How to go from zero to 1000 Online Course Students With No Advertise budget

You have everything planned out. There's an unfinished space, you have made the plan for your class, You're elated and enthralled by it all. It's possible that you're finished in creating your course. There is a dilemma: How do you get the word to potential students? How do you make it more known to your target group? To which sites do you need to post your links?

I've got good news to share with you: this is a solution. A lot of authors before they created online courses to cover a variety of content. And I'll help you learn the best methods for taking your course from 0 students up to 1000. All without spending anything on advertisements.

To begin, however, I will dispel a common mistake teachers make when they set the goal of building their courses. And that mistake is that they pursue a build-first approach rather than an audience-first approach. The reason why the "build-first" method is not optimal is due to the fact that you believe that a number of things will be true. This exposes you to a lot of risk in your course. Especially around what content to create and what your class structure should look.

  However, below are the 4 key parts of this mini-tutorial that will ensure constant, steady traffic on your instruction:  

1. How to Discover Where the ideal audience hangs out
2. What can you do to understand your audience's mind
3. How do you earn respect and Reputation among your Audience
4. How to Share Your Course with a group of people who are ready to Buy your Product

  How to Discover Where your Ideal Audience Hangs Out  

Let's pretend that you're a consultant client of mine. You'd like to promote a course around Marketing Analytics.

One thing I'm going to tell you is that you'll need to ask the right query -- you have to first ask "who are you planning to serve" instead of "what you plan to serve". In the Marketing Analytics case, you will then have to choose whether you wish to target Marketing Managers, CMOs or Entrepreneurs or marketing newbies?

Say that you've chosen to target entrepreneurs.

If that is the case The first thing to do is to begin searching for "where this audience hangs out". One of the best ways to accomplish this is to look for "online lounges". Online lounges are spaces in the internet that allow people to talk about things that are related to their topic of interest. They could be forums, blogs and mailing lists. How I accomplish this is by following these steps:

1. You can open your preferred Google or Bing search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
2. Make a search using any combination of these:

• Profession + Topic forum

• Profession + Topic mailing list

Professional - Topic + blog

- Profession + topic + forum for the industry

- Profession + topic + a link-sharing website (Eg. Reddit, stumbleupon)

- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum

And just right there, I get to uncover 10+ forums that I could target.

It doesn't end there yet. When you've selected a forum, it is necessary to drill down further and make another search using the topic of choice. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you want to look out for here is any signs of difficulty or discomfort from the original poster. From the initial query of only "marketing" on the subreddit. There is no luck.

How can we improve our quest to search for discomfort? Let's add "pain indicators" like "help" as well as "advice needed". Check out the outcomes. In just the very first page, there are a number of threads that could be useful.

If you have found specific threads with LOTS of complaints, then you know that you're in the correct online space to advertise to in the near future. When you start to conduct more investigation you'll discover that some forums work to address specific issues, while some forums will not. This helps you concentrate your marketing efforts on regions where your target users hang out. This is critical to the success of your program.

From the above 15 minute exercise, we just got evidence that reddit.com/r/entrepreneur is a great place to promote our marketing course.

Explore different forums! My advice is that you need to identify at least 10 online lounges. Blogs are also useful (especially thanks to its highly active comments sections).

  How to Read your Readers' Minds  

You've got a long list of threads that show clear signs of pain. Let's underline all of them and let's really understand who are your target audience.

After you've gathered enough information then you'll begin to notice patterns on who your audience is. After you've identified the patterns, you begin to get a strong instinct of what your audience feels and feels about marketing generally.

Based on the information above There are a few minor trends emerging (we'll require 10+ difficult threads before we can really understand) that entrepreneurs really want 3 items: a high-efficiency digital marketing plan that requires little expenditure of cash, advice on cities-specific marketing and how one can position themselves to get high-value clients.

Earlier, in our hypothetical example, you wanted to develop a product around Marketing Analytics. However, it turned out that it could be too complex (at least to be used in at least the Reddit online lounge). Better to take an education that focuses on budget advertising that is high-efficiency locally, as well as seeking & closing high-value clients.

The course I have planned for these pain samples could then begin to look like:

1. How can you use Facebook Interest Targeting to find the most desirable clients in a matter of dimes a Click
2. How do you build the Referral Machine through these Pitch Scripts in Your Next Local Chamber of Commerce Event
3. What are the needs only High-Value Clients Have

Course Name: "How to Get High-Value Customers Using hyperlocal, Hyper-targeted and hyper local marketing"

If you were to change that direction in the Reddit area, I'm certain you'll see some the attention of others. What do you think evidence-based marketing can offer us?

  How to Create Trust and Reputation with your target audience  

Apart from identifying pains it is important to establish yourself as an authority within these online spaces.

This means that you should give bite-sized suggestions when you face these issues. When I say bite-sized, it means anything that's between 1 and 10 sentences, yet is actionable enough for someone to use.

For example, I would answer someone who says "haven't seen Facebook as beneficial" or "need an effective strategy" by saying:

"I know that you require an effective digital plan given your low budget. I am surprised, however to learn that you consider FB ads to be NOT efficient. I use FB advertisements a lot within my business consulting, and this is how I suggest you do your targeting to get quality clicks at $0.40 or $0.80 per click:

1. ONLY employ interest targeting. All other settings are left as defaults.
2. When you use interest targeting, make sure to use more than 10 interests, and then eliminate those with large reach. The reason is that a large reach per interest translates to a high cost per click. If I wanted to target people who are interested in marketing, I would use interests through gurus such as 'Neil Patel', "Derek Halpern or 'Darren Rowse', etc. I'd leave out Gary Vaynerchuk' because his popularity is far too vast!
3. Be sure the total reach does not exceed 800,000 individuals.
4. Start your test! Make sure your test is limited at $5 per day. Do not ever use the lifetime budgeting option.
5. If you exceed $1 per click, you need to cut off interests with the highest reach and add more 'niche' interests
6. If you need ideas on "niche" interests, search for influencers, tools, and even software, then test this out"

If you offer advice in the level of actionable and low-level detail You will earn credibility and respect within your field.

  How to Share Your Course to an Audience which is ready to buy the Product you offer  

"Isn't it spammy to post links? !" "What if I get blocked? !"

You probably have had this thought. And these are fair assertions. In order to to solve the problem, one thing you could do is include inline links in your blog posts, and then combine this with websites that aren't related to your web site. This creates the impression that you intend to be friendly and not spammy. Here's a personal example in which I attempted to assist someone having trouble using landing pages.

Through these four general, strategic steps I was able to build my site to have approximately 4K-5K organic visits per month. 89% of these came from direct link. See the data in the following article from SimilarWeb. There is no advertising budget whatsoever.

Provide lots of value for free and actionable to the world and it will love the world and love you back. I wish you great results in your journey!

  Kenn Costales, a grow hacker as well as an online course designer who enjoys exploring new methods of marketing items online, without investing a penny.