How Did You Get Your First 10 Course Enrollments?
We just launched our no-code 3D game development course (https://www.sovereignmoon.studio/no-code-game-development-course/) and I'm really happy because we just got our first enrollment! I'm curious to know how other eCourse sellers made their first 10 course sales? What channels worked the best for you? Which ones were a total miss?
Use any social media form you can (reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
Honestly you just have to find where your customers hangout and let them know why your product will provide them value!
Do you track attribution? For you, what channels have performed better from a conversion rate standpoint? For me, initial tests are showing that organic search outperforms social channels by far.
This looks SO cool! I wish I had time to take the course, myself :D
I don't have any direct expertise with selling courses. But I've taken a LOT of paid video courses over the years. One approach that I've seen is offering an abbreviated, sort of mini version of a course for free on Udemy, Skillshare, etc. You might consider offering the first one or two videos for free on the site to get visitors hooked. Pop those up on YouTube, too.
Seems like Twitch and YouTube would be great channels for you. You could do short, one-topic tutorials (which could just be edited, repurposed content from the existing course if you want to save time).
One thing I do have a lot of direct experience with is the fact that almost nothing ever out-performs organic search. After all, you're catching your customer at the exact moment they're actively looking for what you offer. Doesn't get better than that.
This is great advice! Thank you.
Ask the customer you just convert to tell you about how did he discover about you and what was the steps he took to end up paying for it!
Just launced this last week and have 26 students in the 1st cohort and 100+ on the waitlist: https://youniversity.landen.co/
We did a survey previously to understand what people wanted to learn. And based on the survey results, we just created a landing page for a course and launced it. Posted the course on several Slack communities and somehow it just started spread by itself
Hey @sovereignmoon, congrats on the launch. How did you get your first enrollment?
Reaching out to people on IG asking for shout-outs. Response rate was abysmal but it looks like someone purchased without giving a shout-out :) We were reaching out to influencers with too big of an audience. They seem to be more closed to creative collabs compared to people with sub 50K followers. We were targeting 100K plus. Bad move. Lesson learned :) We're now testing 10K to 50K to see if we get more partners that way.
Cool. It's great that you're testing rapidly. Post again on indie hackers to let us know how the 10K - 50K influencers work out for you.
I just published this course on Udemy around a week ago and am at ~50 students at the time of writing: https://www.udemy.com/course/remote-work-boundaries/
First paid customer is my girlfriend.
Other students enrolled for free via a coupon that I distributed via my personal network, Reddit and Facebook Groups.
I know that sales will gradually come in via Udemy's own audience and promotion efforts.
Having said that, I'm preparing to actively promote this one via YouTube and my podcast (and maybe Quora).
Looking forward to hearing about your journey, @@sovereignmoon
Thanks for sharing your story. A short course on Udemy seems like an interesting idea.
Congrats on launching your new course!
To get our first 10 course sales we reached out to people individually, grew our LinkedIn and FB pages, and set up 2 partnerships.
I was in university when we started the partnerships, and we partnered with 2 clubs on campus. That proved to be quite a passive and mutually beneficial option for us and our partners.
Thanks for the reply. How long did it take you to build up your LinkedIn and FB to a point where those channels were valuable to you? Was there a follower threshold you passed where it started to make more a difference in terms of sales?
That’s a good question. We’ve had the page for about 8 months and we around 460 followers on FB and 110 on LinkedIn.
It’s where we get most of our in bound traffic but we haven’t done a great job tracking how that traffic directly converts to sales. So far I doubt a lot of it has. I think content marketing through our pages is a bit of a longer term game so it will take time to better quantify our conversion for those pages.
I’d say once you are getting around 25 engagements or so per post I think you’ll start to see a few more sign ups in the coming months.
Awesome. Thanks for the reply.
Check out this essay by PG titled: "Do things that don't scale"
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
I love this point...
"There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them."
Haha yup im definitely guilty of that
Thanks!