How to Promote Your WordPress Online Course

How do you promote an online course? Online learning has seen a massive boom, and in 2021, it’s one of the most preferred forms of learning something new. Besides user benefits, course creators can earn a good amount of money with little time and monetary investment.

Christopher Safford created a course for real estate businesses to use their minds and bodies to grow their revenue and business. It was the first course he ever made, but it got him over $35,000 in revenue and is still growing.

This shows us the massive value and money an online course can bring you. So, if you already have an online course and are looking to promote it and bag more sales, then this article is for you. We’ll talk about how to promote your WordPress online course and hit a home run with your sales.

But, before we talk about these strategies to generate leads for your online course, let’s look at some factors you need to consider before promoting your online course:

Identify your USP to find a driving force for your potential customers to hit the “pay” button.
Survey your audience to understand which platforms they’re most active on and which channels you should use to promote the course.
Define your promotion channels to optimize your efforts only in those areas that can get you some accurate results.

Now that you’re aware of these essential pre-promotion factors let’s jump to the next big thing and get you some power-packed strategies.

There are many platforms to choose from for your online course, but the advantage of creating a course on WordPress is the wide variety of plugins it offers to promote your course. Everything is one step easier because the platform offers some great solutions in the form of plugins that you can use to ease the process and get better results.

Let’s look at some ways to promote your online course on WordPress using the best plugin to make your work that much easier and effective.

1. Create a Killer Sales Landing Page

Your website will provide you with a way to host your online course, which is great. But, you need a sales landing page that you can use to highlight the offerings, bonuses and provide more details about the course with testimonials for social proof. It will also be handy while running paid promotions and redirecting the audience from social media platforms.

If you create an impressive landing page, you could end up doubling your sales. How?

This landing page will convince the reader of the value your course provides, one sentence at a time. Optimized for clicks, this landing page’s main aim will be to hook the audience till they reach the Call-To-Action (CTA) button and swipe their card.

Here are some essential elements of a spectacular course sales landing page:

An attention-grabbing headline that highlights the kind of results this course can get them. Like in the above example of Fizzle.co, the headline is “Earn a living doing something you love.” Isn’t it attractive?
Use a tagline to provide more context to the headline and match it with a complementing image or course teaser video.
Address the pain points of your potential customer using the PAS formula- problem, agitation, solution.
Use pointers to highlight the features and benefits of enrolling. In this example, the brand has highlighted reasons why they need to take up the course, another great way to convey the importance of the program.
Share some student wins and testimonials for social proof and further persuasion.
Use FOMO and exclusivity to induce a sense of urgency.
Include compelling CTAs at several places to optimize and get more clicks. For example, here the CTA is in a different color than the text to make it more noticeable and clickable.

Thrive Architect

You can use Thrive Architect, one of the best wordpress page builders for online business creators. The plugin aims to help you create a landing page optimized for conversions and makes the building process hassle-free.

With innovative landing page templates and conversion-focused elements for drag and drop, it’s one of the fastest ways to build a sales landing page for your WordPress online course.

2. Create a High Converting Sales Funnel

Creating a course is not enough. If you want to attract potential clients and ensure you’re getting regular sales and enrollments, creating a sales funnel is a no-brainer. It will allow you to target the right people, include a volume of interested people in your funnel and nurture them till they convert.

It’s not hard selling, but rather selling by building trust. You will guide your customers through a process that takes them from a place of desire to a place of decision. A sales funnel takes some time to set the initial foundation, but the good news is that it’ll put your lead generation and sales on auto-pilot. Amazing, right?

Let’s see how you can build a sales funnel for your online course.

Identify the core problem your course solves. This will be the number 1 pain point your audience is going through and will be the pillar of your marketing message.
Start building trust through free content. This can be blog posts, social media posts, videos on YouTube, or a podcast.
Offer a free resource or a lead magnet to build your email list. To generate leads for your online course and nurture them through emails, you need to build an email list through a free resource that compels them to give their email address. Here’s an example of a lead magnet.
Start sending them emails that add value. You can’t start promoting your course from the day you get their email address. You need to nurture them. As a general rule of thumb, try to pick up topics that relate to your course material so when you promote it, they have some knowledge about it.
Start talking about your course with a compelling CTA. After you’ve spent some time nurturing your audience, you can start talking about your online course. More than the features, talk about the benefits of enrolling in the course and the kind of results they’ll see through it. Here’s an example of a course promotion email.

