Use PR and SEO to Increase The Sales for your online course
Making your course online is only the first step. After your course has been created then the next thing to do is to enrol students (easier to do than say! ).
Do you have a marketing strategy? Perhaps you've thought that just since your online course is available that people automatically locate it.
Sorry to be the bearer of terrible news, but in order to maximise the return on all your efforts put into establishing your program, it is essential to promote it.
And two of the best methods to do this is through the PR (Public Relations) as well as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
There is no longer a time when you need to dig deep in your wallet and hire an expensive PR firm to help your business get publicity. If you know what do to, you could do it yourself.
Keep an eye out.
The same goes in the case of SEO. No longer do you need to shell out huge sums of money on an SEO agency. When you know how to engage your customers with relevant content, you can send clear signals to search engines.
In this detailed guide, I'm going to give you some tips for actionable how you can use SEO and PR to boost the sales of your online courses.
PR Tips and Tools for increasing the sales of your course
Step 1. How to Find Journalists
If you're working on yourself PR, the initial step is to find journalists that specialize in your area. For instance, if your course is about Social Media Marketing you'll want to locate journalists that specialize in writing about marketing via social media.
And, guess what?
Google is as a good beginning point like other...
Search in Google and use the 'News' tab to locate journalists writing on your subject.
Similar to this:
Then, start looking up the authors of these articles to determine whether they could help in your PR campaigns.
It is worth a moment to determine if the writer of the article is a well-known journalist on your particular subject.
Based on your results from the search, you can begin to build a Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Name of the reporter
- The URL for the article
- Click here to go to Twitter profile for the reporter.
- Link to the website or blog for the reporter (if there is one)
- Email address (if there is one)
- Your Notes
So, in our example, you might have:
- Jayson DeMers
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2016/09/28/9-things-social-media-marketers-get-wrong/#5107342a4b2f
- https://twitter.com/jaysondemers
- http://www.audiencebloom.com/
- Email?
- Chief Executive Officer and Founder of AudienceBloom the Seattle-based company for content marketing. Regular writer for Forbes.
Here's an example a report's spreadsheet that I put together:
>> Your goal for you is to compile an inventory of 20 reporters within your field.
Google is good but not always great. The tough part is to know how your conversation opener will include with journalists from these sources, what are the most popular topics you have with them and who is the most important journalists you can contact right now, and what is their reason for doing so.
JustReachOut can help you find journalists who are most pertinent and give you a reason to contact them. When you type in a search term, the program will tell that you are writing about your keyword and why it is important to contact them. The tool also provides email pitch templates for your pitch. It also provides email support from journalists' staff to assist you to send emails directly to journalists from the platform, and the team of experts who check each email prior to being and sent.
~
Step 2. How to Get In Touch With Journalists
When you've got your list of relevant journalists then you're prepared for the next step: connecting with them. connecting with them.
Below, you can see that this particular journalist is ready to accept pitches. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
For those who don't provide any contact details it is necessary to investigate more. Don't be concerned, there are some instruments that could help.
1. Hunter
Input the website of your company into Hunter, and it'll give you the format and known email addresses.
For example, if you attempt to enter the site will show:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
If you know a pattern, you can safely guess your journalist's contact details.
#2: Email Format
If you look up the publication you want to read on Email Format, it suggests the one it's most confident is correct.
Here is the data it gives to :
Once you have an idea of the possible email address of your journalist, you are able to employ this tool to verify it.
Step 3. How to Build Relationships With Journalists
So far you've identified prospective journalists in your niche and made a spreadsheet including their contact info.
You may be tempted to begin pitching immediately.
But don't.
The first step is to nurture relations with those you are in contact with. And the best way is to begin giving prior to making requests.
Take these steps:
- Respond to journalists queries on the HelpAReporter or JustReachOut
- Contact journalists for article ideas on your own blog
- Answer to a question in Quora and then ask journalists to answer the same question.
- Follow the journalists you'd like to contact on Twitter
- Tweet relevant content and share it with others.
- Leave a meaningful response on Twitter or a post in their blogs. Be open about your personal style in order to let them know your personality.
- Offer them an idea or story which isn't about your own personal interests. That's right, offer them something interesting. They're journalists. They want stories.
Recently, I made a video where I outline a step by step of how to build connections with journalists. This video is here for your reference.
Here's the words of Rebecca Grant, a former writer for VentureBeat she said about creating connections first:
"If you've got an idea or an idea to write an article that *gasp!does not involve you, please share it with journalists. We're always looking for stories that are worth telling. ."
Step 4. How To Suggest Your Story To Journalists
By now you should be establishing a rapport with the journalists you want to pitch to. The time you spend to break the ice implies that you do not have to write a cold email now.
But what exactly are you going to say in your email?
The last thing you need to tell the journalists about your brand new program.
This is a huge NO.
Return to the homepage.
What is the goal of journalists?
--- Good Stories.
Ever heard the saying: "Stories sell newspapers."
The same applies to the world of online.
The best stories are shared, and they generate shares as well as traffic.
Now is the time to share your story with journalists. But where are you going to source them? Your blog.
In the following section, we'll dive into content marketing. However, before we do that, let's review the tools that can help you with the email marketing pitching.
Digital marketing agency Fractl conducted a survey of more than 500 journalists from top publications such as BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch as well as other publications about the things they would like to see to hear in a pitch.
Here are some key results:
- 81% of people prefer to be marketed via email.
- 69% of respondents prefer being pitched during the morning.
