This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
How can a listener sell her course on female solo travel? Welcome to Sidus Old School, Chris Guillebeau here. In today's episode, we navigate the marketing journey for an online course. What is most important or essential? We talk about online courses a lot because lots of people are creating and selling marketing online courses.
And of course, there are so many different ways you can go about doing it. And whenever you have so many different ways and options and choices, that's awesome on one hand. And it's also overwhelming on the other hand, because you're like, wow, if I have to follow all the advice and complete every step that I see out there that I'm never gonna finish. And I think it's so much better to finish something and complete it and get it out there than it is to hit every single possible angle, every different format, every different social media tool, et cetera. So let's talk about crafting a marketing plan that highlights the unique value of the course while reaching potential learners.
What is the strategic approach for a one-person shop? Because that's what most of us are. Like most of us are just one person, even if we have teams, even if we have other people, we are just ourselves. So when you're trying to minimize what are these essential factors? Let's talk about it.
How can I sell my course on female solo travel? That's today's question coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]
I'm launching an online course about female solo travel, targeting a global audience from my base here in Mumbai. With a plethora of marketing channels and strategies at my disposal, I find myself overwhelmed. What are the essential factors to consider in my marketing plan to ensure my course not only stands out, but also attracts the right learners?
[Music]
All right, so the challenge with these questions is to really focus on what is essential. And so I appreciate our caller giving us that word right from the beginning. What is essential? Because you can talk about online courses forever and there are entire podcasts that have hour-long episodes and these podcasts are not just one episode and they just go on and on and on for many episodes and seasons and so on. So again, what is essential?
Number one, define your target audience clearly. I think that is most essential. Really understand who are your ideal learners? Like who is this course for? And think about demographics, think about interests, think about specifically challenges and problems that they have in this area.
Challenges and problems that they have. What are the pain points? And then what are their aspirations? So all these things are connected. They're experiencing pain in some area of their life, but they want to be better and they have an aspiration to be better.
So the more you think about this, I think this is first things first, this is essential. And then the second thing, it's not gonna be SEO, it's not gonna be how to make your Instagram posts. The second thing is define your offer clearly. So you've got a clear target audience and then a clear offer that matches the needs of that target audience. Honestly, in the course creation process, if you spend 50% of your time on these two things, then the other 50% on everything else that you have to do, I think you're gonna be in a much better place than if you just devote a little bit of time to thinking about the target audience and thinking about the offer.
So the offer specifically does have a few components to it. It's got a pretty clear pitch. It's got a promise, like if you take this course, then you will, like what is the outcome? What is the transformational outcome even better? So it's not just, I'm gonna learn X, Y, and Z.
Learning is easy. Like we can all watch YouTube and learn stuff or lots of other ways to learn. What you really want is change, transformation. After taking this course, your life is gonna be better because X, Y, and Z. It's not just from learning these items, it's because you are changed through the process.
So when I think about essential, that's what I think about. And I had a whole bunch of other notes here that I'm looking at on my screen and I'm like, yeah, that's not a bad idea. Okay, that's a good little tactic. That could be a good strategy. But the essential is the target audience, making sure that's really clear and making sure you have a clear offer that connects with the target audience.
If you don't have one of those two things, then I think you slow down and say, wait a second, before I spend however much time, effort, perhaps some expense in making an online course, I should first figure out who I'm trying to serve and what problem I'm hoping to solve. I think that will avoid a lot of pain for yourself to use that word again later on. I'd love to know how it goes. I'd love to know listeners, if you're working on a course, what you have learned, what is difficult, what is easy, what's been surprising. I think of these episodes as an ongoing daily dialogue with creators, side hustlers, small business owners all over the world.
So thank you for allowing me to bring it to you. Thank you for being part of it. This has been episode, what is it, 2,650. How about that? New episode coming out tomorrow.
Let's co-create together. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." From the Onward Project.