You can automate this process and schedule emails and follow-ups through an email marketing tool like MailChimp. And there you have it; a fully-functioning sales funnel aimed at bringing you conversions.

Studiocart

A fantastic stand alone solution is Studiocart. This ecommerce and sales funnel in one plugin allows you to create and embed order forms, add payment options (including payment plans!), sell your courses (or event tickets, digital goods, freelance services or anything else), enable one page checkout and even follow up with customers after the fact thanks to compatibility with top email marketing services with MailChimp. And that’s just the free version! Pro members also have access to features for bumps and upsells, custom form fields, coupons, cart recovery and extensive integrations for Elementor, Zapier, LearnDash, MemberPress and tons more.

WooFunnels

WooFunnels is a great funnel builder for WordPress and is optimized to get you real-time conversions. It’s affordable and offers a wide range of options from landing page templates to email opt-ins and detailed analytics. The easy interface allows for a simple funnel-building experience that doesn’t take much time to build but gets impressive results.

3. Build an Email List

While social media is great to promote your WordPress online course, you need something more reliable and personal to appeal to your audience on a more one-to-one level. The best way to do this is by getting in their inbox and providing valuable content.

The bigger your email list, the more chances you have to convert people, thus generating more revenue for your online course. The best part about having an email list is nurturing those interested in your content, services, or courses.

Buying an email list is an obvious choice for many people because it’s easier and faster. But it’s not the right way to do it. Buying a list means having anyone in your funnel. But, when you’re building an email list, you’re only capturing the ones who have the potential to convert.

Here are some ways to build an email list:

Blogging
Guest posting
Social media
Lead magnets
Paid advertising

Through content, you can redirect your audience to sign up for your email list via these methods. Once you have it ready, you can add them to your sales funnel and start nurturing them, so they convert and become your course customers.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is an excellent list-building plugin for WordPress designed to get you conversions and more people in your email list. They’ve included various templates for opt-ins and forms that you can use on your website to collect email addresses.

With advance targeting, it allows you to target the right kind of people interested in buying from you. The analytics also gives a great insight into how your opt-ins are performing and how you can further improve performance.

4. Publish eBooks

Let’s understand one thing- author means authority.

If you’re an author of a book, be it a paperback or an eBook, you’ll have authority because you’re published. This means more visibility, credibility, and trust- a recipe for online success.

An eBook is one of the best ways to add value to your audience and solve a problem. It can be anywhere between 1-100 pages, although the ideal length should be around 40-50 pages. You can host it on your website or publish it yourself on Kindle.

So, you must be wondering how you can promote your WordPress online course with eBooks.

Well, here’s what you need to do:

Find a topic for your eBook. This should be the main problem you solve in the online course.
Do audience research to understand what language they like to be communicated in, and use that for writing the book.
Prepare an outline for your eBook, and figure out all the elements. You want to touch base on the most critical pillar of your online course, but at the same time, don’t give out everything. Leave them wanting more, so they buy the course from you, and this eBook acts like an additional convincing point.
At the end of the eBook, promote your course. Tell your audience why they should buy the course right away by stating some problem statements, numbers, and income figures to support it.
Create a promotion strategy for your eBook- email marketing, influencers, community groups, ads, social media.

Ebooks are low-ticket offers, so it’s the perfect bait to get them to reach and buy your high-ticket offer- your online course.

eBook Store

Ebook store is a fantastic plugin that allows users to access your eBook on the website with a single click. You can either allow them to download it there or send them to it via email. You can also add your watermark and encrypt your eBook to sell it on WooCommerce. With multiple payment methods and customizable checkout templates, it’s one of the best ways to sell your eBook and promote your course.

5. Start Podcast Marketing

Podcast marketing is one of the best ways to build authority in your niche and build an audience you can later monetize. Today, people listen to podcasts while washing dishes, driving the car, resting, or maybe reading a book. So, it has a great potential to tap into a wide audience, and through that, market your course.

There are two things you can do to promote your course with podcasts. You can do either one of them or both:

Start your own podcast – solo or guest method. Talk about the topics in your niche and answer your audience’s questions directly to build credibility and trust.
Get invited on other’s podcasts. This will help you reach their audience and expand your visibility. The more podcasts you appear on, the more are your chances of redirecting their audience to your website and selling them your course. But for this, you need to appear on niche-specific podcasts where your target audience is present.

