Use SEO and PR to boost Your Online Course Sales
Creating your online course is just the start. After your course has been created, the next step is to enrol students (easier to say than done! ).
Have you got a strategy for marketing plan? Perhaps you've made the mistake of thinking that simply since your online course is available and other users will automatically discover the course.
Well, I'm sorry to bring bad news, but if you want to maximize the return on all the effort you poured into creating your course, then you need to advertise it.
Two of the most effective ways to achieve this is through the PR (Public Relations) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
There is no longer a time when you need to dig in your pocket to employ a costly PR company to help your business get exposure. If you're aware of what to do to, then you are able to take it on by yourself.
Stay tuned.
Same goes in the case of SEO. No longer do you need to pay huge amounts of money to hire the services of an SEO agency. If you are able to get your audience engaged with valuable content, then you can send clear signals to the search engines.
In this comprehensive guide, I'm going to provide some practical tips on ways to use SEO and PR to improve your online course sales.
PR Tips and Tools for Increasing Your Course Sales
Step 1: How To Find Journalists
When you're doing yourself PR, your first step is to find journalists who are in your field. If, for instance, you're a teacher of Social Media Marketing you'll want to find journalists who specialize in the field of reporting on social media marketing.
What's more?
Google is as good a beginning point as any...
Use the search engine Google using the 'News' tab to locate journalists writing on your subject.
Similar to this:
Now start checking the authors of these articles to determine how they might be able to assist you in your PR campaigns.
It is worth a moment to check whether the author of the piece is a regular reporter on your particular subject.
Based on your results from the search, you are able to begin building the Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Name of the reporter
- URL of the article
- Links to the Twitter profile for the reporter.
- Link to the individual website or blog for the reporter (if it is available)
- Email address (if there is one)
- Your Notes
In our case, 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?
- Founder & CEO of AudienceBloom which is a company that specializes in content marketing based out of Seattle. A regular contributor to Forbes.
Here's an example of a spreadsheet of reporters I created:
>> Your objective for you is to compile the list of 20 journalists in your niche.
Google is good but not all the time. The tough part is to know how your conversation opener will be when you meet these journalists What are their common topics of interests you have with them which are the most important journalists to contact now and why.
JustReachOut helps you identify the most appropriate journalists and give you a reason to contact them. When you type in a search term, the tool shows that you are creating an article on your keyword and why it is important to contact the journalist. It also gives you email pitch templates to create your pitch. assistance via email from the staff of reporters to help to directly send email to journalists via the platform as well as the team of experts who check each email prior to being sent.
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Step 2: How To Get In Touch With Journalists
When you've got the list of journalists you want to connect with, and you're now ready to take the next step, which is c connect with them.
Below, you will see that this specific journalist is open to receiving requests for pitches. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
If you don't have the contact information it is necessary to investigate a little more. However, don't fret. There are some tools that can aid.
#1: Hunter
You can enter the URL of your company's website in Hunter The program will show you the structure and emails.
For example, if you attempt to enter it will display:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
If you know a pattern, you can safely guess your journalist's contact details.
#2: Format of Email
When you search for the desired publication using Email Format, it suggests the one it's most confident is correct.
Here is what it returns to :
When you've got an idea of the possible email address of the 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 created a spreadsheet with their contact info.
You may be tempted to pitch right away.
But don't.
In the beginning, it is important establish relations with those you are in contact with. It is best to give prior to asking.
Follow these steps:
- Respond to journalists queries on HelpAReporter or JustReachOut
- Interview journalists for articles on your own blog
- Answer to a question in Quora and request journalists to answer the exact same question.
- Follow the journalists you want to pitch on Twitter.
- Share relevant tweets and retweet them.
- Write a genuine response on Twitter or a comment to their website. Start sharing your personality so they get to know the way you present yourself.
- Offer them an idea or story which isn't about the you. That's right, give them something that is newsworthy. They're journalists. They're looking for stories.
A while ago, I recorded video in which I describe an easy step-by-step guide on how to develop relationships with journalists. Here it is for you to refer to.
Here's what Rebecca Grant, a former writer at VentureBeat, said about building connections first:
"If you've got a suggestion or an idea to write an article that *gasp!isn't about your company, then share it with a journalist. We are constantly looking for good stories ."
Step 4. How To Suggest Your Story To Journalists
At this point, you'll have established a relationship with journalists that you would like to pitch to. Making the effort to make the first move isn't a requirement to email cold today.
What exactly are you going to say in the email you send?
What you do not wish to share with the journalists about your brand fresh course.
This is a huge NO.
Go back to the top of the page.
What are journalists looking for?
-- Good Stories.
You've heard that saying before: "Stories sell newspapers."
It's the same in the world of online.
The best stories are shared, and they generate shares as well as traffic.
It's time to start sharing your stories with the media. But where are you going to source them? The blog you are writing.
In the following section, we'll dive into the subject of content marketing. But before that let's look at the tools that can help you with the email marketing pitching.
Digital marketing company Fractl conducted a survey of over 500 journalists from top publications like BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch, and more about the things they would like to see to hear in a pitch.
Here are some of the key results:
- 81% prefer being pitched over email
- 69% of respondents prefer being pitched during the morning.
- 39% want exclusive research to make available for publication.
