To create an online course is not difficult, to sell, is a big question mark. Most of the online course creators overlook the marketing and the selling part. In the beginning, they were excited to record and launch the course but after launching, many questions start to reveal, especially who do I sell to and how do I sell?

To answer this question, the first thing you need to refer to is your target audience analysis. What? you do not know what “target audience analysis” is? Before you start creating an online course, you need to do a thorough research and analysis about your target audience, take for example, if you are creating a course about “stress management”, selling the course to a kid or to a mom or to a working adult would definitely affect the content you are going to put together.

Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.

–Brian Chesky, Co-Founder & CEO, Airbnb

With a clear target audience analysis, after you have launched your course, you can craft your copywriting message to tell the target audience about your course and publish the copy where your target audience would see it.

However, if you are new in the market, people do not know you, it is always unrealistic to expect the target audience would buy your course right away. Hence, as a start, you shouldn’t sell the courses right away, instead, you need to turn the cold audience to become warm audience.

As when I conduct classroom training, as an instructor, the first activity is always breaking the ice, we would have some activities to make the audience becomes “warm”. When the audience know you better, they start to have trust with you, they will tear down the shield, open their mind and engage themselves in the classroom activities.

Similarly, to sell courses online, you need to have some kind of ice breaking activities with the cold audience. But how? I like the analogy put up by Mike Filsaime, the Groovefunnel CEO, the analogy sounds like this: when a guy fall in love with a girl, should the guy go ask the girl to marry him right away? of course not, the guy needs to spend time understand the girl, dates her, impress the girl, after sometime being together, then only propose, get married, have children. 😄

Same thing to product selling, you need to create your presence to the potential customers through some ways, typically we leverage the social media platform eg facebook page, blog post, live video etc. The potential customers will start to follow you and trust you when they see your content pop up constantly. A lead magnet is sometimes a good start to engage the target audience. Lead magnet is something valuable that you offer as a freebie to the target audience in exchange of their email addresses.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

– Maya Angelou, Civil Rights Activist & Poet

In a nutshell, to sell online course, it is very important to let your target audience know about you, trust you and like you. Do not expect selling product without building the presence and authority. Selling online course takes time hence you need to have a lot of patience and persistence. That’s why we propose you should start your online course business part time, take it as a hobby with the goal to share your skills and knowledge with others, through this way, you can grow your audience list and help your online course business expands gradually.

Cheers!