Course Creators Weekly #66
🗓
September 27th, 2021
- Actionable Marketing for Your Course
Drew Breaux writes about marketing, David Perell, Tiago Forte, and Will Mannon talk about cohort-based courses, and Andrew Barry talks about learner motivations.
How to Market Your Online Course with These 10 Extremely Actionable Tactics
This article covers 10 actionable tactics to market your course, including the steps to implement them. I have to admit, I don't love every tactic in there, but it offers some great ideas worth sharing!
Here are the high-level ideas:
Partnerships
This is about getting bigger players in your niche to put you in front of their audiences
Poster Child: share a story of how they helped you, for them to use in their marketing
Guest Content: help potential partners fill in their content gaps—it's a real pain point
Teaching Team-Ups: offer to teach a free, relevant lesson on your partner's platform
Offer Swaps: swap offers to each other's audience—lead magnets or entire modules
Offers
Attract and convert more subscribers through these tactics:
Viral Thank You: immediately after a signup, offer a bonus in exchange for social shares
Contests: ask your audience to promote you for a chance to win a juicy prize
Exit Intent Offer: a pop-up with an offer before a visitor leaves (I wouldn't do this)
Welcome Offer: make a small but compelling offer to new subscribers
Pricing
"Avoid these tactics if you’ve just started selling your online course. Only tinker with price after you have some sales under your belt."
Consequence Pricing: offer a free mini-course that'll cost money only if not completed
Product Bundle: bundle multiple courses together—yourself, or pair up with a partner
The article goes much more in-depth, including steps to implement these tactics. So, if you're thinking about marketing, do check it out! 
P.S. I found this via IdeaEconomy.
Random Picks from past editions
Building Cohort-Based Courses
A super insightful conversation between three folks behind the flagship cohort-based courses Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage.
Here are some actionable tips, but as always, listen to the episode to learn more!
Let alumni students lead and mentor their own groups, in their own way
Let students pick their own mentor groups—all about ownership + belonging
Encourage live interactions—far more energising than async communication
Let students start their own interest groups—huge for them + stronger community
Understand how the size of your entire cohort affects individual group dynamics
Cap your cohort size and raise the bar to create stronger communities
Help students find each other and make new connections, e.g. breakout rooms
Create engaging interactions—change things up frequently throughout sessions
Help students feel at ease with vulnerability—alumni students can be role models
Try making your course less about you, more about the students and the mentors
Have an email list—don't create courses or products unless you have people waiting
Build a repository of content you can draw from by summarising what you consume
Look to other industries for lessons you can draw from and apply in your own niche
You might also enjoy Ryan Gum's summary on Twitter.
How to stoke motivation in learning
"It's about creating an emotional connection for the learner to the content that they're learning. It's this emotional connection that sparks intrinsic motivation to keep going and keep learning."—Andrew Barry
Look for intrinsic learning motivations hidden behind people's extrinsic motivations
Probe learners to look inwards for their intrinsic motivations by asking 'why' questions
Ask your learners to share with you why they're doing the course, early, and often
Don't rely on leaderboards or other gamification to encourage people
Strive to satisfy people's desire for Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (I'd call it AMP-lify)- Create an emotional connection for the learner to the content they're learning
