How to market your online course: 50 proven methods.

Ready to learn how to market your online course?

You’ve created an amazing course and now it’s time to sell it. But if you want to make money from your online course, you will need to market it.

So, today is the day you get to learn my favorite tips for effectively marketing an online course.

As an online coach or course creator, each day you should have income producing activities that you are focusing on to reach your ideal clients or students.

The real results come with implementing a strategic plan that is going to drive consistent revenue into your business week in and week out.

Your goal is to build your audience and build relationships with them in a way that takes them from cold to hot. All of this takes a lot of effort and energy and you want to be as efficient as possible so you can actually enjoy your business and the rewards it brings.

If you’re not quite sure what you should be doing on a daily basis to market an online course, this ultimate 50 ways to market your online course guide is going to be your new BFF.

Building a profitable online course business is one of the most powerful business models out there.

Once you’ve created your course, you have a digital asset you can sell over and over without almost any additional costs.

There is nothing like creating something once and being able to sell it again and again and again to drive passive income and on-demand sales into your business.

Plus, doesn’t it feel good helping someone else achieve a lifelong dream or goal?

That is what inspires me as a coach. Even more than the income, it’s the impact I can make by sharing my know-how with others that really moves me to do what I do – knowing that when people in my audience are buying my digital products or coaching programs that there is going to be a transformation taking place that is meaningful and positive.

Now, I know you are itching to get to the marketing strategies, but the first and probably most important step is learning how to create a great course.

One that you are passionate about, helps solves a problem, and is profitable!

There is so much competition nowadays that your online course or coaching program must be top-tier for it to sell not just once but over and over again. If you can create a course that is truly transformational, your students will give amazing testimonials and refer your course to their network.

So the key to a profitable course is this…

Get Your Students Results QUICKLY!

The best courses and coaching programs focus on results and helping students get those results as fast as possible. When you can focus on getting your students results, everyone wins. And happy students are the foundation for every successful business.

Create ONE quality course!

Yes, it can be tempting to want to create multiple courses to sell, I mean you are a coach that teaches for a living right? But as tempting as it may be to crank out an entire suite of courses and coaching programs, the fastest way to start your online course business is to create ONE “low-ticket course” instead of an all-inclusive signature course or multiple courses.

A low-ticket course is a course that focuses on a student’s first steps. For example, I am an online coach that teaches students how to take an idea and turn it into a 6- or 7-figure passive income-generating online business. But for me to have created a course that goes through my entire A-Z system would have not only been daunting for me but overwhelming for my students as well.

So instead of creating a program where I taught my students how to create a course, how to market their course, how to create sales funnels for their course, and how to scale their course, I created The 5-Figure Course Creator which walks them through the basics of creating JUST THE COURSE.

My signature course is called “WomanpreneuHER University and it teaches people how to go from finding their profitable idea to building a full-time online coaching business.

However, I first sold The 5-Fogure Course Creator (which used to be called Create Yor Champion Course) before I started working on WomanpreneuHER University. And even when I had created WU, I didn’t move on to the next course, but instead, kept perfecting The 5-Figure Course Creator over several years.

By focusing on selling ONE course in the beginning along with a few easy-to-create lower-ticket digital products, I was able to develop a tried and tested marketing system that now allows me to successfully sell any course or coaching program that I launch.

I share more steps here on how to create your course:

Now once you have a fully validated and transformational course that you know people want and are getting results from, the next step is to learn how to attract more students to your online courses.

So, let’s walk through the steps of how to do that…

There are hundreds of ways to market something but in this post, we are going to focus on 50 strategies that will help you to successfully market your online course in a way that successfully drives sales.

Now just because I am giving you 50 strategies doesn’t mean you need to learn or use them all. I recommend you focus on one or three strategies, master those, and then move on to the next strategy.

For example:

When I first started my online coaching business, I focused on ONE platform (blogging). I didn’t try to simultaneously master Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Paid Ads, or any other marketing strategies. I learned everything was to know about building a search engine-optimized blog that attracted my ideal student and became really good at blogging.

