ByDo you want to market yourself with online courses? Do you want to know how businesses are using online courses to market themselves?
One of the fastest growing industries right now is the online courses market. It is worth $107 billion. Linkedin knew this when it purchased Lynda.com for $1.5 billion.
People are investing in online courses because they help them acquire valuable skills quickly.
This has provided talented people with the opportunity to monetize their skills. They are able to create and sell courses with ease by investing in several easy-to-use tools that integrate together. There are also complete tools like Kajabi for selling courses online.
And it is not just individuals and bloggers who are creating courses, several business are creating them too. They use them to generate extra income and to capture leads and nurture relationships. There are actually special online course platforms that are made just for this purpose.
Hence, in this post I am going to write about the businesses using online courses to market themselves. I will show you how they are benefitting from these courses and the strategies they are implementing so that you can try them out too…
Leadpages:
The people at Leadpages regularly create online courses. These video courses are available for free for everyone to watch, you don’t even need to sign up. For each course, they create a series of videos on YouTube and then embed them on a single page. You can also listen to the audio version of the course.
The course even contains downloadable PDFs which includes templates, checklists, transcripts, etc. To access these, you need to sign up with your email address. When you do this you will also be able to download the video and audio versions of the course.
One of their courses that follows the exact pattern is The Affiliate Marketing System. Another one is The Facebook Advertising System.
Using these types of courses they are able to generate a lot of leads. They also help nurture relationships with their target audience as these are the subjects they are interested in. The Affiliate Marketing System will help them attract bloggers and affiliate marketers. While the Facebook Advertising System will help them attract businesses and other marketers who don’t have the support of a popular blog that can generate traffic for them.
You too can generate leads and build powerful relationships with your target audience if you create courses they need. So put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think like them. If you want to go a step further you can interview them or conduct a survey.
After you know exactly what entices them you should create a course and offer it in exchange for a free sign up. You can then forge stronger relationships with these leads and convert them to customers too.
They actually use Leadpages itself to set up the course page. This is a great way to promote their own product and educate at the same time. You can read my Leadpages review here.
Hootsuite:
Hootsuite also free creates online courses. These are on social media marketing as Hootsuite is a social media management tool.
But unlike Leadpages you cannot just view them without signing up. To access these courses you need to create a Hootsuite account first. This might lead to fewer people viewing their courses, but it helps them generate a lot of potential customers as they will not only watch the course, but also try out Hootsuite’s free plan. They can upsell the paid version of their software through email.
Along with the free courses they offer some certification courses that help them generate a little extra income.
They also have a couple of expensive courses which they created by teaming up with other companies. One of them is the Advanced Social Strategy Training & Certification Course which they created by teaming up with Newhouse School. The other is Social for Health Care Training & Certification which they co-created with the Mayo Clinic.
These courses must be helping them generate some good revenue, especially the one with Newhouse School as it costs $2,200.
This way your business can benefit financially with a course. It will help you generate some passive income on the side as after you create it, you only need to do a little work to keep it going. It shouldn’t be too time consuming to maintain it along with your main business
Adobe:
Another successful saas company that is earning extra revenue by selling online courses is Adobe. They even created a separate website for their courses called Adobe KnowHow. You have a wide range of courses from free ones, to inexpensive ones to paid ones.
They initially started creating courses on how to use Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. As they are complicated to use and are equipped with several features. There was already a huge market for Adobe product related courses as many people offer courses on how to get the most out of these tools. Adobe’s courses are a nice way to not only help their customers use their products better, but to also make some money along the way.
Now they are also creating courses on several other topics like shooting videos and coding.
So if you too have a sophisticated product like Adobe, it would be a good idea to offer some free and paid courses to see if your customers would be willing to invest their time and money into them. If they do you can create more courses.
These are some business using online courses to market themselves efficiently. As you can see they play a key role in generating leads and revenue. Therefore, you too should invest some time into creating online courses. Even if you offer them for free make sure they are of the highest quality.
Are there any other businesses using online courses to market themselves effectively? How do you use online courses to market yourself? Please leave your comments below.
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