Have an amazing idea for a course? Ever considered pre-selling your course? Before we get into why it would be valuable for you to consider, let’s first confirm what we’re talking about here.
What Is Pre-Selling Your Online Course?
Pre-selling is about selling before you have created your online course, or before you have fully finished it.
Why Would You Pre-Sell Your Course?
As content creators, no doubt you’re excited to share your expertise with the world! Pre-selling your online course, allows you to validate your online course idea with real customers first. It allows you to confirm not just if potential students are interested but will these people will actually back it up and pay money for it. It’s an incredibly powerful way to confirm your online course topic, before you spend weeks, months or even years creating and building your course.
Isn’t It Deceitful Pre-Selling Something That You Haven’t Created?
If you’re upfront about it and meet your customer expectations, you will be fine.
There are multiple ways you can deliver upon a pre – sale.
Here’s two of the main ways.
- You can deliver your content live over a series of sessions, that way your initial students are paying for a live experience while you create and deliver the course. (If you go down this path, I’d probably say you don’t need to worry about letting your students know, they will understand if the content is being delivered live).
- Alternatively, you could pre-sell and let them know when you’ll be releasing the content at a set date and time. Letting your prospective students know the time frame in advance, will help manage customer expectations and lead to no doubt a more stress-free and successful launch.
My First Presold Course
To help illustrate this in action, here’s my own example from back in 2017 when I presold my first online course. It was a course focused on how to get a return on investment from setting up automation in your business. I didn’t have a big email list at all and sold it from a free webinar.
I made 6 sales at $297 each, making $1,782.
No, I clearly couldn’t retire off that! 😉
But this was a valuable lesson in online course creation, that I could generate some cash flow, because essentially….
I got paid to create my course!
Plus, I could sell this online course again and again to my future students.
All potential students knew that it would be delivered live over a course of 6 weeks, and they’d have access to the recordings in the portal afterwards.
What Do You Need To Pre-Sell Your Online Course?
If you’re considering pre-selling your course, you just need to have the details confirmed:
- Course Title – what is the title of your course.
- Course Description –one or two sentence overview of your course.
- Course Outline – what are the modules and an outline of what’s included in each.
- Course Price – what will you charge and in what currency.
- Course Delivery Timeframe/Approach – how will you deliver the content – live over a period of time, or will you release it all at a set time?
As you can see, you don’t need to have all your content ready! In fact, we recommend that you don’t, by using this pre-selling marketing strategy to help create a profitable online course.
Now, once you have the above finalised, you’ll then need the ability take money and ideally, you’ll have a list or social media followers of potential customers to share your course idea with. Email marketing as well as social marketing efforts will help you to not only warm up your potential customers, but hopefully convert them to sign up during your pre-sale campaign.
Please note, you don’t need to sell from a webinar in order to get people to sign up for your course. With the right webinar framework and audience, this of course can help, but you could start out by emailing your list if you have built enough value with your audience that they know, like and trust you.
Measuring Your Pre-Selling Success
The final factor you should consider prior to pre-selling are your numbers.
What is the minimum number you would need to reach and by when in order to validate your idea?
Be really clear about this BEFORE you start marketing. Remembering that your initial pre-sell isn’t the end of your course selling journey. This is just the start! Once you’ve got through your official launch and delivered to your first group, then you can continue to market and sell your online course into the future. The income opportunities are abundant!
Pre-Selling Your Online Course
Pre-selling your online course can save a lot of heartache. I’ve seen it time and time again, online course creators getting caught up in the content creation and also setting up the tech. Whilst this is important, not until you have proven the idea has some legs. So please, please, please, consider pre-selling your next course, particularly if you’re new to the course creation space. Your knowledge and experience is valuable! You want to make sure potential students will pay for it, before you do anything further, so ultimately you can have a successful online course launch!
P.S. Unsure of the online course platform that you need to have in place to sell and deliver your online course? No worries, check out our FREE Your Online Course Tech Simplified guide to help you get around what you need.
