The best way to market your online course in 2023
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Every course creator's worst nightmare. You pour your heart and your soul into your course. You spend days editing it to perfection. You painstakingly decide on the right hosting platform. And now is the moment of truth. You open the doors ... to nothing! 🦗
If you don't want that to be you, then read this blog post all the way until the end as I give you the three simple steps to launching your course to wild success and a ton of students and a whole lot of Benjamins in your bank account. 💰
So many course creators I meet feel demoralized by their first foray into selling their courses. They know their topic backwards and forwards. The course content itself is freaking gold, yet in all of their excitement to serve their students well, and just provide the most exceptional experience they miss out on one key factor that will actually get them students. And that's launching well.
I've met countless course creators just like this, many of them I mentored. And we turned those launches around for wild success, which just goes to show it is often not the course that is the problem, but the sales strategy.
So let me share with you what I share with my course launch coaching students.
Over time I quickly identified that course creators with no students enrolling are all suffering from what I like to call Course Flop Syndrome (It's a technical term 😉).
Course creators need to launch their course with a bang, but they don't know what that actually means in practical terms.
What do I do when I open the doors to my course?
What do I post?
How often?
How often am I gonna be annoying people?
These are common thoughts of those about to go through Course Flop Syndrome.
Step 1: Go all in
First step in overcoming Course Flop Syndrome is to know the facts. Let me explain the difference between an evergreen, a sale and a full on launch party.
EVERGREEN
Evergreen is when you set up a fancy technical system, by which when someone opts into a lead magnet, they get a special limited time offer to buy your course with either a discount or a bunch of bonuses added on, but only for a very short period of time.
Evergreen is an incredibly important element of a successful course business. And it is a fantastic way for evening out your revenue between launches. But it is not the way to start and it can be seriously difficult to make ends meet as a course creator doing only evergreen sales.
Louis Henry, a good business friend of mine, and an incredibly successful course creator, has spoken about how she learned this the hard way. For the longest time, she was only doing evergreen running Facebook ads to get traffic into her evergreen funnel. And she was struggling to get her courses to be really profitable. Only once she started launching, did her income truly take off.
Conversion rates on evergreen funnels are a lot lower than with launches. And there's so much that you need to learn and talk to your audience about and learn from your audience during a launch I truly believe evergreen needs to come after you've successfully launched a few courses.
A SALE
A sale is just that. You open the doors, tell people about your course, and then you close the doors. Sales generally involve a handful of emails and social media posts, maybe a special perk or a discount or bonuses to encourage students to join this round versus the next (and possibly a live webinar here or there).
I'll be honest, sales used to be enough. But in the last couple of years the game has changed for everyone trying to sell their online course. It takes even better launch strategy to cut through the noise from what I've seen at my own business and in the back end of other course creators businesses.
LAUNCH PARTY
You can expect, give or take, three or four times the number of sales when you host a full-on launch party versus just a sale. So if you've done a sale before and got maybe five sales know that it could have been more like 20 sales had you properly launched with a full on launch party.
This means sending like 15 or 20 emails. You host a pre-launch live experience, a virtual conference, a challenge, a bootcamp, something like that. You create magic inside of a community ✨ You engage a conversation in the group, you get your following to really create excitement for you. You likely host a bunch of past student interviews or share case studies and you start having one-to-one conversations with potential buyers and you generally give it all you've got. And this is where the conversations happen and conversions go down.
So the first step to overcoming Course Flop Syndrome is to go all in. Decide that you are going to be one of the few wildly successful course creators. That you're not gonna go at it halfway, but you're gonna give it a full effort and host a proper launch party, not jus
Step 2: Planning your course launch in advance
Step two in overcoming Course Flop Syndrome is to plan ahead of time and schedule literally everything 🗓️ So technically you won't actually have to do anything during the launch except engage in conversations with your potential students.
So often when I talk to course creators whose courses flopped, they say "Well, I intended to host a webinar and write a ton of emails, but then the launch came and it was just insane". Life and business happens, your clients have emergencies, you have emergencies. It happens. My best friend's mom died one time during one of my launches. And I spent the week with friends supporting her and her family cooking meals, buying flowers, and attending a funeral.
Launch, however, went off without a hitch because it was all ready to go beforehand. So everything that you're currently planning to do in launch week, do it now. That means, write your posts, write your emails, polish off the sales page, create content for your pre-launch live event. Brainstorm ton of ideas on how to engage conversations in your group of potential students, create a system to track warm leads and scripts to follow up with them with.
Now, if you're still wondering what exactly should be happening during that launch, grab a copy of my free launch calendar.
Step 3: How to host a successful launch party
Step 3 to overcoming Launch Flop Syndrome is to host a Launch Party 🥳🥳
And remember you're hosting. So act like a host like you would at your house. Create an online event people would be thrilled to be invited to. Welcome and introduce attendees. Get the conversations going, maybe pass out some cocktails 🍸
Then deliver an exceptional educational experience live, maybe run a giveaway to encourage participation. And at the end of your incredible online event open doors to your course and give a limited time offer.
So often I see course creators host some sort of online event, but they totally miss capitalizing on the live excitement - They make the course offer right at the end of their live event. But for people on the fence there's no reason to buy now. They technically have all week and there's no benefit of buying now versus on the last day of your launch next week, by which time they've totally forgotten about your great teachings and got overwhelmed by their to-do lists so they just didn't get around to buying.
Solution: Offer a timed live offer at the very end of your last training during your pre-launch event!
There is a big difference between what it took to sell courses a few years ago versus now. And the difference is that you need to build trust and excitement into your launch. Trust was always a thing, but not to the extent that it is now. Trust means legit having conversations individually with potential buyers now, excitement means not just hosting another webinar, which everyone does. You need to make it special. When you do this correctly, when you follow these three steps to overcoming Course Flop Syndrome, you can achieve incredible results.
While there are course creators out there struggling to get by, there are also course creators who have switched over from getting drips and drops of sales on evergreen to doing things like $70,000 on their first course launch 😮 One of my course launch collective students recently did just that!
Now you know the steps to overcome Course Flop Syndrome. You might still be wondering, well, how exactly do I get those first few sales? I made a video on that for you, so check out How to get your first 100 course sales.
Grab a free copy the live launch calendar so you'll know exactly what should be happening during your launch. You're welcome 🤩