If you’re looking for free ways to promote your online course, then podcast marketing is your answer.

Seriously Simple Podcasting

Seriously Simple Podcasting is one of the most top-rated WordPress podcast management plugins. With one-click integrations and an easy playing experience, it’s a great plugin to display multiple shows on your website at an affordable cost, that too, hassle-free.

It’s useful for both, starting a podcast and featuring it on your website or including the podcasts you’ve appeared on as a guest. You can use this plugin to manage your podcasts and include them on your course page. This will display your expertise and provide your potential customers with more reasons why they should buy your online course.

6. Run a Webinar

A live webinar is one of the most powerful ways to interact and persuade your potential customers into buying your online course. Many course creators use webinars to provide free value to their audience, answer the questions and leave them wanting more. In the end, they pitch the online course as a solution to their core problem, with an extension of 1:1 support as an incentive to sign up for it.

So, a webinar is more like a teaser for your course, where you highlight a significant problem your audience wants to solve and position the course as a further step to implement the strategies and achieve their goals.

It would be best to use a software for virtual event scheduling so you don’t have to do a lot of back and forth, and can manage everything from one dashboard.

WebinarPress

WebinarPress is a live streaming WordPress plugin that allows you to host a webinar with your audience directly from the website. You can stream it on YouTube Live, Vimeo, or whichever platform you prefer. Sending email reminders and answering the audience’s real-time questions is also relatively easy with this plugin. With over 3000+ active subscribers, it’s one of the most popular choices for organizing and hosting a webinar on WordPress.

7. Invest in Youtube Advertising

YouTube is the largest search engine in the world after Google, and it’s free. In fact, if you build your audience to a significant number of subscribers, you get paid too. It has a massive audience, and people go to YouTube for both entertainment and education.

To promote your online course, you need visibility, reach, and an audience. All of this is possible with YouTube, and it doesn’t require much time or money investment. However, it does need a good content strategy and consistency. You need to create valuable content for your audience that circles the different problems you solve in your online course.

Now, you must be wondering, “Why will people buy my online course if I’m giving all the information to them for free through videos?”

It’s a valid question, but not the case here. It will show people how experienced and knowledgeable you are in the niche and why you can help them. Even though they will have access to the strategies, they will buy your course when they want to execute them and get results.

Here’s how you can promote your online course on YouTube and get more sales:

Create free valuable content around your niche to build credibility
Include a verbal CTA to your online course in the video, and link CTA in the description and the first comment.
You can also use YouTube cards to redirect them to the course while watching the video. YouTube cards are the pop-ups in the corner and can redirect the audience directly to the course page.
Through YouTube SEO, you can target keywords and rank for relevant keywords to your online course for more organic visibility.
Running paid campaigns on YouTube is another option. But go for it when you’ve optimized your organic efforts.

Once you start creating content on YouTube, you can display those videos on your course landing page and website through the various WordPress plugins for YouTube.

YouTube Embed

YouTube Embed is a powerful plugin to display videos on your WordPress website. It provides a simple process to embed videos and has some exciting features like creating playlists for relevant videos and automatically generating playlists based on search text. It has over 10,000 active installations and is a dynamic plugin to build more authority in your niche.

8. Promote and Nurture Your Audience on Instagram

Instagram has a daily user base of over 500 million people across the world. Imagine, if you could even tap into 1% of this audience, your online course sales would hit the roof. It’s a solid platform to position yourself in front of your audience and monetize them by nurturing and providing visually appealing content.

Many course creators use Instagram as their go-to platform to promote their online course and sell it to not just their followers but also other people interested in the niche. You can do this in a variety of ways by creating a course promotion strategy:

Create an impressive profile. It’s imperative to have a profile that positions you as an authority in the field. So optimize your bio, profile picture, and the overall look and feel of your account.
Provide free valuable content by leveraging all the features of Instagram- feed posts, stories, reels, IGTV, live videos, and guides. To save time, use social sharing plugins  for Instagram that can schedule this content for you.
Start engaging with your potential customers by commenting on their posts and starting a conversation in the DMs. You can find your audience through hashtags and competitor profiles.
Talk about your course creatively by positioning it as a problem-solver. You can do this by talking about the results this course will help them achieve through stories and reels.
Include a CTA in your bio and in every alternative post you publish on your feed. You can use a landing page like this to host multiple links, and make sales through your Instagram profile.
Run Instagram ads to amplify your reach and get more people to visit your online course landing page or profile.