Once I mastered blogging, I got good at email marketing and list-building so that I could turn visitors into subscribers. So good that my blog went from ZERO to 6 figures in a year.

✪ Want to know what I did every single day for a year to take my business from ZERO to 6-Figures? Get instant access to my 365 Day Biz + Blog Plan now.

Once I mastered email marketing, I added more strategies, like SEO, Pinterest, Facebook Groups, YouTube, and Instagram.

The point here is that if you want to ensure that your course sells successfully, leverage one or two strategies that work and use those strategies to get your first course students.

Want more tips on how to create an online course? Check out the following resources:

Now that you know how to create an online course, what do you need to do to market your online course?

So glad you asked!

There are 50 proven strategies that I want to share with you today and I’ve ranked them from beginner to advanced in order to help you filter out the easiest strategies to master first.

Let’s jump in.

If you’ve worked with coaching clients before, then the easiest way to start marketing your new online course is with people who you’ve already helped achieve results.

Promote your new course as an upsell or self-paced continuation to your current 1:1 coaching program. You can also transition your current 1:1 clients into your online course is they want to stay connected to you.

You can also reach out to leads that are already familiar with you, but who didn’t end up buying your coaching or consulting package. An online course may be a more financially viable option for them.

Leverage the popularity and traffic of other blogs by doing guest posts. Getting featured on other sites is a great way to build an audience for your course. While big publications such as Forbes or Entrepreneur can be powerful for building your brand, don’t forget about the smaller more niche publications either.

You may not want to host your own podcast but that doesn’t mean you can’t use other people’s podcasts to promote your online course. Join the Facebook groups, email lists and online communities of people who have Podcasts you’d love to be featured on!

Offering to speak on other people’s platforms can rapidly expand your reach and it is a great way to market your new online course. And, while you are giving their audience value, you are getting exposure and building awareness for your own products and services.

If you are new and don’t have much clout online or your email list is non-existent, one of the best ways to share your new course is to talk one-on-one with your ideal customers.

So get on the phone with you network, you never know, they might just end up buying from you.

Freebies, Freemiums, Bribes, Opt-in Incentives…No matter what you call them, when done right, the “perfect freebie” will attract your ideal target audience and explode your email list so you can market your online course easily.

It is also a great way to drive traffic to your paid offers.
Lead magnets give your audience an opportunity to preview what you have to offer and the level of expertise you are capable of sharing.

Not all coaches see the value of creating a website, but if your goals is to promote your course in the long run, you should most definitely have a website optimized to sell.

There are about 8 places on your website that should feature your customer attracting lead magnets. Make sure you have strategically placed CTAs that encourage visitors to join your email list.

Blogging is NOT dead! Yes, micro-blogging platforms like Facebook and Instagram have changed how information is consumed, but there’s a need for both.

Social media platforms aren’t made for long posts, but blogs are best suited to sharing thoughtfully curated information in a way that primes people to purchase from you. When people are Googling for answers, they are more than likely going to be landing on a blog post or YouTube video. So, if you want to market your online course and sell more always remember, blog posts are NOT dead…Never!

Creating content upgrades is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your course product pages from within your blog posts, get more folks on your list and position yourself as a go-to resource in your industry.

What is a content upgrade exactly? It is a download that you offer people in exchange for their e-mail addresses. It’s like a freebie or a lead magnet but it is offered within your blog post.

Seek out joint venture partnerships and do a collaboration between yourself and a person in your niche who serves the same target audience as you but doesn’t directly compete with you.

For instance, they send an email to their list about your opt-in offer or to market your online course, and you send an email to your list about theirs.

Together, you can cross-promote each other’s products through your social media profiles, podcasts, or by co-hosting a webinar. You both grow your lists and customers in the process!

Even if you are just starting out and your online community is tiny, get the word out by marketing your online course to your followers.

You can directly reach out to people who have engaged with you or asked for your advice before. Or you can post on social media to gauge their interest.

Whether you are on IG, FB, YouTube or Pinterest, make sure to optimize your bio by adding targeted keywords and a link to your new online course.

