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Have you ever thought about converting more visitors to buyers? How about bringing more new visitors? Premium course creators such as consultants, trainers and industry experts could find success in search engine marketing, rather than other marketing and sales methods.
Targeting directly the people interested in your courses and services, while filtering out folks who aren’t, while tracking performance and results. Online advertising with Google Adwords gives you the opportunity to reach potential customers looking for the elearning and training opportunities that you offer. Even if you are not planning to get an income from the online courses, they are valuable assets that bring qualified business leads, especially for speakers and trainers.
Most of the effort in online training goes to creating an online course, then, there is no limits to how many courses you can sell; the sky is the limit!
Promoting online courses – The secret to success
There are a few things you need to know before spending anything in advertising.
Prepare an Adwords Account
First things first, you need an adwords account and you can “Get started”. Setup your account, email, website and payment method. You can follow the steps here.
Control the Budget (and your costs)
AdWords gives you control over how you spend your money and there’s no minimum. You can also choose how much you spend per month, per day, and per ad. Keep in mind that you’ll only pay when someone clicks your ad.
Targeting gives you the ability to show your ads to reach people with specific interests — namely, people who are interested in your products and services — and show them relevant ads.
These are the choices that you have with online ads that can make your marketing campaigns even more targeted:
Show your ads on Google search results pages and websites that are part of the Google Search and partners.
Here you can select how large or small a geographic area you want to target can be. You can choose whole countries, regions of countries, states or provinces, cities—even U.S. Congressional districts. You can also choose custom-designated geographic areas, such as latitude-longitude coordinates or the radius of a set number of miles or kilometers around a specific address. Click “Let me choose …” and then search for the most appropriate area for you.
Sites that show your ads along with their own search results, new articles or other content.
What you need to do is choose your campaign type.
Long story short, what you need in most cases is the Search Network. It includes Google Search, other Google sites such as Maps and Shopping, and hundreds of non-Google search partner websites that show AdWords ads matched to search results.
The Search Network can help advertisers do the following:
The Display Network includes a collection of Google websites (like Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger, and YouTube), partner sites, and mobile sites and apps that show AdWords ads matched to the content on a given page.
The Display Network can help advertisers do the following:
Targeting Niche Course Specific Keywords
Words or phrases relevant to your products and service, which are used to show your ads when customers search for those terms or visit relevant websites.
You need to choose which keywords you will be targeting in search. You can choose the ones that appy to your training course(s). Targeting people that are in the midst of researching relevant subjects to your course is the best way to go. Test a few keywords until you know which one works for you (converts into paying customers).
Here are some symbols you will need setting up your target keywords:
How to use the Keyword Planner
When on the quest for finding the appropriate keyword to market your course and draw potential customers the Keyword Planner is the answer. With it you can try keywords that are relevant to your courses and as a result estimate the size of your target audience as well as your ad bids.
It also provides suggestions upon keywords e.g. you can insert “cooking online course” and the app will show keywords that may be more relevant.
The AdWords Keyword Planner supports three key use cases:
Try all the methods and see which one suits your needs better!e ads”>
Set your bid
Next you need to set your maximum price-per-click now (called your “default bid”). Your bid should be relevant to your total budget (and your maximum daily budget). The more you bid, the more probably it is for your ad to be shown, if that gets too expensive or the Keyword Planner tool suggests a high bid, then it might be an indication to increase your course’s price.
Write a text ad for your ecourse
Ready to write your ad? You will need a course landing page or your course’s page and an attractive description of your ecourse.
You’re limited to 30 characters here, so for some search terms, you’ll need to use abbreviations or shorter synonyms. The description line allows for 80 characters of text. You are bound to be more successful if you describe a benefit of the second headline, on the description line. Later on, you can test which order converts better. Testing different ads is a good way of improving your advertising, as they will influence your cost and quality of traffic.
The last line is your actual destination URL, or your specific chosen landing page. You can also use a tracking link here.
Here’s the short version of your ad template:
Landing Page: your Display URL
Headline 1: up to 30 characters of text
Headline 2: up to 30 characters of text
Description: up to 35 characters of text
Before you start with your ads, have you decided which online course platform to use? Get a 30 days free trial with LearnWorlds and create amazing online courses to sell.
Anthea is a Course designer and Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team. She holds years of experience in instructional design and teaching. With a Master of Education (M.Ed.) focused in Modern Teaching Methods & ICT (Information & Communications Technology), she supplements her knowledge with practical experience in E-Learning and Educational Technology.
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