Your online course should now be launched, but it’s not yet time to sit back and watch the money flow in. In fact, without doing anything else from your side, you will likely see no profit made.

This is why marketing your online course should be just as important step when you are looking to reach success with your efforts.

There are a lot of different ways you can promote your course. You can target both a physical and an online audience; remember many people at a physical location that is close by will have access to the internet, so they can easily enroll in the course you published.

You should consider whether you want to take advantage of free marketing methods or rather spend some money as an initial investment to attract more visitors to your landing page.

A combination of free and paid methods may work most effectively.

Here are a few tips to help you promote your marketing courses:

Free Marketing Methods

• Create a Facebook page that represents your brand, as well as a Facebook group. The group should be private and only allow access through invites. Accept students that enroll in your course into this group. It creates a community where students and communicate, collaborate and even help each other.
• If your course has a strong business focus, consider creating a branded page on LinkedIn too. This is a huge B2B social network with lots of opportunities. Here, you can also find many people looking to expand on their skills with the goal of creating a more successful career for themselves.
• Write guest posts about topics in the niche your course targets. Post the content on external blogs run by recognized names in the niche. This helps you build credibility and attracts more traffic to your website. There are many blog owners who will provide a guest post without any charges.
• Post advertisements for your course on classified websites, such as Craigslist and Gumtree. While this does not have the same response rate as promoting on Facebook, you may still find that these ads bring in a few leads per month, which could potentially convert to sales.

Paid Marketing Methods

Most people who are setting up and selling a course online for the first time find that paid advertising is the best way of creating more awareness for their content.

A lot of different options exist here too. The specific options you utilize depending on the budget you have available for marketing purposes.

Here are a few options you might want to consider:

• Google Ads still remains a top choice among many people. According to recent statistics, about 73% of all paid search ad campaigns are run through the official Google Ads platform. This platform allows you to target audiences based on the country. You can enter specific keywords to target while setting up the campaign. Combined with Google Analytics, this paid advertising platform allows you to easily track your conversions and get a better view of how much you are really paying for signups.
• Microsoft Advertising is an excellent alternative to Google Ads. It gives you an opportunity to display your website and ad in Bing search results, as well as several partner networks. The platform works similar to Google Ads – you set up a campaign by specifying the URL of your landing page, write a headline and text for your ad, and then configure targeting and budget.
• Facebook Ads lets you take advantage of the billions of people who have an account on the platform. You also get targeting options that are much more specific compared to Google Ads and other digital advertising platforms. You can specify the gender, age, interests, country, income group, and several other data points related to the audience you want your ads to target. With this strategy, your ad becomes more relevant to the people who see it, creating a higher CTR and better conversions.

You can also decide to utilize influencer marketing, but this can be costly for people who are only starting out with their very first online course. In this case, you look for an influencer that focuses on content that involves your niche. If you have a health-related course, for example, you would find a personal trainer, fitness trainer, yoga inspector, or a person who likes to share healthy recipes – ask them to promote your course.

Offline advertising campaigns can also be utilized when you are prepared to pay for promotions. Consider having a designer set up a few flyers for you – then get them printed in bulk to save on costs. There are notice boards at local libraries, community clubs, cultural centers and shopping malls where these flyers can be placed. You never know who is looking to learn something new!