How to Use Quora to Become an Expert and Sell your Online Course

This is a part of a multi-post series How to Growth Hack your Online Course and Make Money?

Building authority is crucial when selling your online course. Along with creating creating great content, you’ll also find it very advantageous to position yourself as an expert by answering questions on Quora. If done effectively, you will also get the added benefit of attracting additional traffic from Quora to your course.

I’ve actually been able to do this effectively by becoming the Most Viewed Writer in the Daily Deal and Group Buying topics.

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7 Step Execution Plan:

Search keywords for your Online Course’s topic
Start answering some easy questions even if others have already answered them. Offer small bits of info and continue with more robust answers using your blog
Add these topics to your Bio
Add a link to your course in your Bio and update your title to Expert in “X”
Take some of the larger themes or ideas from your course and create short blog posts with links to your course
Take those blog posts and start adding links to appropriate answers to Quora questions
You’ll start noticing the same question on Quora. Create a blog post answering those questions with small bits of content from your course.

Positioning yourself as an expert will help generate traffic and add authority to 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.

If you missed the first part in this series, learn more about Distribution: How to use Daily Deal Sites to Promote your Online Course?

Marketing Tools and Resources

How to Growth Hack your Online Course and Make Money?

E-Learning and online courses have become the newest ways for young and experienced entrepreneurs to make incremental income or in some instances make enough money to live without any other side hustles.

But how did they do it? A lot of them were very very early and had built reputations and huge followings around their personal brand. How can the rest of us make selling online courses a solid source of additional income? I’m going to use what I’ve learned marketing and selling physical goods and subscription-based services to growth hack your marketing plan for your Online Course. It doesn’t matter if you use udemy, teachable, fedora, or any other platform. Though you should probably be on all of them if possible!

Up next in distribution: How to use Daily Deal Sites to Promote your Online Course?

Or jump head to “Build Authority: Use Quora to become an expert“

Turn Affiliates into Micro-Influencers with Ninja Outreach

Why “micro-influencers”?

“Our research shows that real life influencers who are passionate about what they are recommending have significantly more buying conversations, and consumers are more likely to act on their recommendations,” – Marketing Dive

They aren’t celebrities, and they may not have millions of followers, but they’re considered authentic and knowledgeable individuals who are trusted sources of reviews.

According to the Marketing Dive, 82% of survey respondents said they were highly likely to follow a micro-influencers’ recommendation.

What’s Ninja Outreach?

Ninja Outreach is my new favorite hack. It’s a great lead gen and discovery tool. You can search any keyword to find blogs and influencers. Then, once you’re down prospecting, you can easily download all your leads with all their info like name, site, domain authority and contact info as a csv.

Earlier, I did a post on “No Cost Affiliate Marketing“. This is an extension on that idea. You can use Ninja Outreach to find micro-influencers who might be willing to write a review and promote your product or service. Then, you can use their app to start an email campaign to recruit them to help market your product.

They have a great tutorial here.

No Cost Affiliate Marketing Hacks

The market for affiliate marketing is set to increase from $4.2b to $6.8b by 2020 with 80% of advertisers looking to add or grow their affiliate marketing channels. Making now a great time to test what kind of traction you can get with affiliate marketing. Not only can you add this to your Content strategy

“Presenting content that drives real value in a trustworthy way can be a significant challenge for brands and content creators, but this challenge can be solved with a smart affiliate marketing strategy.” – Market Dive

Smart affiliate marketing not only adds to your content marketing strategy but can add authenticity and trustworthiness to your marketing campaigns. A lot of high performing affiliates have huge followings and are no longer perceived as being “the drudges of the web”. Payouts are also almost always performance base making both sides highly incentivized.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

sites w/ huge, loyal followers
millions of views per day
performance-based
- only payout on a sale
- both sides are incentivized
easy to test
increase sales + increase brand exposure (two birds, 1 stone)

The benefits of my my 3-Step Launch Plan:

no/low cost
no fancy tracking
no network
no industry contacts needed

There are ways to launch an affiliate campaign without signing any IOs. Most daily deal sites have ways to post deals to the community, or submit a deal to deal editors without ever having to go through a network or scour LinkedIn for a connection. You also don’t need tracking. If you don’t have tons of channels up and running, you can just rely on referral traffic. It’s not the best way to track but it’ll give you an idea on whether or not you should move forward and dedicate the time and energy to implement tracking or onboard a network like CJ or Impact Radius.

Here we go:

Craft 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. Include high res images – I wouldn’t recommend a logo, especially if you aren’t Nike. Logos generally never convey the value of a deal. Find a lifestyle product image, it’ll work better
4. If you can find links or screenshots to competitors on the site you’re pitching, even better. Then, clearly and concisely communicate to the DEs why your deal is better.
Pitch your offer
1. Communicate the value and what distinguishes this from other competitors
2. Be personable and describe why your deal is a good deal for the sites customers
3. Remember that these deal editors are reading a ton of other submissions everyday so be short and effective
Post deals
1. Find deal forums
  1. I’ve put together a good list here – What are the Biggest Daily Deal and Coupon Sites?
2. Use Submit contact forms
  1. Usually found in the Footer of most sites
3. Try emailing tips@XXXX.com
  1. Examples:
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
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
Submit to as many sites as possible
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

Want to try another channel? Apply Udemy’s Growth Hacks to increase sales on any Marketplace

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.

@samanthalewe

Daily Deal & Ecommerce Marketing

Category: growth hacking