Following Government recommendations, social distancing and self-isolation is forcing us all to adjust the way we work and live our lives. At the moment, the Plume team are working remotely so we can continue to provide our support to businesses and clients who need to keep themselves up and running.
If you are offering courses to your customers, employees and clients through an elearning platform right now, you should be prioritising how you can sell more online courses while you work from home.
Social distancing is presenting us all with an opportunity to learn and connect in a way we couldn’t have anticipated before. At this point in time, we’re all posed with the same predicament; an abundance of free time.
While we’re being advised to stay in our homes and self isolate, we’re also being forced to stay on our computers, cancel our face-to-face meetings and even postpone our trips to conferences and social gatherings.
It seems bleak.
But, social distancing will give us back the one thing that we never seem to have enough of; time.
While some people might be focused on the doom and gloom of our uncertain future, we hope course creators, entrepreneurs and training academies will finally be granted the free time to work on that ebook/course/video series (delete as appropriate) they’ve been trying to get round to for years.
How many times have you thought to yourself, ‘I know so much about this I should write a book’. Or maybe you’ve contemplated writing a white paper before losing all momentum on it?
It happens!
Whether you’re writing an in-depth guide or a summary of your expertise, selling or giving this away alongside your course is a great way of tying your customers into purchasing your other elearning materials….like, say, your all singing and all dancing, super-duper, online course?
You can either offer your resource as a paid purchase or for free to those who are willing to give you their email. Always link your resource to a bigger purchase like a stand-alone module or your full-course.
Sometimes online course landing pages are just plain dull. We see reams and reams of meaningless copy uploaded onto mile-long course landing pages all the time - all seemingly directionless with little consideration to a learners’ actual decision-making process.
We know how to build course landing pages that convert. Even leading one client to earn three times more a month just from streamlining their content and rewriting the sales copy.
Similarly to a resource that you either sell or give away, offering a mini-course or course preview will help you convert more learners who are sitting on the fence about purchasing your course.
A minicourse is a great way to sell more online courses to learners who might not be mentally or financially ready to commit to purchasing one of your longer or accredited courses. These courses should include unique insights and learning opportunities while tying into larger modules you might be selling.
Unlike course previews, these courses should be valuable in themselves without crossing over too much into what you might cover elsewhere - otherwise you risk undermining the value of your longer online courses.
It’s a course creator’s dream: A large social media following. A dedicated group of brand ambassadors. There’s no doubt that the social proof an engaged following creates will have a huge impact on your business. But growth is slow when you're starting from scratch these days.
If you’ve ever considered creating a private (or public) group for your learners to ask questions and share ideas around your course’s content then now is the time to do it. Start by setting up a Facebook group and emailing your list (make sure you have their permission to do this) with a link to join. Create an incentive that will help motivate people to join, otherwise there might be little reason for them to get involved in your work post-graduation.
We suggest you create some content to share in your group so new members aren’t faced with an empty feed, and be sure to ask them questions - some of which you could even select for a Facebook Live Q&A!
Regardless of whether you currently offer live training, an alternative to face-to-face training could be group webinars.
There are a number of subscription or industry-news organisations currently offering these already, and delivering these yourself through your current setup is easy enough to do: Just set a date/ time and a theme and ask people to sign up, or buy a ticket to ‘attend’ your training.
This solution is perfect for online course creators who are stuck at home or to training academies, corporate training providers and employee learning and development professionals who might be putting a large portion of their work on hold.
If you’ve got a mailing list or are looking to build one, creating a video series with weekly updates is the way forward. Each subscriber can be funneled into an email sequence ensuring everyone sees the same content over a period of time.
You can offer tips and tricks, answer frequently asked questions and generally share your expertise with your engaged or prospective customers.
This is a rather easy thing to deliver. No expensive camera equipment or sequencing software is required. And it’s a very easy and effective way of keeping your users hooked week on week (or daily) on your fresh content.
To maximise this and sell more courses you need to be tying it into another paid product or course.
Now really is the time to look at improving your course or diversifying your product offering. If you’re stumped for creative ideas to help you sell more courses then why not try asking your users?
A post-course feedback form or email reaching out to your graduate learners is the best way of getting constructive feedback from the very users who have experienced your product. They will have valuable insight into the functionality and features of your learning platform and offer you some suggestions that you may not have considered before.
Don’t make brash decisions about incorporating all the feedback you receive. It’s essential you make optimisations that in the long run will improve user experience or cost/time efficiency - though not exclusively, there are other more important factors you may want to consider depending on your offering.
Feedback forms should include text fields for answers so that you can turn some of these comments into testimonials for your website or your professional profile. By collecting feedback both positive and negative as you’ll clearly see where your strengths and USP lie.
Speaking of which...
Have you ever looked at LinkedIn and thought, ‘I don’t have time to do this right now?’ Well, now you do! There’s no better time to get yourself acquainted with the platform. Set up your profile, connect with your users/colleagues/professional network and set up a business page where you’ll periodically share content two over the next 30 days.
Write some posts in advance, don’t worry about sharing old content - similarly to the Facebook group, you just don’t want an empty profile.
What better way to maximize your out of office time than to offer private one-to-one consultations or private lessons with your learners? If you’ve previously had another focus or a full-time role that’s not given you the opportunity to offer these then reach out and schedule a structured meeting via video conferencing.
To ensure you provide value through your one-to-one sessions, start to plan a structure and suggest topics or learning outcomes so that your learners can easily see the value of your offering. If you can sell these consultations/ lessons without needing to get involved with the sales process then you’re onto a winner, so think about the benefits that having this call with you will bring to your users.
As you can see these are just a few of the creative content marketing and sales strategies that you can use to sell more online courses while you work from home. These are tried and tested ideas that we’ll be happy to discuss with you and help implement. We’re also working from home right now but you can contact us by filling out our New Project form and telling us a little bit about your business.
Are there any that we've missed? Let us know your ideas below.