To ensure that you are aware of this that in mind, make sure that you track the progression of your pitch. There are two tools you can use:
MixMax is a free plugin to Gmail which includes the ability to track emails for an indefinite period of time. It is possible to choose the option to monitor all your emails or individual ones:
The lightning icon with a number next to your messages will indicate the fact that someone been able to open your email, as well as the number of times that they've opened it:
2. Yesware
Yesware is yet another Gmail plugin that allows you to track email open and reply rates, clicks to links and attachment opens. Just click on the "track" button just before you click send, and Yesware handles all tracking. Yesware allows you to try different variations for your email subject line as well as save templates of email for future use.
Whether your online course is finished or not, this is the perfect opportunity to plan the strategies. Consider which journalists you could connect with and start building connections. Make sure to give them excellent content.
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SEO Tips to Increase Your Online Course Sales
SEO is the practice of maximizing the number of visitors to an online site by making sure that your website appears first in the search results returned by a search engine. If someone is searching for your course topic using Google, for example, having your website appear in the results of a search means free exposure for your business.
How do you get your website to show up in the results of searches for subjects related to your course?
Through publishing amazing information (blog posts, videos, etc.) on your site that visitors can access for free.
You might now be asking: after all your efforts in developing your course material, why do you need to make free content?
I'll describe the reason:
Through the creation and promotion of high quality content for free (usually via the blog) and establishing credibility and trust in your field. If you can create content that is free that actually helps people, those people are more likely to buy your course because they are familiar with, trust and are confident inyou. Content that is free builds the reciprocity.
Ideally, you'll already have a website and an audience before you start marketing your course. But if not yet, you don't have to wait to get started now.
One of the keys to making your blog successful is to have highly valuable information. This is what Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Contentis material that's 10 times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results of a particular keyword or subject.
Journalists and readers would prefer to hyperlink to your premium value content
The process of creating 10x content is not easy. If it was, every piece of content would have to be 10x.
You have an exclusive advantage...
- It's a great online course.
- A wealth of material is at your fingertips.
- There are a few primary terms and subjects which your target audience would like to know about.
Once you begin writing content for your blog it is possible to pull from this library of ideas and then turn it into 10x content.
Be sure to include 10x Content
- Helps solve a problem, or answer questions by giving comprehensive, accurate, exceptional info or resources.
- Is high-quality, trustworthy, useful, interesting as well as remarkable.
- Gives users a pleasant experience by providing a user-friendly layout, interface, fonts, and images.
If your material meets these requirements, then your readers, plus the journalists whom you approach is bound to want to share your content.
Be aware that all of this takes some time. A lot of time! Making a list of your work and managing your time is crucial for making progress quickly. I recently provided some tips for managing your time when you are writing or doing PR outreach. I also found some fantastic useful advice there from other bloggers too.
10x Content is more attractive to natural backlinks, and is ranked more highly on Google
If Google starts to see the quality of your content, then it will increase the rank of your website on the results page. Because it's a top-quality piece of content, others who are in your area will want to link to it.
Also, Google likes natural backlinks.
After you have completed your work producing the content, be sure to do the following.
1. Be sure that your site is ready to receive the influx of traffic
- Go to GTmetrix to input your website's URL Try your home page URL as well as your highest ranking or most popular blog posting URL. Check out the grades you get as well as the problems it identifies. You should have a grade either B or A.
- Utilize dedicated web hosting. Do not use HostGator or something less expensive like GoDaddy that uses an array of shared servers and are not designed for hosting and serving up WordPress or blog-related content in particular. Look at services such as Flywheel or WPEngine which are designed specifically to host and serve up WordPress blog content. This improves how your page loads and makes load speed faster and also helps to rank your page higher on Google.
- Consider using CDN (Content Delivery Network) - it works by providing other server options for customers to download and install resources (usually static content like images and JavaScript). The result is that your site will be faster a great deal, most major sites use this. You can learn more about it here.
- Consider using a caching plugin If you've ever clicked an back button on your website because it took more then 5 minutes to load, you've encountered the site with no caching. The excessive load time can hinder your traffic, lower your Google ranking and reduce the potential of your site's. The installation of a caching plugin can assist in improving load speeds a great deal. You can learn more here.
- Optimize your entire image for faster page loading This is a elementary concept that can become a little technical since you might need to use CSS sprites to optimize the images. In this article, we will show how you can do it and the reasons. When you are done with the day, you should have a score of B or A on GTmetrix for the homepage of your blog and for any other major posts you'd like to rank at very least. I make sure that every article I post for my blog get this rating.
2. Make sure you have applicable CTAs (calls to actions) strategically placed throughout your website:
- To buy your online course
If you've not started your blog yet, you need to make sure your site is operational. Start planning what 10x contents you'll be able to create in order that your readers will desire to share your story.
Incorporate SEO and PR to the marketing strategy for your course
Are you prepared to begin marketing your online course by using the most cost-effective SEO and PR techniques?
SEO and PR don't need to cost you a lot of money. When you commit your thoughts towards it, you'll utilize the resources available at your disposal. Build meaningful relationships with influencers and create valuable content to increase your online course sales.
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Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io that helps start-ups and entrepreneurs reach out to journalists and influencers with no help of PR firms. In the past, he employed PR outreach in order to have an enterprise acquired by Google. He blog about PR tricks along with SEO in his blog CriminallyProlific.