How Can You Go From zero to 1000 Online Course Participants With No Advertise Budget

It's all set. It's been discovered that there's a gap in your space You've drafted your lesson plan, and you're pumped up and enthusiastic about the whole thing. Perhaps you're done creating the curriculum. However, a problem is what can you do to spread your message to students who might be interested? What are the best ways to get it more known to your target community? To which sites should you post links on?

I've got good news for you: this can be the case and a resolved issue. A lot of authors before they created online courses for all types of content. And I'll teach you the best techniques to build your class from zero students to 1000 students. This is all without any expense for marketing.

In the beginning I'll dispel a common mistake educators make when setting up to create their own course. The reason for this is because they choose to follow a build-first method rather than an audience-first approach. The reason that the "build-first" method is not optimal is because you are assuming that a number of things will be true. This exposes your course to lots of risk in your course. In particular, it is about what to create and what your course structure should be.

  This being said, here are the four key components to this mini-tutorial to ensure continuous, reliable traffic for your instruction:  

1. Find out where Your Ideal Clients Hang Out
2. How to Read your Audience's minds
3. How to Build Respect and Reputation in your Audience
4. How to share your Course to an Audience that's Ready to Purchase your Product

  Find Out the Places where your ideal audience hangs Out  

Let's say you're a client consulting with mine and you want to market a class on Marketing Analytics.

First thing I'll explain to you is you'll have to pose the correct query -- you have to start by asking "who do you plan to serve" rather than "what you're planning to do". If you're in the Marketing Analytics case, you must then choose whether you want to target CMOs, Marketing Managers, Entrepreneurs or marketing newbies?

Let's say you've made the decision to target entrepreneurs.

If so your first step is to search for "where this audience hangs out". The most effective way to do this is to look to find "online lounges". Online lounges are places on the internet where people discuss things related to the subject they're interested in. They could be forums, blogs and mailing lists. The way that I do this is to do the following steps:

1. Open up your web-based search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
2. Make a search using one of these combinations:

Forum - Profession + forum

- Profession + topic + mailing list

- Profession + topic + blog

Topics + Professionals + industry forum

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

- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum

Just there, I get to discover 10+ potential forums that I could target.

It doesn't end there yet. Once you select a specific forum, you need to drill down further and make another search with your preferred topic. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you're looking for is an indication of pain or trouble from the original poster. From the initial query of just "marketing" within the subreddit. It's not working.

So how do we refine our hunt to truly search for discomfort? We can add "pain indicators" such as "help" as well as "advice requested". We'll look at the outcomes. We can see that in only the first page there are a number of threads that could be useful.

If you've found particular threads with LOTS of complaints and apprehension, you'll know you're in the correct online space to advertise to in the future. When you start to conduct more investigation, you will find that some forums work to address specific issues, while some forums won't. This will help you focus your promotion efforts only in regions where your target users hang out. This is critical for the success of your course.

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 other forums! My advice is that you need to identify at minimum 10 lounges online. Blogs are also useful (especially with its very frequent discussion sections).

  How to Read the minds of your audience  

By now, you have an extensive list of threads that clearly show signs of suffering. Let's look at them all and let's really understand who are audience is.

Once you collect enough data, you'll start seeing trends in who your target audience is. Once you identify these patterns, you'll begin to develop a clear understanding about how your customers feel and feels about marketing generally.

In the above data, there are some small patterns emerging (we'll have to wait for 10+ painstaking threads to truly understand) that entrepreneurs actually need three things: a highly efficient digital marketing strategy with low cash outlay, tips around the local and city-friendly marketing and how to position oneself in order to attract high-value customers.

In our earlier instance, you were planning to build a product around Marketing Analytics. It turns out, however, that the idea could be too complex (at at least to be used in the Reddit online lounge). The best option is to follow a course focused on low-budget advertising that is high-efficiency, local marketing, and seeking & closing high-value clients.

My structure of course to deal with these types of pain will then start to look like:

1. How can you use Facebook Interest Targeting to identify High-Quality Clients at a few dimes a Click
2. How to Build a Referral Machine through these Pitch Scripts for your next Local Chamber of Commerce Event
3. Find out what needs only High-Value Clients Have

Course Name: "How to Get High-Value Clients Using with Hyperlocal and Hyper targeted Marketing"

If you decide to drop that particular course within the Reddit market, I'm confident you'll see some traction. Do you know what the evidence-based approach to marketing offers us?

  How to build respect and trust among your audience  

In addition to identifying problems, however you must be a expert in these salons.

It means offering bite-sized tips whenever you encounter these pains. When I say bite-sized, it means things that range from one to 10 sentences but is actionable enough to allow the user to apply.

In this way, I would answer the person who said "haven't found FB to be helpful" or "need an effective strategy" with this form:

"I understand that you need an efficient digital strategy given your low budget. However, I'm surprised, that you find FB advertisements to not be useful. I do FB ads quite often in my consultancy, and here's what I would suggest to do with the right targeting for quality clicks at $0.40 - $0.80 per click:

1. ONLY use interest targeting. Set everything else to default.
2. When you use interest targeting ensure that you use 10+ interests and eliminate those with huge reach. A large number of clicks for each interest can translate to a high cost per click. If I were targeting marketers, I would use interests through gurus such as 'Neil Patel', "Derek Halpern' "Darren Rowse" etc. I would leave out 'Gary Vaynerchuk's influence is too large!
3. Be sure the total reach doesn't exceed 800,000. persons.
4. Get your test started! Be sure that the test is set at $5 per day. NEVER use the lifetime budget option.
5. If your earnings exceed the threshold of $1/click, it is necessary to eliminate interests with the highest impact and then add additional 'niche' interests
6. If you need ideas on "niche" interests, search for tools, influencers, and even software, then test the idea"

If you give advice at such low-level and actionable detail, you will gain credibility and respect within your field.

  How to Share Your Course to an Audience who is ready to purchase the Product you offer  

"Isn't it a violation of the law to share hyperlinks? !" "What if I get banned? !"

It's likely that you've had these thoughts. These are valid assertions. In order to to solve the issue, all you could do is include inline links in your comments and you add other websites that aren't related to your site. This will help convey the idea that you are trying to be friendly and not spammy. Let me give you a personal experience when I tried to help people who were having issues using landing pages.

Through these four large, strategically-planned steps I was able to build my site to have approximately 4K-5K organic visits per month. Eighty percent of those came through direct link. See the data in the following article from SimilarWeb. There is no advertising budget whatsoever.

Give lots of actionable, free value to the world, and the world will love you and love you back. I hope you achieve great success in your journey!

  Kenn Costales is an growth hacker as well as an online course creator who is passionate about discovering new methods to market products on the internet without having to spend a cent.