How to go from to 1,000 Students enrolled in Online Courses with No Advertise budget

You have everything planned out. It's been discovered that there's a gap in your space and you've created the lesson plan and you're pumped up and passionate about it all. You may be even done creating the curriculum. But a question looms: how do you spread the word to potential students? How do you make it more visible to your intended community? What websites are you supposed to share your link?

There's a good thing for you: this is a solved problem. A lot of authors before created online courses that cover all kinds of content; and I'll show you the most effective practices that you need for taking your course from 0 students to 1000 students. This is all without any expense for advertisements.

First, however I'll clear up a common mistake teachers make when they set the goal of building their courses. This is due to the fact that they pursue a build-first approach rather than an audience-first approach. The reason the "build-first" strategy isn't optimal is because you are assuming a lot of things to be the case, which can expose the course instructor to significant risks in your courses. Especially around what content to create and what your course structure will be.

  This being said, here are the four key components to this mini-tutorial to ensure constant, steady traffic on your instruction:  

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

  What to Do To Find Your Ideal Audience's Place Out  

Let's imagine that you're a client consulting with mine. You want to advertise a course on Marketing Analytics.

One thing I'm going to state to you is that you'll need to ask the right questions. You need to first ask "who are you planning to serve" rather than "what you're planning to do". In this Marketing Analytics case, you will then have to make a choice: do you wish to target CMOs, Marketing Managers, Entrepreneurs or marketing newbies?

You've decided to target entrepreneurs.

If that is the case The first thing to do is to begin searching to find "where the audience is". The most effective way to do this is to search for "online lounges". Online lounges are places on the internet that allow people to discuss things related to the topic they are interested in. This could include forums, blogs, and mailing lists. My method for doing this is by following the following steps:

1. You can open your preferred web-based search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
2. Do a search query using any combination of these:

• Profession + Topic forum

• Profession + Topic mailing list

Professional - Topic + blog

• Profession + forum for the industry

• Profession + topic + link-sharing sites (Eg. Reddit, stumbleupon)

- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum

And just right there, I uncover 10+ forums to target:

It doesn't end there yet. Once you select a specific forum, you need to explore further, and then create another search using the chosen topic. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you're looking out for here is any signs of difficulty or discomfort that was not posted by the original poster. From the initial query of only "marketing" on the subreddit. We don't have any luck.

What can we do to refine our quest to look for discomfort? Let's add "pain indicators" for example "help" as well as "advice needed". We'll look at the outcomes. We can see that in only the first page we can find a plethora of threads that could be useful.

If you have found specific forums that are full of expressions of pain, then you know that you're in the right online lounge to promote to in the near future. As you dive in and do more research, you will find that some forums will work on specific subjects, while other forums won't. This will help you focus your marketing efforts on regions where your target people hang out. This is critical to the effectiveness of your plan.

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

Try it out for additional forums! I would suggest that you must find at minimum 10 lounges online. Blogs can also be useful (especially with its very lively comments sections).

  How do you read your Readers' Minds  

You've got an extensive list of threads that show clear signs of suffering. Let's look at them all and let's be able to understand who are audience is.

Once you collect enough data and begin to see trends in who your target audience is. When you recognize the patterns, you begin to get a strong instinct of how your target audience feels and thinks about marketing overall.

In the above data, there are some small trends emerging (we'll require 10+ painstaking threads to truly understand) that show entrepreneurs truly want 3 things: a highly efficient digital marketing strategy with low cost of capital, useful tips on cities-specific marketing and how to position oneself to get high-value clients.

As we mentioned earlier, in our hypothetical example, you wanted to build a product around Marketing Analytics. However, it turned out that it could be too complex (at minimum to be used in it to be used in the Reddit Online Lounge). Better to take a program that is focused on low-budget advertising that is high-efficiency as well as local marketing. seeking & closing high-value clients.

My structure of course to deal with these types of pain is going to begin looking as follows:

1. How to Use Facebook Interest Targeting to find High-Quality Clients at a few dimes a Click
2. How do you build a Referral Machine with these Pitch Scripts for your next Local Chamber of Commerce Event
3. How to Discover the Needs only High-Value Clients Have

Course Description: "How to Get High-Value Clients Using with hyperlocal, Hyper-targeted and hyper local marketing"

If you dropped that course in the Reddit area, I'm certain that will get the attention of others. Do you know what the evidence-based approach to marketing offers us?

  How to Build respect and trust among your Audience  

Beyond discovering pains, however, you need to make yourself an expert in these salons.

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 but is actionable enough for someone to use.

In this way you can answer those who say "haven't discovered Facebook to be helpful" or "need an effective strategy" with this form:

"I know that you require an efficient digital strategy given your low budget. It is a surprise, however, that you find FB ads not to be useful. I use FB ads quite often in my business consulting, and this is what I would suggest to do with the right targeting for quality clicks at $0.40 - $0.80 per click.

1. ONLY make use of interest targeting. Leave everything else at defaults.
2. When you use interest targeting, make sure to use 10+ interests and do not exclude interests that have significant reach. Reason being large reach per interest will equate to a high price per click. If I wanted to target entrepreneurs into marketing using interests, I would do so through gurus such as 'Neil Patel', "Derek Halpern or "Darren Rowse" etc. I'd recommend excluding 'Gary Vaynerchuk's influence is too large!
3. Make sure that the TOTAL reach does not exceed 800,000 individuals.
4. Start your test! Make sure your test is locked at $5 per day. NEVER use the lifetime budgeting option.
5. If your earnings exceed $1 per click, you need to cut off interest with the greatest impact and then add additional 'niche interested
6. If you need ideas on 'niche' interests, google for the right tools, influencers and then check the idea"

If you provide advice at such low-level and actionable detail it will be a source of credibility and respect within the space.

  How to Distribute Your Course with an audience who is ready to purchase your Product  

"Isn't it a bit shady to publish URLs? !" "What if I be blocked? !"

It's likely that you've had these thoughts. And these are fair assertions. To solve for this problem, what you could do is use inline links in your comments and you add other links not related to your web site. This will help convey the idea that you intend to be friendly and not spammy. This is a real-life example of when I tried to help someone having trouble with landing pages:

Through these four large, strategically-planned steps I managed to grow my website to get approximately 4K-5K organic visits per month. Eighty percent of those came through direct links. See the data below from SimilarWeb. There is no advertising budget whatsoever.

Offer a lot of value for free and actionable to the world and the world will love the world and love you back. I hope you achieve great success on your path!

  Kenn Costales is an growth hacker and online course creator who is passionate about discovering new methods to market products on the internet without investing a penny.