How to use SEO and PR to boost The Sales for your online course
Making your course online is just the start. When your course is completed, the next step is to enroll students (easier to do than say! ).
Have you got a strategy for marketing plan? Perhaps you've thought that simply because your course is online that people automatically locate the course.
It's a pity to bring bad news, but in order to maximise returns on your efforts put into developing your course the first step is to advertise it.
Two of the most effective ways to achieve this is through the PR (Public Relations) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Gone are the days where you had to reach deep into your pockets and hire an expensive PR firm to help your business get publicity. If you know what do to, you could make it happen by yourself.
Keep an eye out.
The same goes for SEO. You no longer have to pay huge amounts of money hiring an SEO agency. If you can engage your customers with useful content, then you are able to send clear signals to search engines.
In this detailed guide, I'll provide some practical tips on ways to use SEO and PR to boost your online course sales.
Tips and Techniques for PR for increasing the sales of your course
Step 1. How to Find Journalists
When you're doing yourself PR, the first stage is to locate journalists in your niche. For instance, if the course you're taking is Social Media Marketing you'll want to look for journalists who are specialized in writing about marketing on social media.
And, guess what?
Google is as good a starting point as any...
Find the search results in Google using the News tab for journalists that write on your subject.
This is how:
Then, start looking up the authors of these articles to see how they might be able to assist you with your PR efforts.
Spend a couple of minutes to verify whether the person who wrote the article of the story is a regular reporter within your field.
After you have viewed your results, you can start building a Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Name of the reporter
- URL of the article
- Click here to go to Twitter profile for the reporter
- Link to the website or blog for the reporter (if there is one)
- Email address (if available)
- Your Notes
For example it could be:
- Jayson DeMers
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2016/09/28/9-things-social-media-marketers-get-wrong/#5107342a4b2f
- https://twitter.com/jaysondemers
- http://www.audiencebloom.com/
- Email?
- Chief Executive Officer and Founder of AudienceBloom, a company that specializes in content marketing based out of Seattle. Regular columnist for Forbes.
Here's an example a spreadsheet of reporters that I put together:
>> aim is for you to make a the list of 20 journalists who are in your area.
Google is good, but not always great. It is difficult to know the topic of your conversation be with these journalists, what are the most popular topics they have in common which are the most relevant journalist to contact now and why.
JustReachOut helps you identify the most relevant journalists and give you a reason for why to reach them. Enter a keyword, and the program will tell the journalist who's creating an article on your topic and the reason it is important to contact journalists. The tool also provides emails pitch templates to write your pitch, help with email messages from our journalists' staff to assist users send direct emails to journalists via the platform and a team which human verifies every single email before it's sent.
~
Step 2. How to Join Journalists
After you've compiled your list of relevant journalists you're ready for the next step: c connect with them.
In the example below you can see that this particular journalist is open to receiving requests for pitches. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
For those who don't provide the contact information it is necessary to investigate more. However, don't fret. There are several devices that may aid.
1. Hunter
Input the website of your company into Hunter The program will show you the format as well as known email addresses.
In this case, if you try entering the site will show:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
If you are able to identify a pattern, it is possible to guess your journalist's contact details.
In the event that you locate the desired publication using Email Format, it suggests which format it is most sure is accurate.
Here is what it returns for :
Once you have an idea of the possible email address for your journalist, then employ this tool to verify the email address.
Step 3. How to Build Connections with Journalists
So far you've identified prospective journalists in your niche and created a spreadsheet with their contact details.
You may be tempted to start pitching straight away.
But don't.
The first step is establish relationships with these people. The best approach is to start giving before you begin making requests.
Take these steps:
- Respond to journalists queries on HelpAReporter or JustReachOut
- Contact journalists for article ideas on your own blog
- Answer a question via Quora and then ask journalists to respond to the same question.
- Follow the journalists you'd like to contact on Twitter. Follow the journalists you want to pitch on
- Tweet relevant content and share it with others.
- Leave a meaningful response on Twitter or leave a message on their blog. Be open about your personal style in order to let them know your style.
- Offer them the possibility of a story or idea that isn't about the you. You're right. throw them something newsworthy. They're journalists. They're looking for stories.
A while ago, I recorded a video that outlines an easy step-by-step guide on how to develop relations with journalists. It is available for you to refer to.
Here's what Rebecca Grant, a former writer for VentureBeat she said about developing relationships first:
"If you've got an idea or an idea for an article that *gaspdoes not involve your company, then share it with journalists. We're constantly looking for stories that are worth telling. ."
Step 4: How to Pitch Your Story To Journalists
By now you should be establishing a rapport with the reporters you'd like to reach out to. Taking the time to build rapport implies that you do not have to send a cold email right now.
However, what are you going to say in the email you send?
One thing you don't wish to share with reporters about your fresh course.
It's a no-no.
Scroll back up the page.
What are journalists looking for?
-" Good Stories.
Ever heard the saying: "Stories sell newspapers."
Similar to what happens in the world of online.
Stories that are good get shared as well as traffic.
It's time to start sharing your experiences with reporters. But where are you going to find them? Your blog.
In the following section, we'll dive into content marketing. However, prior to that, let's take a look at some tools to help with your email pitching.
Digital marketing company Fractl surveyed over 500 journalists at top sites such as BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch as well as other publications about what they want when pitching.
Here are some key conclusions:
- 81% prefer being pitched by email
- 69% of respondents prefer being pitched early in the morning.
