What can you do with SEO and PR to increase The Sales for your online course
The process of creating your online course is only the first step. After your course has been created it is time to enrol students (easier to do than say! ).
Are you using a marketing plan? Perhaps you've been a victim of the assumption that simply because your course is online that people automatically discover it.
Sorry for being the one to share negative news. However, If you're looking to get the most the return on all the effort you poured into creating your course, the first step is to make it known.
And two of the best methods to do this is through PR (Public Relations) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
The days are gone when you need to dig deep in your wallet and hire an expensive PR firm to help your business get exposure. If you're aware of what to do to, you can take it on yourself.
Keep an eye out.
The same goes for SEO. No longer do you need to spend vast amounts of money on 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 search engines.
In this comprehensive guide, I'll reveal some actionable tips on how you can use SEO and PR to improve the sales of your online courses.
PR Tools and Tips to Increase Your Course's Sales
Step 1: How Do I Find Journalists
If you're doing yourself PR, your first stage is to locate journalists in your niche. In the case, for example, if the course you're taking is Social Media Marketing you'll want to find journalists who specialize in the field of reporting on marketing on social media.
What's more?
Google is as good a beginning point like any other...
Search in Google and then click on the tab 'News' to find journalists who write about the subject of your class.
Similar to this:
Start looking into the writers of these articles to determine if they can help you with your PR efforts.
Spend a couple of minutes to check whether the author of the piece is a well-known journalist on your particular subject.
Based on your results from the search, you are able to begin building the Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- The name of the journalist
- URL of the article
- Links to the Twitter profile of the reporter
- Link to the individual website or blog of the reporter (if it is available)
- Email address (if there is one)
- Your Notes
So, in our example it could be:
- 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, a company that specializes in content marketing based out of Seattle. A regular writer for Forbes.
Here's an example a spreadsheet of reporters I created:
>> aim for you is to compile the list of 20 journalists within your field.
Google is good, but not all the time. The tough part is to know how your conversation opener will include with journalists from these sources, what are the most popular topics that you share with them, who are the most important journalists to talk with now, and why.
JustReachOut helps you identify the most relevant journalists and give you a reason to contact them. When you type in a search term, it will show the journalist who's creating an article on your keyword and why you need to reach the journalist. The tool also provides email pitch templates to write your pitch, assistance via email from the reporters' team members to aid to directly send email to journalists directly from 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
Once you have the list of journalists you want to connect with, and you're now ready to take the next step: c connect to them.
The example below can see that this particular journalist is ready to accept requests for pitches. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
For those who don't provide your contact information it is necessary to investigate a bit further. However, don't fret. There are some instruments that could aid.
#1: Hunter
Enter the company website into Hunter It will give you the format as well as known emails.
In this case, if you try entering it will display:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
When you have a known pattern, you can safely determine the details of your journalist's contact.
When you search for the publication you want to read on Email Format, it suggests the format that it is sure is accurate.
As an example, this is what it returns to :
When you've got an idea of the potential email address for your journalist, then make use of this tool to confirm that it is valid.
Step 3: How To Establish Relations with Journalists
In the past, you've identified possible journalists in your niche and made a spreadsheet including the contact information of each.
You may be tempted to pitch right away.
But don't.
First, you need establish connections with them. The best approach is to begin giving before you start making requests.
Follow these steps:
- Respond to journalists queries on HelpAReporter or JustReachOut.
- Ask journalists to write articles for your blog
- Answer to a question on Qora and then ask journalists to answer the same question.
- Follow the journalists you'd like to pitch on Twitter. Follow the journalists you want to pitch on
- Tweet relevant content and share it with others.
- Leave a meaningful response on Twitter or a comment to their website. Be open about your personal style in order to let them know your style.
- Give them the possibility of a story or idea that isn't about your own personal interests. You're 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 build relationships with journalists. This video is here for you to refer to.
Here's the words of Rebecca Grant, a former writer for VentureBeat, said about building relationships first:
"If you've got a suggestion or a suggestion for a story thatdoes not involve you, share it with a journalist. We're constantly looking for stories that are worth telling. ."
Step 4: How To Pitch Your Story To Journalists
At this point, you'll be establishing a rapport with journalists that you would like to approach. Making the effort to build rapport isn't a requirement to email cold now.
But what exactly will you say in the email you send?
The last thing you want to do is tell reporters about your fresh course.
That's a big NO.
Scroll back up the page.
What are journalists looking for?
--- Good Stories.
You've heard that saying before: "Stories sell newspapers."
It's the same in the online world.
Good stories get shares and visitors.
Now is the time to share your stories with the journalists. What are you going to find them? The blog you are writing.
In the following section next section, we'll look at content marketing. However, prior to that, let's take a look at some of the tools you can use to aid in your email pitching.
Digital marketing agency Fractl surveyed more than 500 journalists on top websites such as BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch and many more to find out the things they would like to see in a pitch.
Here are some of the key findings:
- 81% of people prefer to be marketed by email
- 69% would prefer to be pitched in the morning
- 39% want exclusive research that they can make available for publication.
To ensure that you are aware of this that in mind, ensure that you keep track of the progress of your email marketing campaign. There are two tools you can use:
MixMax is a plugin for free for Gmail that includes an unlimited tracking of emails. It is possible to choose whether you want to track every email you receive or just specific ones.