Speaking of links in social media bios, if you do not know what an EZtree or LinkTree is (or looks like), check out the URL of some of your favorite influencers and coaches on Instagram.

It is basically a customizable website page that lists your featured content, courses, and lead magnets and it’s a great way to convert social media followers into buyers. If you want to check out my customized link tree, hop on my IG @andreabolder and click the link in my bio or you can see mi links page here !

With a beta course you have a better opportunity to upsell your beta students into paid students. Working with beta students is also helpful when you want to validate your online course especially if you have never launched that offer before.

It’s also a way to get social proof in the form of testimonials and feedback in exchange for offering your coaching program or course for FREE or at a heavily discounted price.

Very similar to the concept of a beta-course, pre-selling your online course is something you can do to make sales BEFORE your course have even been completed.

As a new course creator, you may not know exactly what your students need. By pre-selling your course and then creating it based on their real-time feedback, you have an opportunity to deliver a product that really speaks to the needs of your current community.

Now with that said, you do want to make sure you have some content ready to go. Whether you are delivering your course LIVE (in real-time) or as a self-paced program, before you start pre-selling your course and pulling people in, it’s a good idea to have the first module complete so that your students can get started right away.

When you’re a new coach, livestreams can be an amazing “shortcut” to market your online course. You don’t have to be a great writer, you don’t have to master email marketing or sales calls, you don’t even have to be great at doing webinars or marketing.

If you have a camera and the ability to talk to your audience, livestreams allow you to create a personal connection with the people inside of your community.

This is where you can share stories and build your authority by providing results-driven content. People buy from people they know, like and trust and video is one of the best and easiest ways to engage your group and build rapport with people who could potentially be interested in buying your new online course.

In addition to Reels and Stories, going live inside of Instagram has increased my visibility in the algorithm, resulted in more DM’s, and more people on my email list. It’s for this reason that I believe that EVERY course creator should use the Live feature to show up consistently and demonstrate who they are, what they do, and how they can help their audience.

Again, to master live streams, you only need one skill…

BE YOURSELF!

Instagram lives, just like FB lives, Linkedin lives, Pinterest lives, Tik Tok lives and YouTube lives, can be a highly effective way to engage and educate your target audience, putting you in the perfect position to promote your online courses.

The Instagram Reels feature is a quick, fast-paced way to produce content…just like TikTok. And for course creators, Instagram Reels is the best thing to hit the app since they added Stories.

I think of Reels as 15 (30) second micro-commercials that can be edited together rather than recorded in real time like on Stories and because this is a new feature, anyone creating Reels on a regular basis is bound to see viral growth.

So, if you are not using Reels yet, start incorporating Instagram Reels into your current content strategy as a way to establish yourself as an authority in your industry and promote your courses.

The key to using Instagram stories to get more customers and clients is to use them to create personal connections!

Stories are more personal than normal Instagram posts and you can share a lot of “behind the scenes” content about your band and ultimately your online course.

Use stickers for your audience to vote on a poll, answer or ask a question, or send you a DM. The more you engage your followers and encourage them to respond, the quicker you’ll see sales. You can also use stories to share what’s going on in your personal life as well as tips or insights that help your audience get to know you better, learn more about what you do, or how your business serves them.

If you are doing Instagram Stories you should be doing Facebook Stories, too. The audience that finds you in your Facebook Stories will be different than the potential customers and clients that find you on IG.

You can share testimonials, videos and slides with a call to action that invites people to learn more about what you do.

Blogging is NOT dead! Yes, micro-blogging platforms like Facebook and Instagram have changed how information in consumed, but there’s need for both. Social media platforms aren’t made for long posts, but blogs are best suited to share thoughtfully curated information in the fullest way. And when people are Googling for answers, they are more than likely going to be landing on a blog post or YouTube video. So are blog posts dead…Nah!

Pinterest is not just my primary source of inspiration, it is my primary source of income! Most of my traffic comes from Pinterest!

Why?

Because I use it to cross-promote every single piece of content I create.

