Mediaboss Marketing

As soon as your put your knowledge into an online format, you open it up to a global marketplace. But too many online educators think creating an online course and pressing publish is the end point. Not to be an entrepreneurial party-pooper, but publishing your course is just the beginning.

I have over 40 online courses, have built close to 1,000 courses for other people and have more than 7,000 students enrolled in my online courses in over 130 countries.

Here's some tips I've used to grow my global student base.

Consumers are now in control of their knowledge because they have the power to jump onto a search engine and ask "How to xxx." A great way to rapidly go global is to start providing your audience with those answers.

If your content appears as the result for every "how to" question your audience has, then it is your courses they are going to buy.

Heres what to do: Write down every question your audience has on your topic, write a simple "tip" answer to each question and record that answer as a video.

Keep each video as close to the two- to nine-minute mark as you can. Note it is not wrong to film longer videos than this. Its just the modern day online learner may not watch the entirety of a video that exceeds this length and therefore may not get the full value of your content. Add the video to YouTube, your own blog and social media, ensuring it has a "how to" title that is the most likely to be searched by your audience.

Every video you add increases your chances of being found as the one "who has all of the answers" and your courses become a no-brainer for them to take.

Online course marketplaces are like the supermarkets of online courses. They are big, powerful, have huge reach and big customer numbers. The downsides to them are that you as the course owner do not own the student data, or have full control over your course pricing. However, many of them have millions of users all of whom you can get your course in front of.

Because these marketplaces can highly discount your courses, I advise you to only offer a smaller (quality) "taster" version of your course on these sites and use them as a way to get yourself in front of millions of customers from around the world that otherwise wouldnt know you.

Every online course is essentially a collection of tips, advice and strategies for something. Pull out every single tip and strategy from your course and for each one write a short blog post. Not only will your own website be more discoverable in search engine results due to the keyword content and data, but you can also repurpose those blogs as articles to send to industry relevant magazines.

Webinars are the global classroom. There are endless webinar tools out there that are free or very cheap. Select a small handful of tips from your online course the ones that people want to know are the best ones to pick, and create a free webinar where you share sensational value. At the end of the webinar, reveal there are X more tips just like those that you have to share in your course give them a discount coupon and expect to see some significant enrollments if you wowed them.

Just like the deli lets you taste a little square of cheese before you buy a block of it, allow your prospective customers to nibble on a piece of your training for free too. This will allow them to be assured you are the expert you say you are by seeing for themselves.

Create a mini version of your online course and give it away as a lead magnet opt-in on your website. Ensure you let them know they can upgrade to the full course at the end of the freebie.

Make sure the search engines can find your course. Write down at least 20 words and phrases people might type into Google to find a course like yours. Then go back through all of your course description, lecture titles and module titles as well as the course name itself to make sure they are optimized for search ranking by including the keywords you have selected.

Then go into the back end of your website and your online school and ensure you list all of your keywords and phrases into the SEO areas on your site to increase the opportunity for it to be found on Google.

Facebook groups are a fantastic opportunity for you to build strong relationships with your customers. They go way beyond the power of a Facebook page which these days have very little reach without paying. A Facebook group is a way to make your audience feel like they belong to something. If you can create this in your own global community you will create loyal fans from around the world forever.

Books are another fantastic way to reach your audience at a global level, and these days it's really easy to self-publish. Send your online course videos to a transcriber, do some heavy re-writing, filling, editing and formatting, upload your book on to the Amazon platform and youll immediately have your content open to over 63 million people.

I only started podcasting at the end of 2016 and the first thing I asked myself when I released my first episode is why I hadn't done it sooner. Create a podcast delivery plan around the content in your online course.

The more you can repurpose your content into every different medium possible the more your global student base will grow.

Sarah Cordiner is an international best-selling author, educator and professional speaker and one of Huffington Posts' "Top 50 Must-Follow Female Entrepreneurs." Reach her at sarahcordiner.com/services.

Visit link:
11 ways to make your online course go global | Expert column - Virginian-Pilot