How to Prep Your Online Course for Sale (Right Away!)
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Here's what to do ASAP to get your course ready to be sold!
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
How to Prep and Presell Online Courses
Welcome back to my channel. In today’s video, I’m continuing with my new video series all about creating an online course. Basically, I am building a course right now, and I’m bringing you with me behind the scenes and showing you exactly what I do to bring a new course to life. Personally, I love to learn from example, so I hope you find this really valuable. In the last video, we talked all about how to outline your online course. Today, I’m going to go over what I do right away to prepare it for sale. So, follow these steps to help prep and presell online courses.
Build Your Email List - With A Freebie
The first thing I do is build up an email list of people who are interested in my specific course topic. My new course is called Scale with Kartra. This is all about how to use the all-in-one marketing platform, Kartra, to simplify and scale your online business. What I did was build out a “freebie”. I wanted to create something that was really valuable, and would help people get started with the platform, Kartra. I designed this freebie in Canva of course – when do I not use Canva? You can as well – this is an easy graphic design software with so many templates built into it, that make it so easy for you to design anything that you could want. I decided to create a roadmap so that I could get people started with Kartra and show them everything that Kartra is capable of helping them with. I created this freebie in order to collect email addresses. I then had to create a landing page and a thank-you page that I could direct people to. So, people go to this page here, they sign up with their name and email address, then they’re going to automatically get that freebie in their inbox, and then they’ll see this thank-you page right here.
Build a Wait List
I added to the freebie, on the very last page, that my course was coming soon. I included information about my course, and linked this out to a wait list, so if people were interested in the course, they could put themselves onto this list.
So, from here, as I’m building out the course, I’m also actively building up the wait list, so that when I launch the course there are actually people that are interested in this topic and might want to join.
Presell Your Online Course
After I finished the outline, I decided I’m going to switch the wait list, and I’m going to do a pre-sale. I think a pre-sale is a great opportunity. You can offer a really fantastic deal to those that become early adopters and join your course right away. I decided to offer 50% off for anyone that joined, and then told them that I would be releasing the content as I created it. This was really great, because before I dove into doing the hardest work – which for me is filming the lessons – I was able to test the concept and make sure that this was a course that people wanted. This was also really nice personally, because as these people joined I was able to think of exact people as I built out the course. I am really grateful to these early adopters. If this is your first course, I think it’s fine to pre-sell, but it definitely can make things a lot more stressful. So, if you are going to do presell online courses, I would have the outline completely finalized, all of your scripts ready to go, and maybe even the first few modules completed, before you start the pre-sale process. My first course took me forever – I really wasn’t used to the process – so I think if I had tried to do this it would have added a lot more stress. As long as you give yourself enough time, I think it’s fine to presell online courses, and it does allow you to validate the idea, which is great.
As I’ve been working on the course, I’ve also been pre-selling, so I’ve been documenting creating the course on Instagram, and then I have been putting out offers as well for people to come join. It has been great, and we’ve had a ton of new students join, which is really exciting.
So that is the process in terms of prepping something for sale. You need to build up your list of people that are interested in this topic, you can create a wait list, you can presell, and you can drive as many people to that awesome freebie of yours as you can.
That is what I’ve done to prep my course for sale. I created that freebie so that I could build up my email list of people that were interested in this topic, created a wait list and then flipped this to pre-sale.
It’s actually been a really easy form of marketing, because I’ve been working on it anyway, so all I had to do was simply document what I’m doing, share behind the scenes in real-time, and then put a few offers out there. I would definitely recommend that style of selling, because it’s nice, it feels natural, and it feels as though you’re just taking people along. But you can also invite those who want to come and join.
So, we’ve covered how to outline online courses, and how to prep and presell online courses. In the next video, I’m going to walk you through how I film all of my lessons. I have a few really easy hacks that I’m excited to share with you, so make sure that you hit Subscribe down below if you haven’t yet, and I will see you real soon with the next video.
TOOLS MENTIONED:
Canva (for designing your freebie)
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Behind the scenes of how I bring in sales on autopilot - and how you can too! 👏