Category: daily deal

How to use Daily Deal Sites to Promote your Online Course?

How to use Daily Deal Sites to Promote your Online Course?

Daily Deal sites are a great distribution network to leverage. Sites like slickdeals and techbargains have have huge followings and get tons organic traffic of value-focus people who are looking to buy something. They also already SEO optimized, and actively work on acquiring new users who can also be your new users.

Their users are value-focused, so for best results offer a coupon for 15-20% off. If you absolutely cannot lower price even for testing purposes offer extra content or bundle a few of your courses if you have them together and offer a coupon for that.

7 Step Execution Plan:

  1. Check out my list of the Biggest Daily Deal and Coupon sites in the US
  2. Look for a “submit a deal” link
    1. Usually located at the top navigation bar or scroll down to the footer
  3. Submit your deal
    1. Think really hard about how you  position the deal. What you write will probably be copy and pasted when your deal is posted
    2. Write out your ideal Title, keywords and description as you would want customers to see it
    3. Let them know how long the sale is for (ideally 1-2 weeks)
    4. Be personable and describe why your deal is a good deal for the sites customers
    5. Remember that these deal editors are reading a ton of other submissions everyday so be short and effective
    6. Use unique codes per site you are submitting for and keep a master list
  4. Follow up
    1. If it’s been a day and it hasn’t been posted. Follow up and ask if there’s any questions that you might answer because you’re sure that your course would benefit their readers
  5. Check the comments section
    1. If there’s a comments section, check if anyone has questions
    2. Commenting directly will help get people who are on the fence right over if they think they can ask you questions and get answers fast
  6. Submit to as many sites as possible
  7. Review performance
    1. You should be able to optimize copy and images, as well as prioritize more time on sites that give you the most leads or sales going forward

Remember that unlike other distribution channels needs constant work. It’s not a set it and forget it type of hack. Checking for comments and constantly submitting “new” deals for your course will help get your deal more traffic from the below deal sites.

The Biggest Daily Deal and Coupon sites in the US

Daily Deal:

  • slickdeals.net
  • fatwallet.com
  • dealnews.com
  • bensbargains.com
  • techbargains.com
  • dealmoon.com
  • offers.com
  • 1sale.com
  • bradsdeals.com
  • deals.woot.com
  • stacksocial.com
  • deals.kinja.com
  • wirecutter.com
  • hotukdeals.com
  • dealtrend.com
  • hotdeals.com

Coupon/Cashback:

  • ebates.com
  • befrugal
  • topcashback.com
  • savings.com
  • retailmenot
  • shopathome.com
  • promocodes.com
  • coupons.com
  • goodsearch.com
  • goodsearch.com/goodshop

Retail/marketplace

  • groupon.com
  • tanga.com
  • yugster.com
  • dailysteals.com
  • deals.ebay.com
  • woot.com
  • meh.com
  • flash.newegg.com
  • amazon gold box

I hope this helps find the best distribution channel for your online course. Like most marketing campaigns, it usually takes a few tries and a good “mix” of channels to get enough momentum to make a good amount of money.

Leave a comment or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Would love to talk about what growth hacks you’ve used or if you’ve found success trying this one.

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Udemy’s Growth Hacks – Course Seeding

Udemy’s Growth Hacks – Course Seeding

Found this Quora post about How Udemy got to 5,000 courses and I found their seeding of the marketplace and content creation process interesting.

The lessons for any marketplace business
– Seed the supply first; its extremely hard to get early adopters without users.
– Create some initial success stories however you can. Don’t focus on too many; 1 or 2 is enough.
– Figure out how to promote their successes to more people. Your supply side will start to multiply.
– If you get this far, you’ll know what to do next.

No one wants to the be first to the party and unfortunately, marketplaces like Amazon are self-perpetuating. You can’t get exposure or better placement on the never ending list of products until you get more views, purchases, or reviews but you can’t get traffic, conversions, or feedback because no one can find your listing! Super annoying.

The only way to jump start this process is to introduce something from outside the system. For Daily Deals, I recommend using your network of family, friends, facebook, linkedin, etc on 15 Daily Deal Tips. Here Udemy did what any smartup would have done, just rolled up their sleeves and hacked it . They used

commons-licensed courses on the internet as part of the OpenCourseWare movement. [They] legally obtained these videos and posted them on Udemy.

On top of this they used outsourced VAs or virtual assistants to find leads, then a member of the Udemy team would contact them and close the deal. Similar to the Predictable Revenue model – the OG of Sales Hacks.

Then they used Initial Success Stories, basically a form of Reviews to get more. Reviews on Amazon are extremely valuable for the same reason. They are self perpetuating. Reviews anywhere searchable on Google is like gold.

Udemy hacked content creation by introducing something from outside their system to jump start the wave of early adopters they had.

If you don’t know much about Growth Hacking. Check out some definitions that I compiled together here.