4 Tips for Launching an Online Course

Do you want to sell online courses through your website? Is your goal to teach customers how to use your program with step-by-step eCourses? If so, you’re in the right place.

These strategies are commonly used by business owners and marketing teams worldwide to educate users while generating a passive income. If you have something worth sharing, you may have thought about uploading a course to one of many hosted eLearning websites.

Today we will show you why it’s best to host your lessons on your business website and give you some valuable tips that will help you successfully launch your first online course.

Let’s get started!

Establish Concrete Success Metrics

The first thing you should do when launching an online course is to determine your success metrics. If you don’t understand your goals, you will have a hard time fine-tuning your classes.

When you can’t make improvements because you don’t know your weak spots, traffic, and new signups may slow to a crawl.

You don’t have to worry about this fate for your online course if you establish your metrics early in your eLearning career. Business owners and marketing teams that know what they hope to accomplish with their classes can generally make changes over time that benefit their cause while helping customers succeed.

Sit down and think about what you want customers to do or think after completing your class. SaaS companies, for instance, create online courses to teach new customers how to use their software. So, if your goal is to get more people up and running with your plugin or tool, you’ll want to look at how many people decided to open your software after taking part in your lessons.

You’ll also want to look at customer feedback to see if there are suggestions from the people who participated in your lesson. Odds are, your customers can help you identify trouble areas that you can gradually improve over time.

Create Multiple Course Plans

Our next tip couple of tips are geared towards selling lessons for a passive income. You’re going to spend a ton of time creating your first online course, and not all of your ideas will make the final cut.

Look at it as an opportunity to expand on your first lesson. For example, if you decided to create a course on woodcarving and thought that some of your tips were too complex, you could compile those tips into an advanced course for people interested in this hobby.

Depending on how many different topics you cover, you can create a slew of course plans designed to please customers on your site regardless of their experience, interest, and funds.

These various plans open the opportunity to sell customers precisely what they need in a bundle. Users are far more likely to buy a series of classes than a one-off that they may never reference again. Long-form lessons get customers involved, and plans ensure that these people work towards getting the maximum value from your online classes.

Start Pre-Selling Early

Next, let’s talk about the importance of pre-selling. Imagine putting a ton of time into a launching an online course, only to see zero conversions on day one. If you don’t pre-sell your course, you could end up in this situation. People are not likely to invest their money in a commitment like online lessons without researching the company creating the courses.

You can start pre-selling through email, social media, and your website. We’ve found that it’s best to start with a website for your online courses. Your landing page will get better results if you host it on a unique domain, like your existing website. This practice ensures that you have full control over your product’s design and price, plus you can start generating leads through email and social media.

Building an email list will help you dramatically improve the way you engage with customers. On average, email marketing has a return on investment of 4,400%, which shows the power of building a targeted lead list. Include an option on your website that encourages users to sign up for new information about your course as launch day approaches. You’ll find that many users will sign up, especially if you offer a limited-time pre-sell offer for new subscribers.

Social media is also a valuable tool that can help you boost exposure and engagement before your courses ever hit the market. On Facebook alone, there are 2.45 billion active users. You better believe that your target audience is spending some of their time on this platform, and others like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.

Creating a prominent social media profile where you show off your product, and brand identity will help you grow your followers while building pre-order numbers. When you use the strategies outlined here, you’ll have a much easier time exceeding your sales expectations on day one.

Make it Easy for Customers to Ask Questions

We can’t stress the importance of making it easy for customers to ask questions. There’s a good chance that some people taking your online courses are brand new to the topic being discussed. If you don’t allow these folks to find answers quickly, you could see a significant dropoff in your completion rate.

There are several ways you can allow customers to ask questions and provide crisp answers. We’ve found that it’s helpful to include a comprehensive FAQ at the end of every lesson. If you include an FAQ, make sure to let users know so they know what to expect once they make it to the end.

Add a contact form, or the ability to contact a live agent during the lesson if users have a question that they need to be answered right away. This tip will help reduce frustration and give your customers a top-notch experience.

Finally, if you’re offering live lessons through a webinar, or live lesson plan, add a section at the end where people watching your stream can ask questions. You’ll find that people are always willing to ask questions if they are given an opportunity. Failure to ask for questions at the end could result in a poor UX and lead to unnecessary confusion.

Conclusion

There you have it! It’s clear that online teaching is here to stay, especially when you look at the circumstances that have evolved with the pandemic since the start of 2020. If your goal is to get more people engaged with your lessons, these tips will get you started.

We all have our own unique traits and things we can teach the world. It’s up to you to figure out how to put this information into a format that’s both engaging and informative. You may have to create several versions of your first lesson before launch day.

The more time you spend honing your lessons and learning from your audience, the better results you’ll see when launching future online courses.

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Author: Jared Atchison

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