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Let me guess: You’ve decided to start running your very own online course business, haven’t you?
That’s great.
With the huge earning potential that comes with running such an online business, you’re certainly on the right track for jumping into the bandwagon.
Now that you’re pretty much set on the type of online business you’ll run, the next question you need to address is how you’re supposed to get subscribers for your online courses.
Chances are, before you decided to run an online course business, someone told you how they made tens of thousands of dollars in profit in less than 30 days, or how amazing their life is. What they left out, however, is one of the most crucial aspects of your business — how exactly you’re supposed to get paying subscribers.
If you’re struggling with getting people to register for your online courses, then you’re definitely in the right place. That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.
1. Coauthor with influencers.
Coauthoring with an influencer is strategic for you since you can leverage their existing followers.
Instead of publishing your new course and promoting it by yourself, why not get the help of people who already have thousands of followers — I’m talking about the influencers, of course.
If you’ll allow them to coauthor, they’ll be invested in promoting your online course since their name is also attached to it.
That makes for a win-win-win scenario for everyone: for you, the influencer, and their audience.
To help you find the right influencer to collaborate with, you can use an online tool like Influence.co.
This is what the tool came up with.
As you can see from the results, there are several Instagram influencers who are into web development.
If the course you’re thinking of creating is about web development, then you can just connect with the influencers shown in the results.
2. Find your subscribers and build relationships.
In order to get new subscribers, you’ll need to go where your audience hangs out.
To find them, you can use advanced Google search queries using questions related to your online course.
For instance, you could search using this search string: “learn html” inurl:forum
The search query basically tells Google to come up with pages where the URL has the word “forum” in it, and the page has text that exactly matches the phrase “learn html.”
Here’s what Google will come up with.
As you can see, the search results brought back forums.
Forums are a great place to find new subscribers since that’s where people converge to talk about certain topics — topics that they are passionate about. Just by being active in the forum posts (or threads), you can build a relationship with the other users — who are your target audience.
At that point, you just need to pitch your course strategically while adding value, commenting on the posts.
You can also use social media to find subscribers. Instead of marketing on all the different social media platforms that you can get your hands on, however, look for one to three platforms where you know your audience is active. (There’s no need for you to be active on other sites if your audience doesn’t even spend their time there.)
From there, you can sign up for groups that are related to your online course topic.
Take the time to become established as an active member. Once you’ve proven yourself as an active member, you can share excerpts of your course so that the members can get a glimpse of your content and be able to determine if it’s what they are looking for. (Whatever you do, don’t start blasting them with advertisements for your online course immediately. You’ll only come off as a spammer.)
If you’re going to use Facebook — you can do a demographic search using Facebook’s Audience Insights tool.
You can define your audience using a plethora of filters and then see what pages they like and/or follow.
Equipped with this knowledge, you can find new connections, engage with them, and even promote your online courses with ads. Best of all, if you use the advanced search parameters wisely, then your messaging will be relevant to these people. Not so confident in your ability to handle setting up ad funnels on your own? There are plenty of amazing PPC agencies out there.
3. Answer Their Questions
When you answer a question online, you are providing value to the reader.
The good news is, there are a lot of places where you can do this.
One of the most popular Q&A websites is Quora. This is a great place to start and should easily help to establish you as an authority in your market. As you answer, you can slip in a quick blurb about your online course while still answering their question.
To help you out, here’s a quick list of Q&A websites that might be helpful in finding new subscribers:
- Quora
- Fluther
- StackExchange
- AskVille by Amazon
- Answers
4. Look Professional
Finally, you need to look professional.
While there are plenty of online course creation platforms to choose from, not all of them are created equal. Deciding which platform you’ll use can mean the difference between the success or failure of your online course business.
Two of the most popular LMS platforms are Kajabi and Teachable.
Kajabi and Teachable are often compared to each other because of how authoritative they are in the knowledge commerce space.
Both give you customizable page designers, online course builders, and automation tools. They even have marketing and community management features. However, choosing one or the other could come down to one thing: How easy is it to build an online course?
Here’s how it looks when you’ll create a new course using Teachable.
Here’s how Kajabi’s interface looks.
As you can see from the two screenshots above, Kajabi gives you a prebuilt template to work with whereas Teachable makes you start from scratch.
Regardless of which stage you’re at in your online course business, Kajabi makes course creation so much easier.
When creating your website, it’s also worth pointing out that Teachable doesn’t have various website templates/themes. Kajabi, on the other hand, has several themes you can work with.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to get more subscribers for your online course business.
If you are willing to work (and we know you are), you can find more than enough subscribers to make your online business successful.
If you follow the advice we’ve given you, your subscriber count should start increasing, especially if your courses provide truckloads of value to your audience.