Published a blog post? I pin it to Pinterest.
Upload a video on YouTube? I pin it to Pinterest.
Shared an image on IG? I pin it to Pinterest.
Created a new online course? I pin it to Pinterest.

Pinterest is a platform that’s often overlooked, but it has massive potential to help you grow your business, regardless of the niche or industry you’re in and hands down it’s one of the most powerful ways to get (FREE!) advertising for your business.

With the blessing of the FB Group Admin, you can host a short live or training in a FB group that has a community full of your target audience.

This will help you expand your reach and get in front of new customers and clients you would normally not have access to.

After you’ve delivered value inside of the group, you should have the opportunity to pitch your course at the end to drive fresh leads and sales into your online course.

Another great way to promote your online course, especially when you don’t have an audience to sell to yet, is to partner with other YouTubers.

You can create a YouTube video or a series of videos and ask them to post it on their channel. You can also ask them to “remix” one of your existing videos to create an original piece of content that showcases both you and your Youtube partner.

It’s a win-win: the channel owner gets fresh and interesting expert content, while you get to promote your course to their audience.

Quora is a popular social platform where people go to find answers to their questions.

And regardless of your niche or industry, I am willing to bet that there are people asking questions about your course topic.

If you want to use Quora to market your course, go to the platform and start answering questions with valuable and genuinely helpful answers. If you are consistent, people will start to take notice.

It’s important to create a community around your OWN brand; a safe place where your audience can connect, ask questions, and tap into your courses and coaching programs.

Creating a group is a game-changer and it’s personally added tens of thousands in profits to my bottom line. Facebook groups are a great way to build a community-owned by YOU and by creating a group that gives a ton of value to your members, you’re creating an resource that helps you market your online course.

One of the biggest mistakes online coaches make is not leveraging the testimonials, love notes and praise they have received from their community and customers.

Once you have a few students and they have gotten results, you can ask them to give you testimonials. And those testimonials will help you sell your course to more people because they show that your program works.

Many times, it’s not what you say, but what a former customer or client has said that gives others the confidence to invest in you. So, by sharing their wins on a regular basis, your community knows that they can trust you to deliver the results they desire.

Challenges were one of the key strategies I use to grow my own course business and launch my new courses and digital products.

A challenge is a 3-day, 4-day or 14-day themed event you can run any time you want to grab the attention of your audience, grow your email list and convert participants into customers. It’s a strategy I’ve taught to hundreds of female entrepreneurs who’ve gone through my 5-Figure Course Creator and WomanpreneuHER University coaching programs.

A 5-day challenge tends to be the most popular – long enough to provide actionable content but short enough to keep your audience’s attention.

Your email list is EVERYTHING! And, most of your sales will come NOT through social media, but from your sales funnels and launches!

While a lot of people will find you on social media by seeing your content in their feeds, your emails are what will get them to take action and purchase your course. Plus, with email, you get to control how you communicate with your community and who sees your content. Your email list is an asset that can’t be taken away from you, like your Instagram or Facebook accounts.

So, if you want to successfully sell your course, make building an email list a priority.

While live launching is not for everyone, it is a great way to drive a huge influx of income and sales in a short period of time.

Yes, it’s more labor intensive and stressful than setting up a passive income sales funnel, but launching your online course once or twice a year can be highly lucrative if you know the STRATEGIES that work.

It’s easier to get an existing customer to make another purchase than it is to get someone who’s never bought from you to buy for the first time.

Upsells are add-ons or upgrades that you offer when someone buys your course or you can offer your course as an upsell to a different product.

Many times I will offer a tiny digital product or low-ticket membership as an upsell to my courses and that’s how I am able to add tens of thousands of dollars to my sales.

Who doesn’t love a bundle!

A bundle is a collection of different courses or products that you offer for sale at one special bundle price.

When launching a bundle sale you are putting together a unique collection of products that may include your course, other digital products, or 1:1 coaching.

The benefit of a bundle is that the bundle will have a higher perceived value. For instance, if you were to sell each course or product included in the bundle individually, it may cost $1000, but you are giving people the opportunity to grab everything in this bundle for say $297 or $147. Now, if you tell me I can get something that costs $1000 for $297, I’m gonna jump all over it.

