and valuable content like YouTube videos. This is content where people are able to discover you, get to know you more, and they can watch all the different videos that you have released on your channel. But it can also be in the form of a podcast or a blog as well. Now, YouTube is the best way to build trust with people because not only can they hear you, they get to see you and see your mannerisms, the way that you explain things, get to know you more, especially if you're making good eye contact. And then if your content is really good and they can take action on the things that you say and get results, naturally they're gonna wanna come back to you and learn more. Now another great way to build belief before ever promoting your product is to address and understand objections and concerns that your audience has ahead of time. For example, if I told you, you can create passive income with digital products, instantly your brain is gonna go into defense mode because you've either experienced things in your life that have caused you to not believe that that's true or that it's not possible for you. Or maybe even you have a friend or someone else you know, or you've read stories, whatever it is, where you feel like that is really difficult to achieve, if not impossible. So it's my job to address those concerns and doubts that you have and then create new beliefs inside of your mind about how this actually is possible for you and it's not as complicated as you think. I can do this by sharing strategies to help you achieve that goal, also by telling stories of my success and other people's success by using those strategies as well. I can address these concerns in my free content, in an automated email sequence, and on my sales page. As I'm telling you all this, you might be thinking, well, James, this sounds all well and good, but why would people buy my online course if there's already so much information out there online that's free? I think André Agide put it the best where he said, everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since nobody was listening, everything must be said again. There's no real new information that's being shared online. With a simple Google search, I can find an answer to any question that I ask. In fact, I can find a lot of answers to the same exact question. But picture this: sifting through hundreds of blog posts, YouTube videos, and books, trying to piece together the transformation that you want requires an insane amount of effort. Not to mention learning from a ton of different people with different viewpoints and teaching styles. People will buy your course simply for convenience. If people find you online, they like you, they feel like they can trust you, they believe that you're the person who can help them get the result they really want, then you offer it to them in a perfectly curated step-by-step system. They'd rather pay you for the path than try and figure it out on their own. Think of free content more like a flashlight that's very broad and it covers one idea, whereas a course is more like a laser beam where it covers everything you need to know in one streamlined system. People are busy. And by purchasing your course, if you've done your job right and created a good course, you're going to save them time. Not to mention, when people make an investment, they have skin in the game, so they put more effort in rather than just reading a blog post that has all the steps that they need. Because they paid for a program and a system, they are going to be more committed to go through that system. And speaking of saving time, if you're looking to work less and earn more money in your life and business, you're going to want to check out this video. If this video was helpful, show me some love, give me a thumbs up, and let me know any questions you have down below in a comment. I'll see you in the next one.