Welcome back, this is Dave Espino and today I want to talk about a problem I hear a lot; "How can I market my courses better?” This is something a lot of online course instructors (especially Udemy instructors) are curious about.
Here's the question I've got to ask you at the very beginning of this; do you want your marketing efforts to go toward your Udemy courses, the courses on the Udemy marketplace, or would you rather have those marketing efforts applied to somewhere where you get 100% of the revenue and you have full control over your pricing? In other words, you can charge a lot more for your courses. Then you get on Udemy, and for some reason Udemy is just this very highly discounted marketplace. It relies on high volume and low ticket prices.
What Do You Want Out of the Online Course Business?
So at the very beginning of this answer, I've got to ask you would you really like to get the most out of your course business? And if that's the case and if you're planning to do marketing for your courses, then why not have them on your own self hosted platform where you make a 100% of the revenue, you don't share 50% or 75% of the revenue with a marketplace like you do on Udemy and some of these other marketplace websites. So I like to let Udemy do what it does with my Udemy courses. Udemy does the marketing and they do a pretty good job of it, but the prices on Udemy are so low that it doesn't really make sense for me to invest time or money in marketing my courses that are on you.
It makes a lot more sense if I'm going to be doing some marketing to market those courses on my own self hosted platform such as Thinkific or Teachable or some other self hosted platform. A place where I could charge a lot more money for my courses; $47, $97, $197. And that allows me some leeway in terms of how much money I want to pay out in advertising in order to make sales. Of those $47, $97 or $197 courses.
See when you're selling courses for $10 or $15 or $20 like they do on Udemy, it doesn't give you a whole lot of leeway to do marketing. There are ways to do that. There are ways to market your courses on Udemy if you've pretty much settled on this as the only online course business you’re going to have.
Where to Market your Course
In that case, there are some ways to do it. Basically what you've got to do is find out where your prime target students and where they're hanging out on the internet already. They may be hanging out in certain Facebook groups, or certain online forums, or they may be hanging out on certain websites. Find those locations where your students are already hanging out on the Internet and run some ads there. Buy some advertising if it's a website. If it's a Facebook group, offer the Facebook group administrator some money to run some ads or to do a giveaway of your course or something along those lines. If it's a message forum or some kind of an online forum, find out if they have an advertising offers and find out if you can run ads there.
Then of course there's also a free ways to do it where you have some kind of a lead magnet, some kind of a Freebie that introduces people to your course. And that Freebie gives them some good value in advance. And by giving them some good value in advance, in order to get the Freebie, they give you their name and email address. Now you've got an email that you can follow up with and stay in touch with. And over time you warm these people up to buying your course.
So there are tried and true and proven ways to market your online courses, but again I've got to come back to the core question if you're going to do this then why not market your courses? I hope you enjoyed this article, and I'll see next time.