Leveraging affiliates by creating your own affiliate program is a powerful marketing strategy that can exponentially grow your online course sales. An affiliate is a person who markets your course to their community in return for a commission. And because you are not paying for leads or paying to acquire new customers, affiliate marketing is a really profitable and effective strategy.

If you don’t know where to start when it comes to creating your affiliate army, start building relationships with existing students, influencers or peers who are willing to promote your products in exchange for a commission or percentage of each sale they make.

Referrals are one of the most profitable ways to market your online and it is a course marketing strategy you can use to boost sales.

Many online course creation platforms like Teachable have features that allow course creators to set up a student referral program to help grow their audience and increase sales.

Student referral programs provide an opportunity for students to refer your products to their friends and community with a unique referral link—and when they do so, both the friend and the student will receive a reward discount.

The power of leveraging a referral program is that because your course comes recommended to them, people are more likely to join it. AND you don’t have to spend any money to acquire new clients.

PR is not just for celebrities and influencers! Leveraging PR aka public relations, is a great way to get your brand and products in front of new audiences. It is also one of the secret strategies established coaches use to market their online course.

With PR, you can pitch various media outlets such as publications like Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, Forbes, and Bloomberg. If your pitch works, you get the opportunity to write for or get featured in some pretty major publications that can put you in front of thousands, even millions of new people.

Reddit is very popular platform that a lot of coaches and course creators don’t leverage as much as they could or should. On Reddit, you can choose a few subreddits or groups related to your niche to participate in. Reddit is very much community based, so I wouldn’t recommend that you just hop in and start promoting your course (you’ll probably get you kicked off the platform), but what I do recommend is that you engage and leas with value first before you driving people to your online course.

People are creatures of habit and a great way to get people to purchase your courses is to launch promotional campaigns during the times of year when their wallets are open and they are already accustomed to sending money.

For instance, I often do a Black Friday promotion to market my online course where I bundle a few of my digital products and courses together as part of my Black Friday Cyber Monday sale. If it makes sense, doing seasonal or themed promotions during Christmas and New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, and other holidays can really boost your sales.

Webinars are one of the best ways to get in front of and talk to your audience on a regular basis. I know, I know, we love to attend them but hosting them – OMG now that’s another story. But, here’s the deal. Love them or hate them, webinars are conversion machines and one of the most effective ways to market your online course.

Webinar marketing is a skill, and it can be intimidating for new course creators. If it makes you feel more comfortable, you could do a co-webinar where you and someone else are doing a webinar together, getting in front of each other’s audience and promoting your products and services.

Billions of people use YouTube which is a clear indication that video is not going anywhere any time soon.

YouTube is one of the best ways to leverage video and it is a powerful medium to getting people to engage with your brand. Youtube, Facebook lives, Instagram videos are all great tools for building your following.

If you are uploading videos to Youtube you can add clickable annotations to your clips and use that space to send viewers back to your product page. If annotations aren’t available to you, a simple “go here to buy my product ….” will do!

LinkedIn is NOT just for job seekers and corporate America! If you want to connect with more customers, this unlikely marketing platform should be your new best friend.

LinkedIn is a great platform for course creators that cater to professionals and when you know how to create content around your course or coaching program that appeals to people in the professional space, you’ll be able to attract paying customers with ease.

The fastest way to build your audience is to pay for it so if you are in a hurry…run paid ads or promoted posts on Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest or YouTube. While ads are not as cheap as they used to be, if you know (or can hire someone that knows) how to run ads effectively it can be a great way to sell more courses.

But buyer beware. If you don’t know what you’re doing you can lose money very quickly! If you have the budget, and don’t mind investing some money to make some more money, look into paid ads on social media. Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and even Pinterest Promoted Pins are great ways to get more exposure. These are highly-targeted ads that put your blog post or product offering right in the middle of your audience’s feeds.

Once you have created your course, you can start planning out an automated sales funnel.

