Your course is finished - congrats! Now what? You have to sell it. This episode shares 3 keys and the OMT Principle to help you sell more courses.
Links mentioned in this episode:
Get some of my favorite marketing resources at :
Watch the training at https://www.CourseCreatorsHQ.com/marketing
Book mentioned in this episode:
Influence: The Power of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
Is my idea any good?
Grab the FREE training at https://www.CourseCreatorsHQ.com/idea
Finish your course in just 24 hour with the 24 Hour Course Creator program:
Find out more at https://www.24HourCourseCreator.com
You've created your course. And now what it's time for the S word. You've got to sell it. So in today's episode, I've got three keys to successfully selling your online course. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood. Hello there. And I'm excited to have you join me for episode three.
We also have Marius the cat with us. I think you can Maybe even hear him putting a little bit in the background. He's joining us today for today's episode, where we're going to talk about the three essential keys to marketing an online course on this podcast. We believe that you can change the world with your courses. We want to make it simpler and easier for you to do just that.
So let's jump in today. I'm excited to share these ideas with you to make your core sales even better. The first key is what I call the O M T principle and O M T stands for three really important pieces of the puzzle. When you're trying to sell your course, the first one is that your offer has to be irresistible. It has to be something where people look at it and think,
oh my gosh, I've got to have this. So you need to spend some time thinking about where they are at. And what's going to be really amazing for them at this point in their journey. And then the second piece of that is thinking about what are some of the objections that they're going to have to purchasing from you, and what you want to do then is make your bonuses help with those objections.
So I'll give you an example of this. Let's say folks are telling you, Hey, I don't think I have time for your course. Well, maybe one of your bonuses is a productivity and time course to help them get more done. So they'll have time to do your course. That's just one easy way to make your offer even better. So the second piece of the OMT principle is that your messaging has to be exactly right and has to be very persuasive.
And this is not always obvious, especially to course creators because you know, we are very much how to, here's the six steps. Here's the XYZ to get you from a to B. And that doesn't always resonate with the emotional side of your prospective students. So you want to go back and figure out, okay, how can I make this more persuasive?
What do I need to do to reach them at more of an emotional level? And I've got a book for you that I really like that goes into some of these persuasive elements. It's called influence the psychology of persuasion by Robert Cialdini. And I'll include a link on the show notes. At coursecreatorshq.com/3. Since this is episode three coursecreatorshq.com/3.
We'll give you a link to this book and he has listed in the book. I highly recommended six influencing principles. And I'll just share a couple of those today. We'll probably do an entire episode about these principles because they are so important to converting your prospective students into actual students. And the other piece of this is that he gives some really outstanding examples inside the book so that you can understand them more thoroughly,
but I'll give you just some highlights of a couple of the six principles. The first one I want to share is called social proof. And so this is when we are using testimonials on our sales pages to help explain to our prospective students what we're able to do with our course and what hopefully they will be able to do. There's something about seeing other people that gives social proof to be more persuasive and more convincing.
Another one of the principles that he talks about is called scarcity. And this means that there is a limited access to whatever you are providing. And so I do not believe in doing fake limited access. So for example, digital courses are pretty much unlimited. So saying you only have X number of courses available is not true. Don't ever do that. That will hurt your credibility with your audience.
But what you can do is offer some bonuses that are limited. So maybe they get a one-on-one session with you when they sign up. And those can be limited. You only have a certain amount of time in your day that you could provide. So some kind of scarcity on another piece of the scarcity is that you can have a time period limitation. So XYZ bonus only comes if you sign up today,
or if you sign up before the end of the day today, those kinds of scarcity options are really, really powerful in getting people to take action, because they're always, if you think about it, when we're online and we're looking at things, we're always looking forward, the reasons why we can say no. So give me a reason to say yes and to say yes,
right this minute. And then the third principle that I wanted to share with you today is the liking principle. And that just means that we tend to buy from people that we know like and trust. So when you are doing things online, to help people get to know you and get to like you, that will help with your persuasion and make it that much easier.