Analyze metrics as you implement these strategies to see what brings you conversions to optimize your efforts and see more remarkable results.

Spotlight Social Media Feeds

Spotlight Social Media Feeds is a plugin that allows you to embed your Instagram feed on your website. It has various design options to reflect your brand personality on the website through your feed. Its simple process allows for a seamless embedding experience that you can do in minutes.

So, suppose a potential customer reaches your course landing page through organic search results or YouTube. In that case, this feed can give them a greater insight into your online presence, thus, strengthening the authority and pushing them towards making a purchase.

9. Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencers are one of the best ways to impact the audience’s purchasing power and drive them to make a sale faster. By connecting with like-minded influencers who have a similar audience as you, your online course can see a rise in visibility and sales.

Influencers have a large following, and the people who follow them invest their faith in the creator. If they endorse your course and redirect the audience to buy it, you could make a good number of sales.

Here’s how you can build an impactful influencer marketing strategy to promote your WordPress online course:

Have a clear understanding of your target audience and who you’re selling to.
Using platforms for influencer marketing, find influencers  in your niche who have a good following and an authentic and engaged audience.
Create a proposal for these influencers that mention why you’re reaching out to them, what you seek, and how they will be benefited from it- barter or monetary arrangement.
Reach out to them on the platform they’re most active on- Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or even their email.
Work out the deliverables and the structure of your collaboration with a clear establishment of what will be done to promote the course.
Implement the campaign and measure results.

It’s a great way to tap into a new segment of your audience and amplify your reach to increase sales.

Social Boost

Social Boost is a giveaway and rewards plugin that will allow you to run contests from the website. They have a wide range of templates that you can use to organize giveaways- a great way to invite more audience to your channel.

You can partner up and organize giveaways with influencers to give a discount for your online course to 2-3 winners. For this, you can keep conditions like participants should follow you on social media, be added to your email list, etc. This will invite more eyes to your brand and the online course, ultimately getting you more sales.

10. Do Content Marketing and Guest Blogging

Content is the driving force of promoting any product today, and online courses are no exception. Simply putting up a course on your website will not attract visitors or get you sales. You will have to make efforts to drive traffic to your course landing page.

Content marketing and guest blogging are powerful ways to get more eyes on your online course. They use organic methods to position you in front of a broader target audience that would love to buy from you and learn further.

Content marketing is the act of marketing your content through multiple tactics, so your potential customers navigate to your website and make a purchase.

Here are a few elements of an effective content marketing strategy:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Blogging
Videos
Social media distribution
Webinars and podcasts

It takes some time to set up a content marketing strategy and execute it, but once you start implementing it, you’ll see a difference in the kind of response, traffic, and sales you get.

Guest blogging is publishing content on an authority website that already has a significant amount of daily visitors and readers. You get a byline with your article, so after reading your content, a user can click on your name and visit your website where the course is being hosted.

Here’s what you should do to begin guest blogging:

Identify the websites which have a similar target audience as you.
Choose the websites that are the best fit for your niche by checking out their blog posts and publishing guidelines.
Research and create an impressive pitch for the editor.
Follow up and begin your guest blogging journey.

You can also add a link to your online course directly in the article to drive more traffic to your sales landing page. This will also help build links for your website, thus boosting ranking.

WP User Frontend

There are multiple WordPress plugins for content marketing because it has various tactics and strategies. But some of these include Rank Math for SEO and MailChimp for WordPress for email marketing.

Apart from publishing guest posts on other websites, you can allow guest posts on your website. This will drive traffic to your website directly and help you rank for multiple keywords. WP User Frontend is a plugin that can allow guest post submissions on your WordPress website and a dashboard to perform multiple activities from one place while maintaining security.

In a digitally empowered world like today, there are multiple ways to promote your online course and monetize your audience. If you have a valuable course that solves your customer’s problems, it’ll be easier to get sales for your program.

Use these 10 proven strategies as your starting point to promote your WordPress online course. These plugins will help you seamlessly execute these tactics and get you results sooner than you expect.

Happy selling!