How to use SEO and PR to boost The Sales for your online course
The process of creating your online course is only the first step. Once your course is created then the next thing to do is to enroll students (easier to say than done! ).
Are you using a marketing strategy? Or have you made the mistake of thinking that simply because your course is online and other users will automatically discover the course.
It's a pity to bring bad news, but if you want to maximize the return on all the work you put into establishing your program, then you need to advertise it.
And two of the best ways you do that is by using PR (Public Relations) as well as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
The days are gone where you had to reach deep in your wallet and engage a PR agency that is expensive for help in gaining visibility. If you're familiar with what to, you could make it happen yourself.
Stay tuned.
The same goes for SEO. You no longer have to pay huge amounts of money to hire the services of an SEO agency. When you know how to keep your readers engaged by providing valuable content, then you will be able to communicate clear messages to the search engines.
In this comprehensive guide, I'm going to provide some practical tips on how to make use of SEO and PR to boost the number of people who purchase your course online.
PR Tools and Tips for Increasing Your Course Sales
Step 1: How To Find Journalists
When you're doing yourself PR, the initial stage is to locate journalists in your niche. For instance, if the course you're taking is Social Media Marketing you'll want to find journalists who specialize in reporting on marketing via social media.
And, guess what?
Google is as a good starting point like any other...
Use the search engine Google and then click on the 'News' tab to find journalists who write about the subject of your class.
Similar to this:
Now start checking the authors of these articles to see if they can help you to improve your public relations efforts.
Spend a couple of minutes to determine if the writer of the article is a regular journalist on your particular subject.
From your search results you can start building the Google Spreadsheet with the following columns:
- The name of the journalist
- URL of the article
- Click here to go to Twitter profile for the reporter
- Link to the personal site or blog page of the reporter (if there is one)
- Email address (if available)
- Your Notes
So, in our example, you might have:
- 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?
- The founder and CEO of AudienceBloom the Seattle-based content marketing firm. An ongoing writer for Forbes.
Here's a sample of an Excel spreadsheet of reporters I created:
>> Your objective for you is to compile a list of 20 reporters within your field.
Google is good but not always great. The tough part is to understand the topic of your conversation be with these journalists and what common topics of interests that you share with them which are the most important journalists to talk with now, and why.
JustReachOut will help you locate the most relevant journalists and also provide you with a compelling reason of why you should contact them. When you type in a search term, the program will tell that you are writing an article about your topic and the reason you need to reach journalists. Additionally, it provides emails pitch templates to write your pitch, help with email messages from our reporters' team members to aid to directly send email to journalists from the platform, and the team of experts who check every email before being sent.
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Step 2. How to Get In Touch With Journalists
When you've got your list of suitable journalists and you're now ready to take the next step, which is connecting with them. connect with them.
Below, you will see that this specific journalist is willing to receive solicitations. She even lists her contact details (Email/Twitter/Website):
For those who don't provide any contact details You'll need to look more. However, don't fret. There are several instruments that could assist.
1. Hunter
Enter the company website into Hunter It will give you the structure and email addresses.
For example, if you attempt to enter it will return:
58 email addresses found.Email pattern: [email protected]
If you know a pattern, you can safely guess your journalist's contact details.
2. Email Format
If you look up your chosen publication on Email Format, it suggests which format it is most certain is the correct format.
For example, here is what it returns on :
When you've got an idea of the email address of your journalist, then you can use this tool to verify it.
Step 3: How To Build Connections with Journalists
In the past, you've identified possible reporters in your field and have created a spreadsheet that includes their contact info.
There is a temptation to begin pitching immediately.
But don't.
The first step is to build relations with those you are in contact with. The best approach is to start giving before you begin asking.
Follow these steps:
- Respond to journalists queries on HelpAReporter or JustReachOut.
- Contact journalists for article ideas on your own blog
- Answer a question on Qora and request journalists to respond to the same question.
- Follow journalists that you would like to contact on Twitter
- Share relevant tweets and retweet them.
- Send a thoughtful response via Twitter or leave a message to their website. Be open about your personal style to help them get acquainted with your personality.
- Give them an idea or story that isn't about your own personal interests. Yes, that's right, throw them something newsworthy. They're journalists. They are looking for stories.
Not long ago a recorded video in which I describe an easy step-by-step guide on how to build relations with journalists. Here it is to help you.
Here's the words of Rebecca Grant, a former writer for VentureBeat spoke about creating connections first:
"If you have a tip or a suggestion for an article that *gaspisn't about your company, then share your idea with a journalist. We're constantly looking for stories that are worth telling. ."
Step 4. How To Suggest Your Story to Journalists
At this point, you'll have established a relationship with the journalists you want to pitch to. The time you spend to build rapport implies that you do not have to write a cold email today.
However, what will you say in the email you send?
The last thing you need to tell reporters about your new program.
That's a big NO.
Return to the homepage.
What do journalists want?
-- Good Stories.
You've heard that saying before: "Stories sell newspapers."
It's the same in the world of online.
Good stories get shares and traffic.
It's time to start sharing your story with journalists. But where are you going to source them? The blog you are writing.
In the next section, we'll dive into the subject of content marketing. But before that let's look at some tools to help with your email pitching.
Digital marketing company Fractl conducted a survey of over 500 journalists on top websites such as BuzzFeed, TIME, Lifehacker, Scientific American, TechCrunch as well as other publications about the things they would like to see in a pitch.
Here are some key findings:
- 81% would rather be pitched by email
- 69% prefer to be pitched during the morning.
