How Do You Pre Launch a Course?
Full Answer
Again, when pre-launching, you don’t need to have your online course fully created. It’s about validating your course idea, pinpointing your audience’s exact needs, and tailoring your course to meet those needs. But just how much content should you have ready for your course launch?
An email marketing tool so you can connect with and gradually nurture your email subscribers to purchase your course on release date Teaser content that you can use to promote your pre-launch on both your landing page and in pre-launch emails Happy pre-launching (and pre-selling).
It follows that the email sequence leading up to your pre-launch emails does a lot of the nurturing for you. You’re not selling in those emails — you’re simply learning about and providing value to your audience. Only after that point are you ready to pre-launch your online course.
For the purpose of this guide, we’ll focus on the tools you need to actually pre-launch a course, not to record and edit your video content. All you need for your online course pre-launch is an email marketing tool and landing page builder.
Be strategic with the way you launch your courses and make sure to test through pre-launching before committing to your entire online course.
A landing page allows you to collect your customers’ email addresses and encourage conversions and sales. You will need to use a landing page builder for your freebie, as well as your pre-launch sales page, which we will discuss in step 4.
Podia makes it easy to pre-launch your online course and collect email addresses from potential customers, then send email campaigns to your audience leading up to your course launch.
So, you know it’s easy to pre-launch a course, but are still wondering why you should go to the effort. That’s fair.
Rachel is a content marketer for Podia, an all-in-one platform where online courses, digital downloads, and communities scale with their creators. When she’s not writing, you can find her rescuing dogs, baking something, or extolling the virtue of the Oxford comma.
The first step to pre-launching your course is to choose a course subject area, this is not a topic. A course subject area is the bigger view of your topic.
Now that you have successfully set up your course for pre-launch, the next thing to do is to start marketing and sell your course to your audience.
Just to cap it all, we have established that pre-selling your course can vastly improve the sales of your course. You don’t need to create the course before selling it. All you need is to know the benefits of your course.
Ask yourself these key questions when you ’re deciding on whether you ’re ready to launch your course:
When you sell your course, you need to choose a launch plan depending on where you are right now as a course creator. These are:
Growing your audience and making sales shouldn’t be mutually exclusive events. Instead, use a course launch to capture attention, grow your audience, AND make more sales.
One way to share your course videos (if you create your course on a simple WordPress page or share it in a Facebook group) is to upload them to Vimeo. Embed the videos and share them on your website or social media.
And if you have no audience, give yourself at least 90 days to build an audience. That might be through ads, podcast interviews,partnerships, or a number of other ways that you can use to build it.
The first thing you need is a course idea. What’s the best way to come up with your idea ?
Online courses are a great way to share your knowledge with a bigger group of people and scale your income.
Pre-selling an online course means putting it up for sale before it is finished, allowing students to purchase it, but not access it until the actual release date. Whether you are just drafting your course now or you are already halfway through, it is always a good time to start pre-selling your course.
By doing this, you eliminate the risk of investing time and money into a project that would ultimately fail. When you are pre-selling your course, your customers will be happy to provide feedback and requests which will make it easier to shape the direction of your content according to your student’s liking.
Gaining customers before finishing your course will allow you to receive their feedback about the validity of your content. Collecting suggestions from your customers and including them in your course will ensure your students’ retention and your course likability .
Selling your online course in advance not only validates your idea, but it allows you to collect enough revenue to continue with the production of your lessons. You will avoid investing large amounts of money before having any guarantee of sales.
Pre-selling a product either digital or physical is not a new thing in the marketing world. Individuals and organizations have pre-sold their services and products even before creating them.
Pre-launching your course before creating is a great way to build the right audience for your course: the type of audience that’s interested in your teachings and are already anxious about your proposed course, the type of audience that will most likely tell their friends and colleagues about your course.
By now, you shouldn’t be contemplating whether to prelaunch or not. Skipping the pre-launch process will put you at the risk of creating products no one will buy.
Pre selling basically means opening up sales for your product before the product is either finished, or in some cases, before it has even started to be created. I’m a pretty big advocate for releasing a product as a pre-order as opposed to waiting until it’s all finished before opening up sales. There are three reasons for this:
When it comes to the design of your landing page, it has to look good. But that doesn’t mean you have to be an expert designer in order to put something together. In lieu of taking my course, you can either create or buy a super simple typography based theme and use that as your landing page.