SELLING ONLINE TRAINING COURSES
husband and wife make first sale of online course
Overview
A husband and wife team with a unique story decide they want to start selling online training courses. The husband built the website in the evenings. The wife built the course to be housed on the website.
Everyone is “new.” The site is new. The course is new. But, there haven’t been any new sales. In fact, the team has yet to generate their first paid sale.
But, there are some encouraging signs that indicate the idea is moving in the right direction. There’s a few people who have signed up for the free version of the course, and the feedback has been positive.
How do you launch an online training product while expanding into new markets?
Challenge
The challenge with any SEO engagement is building momentum. This is especially true with startup websites. The definition of a startup is to “put something in motion.” When you combine SEO and a startup, you essentially have to double the things that are put into motion.
So how does a training company begin on the journey to selling online training courses?
And, how can sales be accomplished on a limited budget? Are there any DIY opportunities for our client to act on in order to better their chances of success?
Solution
Our solution was to develop a 12-month SEO content strategy.
If we were going to sell our first online training course (with hopefully many sales after that!), then we would have to focus on putting the right things in motion.
This meant getting very focused on the keywords that could drive paid conversions.
How was the content strategy created? What elements were considered when creating the strategy?
For every keyword opportunity, we considered things like:
- Search Volumes
- Ranking Difficulty
- Cost Per Click
- Current Search Positions
Once we had our list of keywords, it was a matter of prioritizing and coming up with great content ideas. By knowing where we wanted to be, we could focus on the plan that would get us there.
Result
As you can see from the graph below, starting a brand new site and growing organically takes time. But, when this site started to pick up steam through the execution of the SEO strategy, we began to see achievements like:
- #1 average search ranking for the term “online INDUSTRY NAME classes”
- Achieved sustainable growth in organic search in less than 2 years (0 monthly organic search visits when we started, to 5,000+ monthly organic search visits on average)
- Excellent flow of inbound sales each month
The fun part is when you’re able to attribute a “value” (the equivalent value of the organic search traffic, should that traffic have been acquired via PPC) to the organic traffic.
Since selling online courses in the industry commanded a high cost per click, it was great to see the savings each month through organic search success.
Overall, our client was one of the rare success stories: they were able to effectively sell courses online. This had a lot to do with the quality of the course being offered, and the story being told to prospective customers. But, it certainly helped that a steady inflow of prospective customers were coming to the site through our Training SEO services.
