How To Go From zero to 1000 Online Course Participants With No Advertise budget

You have everything laid out. There's an unfinished space You've drafted your lesson plan, and you're pumped up and enthusiastic about the whole thing. You may be even done creating the curriculum. But a question looms: what can you do to spread information to prospective students? What are the best ways to get it more visible to your intended group? Which websites are you supposed to share your link?

There's a good thing for you: this is an easily solved problem. Numerous authors prior to created online courses to cover a variety of material. I'll show you the most effective methods to build your course from 0 students up to 1000. This is all without any expense for advertising.

In the beginning I'll dispel one of the common mistakes instructors make when setting out to build their course. This is due to the fact that they pursue a build-first approach instead of an approach that is based on audience. The reason why the "build-first" approach is sub-optimal is because you are assuming many 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 should be.

  However, below are the four main components in this mini-tutorial for ensuring steady, consistent traffic to your training course:  

1. What to do to find out where Your Ideal Clients Hang Out
2. What can you do to understand your audience's minds
3. How to Build Respect and Reputation with your audience
4. How do you share your course with a group of people who are ready to purchase your product

  What to Do To Find Your Ideal Audience's Place Out  

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

First thing I'll state to you is that you'll have to ask the appropriate question -- you need to first ask "who will you serve" rather than "what you'd like to serve". If you're in the Marketing Analytics case, you will then have to decide if you intend to focus on Marketing Managers, CMOs, Entrepreneurs or marketing newbies?

Let's say you've made the decision to concentrate on business owners.

If so The first thing to do is to search for "where this audience hangs out". The best way to do this is to search to find "online lounges". Online lounges are places on the internet that allow people to talk about things that are related to the topic they are interested in. They could be forums, blogs, and mailing lists. The way that I do it is to follow the following steps:

1. You can open your preferred Google or Bing search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
2. Search for a query with any of the following combinations:

Forum - Profession + forum

- - Profession + "topic" + mailing list

• Profession + blog

• Profession and a forum for industry

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

- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum

Right there, I get to uncover 10+ forums to target:

The search doesn't stop there. Once you select a specific forum, you need to drill down further and make another search using the preferred topic. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you're looking for is an indication of pain or trouble from the original poster. From the initial query of just "marketing" on the subreddit. There is no luck.

How can we improve our search to really look for pain? Add "pain indicators" like "help" or "advice needed". Check out the results. We can see that in just the first page, we can find a plethora of threads that could be useful.

If you've found particular threads with LOTS of expressions of pain, then you know that you're in the correct online club to spread the word to the future. If you dig deeper and look deeper into the forums it will be apparent that some forums work to address specific issues, while some forums will not. This can help you narrow your marketing efforts on the areas where your desired audience hangs out. This is crucial for the success of your plan.

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! I would suggest that you should find at least 10 online lounges. Blogs work too (especially because of its extremely lively discussion sections).

  How to Read your Audience's Minds  

Now, you're faced with a an extensive list of threads that clearly show signs of hurt. Let's highlight all of them and be able to be aware of who the people who are.

Once you collect enough data and begin to see patterns on who your audience is. When you recognize these patterns, you'll begin to get a strong instinct of how your target audience feels and feels about marketing in general.

In the above data we can see a few small patterns emerging (we'll have to wait for 10+ painstaking threads to truly understand) that entrepreneurs really need three things: a highly efficient digital marketing strategy with low cost of capital, useful tips on cities-specific marketing and how one can position themselves in order to attract high-value customers.

As we mentioned earlier, in our hypothetical instance, you were planning to create a product based on Marketing Analytics. But it turns out it could be too complex (at least for the Reddit online lounge). It is better to pursue an education that focuses on budget advertising that is high-efficiency locally, as well as looking for and closing customers with high value.

My structure of course to deal with these types of pain could then begin to look as follows:

1. How to Use Interest Targeting on Facebook to locate High-Quality Clients at a few dimes a Click
2. How to Build an Referral Machine through these Pitch Scripts at your next local Chamber of Commerce Event
3. How to Discover the Needs only High-Value Clients Have

Course Description: "How to Get High-Value clients using the Hyperlocal as well as Hyper Targeted Marketing"

If you decide to drop that particular course within the Reddit market, I'm confident it will gain traction. Do you know what the evidence-based approach to marketing offers us?

  How to build Respect and Reputation among your target audience  

In addition to identifying problems, however you must establish yourself as an expert in these salons.

It means offering bite-sized tips when you face these issues. By bite-sized, I mean anything that's between 1 and 10 sentences but is actionable enough for the person to use.

As an example I'd respond to those who say "haven't found FB to be useful" as well as "need an efficient strategy" with this form:

"I understand that you need an efficient digital strategy given your low budget. I am surprised, however in that you believe FB ads not to be efficient. I use FB ads quite often in my consultancy, and here's the way I recommend you conduct your targeting to get quality clicks at $0.40 to $0.80 per click.

1. ONLY use interest targeting. Leave everything else at defaults.
2. When you use interest targeting, make sure to use more than 10 interests, and then eliminate those with large reach. A large number of clicks for each interest can translate to high price per click. If I were targeting people who are interested in marketing using interest with gurus like Neil Patel', 'Derek Halpern' 'Darren Rowse', etc. I'd recommend excluding 'Gary Vaynerchuk's influence is too large!
3. It is important to ensure that your TOTAL reach does not exceed 800,000 individuals.
4. Begin your test! Be sure that the test is set to a daily fee of $5. Do not ever use the lifetime budget option.
5. If your earnings exceed the threshold of $1/click, it is necessary to eliminate interest with the greatest impact and then add additional 'niche' interests
6. If you need ideas on "niche" interests, search for the right tools, influencers and even software, then test the idea"

If you offer advice in an unassuming level and in a way that is actionable it will be a source of respect and credibility within the space.

  How to Distribute Your Course with an audience which is ready to buy your Product  

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

You probably have had this thought. They're valid claims. For a solution the issue, all you can do is make use of inline links within your posts and combine this with links not related to your web site. This helps drive the sense that you are trying to be useful and not to be a spammer. Let me give you a personal experience in which I attempted to assist anyone who was having difficulty in landing pages.

By doing these 4 large, strategically-planned steps I was able to increase my site to have around 4k-5k organic visits a month. 89% of these came from direct hyperlinks. Check out the stats in the following article from SimilarWeb. No dollar spent on advertising in any way.

Offer a lot of free, actionable value to the world, and the world will be awestruck by the world and love you back. I wish you great results on your path!

  Kenn Costales is a growth hacker and online course creator who loves discovering new methods to market products online without spending a dime.