Online courses as a way of content marketing

Creating online courses can bring you traffic and a large number of subscriptions. You can totally achieve this.

Select the problem you are going to solve

Creating a course is a complex task. It can take you almost a year to complete a business blogging course, from concept, script, post, all the way to promotion. If you do not work on the course constantly, but in your free time from your main job.

So, before you jump into the deep end, you need to think about the problem you want to solve. And it should be something that your product or service helps solve. This way you can promote your business as the course progresses.

Create a course

90% of people who sign up for online classes don't complete them. And this number may be even higher in the case of free courses, since people tend to value free content less.

It is important to understand this in order to develop a “compelling” course.

This is the reason why it is worth focusing so much on the quality of production and explanations. Most free courses are filmed either as a screen recording or a talking head.

Promote the course

Promoting an online course is similar to promoting a blog post. You can promote it to your existing audience or on platforms where your audience resides.

Blogging for Business on Product Hunt

You can also promote your course by offering various “bonuses”. If you have launched a course for the first time, you can offer two main bonuses:

Free trial period for 14 days. If you haven't used it before, you'll need to register for our $7 7-day trial. But when you launch the course, you can provide free access for 14 days to everyone who signed up for the course.

Community on Slack. You could also create a community on Slack where course participants could ask the creator any question about the course (or marketing in general).

How do you know which bonus will be good?

The key to choosing a good bonus is to give away something that will be valuable enough to be sold as a separate product or service. For example, you need to be a paying customer to gain access. But for the duration of the course you can use it for free. So it's valuable.

Likewise, if you want to consult with the creator, you will likely have to pay for their time. But as part of the course, you can ask him any question related to marketing that interests you. Again, this is super valuable.