Online Course Marketing with YouTube

Increasing your exposure and online course sales with YouTube

Note – this is part 2 of a series of resources about marketing courses on YouTube. To start at the beginning click here: Part 1 – Online course marketing with YouTube – Part 1

Here’s the Step by Step approach…

Here’s how YouTube can lead to the sale of your online course. Let’s use an example of a course called “Sleep Training for Toddlers”, or better yet, if you’re keeping up with my advice on choosing your online course topics and title: “How to Sleep Train you Toddler in less than 30 days”.

I’ve put together a short checklist / summary as a reference for you. Get the Checklist here.

The Teaser – The first step is to create a few video teasers. You can start with just one but you’ll want to add more. A video teaser gives the viewer some help with the subject and ends with a call to action to check out your full course for more help. The key to the teaser is it MUST ADD VALUE. That means that on it’s own it should help the viewer out. It shouldn’t be just an advertisement. In fact I find my most successful teasers add tremendous value on their own. We’ll look at a detailed step by step setup guide to teaser videos later but here’s the key components to the video itself:

There’s a few ways to do this.. the list below is one way I’ve found that works exceptionally well.

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Here’s the key components to the YouTube Teaser video itself:

Tell them what they’ll learn in the video (make sure this matches the video title)
- Sleep training example “In this video I’m going to show you how to set up your child’s room to help with sleep training. I’ll show you the three things that parent’s often forget to remove from the room that can interfere with sleep training and the two things that will save you weeks of sleepless nights. Let’s get started…”
As you’re telling them what they’ll learn, show a link to your site in the video (more on how to do this later) You can use YouTube’s Callouts for this with a link directly to your site.
- Something like ‘More info at sleeptrainingcourse.com” could appear on the video. No need to mention it in your script, just have it appear over top of the video.
Get right into the lesson fast – save the sales pitch for the end of the video, they don’t know you yet and they’re not ready to buy.
- “Okay the first step in sleep training is…”
Offer REAL VALUE in the meat of the lesson – this should make up 90% of the video or more. Depending on the size of your course you may have more or less material to give away, but I’ve found that the more value you give in the free videos the more it helps drive sales. Try to keep it between 3-7 minutes in length.
- Sleep training example – give them the essential items and items to remove from the room as you promised at the start of the video and in the video title.
Ask for comments. During the meat of your video lesson, ask the viewers to leave comments below. Ideally give them specific things to leave comments on. It’s better to do this during your lesson than at the end. You can also ask for comments at the end of the lesson, just before your call to action – if you do this be quick about it as you don’t want them to leave before they hear the call to action.
- “So that’s the first item to remove from the room. I’d love to hear from you, how many of you have this item in your child’s room? Please let me know in the comments below.” … “I hope you find these tips helpful! If there’s other things you’d like to learn about sleep training please let me know in the comments below..”
Close with a call to action. Now that they’ve gotten to know you and your teaching style, and they’ve seen that you add value to their life, now is the time to ask for them to take action. You do this by letting them know you have more great help/resources/lessons in your full online course on the subject. And let them know where to get it.
- “This is only one small part of the sleep training process, for a full look at how to sleep train your child in less than 30 days, check out Sleep Training Course dot com where you’ll find everything you need to sleep train your child, including a step by step process and a look some key mistakes to avoid.”
Show a link to the site where your course lives. Again, similar to the beginning of the video but now you can be a bit more blatant and show the link for longer. Put it up and leave it up for a while. Remember, when a YouTube video ends, they suggest other videos for you to watch next. With short attention spans, web viewers often click on one and hop off to the next video. Avoid losing viewers by putting your link up and leaving it there for a while, 10-30 seconds.
Advanced tip – Once you have a few videos up, you can include your own “Videos to watch next” by embedding them right into your video as you edit it. Here’s an example of how that works: http://youtu.be/XXCbffp7jLM?t=1m50s
- The video ends at 1 minute and 52 seconds, but continues for another 10 seconds showing videos to watch next on the same channel. It’s also part of a playlist which is another way to accomplish a similar result.
- Note that this has to be edited into the video before you upload it to YouTube and then you can add the calls to action over the embedded videos.