- 39% of respondents are seeking an exclusive study to publish
In this regard that in mind, be sure to track the progress of your email marketing campaign. There are two methods to try:
MixMax is a no-cost plugin to Gmail which includes the ability to track emails for an indefinite period of time. You can select which emails you would like to be tracked every email you receive or just specific ones.
The lightning icon with numbers next to your sent messages indicates that someone has read your email and the number of times they opened it.
# 2 Yesware
Yesware is yet another Gmail plugin that lets you track email open and reply rates, link clicks, as well as attachment open. Click"track" before hitting send "track" button prior to you click send, and Yesware does all the monitoring. Yesware allows you to try different variations for your email subject line and lets you save templates of email for future to use later.
If your course online is finished or not, now is a great time to start planning the strategies. Consider which journalists you can meet and begin to build connections. Make sure to give them excellent news stories.
~
SEO Tips to Boost the Sales of Your Online Course
SEO is the process to increase the amount of people who visit a website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a engine. For instance, if someone searches the subject of your class using Google or Yahoo getting your website to appear in the results of a search means free exposure to you.
How do you get your site to appear on search results when you type in topics related to your course?
Through publishing amazing material (blog posts or videos.) on your site that visitors are able to consume at no cost.
Now you might be wondering what you did all the effort in creating your course material, why should you share your content as free?
Allow me to describe the reason:
By creating and marketing excellent content on a budget (usually by way of the blog) You establish credibility and trust in your field. If you produce content for free that actually helps people, those people are more likely to buy the course since they are familiar with, trust and are confident inyou. The free content you offer helps build reciprocity.
In the ideal scenario, you'll have a website and an audience before selling your courses. If not, it's not too late to start one now.
The key to making your blog a success is having highly relevant content. It's what Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Contentwhich is material that's 10 times more valuable than the best results currently located in the results of a search of a particular keyword or subject.
Journalists and readers prefer linking to your top worth information
Making 10x content isn't an easy task. If it was, every single piece of content will be 10x.
However, you've got a distinct advantage...
- It's a great online course.
- A wealth of material is in your reach.
- It's already clear some key keywords and topics that your audience is craving.
When you start writing content for your blog you will be able to draw from that library of ideas and then turn it into 10x content.
Make sure that your 10x Content
- Helps solve a problem, or answer questions by giving extensive, exact, outstanding details or sources.
- High-quality, trusted, useful, interesting as well as remarkable.
- Provides a positive user experience via the user layout, interface of the site, fonts, images, and layout.
If your material meets these requirements, then your readers, plus the journalists who you've pitched to are bound to share it.
Be aware that all this stuff takes time, a lot of time! The ability to prioritize your projects and manage your time are essential to achieving results quick. I recently provided some tips on how to manage your time while writing or doing PR outreach. I also found some fantastic practical advice from other people too.
10x Content gets more natural backlinks and rank better in Google
When Google begins to realize that your content is popular It will then push your page higher in the search results. Because it's a top-quality piece of content, others in your niche will naturally desire to hyperlink to it.
and Google is a fan of naturally-generated backlinks.
After you have completed your work creating the content remember to do the following.
1. Be sure that your site is ready to receive the floods of traffic:
- Visit GTmetrix then enter your website's URL Try your home page URL, and then your most ranking or most popular blog posting URL. Look over the grades you get and what issues it highlights. It should be a grade that is"B" or "A..
- Utilize dedicated web hosting. Beware of HostGator or a cheaper service like GoDaddy which uses a bunch of shared servers and do not have the capacity for hosting and serving up WordPress or blog posts specifically. Look at services such as Flywheel or WPEngine specially designed to host and deliver WordPress blog post content. This optimizes the way your page loads and makes your page load time faster, as well as helps your site rank higher in Google.
- You should consider the use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) This operates by offering different server nodes to users to download resources (usually static content like images and JavaScript). It speeds up the speed of your website significantly, and the majority of major sites use this. You can learn more about it here.
- You should consider using a caching software If you've ever hit the back button in a web browser and the page was taking more than 5 minutes to load, you've encountered an uncached website. The excessive load time can hinder your traffic, lower the quality of your Google search rank and lessen your website's overall potential. Installing a caching plugin will assist in improving load speeds significantly. It is possible to learn more about it here.
- Optimize all your images for quicker loading times - this is a pretty elementary concept that can become a little technical since it is possible to utilize CSS Sprites to make the images. In this article, we will tell you how to do this and why. When you are done with the day you want a grade of either A or B GTmetrix to rank your blog's homepage as well as any other major posts that you wish to rank on at least. I like to make sure every article I post for my blog get the grade.
2. Check to see if you've got the right CTAs (calls to actions) strategically placed throughout your website:
- To buy your online course
If you've not started your blog yet, you need to make sure your site is operational. Plan out what 10x-quality content you can create so that your audience will want to hear your story.
Include SEO and PR to the marketing strategy for your course
Are you eager to begin promoting your online course with the most cost-effective SEO and PR tactics?
SEO and PR don't need to be expensive. If you put your heart to them, you'll be able to make use of the tools readily available. Build meaningful relationships with influencers and create valuable content to boost the sales of your online courses.
~
Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io that helps start-ups and entrepreneurs reach out to journalists and influencers with no assistance of PR agencies. In the past, he used PR outreach to get an enterprise acquired by Google. He blog about PR tricks along with SEO in his blog at CriminallyProlific.