How Can You Go From 0 To 1,000 Students in an Online Course With no advertising budget

It's all planned out. You have discovered that there's a gap in your space and you've created the plan for your class, and you're excited and enthusiastic about the whole thing. You may be even done with building the course. There is a dilemma: how do you spread the word to potential students? How do you make it easier for your targeted audience? Which websites do you need to post your links?

There's a good thing for you: this is a solution. A lot of authors before they created online courses that cover all kinds of content; and I'll show you the most effective techniques to build your class from zero students to 1000 students. All without spending anything on advertisements.

To begin, however, I will dispel one of the common mistakes instructors make when setting up to create their own course. This is due to the fact that they pursue a build-first approach rather than an audience-first approach. The reason the "build-first" method is not optimal is because you are assuming that a number of things will be true, which exposes you to a lot of risks in your courses. Especially around what content to write and how your class structure should look.

  However, below are the 4 key parts to this mini-tutorial to ensure steady, consistent traffic to your course:  

1. Find out where your Ideal Audience Hangs Out
2. Learn to read your audience's minds
3. How do you earn respect and Reputation among your Audience
4. How to Share Your Course with a group of people who are ready to Buy your Product

  What to Do To Find the Places where your ideal audience hangs Out  

Let's imagine that you're a client consulting with mine and you want to promote a course around Marketing Analytics.

The first thing that I'll state to you is that you'll need to ask the correct questions. You need to start by asking "who do you plan to serve" rather than "what you'd like to serve". If you're in this Marketing Analytics case, you must then choose whether you want to target CMOs, Marketing Managers, entrepreneurs, or Marketing Newbies?

Let's say you've made the decision to target entrepreneurs.

If so your first step is to begin searching to find "where the audience is". One of the best ways to accomplish this is by searching for "online lounges". Online lounges are places on the internet where people discuss things related to their topic of interest. These can be forums, blogs, and mailing lists. The way that I do it is to follow the following steps:

1. Start your Google or Bing search engine (eg. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
2. Do a search query using one of these combinations:

Forum - Profession + forum

• Profession + Topic mailing list

Professional - Topic + blog

Topics + Professionals + forum for the industry

- - Profession + "topic" + link-sharing sites (Eg. Reddit, stumbleupon)

- Example: Entrepreneur + Marketing + forum

Just there, I find 10+ forums to target:

There's more to come. When you've selected a forum, it is necessary to drill down further and make another search with your topic of choice. In this example, we search for discussions revolving around marketing within reddit.com/r/entrepreneur. What you're looking for is an sign of trouble or pain in the initial post. The original question was just "marketing" on the subreddit. There is no luck.

How can we improve our search to really dig for the source of pain? Add "pain indicators" like "help" or "advice needed". We'll look at the outcomes. We can see that in only the first page we can find a plethora of threads that could be useful.

If you've found particular threads that have a lot of expressions of pain, then you know that you're in the right club to spread the word to the future. When you start to do more research, you will find that some forums work on specific subjects, while other forums won't. This will help you focus on promoting only those regions where your target people hang out. This is essential for the success of your plan.

From the above 15 minute exercise, we just got evidence that reddit.com/r/entrepreneur is a great place to promote our marketing course.

Try it out for additional forums! My suggestion is that you must find at least 10 online lounges. Blogs are also useful (especially because of its extremely frequent discussion sections).

  How to Read your Audience's Minds  

By now, you have a long list of threads that show clear signs of pain. Let's look at them all and let's really be aware of who the people who are.

Once you collect enough data, you'll start seeing trends in who your target audience is. Once you identify these patterns, you start to get a strong instinct of how your target audience feels and believes about marketing overall.

In the above data, there are some small patterns that are emerging (we'll need 10+ more difficult threads before we can really understand) that show entrepreneurs truly need three factors: an extremely efficient digital marketing approach that is low cash outlay, tips around local or city-wise marketing, and the best way to present oneself in order to attract high-value customers.

As we mentioned earlier, in our hypothetical instance, you were planning to build a product around Marketing Analytics. But it turns out it could be too complex (at minimum to be used in at least the Reddit online lounge). It is better to pursue an education that focuses on budget and high-efficiency marketing locally, as well as finding and closing clients with high value.

My course structure to deal with these types of pain could then begin to look as follows:

1. How do you utilize Facebook Interest Targeting to find the most desirable clients in a matter of cents a click
2. How to Create a Referral Machine with these Pitch Scripts for your next Local Chamber of Commerce Event
3. Find out what needs only High-Value Clients Have

Course Description: "How to Get High-Value clients using the Hyperlocal as well as Hyper Targeted marketing"

If you dropped that course in the Reddit space, I'm sure you'll see some traction. Do you know what the evidence-based approach to marketing offers us?

  How to build respect and trust among your target audience  

In addition to identifying problems, however, you need to establish yourself as an authority within these online spaces.

This means that you should give bite-sized suggestions whenever you encounter these pains. By bite-sized, I mean anything that's between 1 and 10 sentences, yet is actionable enough to allow the user to use.

For example you can answer those who say "haven't discovered Facebook to be useful" and "need an effective plan" in this way:

"I understand that you need an efficient digital strategy given the budget you have. I am surprised, however in that you believe FB ads not to be effective. I do FB advertisements a lot within my business consulting, and this is what I would suggest to do with the right targeting for quality clicks at $0.40 - $0.80 per click.

1. ONLY employ targeted interest. Set everything else to default.
2. If you are using interest targeting, make sure to use at least 10+ interest and leave out interests with a significant reach. A large number of clicks per interest translates to a high cost per click. If I was targeting marketers using interest with gurus like Neil Patel', "Derek Halpern and "Darren Rowse," etc. I'd recommend excluding 'Gary Vaynerchuk's' reach is way too big!
3. Make sure that the TOTAL reach does not exceed 800,000 people
4. Get your test started! Check that your test is locked to $5 per day. Never use the life-time budget option.
5. If your earnings exceed $1 per click, it is necessary to eliminate interests with the highest range and also add more "niche' interests
6. If you are looking for ideas about 'niche' interests, google for tools, influencers, and then check it out"

If you give advice at the level of actionable and low-level detail You will earn respect and authority in the field.

  How to Distribute your Course with an audience that's Ready to Buy your Product  

"Isn't it a violation of the law to share URLs? !" "What if I am banned? !"

I'm sure you have had this thought. These are valid assertions. For a solution the problem, one thing you could do is use inline links in your comments and you pair this with other websites that aren't related to your website. This will help convey the idea of being helpful and not be spammy. Here's a personal example where I was trying to help people who were having issues with landing pages:

By doing these 4 large, strategically-planned steps I was able to build my course to around 4k-5k organic visits a month. 89% of these came from direct link. Check out the stats in the following article from SimilarWeb. No dollar spent on advertising whatsoever.

Offer a lot of actionable, free value to the world and the world will love it back. I wish you the best results in your journey!

  Kenn Costales, a grow hacker as well as an online course creator who loves finding new ways to marketing products on the internet without investing a penny.