So it may be, you're doing a podcast, maybe you're doing Facebook lives. And we think like that will help with your persuasion. So we had our OMT principle. The first one is that the offer had to be irresistible and something that where they're saying, oh, I've got to have this right now. The second is that your messaging has to be very persuasive.
And then the third part of the OMT principle is that your timing has to be right. And this is somewhat out of your control, depending on how you're trying to reach your students. They have to be ready to buy. They have to be at the point where their pain or their need for what you're offering is strong enough to get them to take action.
So there's only so much you can do about this at the moment that they find you. But one of my best solutions for this is that you want to offer them something so that they will opt in and stay connected with you. Because maybe today, the timing isn't just right, but two weeks, two months, two years from now, the timing will be perfect and you still want to be showing up for them and be in their inbox and helping them because that's when they'll be ready to purchase.
So that's the OMT principle. That was one of the first keys to your marketing. So the second key is what I call marketing math. And there's a couple of different parts of this that we'll go into further in future episodes. But one of the ones I want to talk about today is the fact that when a prospective student comes across the product that you are providing really only three out of a hundred might be ready to buy,
or it could even be less depending on how cold your traffic isn't and how much they know about you. But if you think about that three out of a hundred, that's 3%. So 97% of the time you're going to fail. And that's how it works. That's not that you're doing something wrong. That's just how it works. So it took me a long time to understand this marketing,
math principle. And so I want to get it in front of you right away so that you can start doing the work that you're doing and not feel like you're failing. Yes. Maybe your marketing isn't working as quickly as you would like, but that's probably just because of the rule of 97, 97 of the people who come across, you probably aren't going to buy today.
So instead of getting depressed, or it can be disheartening when that happens, instead of that, just recognize that's what's going on and you just need to get in front of more people. So that's part of the marketing math principle. We'll talk about more of that in future episodes. And then the third key to your marketing is that you have to plant a lot of acorns.
And so if you think about the acorn there, a tree has so many acorns on them. And my parents actually had an entire backyard full of Oak trees. And so every fall we would hear all of the acorns falling on the house and rolling down the house and falling on the ground. And not very many of them actually grew into trees going forward.
It was a very few of them that actually became a tree and they required a lot of nurturing in order for that to happen. So it's the same sort of thing with your marketing. You have to plant a lot of acorns and see what's going to be prolific. What's going to work for you. What's going to be the key. And usually what I've seen with my students is they try a bunch of different things to find out what's the one type of marketing that is the best fit for them.
So that takes a little while. It can also be a little frustrating. I will tell you along the way, but once you hit that sweet spot where you've figured out how to get in front of your people, you figured out the message, you figured out what they're interested in. That's when you can truly scale and get your business going gangbusters and selling lots of your courses.
So I hope those three ideas give you some things to think about. The first key was the OMT principle, the offer, the messaging and the timing. The second key was marketing math and how the rule of 97 is something to keep in mind. And don't get disappointed when 97 of the people that you talk to say no. And then the third key is to be planning a lot of acorns and trying out a lot of different marketing techniques to figure out which ones are the best fit for you.
So to compliment this Epps episode for you, I've gathered some of my favorite marketing resources and it's at course creators hq.com/marketing that's course creators, hq.com/marketing. And this is going to be a dynamic page on the website. We're going to have lots and lots of marketing resources coming in the months ahead. So you'll want to revisit this page periodically on there. One thing I know we're going to add is a free webinar checklist that you can download to help you with your webinars.
So that's course creators, hq.com/marketing. And I hope this was helpful for you, give you a few things to think about, to remember as you're doing your marketing and as always, I so appreciate you listening and subscribing. If you learned anything today, I'd love it. If you could leave us a five-star review, that would be fantastic. And one last request,
if you're in any Facebook groups where you think this podcast could be helpful, if you could share that there's a new podcast called course creators HQ. I'd so appreciate your help spreading the word about the new podcast. So thanks so much. I can't wait to talk to you again next week. We're going to talk more About marketing and building your online courses to have an incredible course business,
have a great week.