- 39% are looking for exclusive research to make available for publication.
In this regard, you need to ensure that you keep track of the progress of your email pitch. Here are a couple of techniques you could use:
MixMax is a plugin for free to Gmail that includes an unlimited tracking of emails. It is possible to choose whether you want to track all your emails or individual ones:
The lightning symbol with a number next to the messages you have sent indicates that somebody has been able to open your email, as well as the number of times that they've opened it.
2. Yesware
Yesware is another Gmail plugin that lets you monitor email reply and open rates, link clicks, and attachment openings. Just click the "track" button just before you hit send and Yesware handles all monitoring. Yesware can also help you test variations of your subject line for emails, and save email templates for later to use later.
No matter if your online course has been finished or not, this is the perfect opportunity to plan these strategies. You should think about the journalists you can establish connections with, and then begin building relations. Be sure to provide them with great content.
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SEO Tips to Boost Your Online Course Sales
SEO refers to the method of maximizing the number of visitors to an online site by making sure that your website appears first in the results returned by a search engine. If someone is searching for your course topic using Google, for example, having your website appear in the results of a search means no cost exposure for your business.
How can you make your website's page to be visible in the results of searches for subjects that are related to your subject?
by publishing excellent information (blog posts or videos.) on your site that visitors can consume for free.
Perhaps you are thinking how you can go about putting in all that efforts in developing the course materials, why would you want to share free content?
I'll explain the logic:
Through the creation and promotion of top-quality content at no cost (usually by way of a blog), you establish trust and authority in your area of expertise. If you produce content for free which actually aids people, those people are more likely to buy the course since they know, like and are confident inyou. Content that is free creates reciprocity.
Ideally, you'll have a website and an audience prior to marketing your courses. However, if you don't yet, you don't have to wait to start one now.
The key to making your blog a success is to have highly valuable material. This is what Rand Fishkin from Moz calls 10x Contentwhich is material that's 10 times more valuable than the most popular result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or subject.
Journalists and users prefer to link to your high value content
Making 10x Content isn't easy. If it was, each piece of content could have to be 10x.
But you have a unique advantage...
- This is a fantastic online course.
- You've a mountain of content available to you.
- You've already identified some primary keywords and topics that your audience is craving.
When you start making content for your blog it is possible to pull from this library of ideas and then turn it into content that is 10 times more.
Make sure that your 10x Content:
- Solves a problem or provides the answer to an issue by offering comprehensive, accurate, exceptional info or resources.
- It is of high-end, reliable and reliable, as well as interesting as well as remarkable.
- Creates an enjoyable user experience via the user layout, interface as well as fonts and images.
When your content meets those standards, your target audience, plus the journalists who you've pitched to is bound to want to share your content.
Important to note: All these tasks take time, a lot of time! Prioritizing your tasks and managing your time is essential for making progress quickly. I have recently shared some advice about how you can manage your time when working on your writing or PR outreach. I also found some fantastic actionable stuff there from others also.
10x Content gets more natural backlinks, and is ranked higher on Google
If Google begins to realize the quality of your content, then it will boost your site's ranking within the search results. And because it's a high-quality piece of content, others who are in your area will be inclined to share it.
And Google loves natural backlinks.
After you have completed your work in creating your content, remember to take the next steps.
1. Be sure that your site is ready to receive the torrent of traffic
- Visit GTmetrix to type in your website's URL and try it with your homepage URL as well as your highest placed or top blog page URL. Look over the grades you get as well as the problems it identifies. It should be a grade of B or A.
- Use only dedicated web hosting. Avoid using HostGator or a cheaper service like GoDaddy which makes use of a variety of shared servers that do not have the capacity specifically for hosting or serving WordPress or blog-related content in particular. Take a look at options like Flywheel or WPEngine specially designed to host and serve up WordPress blog posts. This improves how your website loads and improves load speed faster and also helps your site rank higher on Google.
- Think about making use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) - it works by providing alternative server nodes for users to download content (usually static resources such as images or JavaScript). The result is that your site will be faster greatly, many important websites utilize this. You can learn more about it here.
- You should consider using a caching software If you've ever hit the back button in a web browser and the page took more then 5 minutes to load you've visited the site with no caching. Excessive load times can limit your website's traffic, reduce your Google index and decrease the potential of your site's. A caching software will help with load speed significantly. You can learn more here.
- Optimize your entire image for speedier loading of your website - this is a pretty simple concept, but it can get more technical as it is possible to utilize CSS sprites to optimize the images. The article below will show the steps to take and what to do. At the end of the day you'll want to get a mark of A or B on GTmetrix in order to improve the ranking of your blog homepage and any other major posts you want to rank on at least. I prefer to ensure that the articles on my blog have this grade.
2. Check to see if you've got the right CTAs (calls to take) strategically placed on your website.
- To buy your online course
If you've not started your blog then get your website up and running. Plan out what 10x-quality content you can create so that your audience will want to tell your story.
Incorporate SEO and PR to your marketing plan for your course
Are you prepared to begin marketing your online course by using the most cost-effective SEO and PR tactics?
PR and SEO don't have to cost a fortune. If you put your heart to it, you can tap into the resources at your disposal. Build meaningful relationships with influencers and develop valuable content that will improve the number of sales for your online course.
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Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut.io that helps start-ups and entrepreneurs pitch journalists and influencers without the help of PR firms. A few years ago he employed PR outreach to help an enterprise acquired by Google. He blogs about PR hacks and SEO on his blog CriminallyProlific.