- 39% are looking for exclusive research that they can publish
In this regard that in mind, make sure that you track the progress of your email pitch. Below are some techniques you could test:
MixMax is a no-cost plugin for Gmail that includes an unlimited tracking of emails. You can select the option to monitor every email you receive or just individual ones:
The lightning symbol with numbers next to your sent messages indicates that someone has opened your email plus the amount of times they have opened it.
2. Yesware
Yesware is yet another Gmail plugin that lets you keep track of email opening and reply rates, clicks on links, and attachment openings. Simply click the "track" button prior to you hit send and Yesware does all the monitoring. Yesware allows you to test variations of your subject line for emails, and save templates of email for future use.
No matter if your online course has been finished or not, this is the perfect time to start planning the strategies. You should think about the journalists you might be able to meet and begin to build relationships. Remember to offer them great content.
~
SEO Tips to Increase the Sales of Your Online Course
SEO is the process that aims to maximize the number of visitors to the website through ensuring that your website appears first in the search results returned by a search engine. If someone is searching for the subject of your class using Google or Yahoo, having your website appear in search results means free exposure to you.
How do you get your website to show up in the results of searches for subjects relevant to your program?
by publishing excellent material (blog posts, videos, etc.) on your website that people can consume for free.
Perhaps you are thinking: after all your hard work on developing your curriculum, what would you want to share free content?
Allow me to explain the logic:
Through the creation and promotion of excellent content on a budget (usually via a blog) and establishing confidence and credibility in your field. If you produce content for free which actually aids people, those people will be more likely to purchase your product because they know, like and are confident inyou. Free content builds the reciprocity.
In the ideal scenario, you'll have a blog and an audience prior to selling your course. If not yet, you don't have to wait to start one now.
One of the keys to making your blog effective is to have highly valuable material. This is what Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Contentwhich is material that's 10 times better than the most popular result that can currently be located in the results of a search of a particular keyword or topic.
Journalists and users prefer to link to your high quality content
The process of creating 10x content isn't easy. If it was, every single piece of content will have to be 10x.
You have an exclusive advantage...
- You've just created an excellent online course.
- A wealth of material is in your reach.
- It's already clear some key keywords and topics which your target audience would like to know about.
Once you begin making content for your blog it is possible to pull from this library of ideas and then turn it into 10x content.
You must ensure that you have 10x Content
- Solves a problem or provides the answer to a question by providing complete, precise, and exceptional info or resources.
- High-quality, trusted practical, fascinating, and remarkable.
- Gives users a pleasant experience by providing a user-friendly layout, interface as well as fonts and images.
If your material meets these standards, your target audience, plus the journalists you pitch to, will automatically want to spread the word about it.
Be aware that all this stuff takes time, a lot of time! The ability to prioritize your projects and manage your time is essential for achieving results quick. Recently, I shared some suggestions about how you can manage your time while working on your writing or PR outreach. I also found some fantastic actionable stuff there from others too.
10x Content gets more natural backlinks and ranks more highly in Google
When Google starts to see that your content is popular, then it will increase the rank of your website within the search results. Because it's a top-quality piece of content other people within your field will want to link to it.
and Google likes natural backlinks.
After all your hard work in creating your content, remember to follow these steps.
1. Make sure your website is ready to receive the influx of traffic
- Visit GTmetrix to enter your URL into the site, try your homepage URL and your top placed or top blog post URL. Check out the grade you receive and the issues it reports. The grade you receive should be that is B or A.
- Use only dedicated web hosting. Avoid using HostGator or a cheaper service like GoDaddy that uses an array of shared servers and do not have the capacity specifically for hosting or serving WordPress or blog content specifically. Take a look at options like Flywheel or WPEngine that are specifically designed for hosting and serving up WordPress blog post content. It optimizes how your page loads and makes load speed faster in addition to helping to rank your page higher in Google.
- Think about making use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) It is a service that provides alternative server nodes for users to download resources (usually static files such as images or JavaScript). This speeds up your site a great deal, most important websites utilize this. You can learn more about it here.
- Consider using a caching plugin If you've ever hit the back button in a browser because the site required more than five seconds to load you've experienced a site without any caching. Excessive load times can limit your website's traffic, reduce the quality of your Google search rank and lessen your website's potential. A caching software will help with load speed a great deal. Learn more here.
- Optimize your entire image for speedier loading of your website This is a elementary concept that can become somewhat technical because it is possible to utilize CSS sprites to optimize the images. This article will tell the steps to take and why. In the final day, you should have a score of either A or B GTmetrix to rank your blog's homepage as well as every major article that you wish to rank at very least. I make sure that all articles I have for my blog get the grade.
2. Check to see if you've got the right CTAs (calls to action) strategically placed throughout your website.
- To buy your online course
If you're not yet launching your blog, then you should start by getting your blog operational. Begin to think about what 10x articles you could create to ensure that your readers will desire to share your story.
Add PR & SEO to your marketing plan for your course
Are you eager to begin promoting your online course with these cost-effective PR and SEO strategies?
SEO and PR don't need to cost you a lot of money. When you commit your thoughts to them, you'll be able to tap into the resources at your disposal. Develop meaningful connections with influential people and develop valuable content that will increase your online course sales.
~
Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io that helps start-ups entrepreneurs and business owners pitch journalists and influencers with no assistance of PR agencies. In the past, he used PR outreach to help a startup acquired by Google. He blog about PR tricks as well as SEO, on his blog at CriminallyProlific.