The lightning icon that has numbers in front of the messages you have sent indicates the fact that someone been able to open your email, as well as the amount of times that they've opened it.
2. Yesware
Yesware is yet another Gmail plugin that allows you to monitor email reply and open rates, clicks to links as well as attachment open. Just click on the "track" button before you click send, and Yesware will do all the monitoring. Yesware can also help you experiment with different versions of your subject line for emails and lets you save templates of email for future for use.
No matter if your online course has been finished or not, now is a great moment to begin planning the strategies. Consider which journalists you could connect with and start building relationships. Be sure to provide them with great stories.
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SEO Tips to Boost Your Online Course Sales
SEO is the practice of maximizing the number of users who visit an online site by making sure that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a engine. If someone is searching for the subject of your class using Google, for example the presence of your site in the results of a search means free exposure for your business.
How can you make your site to appear in the results of searches for subjects that are related to your subject?
by publishing excellent material (blog posts, videos, etc.) through your website, which people are able to consume at no cost.
Perhaps you are thinking what you did all the efforts in developing your course material, why would you want to share the content for free?
Allow me to describe the reason:
Through the creation and promotion of excellent content on a budget (usually through blogs) You establish trust and authority in your area of expertise. If you can create content that is free that is actually helpful to people, those people are more likely to buy your course because they are familiar with, trust and are confident inyou. Content that is free helps build the reciprocity.
Ideally, you'll have a blog and an audience before you start selling your course. If not yet, you don't have to wait to begin one today.
The key to making your blog successful is to have highly valuable information. This is the kind of content Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Contentwhich is content that's 10 times better than the top result that can currently be seen in search results of a particular keyword or subject.
Journalists and readers prefer linking to your top value content
Producing 10x content isn't an easy task. If it was, each piece of content could be 10x.
However, you've got a distinct benefit...
- This is a fantastic online course.
- You've a mountain of content at your fingertips.
- You've already identified some primary keywords and topics that people are searching for.
If you are writing content for your blog you can draw on that library of ideas and then turn it into content that is 10 times more.
You must ensure that you have 10x Content:
- Helps solve a problem, or answer an issue by offering comprehensive, accurate, exceptional information or resources.
- It is of high-end, reliable, useful, interesting and amazing.
- Provides a positive user experience by providing a user-friendly layout, interface, fonts, and images.
When your content meets those criteria then your audience, plus the journalists whom you approach are bound to spread the word about it.
It is important to remember that all these tasks take time, a lot of time! Making a list of your work and managing your time is crucial for making progress quickly. I have recently shared some advice about how you can manage your time when you are working on your writing or PR outreach, some great useful advice there from other bloggers as well.
10x Content attracts more natural backlinks and rank higher on Google
If Google starts to see that your content is popular, then it will push your page higher in the search results. And because it's a high-quality piece of content other people in your niche will naturally want to link to it.
And Google is a fan of naturally-generated backlinks.
After all your hard work in creating your content, remember to follow these steps.
1. Check that your site is ready for the influx of traffic
- Visit GTmetrix to type in your URL on the site and try it with your homepage URL and your top ranking or most popular blog page URL. Take a look at your grade as well as the problems it identifies. It should be a grade of B or A.
- Make use of the dedicated web hosting. Avoid using HostGator or something cheap like GoDaddy which makes use of a variety of shared servers and are not designed specifically for hosting or serving WordPress or blog content specifically. Consider using services like Flywheel or WPEngine that are specifically designed to host and deliver WordPress blog posts. It optimizes how your website loads and improves the speed of loading faster as well as helps you rank better in Google.
- Think about making use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) It operates by offering different server nodes to customers to download and install resources (usually static resources such as images or JavaScript). It speeds up the speed of your website greatly, many important websites utilize this. Learn more about it here.
- Think about using a cache plugin If you've ever hit the back button in a web browser and the page took more then 5 minutes to load, you've encountered an uncached website. Inexpensive loading times could limit your traffic, lower the quality of your Google index and decrease your website's potential. The installation of a caching plugin can aid in speeding up loading greatly. You can learn more here.
- Optimize all your images for faster page loading - this is a pretty simple concept, but it can get a little technical since you may need to employ CSS images to improve the performance of your images. This article will teach the steps to take and the reasons. At the end of the day you want a grade of either A or B GTmetrix in order to improve the ranking of your blog's homepage as well as all the major articles that you wish to rank at very least. I like to make sure all articles I have on my blog have this grade.
2. Make sure you have applicable CTAs (calls to actions) strategically placed on your website.
- To buy your online course
If you've not started your blog, then you should get your website online and up and running. Plan out what 10x-quality content you can create so that your audience will want to hear your story.
Incorporate SEO and PR to your marketing plan for your course
Are you ready to start marketing your online course by using these cost-effective PR and SEO tactics?
SEO and PR don't need to cost you a lot of money. When you set your mind towards it, you'll make use of the tools readily available. Develop meaningful connections with influential people and produce valuable content to increase your online course sales.
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Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io, which helps startups and entrepreneurs reach out to journalists and influencers without the assistance of PR agencies. A few years ago he used PR outreach to help an entrepreneur's startup bought by Google. He blogs about PR hacks as well as SEO, on his blog CriminallyProlific.