With a passive income sales funnel aka an evergreen sales funnel, your course shopping cart is always so you are selling your course on an ongoing basis vs. only making it available a few times a year. It’s a funnel that consists of a lead magnet, follow up email sequences, webinars, and sales pages.
Setting up and testing an evergreen course sales funnel can take some time, but the first step is to create a sales page for your online course, also known as a landing page which is the page visitors land on to learn more about your course.

The best sales funnels lead from one product to the next – what I call your customer product map – and they don’t have to be complicated to create cash! You can create $100K year with a course sales funnel that drives qualified leads through a passive income sales system that looks like this.

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, refers to the steps you can take to get your blog posts, product pages, videos and images to show up near the top of search engines like Google, YouTube and Pinterest when someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase.

When people search for topics related to your course, and they find your website there is a good chance they’ll be interested in learning more about your course.

SEO, when done right can be a super effective strategy that drives traffic to your course sales pages and leads to your passive income sales funnels!

Ebooks, planners, journals and guides are a very smart way to market your online course. By creating an ebook about your course topic and selling it on a marketplace like Amazon, you can quickly get readers. Once those readers have read your book and understand your process for solving their problem, you can redirect them to your course.

Invite other influencers to teach a free conference online or accept an invitation to participate in someone else’s event.

The last time I did a virtual summit I gained like 50 subscribers a day for 7 days. Now, I have these people on my email list that may have never found me otherwise. I can send them emails or direct them to my Facebook group and it drives more traffic to my biz which results in more sales. Cha-Ching.

Here’s an example of a virtual summit I participated in that was hosted by my friend, Business Finance Success Coach, Phoebe Dray.

This is one of the best and most exciting ways to grow your community FAST and convert new members into customers.

Every few months I host the Wealthy WomanpreneuHER Giveaway in the FB group that aligns with a product launch. Not only does it grow my FB group, it attracts hundreds of new people to my business which ultimately results in an increase in sales.

When you have a killer content strategy that consistently attracts, engages, and connects you to your ideal audience, you are bound to bring in more customers and clients.

My viral content lands me sales every single day. Get access to my Done-For-You Viral Content Monthly Membership Here!!!!

Did you know that you can use chat apps like Telegram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Slack to build your course business?

Essentially, you can engage in chat groups and create your own group to grow an audience.

Let’s talk about what I believe is the most powerful way to get noticed online, get lot’s of leads and sell tons of courses. The resource library!

Because a resource library is a really high-value opt-in, something super unique that people can’t find anywhere else, people are more inclined to want to sign up and get that. And if your resource library is awesome, people are going to share it with their own friends and followers driving more traffic and customers your way. You can check out my resource library for ideas on how to set yours up and what to offer.

If the right situation arises, offer to be a featured coach inside of someone else’s membership site or coaching program.

It’s a great opportunity to meet people and hone you skills as a coach and it’s a great way to make additional money. Some expert coaches can make a few hundred dollars a month showing up as a guest coach or mentor in someone else’s coaching program or membership site.

Plus, if people enjoy your coaching style, they will seek you out and want to work with you in the future!

This is one of the best and most exciting ways to grow your community FAST and convert new members into customers.

Every few months I host the Wealthy WomanpreneuHER Giveaway in the FB group that aligns with a product launch. Not only does it grow my FB group, it attracts hundreds of new people to my business which ultimately results in an increase in sales.

Speaking at events is an effective way to grow your audience. If you enjoy speaking engagements, you could possibly build a business around that, while you’re selling your course.

You can either host your own event or pitch yourself to be a speaker at a live event. Live events give you the opportunity to network, grow your audience and sell from the stage!

Imagine how amazing it would be to create an online course that actually sells like hotcakes…

To start marketing your course ask yourself:

• What 1-3 marketing strategies do I want to master now?
• Can I be consistent with the strategies I choose?
• What help do I need in order to master my chosen marketing strategies?

If you are ready to promote your online course, check out the resources I shared with you inside of this post today!

It’s time to make some money!

DID YOU ENJOY THIS POST? WANT MORE COURSE CREATION TIPS? LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS + MAKE SURE TO PIN THIS POST