3 Reasons to Pre-Sell Your Online Course
It’s absolutely no secret that I am team pre-sell when it comes to creating an online course… and it’s for good reason!
Being in the business of helping entrepreneurs create courses, I get to talk to a lot of course creators and unfortunately the conversation usually goes:
Course Creator: “I made an online course, put it up, but nobody bought it”
Me: “Are you marketing it?”
Course Creator: “No.”
Me: “Are you telling people about it?”
Course Creator: “No.”
Me: “Are you talking about it at all?”
Course Creator: “No.”
Me: “Does your mom know about it?”
Course Creator: “No.”
When I ask why they didn’t pre-sell they say “you can do that!?” - Abso-freaking-lutely!
There are so many great reasons to pre-sell an online course:
Money In Your Pocket
This one is going to seem super obvious but you are running a business and the purpose of your business is to make you money. If you create a course but never sell it…. you don’t make money! I always say that the best business model is the one where you get paid FIRST because you are guaranteed that you are creating something that someone is willing to pay for (because they did pay for it!)
Running an online course business doesn’t have many costs that you need to cover but I do want you to feel motivated to create this course and know you are getting paid for it!
Validate Your Course Idea
When you are putting out a new service or product it’s a good idea to validate your idea.
What does this mean? Validating your idea means that you make sure your idea is good before you go ahead and spend time, effort, and money creating it. A lot of people just talk to people and say ‘hypothetically if I made this thing, would you buy it?” and that doesn’t work. You are asking if they would spend pretend money on a pretend product. There is no real commitment.
Pre-selling requires your students to commit to the course. When they hand over money for the course you are creating, you are proving there is a demand for your course and that the idea is solid.
Give Yourself a Deadline
Have you ever started working on a project with no deadline, and the project just goes on and on for ever?! This can definitely happen in course creation! Let’s be honest, creating a course is a bit of a project and the analysis and creation stage can take over your existence if you let it. On the flip side, it is completely possible to create a course in a month but you need to commit to it!
Pre-selling your course, taking someone’s money and telling them “I will start teaching you on ____” gives you an absolute commitment that you now can’t get out of. Someone has paid you to teach them on that date so your course has to be ready!
For some reason, we seem to take commitments to others so much more seriously than commitments to ourselves. It pretty much guarantees that this project is going to get done!
Ready to turn your followers into customers?
Get my free guide: Get Paid for What You Know!