How to go from 0 To 1,000 Online Course Students With no advertising budget

So you have it all planned out. You have discovered that there's an area that needs to be filled and you've created the lesson plan You're elated and enthralled by it all. Perhaps you're done with building the course. However, a problem is How do you get information to prospective students? What can you do to make the site easier for your targeted group? To which sites are you supposed to share your link?

I have good news for you: this can be a solution. Numerous authors prior to they created online courses that cover all kinds of content; and I'll help you learn the best methods to build your class from zero students to 1,000 students. All without spending anything on advertising.

To begin, however I'll dispel the most common error educators make when setting up to create their own course. The reason for this is because they pursue a build-first approach instead of an audience-first method. The reason that the "build-first" method is not optimal is that you're assuming a lot of things to be the case, which can expose the course instructor to significant dangers in your class. Particularly, when it comes to what you should compose and how the course structure will be.

  This being said, here are the four main components in this mini-tutorial for ensuring continuous, reliable traffic for your course:  

1. How to Discover Where the ideal audience hangs out
2. What can you do to understand your audience's Minds
3. How to Build Respect and Reputation with your audience
4. How to share your Course with a group of people who are ready to Buy your Product

  How to Discover Your Ideal Audience's Place Out  

Let's imagine that you're a consulting client of mine. You'd like to promote a course around Marketing Analytics.

First thing I'll tell you is that you'll need to ask the appropriate query -- you have to first ask "who are you planning to serve" rather than "what you plan to serve". In the Marketing Analytics case, you must then make a choice: do you want to target Marketing Managers, CMOs or Marketing Newbies, or Entrepreneurs?

Say that you've chosen to focus on entrepreneurs.

If so The first thing to do is to search to find "where this audience hangs out". The most effective way to do this is by searching for "online lounges". Online lounges are places on the web where users engage in discussions about the subject they're interested in. This could include forums, blogs, or mailing lists. The way that I do this is by following these steps:

1. You can open your preferred web-based search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
2. Search for a query with any combination of these:

Forum - Profession + forum

• Profession + Topic mailing list

Professional - Topic + blog

- Profession + topic + industry forum

• Profession + topic + link-sharing site (Eg. Reddit, stumbleupon)

- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum

Right there, I uncover 10+ websites to focus on:

There's more to come. When you've selected a forum, you need to drill down further and make another search using the topic of choice. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you're looking out for in this instance is any signs of difficulty or discomfort from the original poster. Starting with the original query of"just "marketing" on the subreddit. It's not working.

What can we do to refine our search to really dig for the source of pain? Add "pain indicators" like "help" as well as "advice required". Check out the results. We can see that in just the very first page, there are a number of potentially useful threads.

If you've come across specific forums that are full of complaints and apprehension, you'll know you're in the right online space to advertise to in the future. As you dive in and conduct more investigation it will be apparent that some forums will work to address specific issues, while some forums won't. This helps you concentrate your promotion efforts only in regions where your target audience hangs out. This is crucial to the effectiveness of your course.

From the above 15 minute exercise, we just got evidence that reddit.com/r/entrepreneur is a great place to promote our marketing course.

Check out additional forums! My suggestion is that you must find at least 10 online lounges. Blogs are also useful (especially thanks to its highly active comment sections).

  How to Read your Readers' Minds  

You've got an extensive list of threads with clear indications of hurt. Let's underline all of them and really know who our people who are.

After you've gathered enough information then you'll begin to notice patterns in your customer base. is. Once you identify the patterns, you begin getting a good sense of what your audience feels and feels about marketing in general.

From the above we can see a few small patterns emerging (we'll have to wait for 10+ painstaking threads to truly understand) that entrepreneurs truly require three factors: an extremely efficient digital marketing plan that requires little expenditure of cash, advice on cities-specific marketing and the best way to present oneself for attracting high-value customers.

Earlier, in our hypothetical scenario, you had a desire to create a product based on Marketing Analytics. But it turns out it may be too advanced (at least to be used in the Reddit online lounge). The best option is to follow an education that focuses on budget and high-efficiency marketing as well as local marketing. looking for and closing customers with high value.

The course I have planned for these samples of pain is going to begin looking like:

1. How can you use Interest Targeting on Facebook to locate High-Quality Clients at a few dime a time
2. How to Build an Referral Machine by using these Pitch Scripts at your next local Chamber of Commerce Event
3. Find out what needs only high-value customers have

Course Title: "How to Get High-Value Customers Using the Hyperlocal as well as Hyper Targeted Marketing"

If you were to change that direction in the Reddit market, I'm confident it will gain traction. What do you think evidence-based marketing can offer us?

  How to Build respect and trust among your audience  

In addition to identifying problems, however, you need to make yourself an authoritative figure in these virtual salons.

It means offering bite-sized tips anytime you experience these problems. By "bite-sized," I refer to something that's from 1 to 10 sentences but is actionable enough for the person to use.

In this way you can answer the person who said "haven't seen Facebook as useful" or "need an effective strategy" with this form:

"I realize that you will require an efficient digital strategy given the budget you have. It is a surprise, however in that you believe FB ads not to be effective. I run FB ads quite often in my consulting business, and here's what I would suggest to do with the right targeting for good quality clicks, at $0.40 - $0.80 per click.

1. ONLY use interest targeting. All other settings are left as defaults.
2. When using interest-targeting be sure you select 10+ interests and eliminate those with significant reach. A large number of clicks per interest translates with a higher price per click. If I was targeting entrepreneurs into marketing, I would use interests with gurus like Neil Patel', 'Derek Halpern and 'Darren Rowse', etc. I'd recommend excluding 'Gary Vaynerchuk's influence is too large!
3. Be sure the total reach doesn't exceed 800,000. people
4. Start your test! Make sure your test is locked to $5 per day. NEVER use the lifetime cost option.
5. If you exceed the threshold of $1/click, you must cut off those with the most range and also add more "niche' interests
6. If you are looking for ideas about "niche" interests, search for influencers, tools, and even software, then test the idea"

If you provide advice at an unassuming level and in a way that is actionable, you will gain respect and authority within your field.

  How to Distribute Your Course to an Audience who is ready to purchase your product  

"Isn't it a bit shady to publish hyperlinks? !" "What if I am blocked? !"

It's likely that you've might have thought of these ideas. And these are fair assertions. For a solution the issue, all you can do is to use inline links in your blog posts, and then pair this with other links not related to your website. This will help convey the idea that you intend to be friendly and not spammy. Here's a personal example in which I attempted to assist anyone who was having difficulty using landing pages.

By doing these 4 large, strategically-planned steps I was able to build my website to get approximately 4K-5K organic visits per month, 89% from direct links. Check out the stats below from SimilarWeb. No dollar spent on advertising whatsoever.

Offer a lot of free, actionable value to the world and the world will love you and love you back. I wish you the best results throughout your life!

  Kenn Costales, a grow hacker and online course designer who enjoys discovering new methods to market products online without investing a penny.