How to Market & Test Your Online Course While You Build It

Jean Pak
Jean Pak
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Oftentimes, people say I’ve launched my course but where are the buyers?

As I’ve stated before in a previous article, selling an educational based online product requires time to build your list and communicate your value to future prospects. Instead of marketing the course after you build it, why not begin the marketing process at the same time you develop the course?

Marketing or validating the product doesn’t necessarily mean creating social media accounts, keep it simple and start small.

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Here are 3 steps you can take now to validate and begin marketing and testing your online product:

Step 1: Find your audience — who is your potential target audience and what can they hope to accomplish from the product you’re selling? How can your product benefit them? What additional skills or value will they get from your product?

Once you find them, do some informal testing for your product. Use a free course to see if they are meeting the intended goals and objectives and obtain feedback to improve your official launch.

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Share with them an article you wrote about your product. For example, let’s assume you’re teaching people how to learn English for business conversations in Asia. Your target audience is Chinese businessmen who visit the U.S. for business and want to improve their English conversation skills to be more comfortable, confident, and solid communicating with others.

One way to find them is online communities- web-sites where they may hang out or internet forums where Chinese businessmen frequent to exchange tips about doing business internationally.

Step 2: Sign up for an account on these communities and introduce yourself. Don’t pitch your idea. Put out questions to test your idea. For example, you might ask: What percentage of Chinese businessmen feel comfortable conversing in English? What is the demand for learning English in China? Where are people going to learn English?

Continue to engage with them, ask questions and offer value. Get people to sign up for an email list where you continue to share tips and share a link to your product. You might test your audience with a free course and then add more content to a premium and paid product. This method is used frequently because it’s a good way to generate leads and test the market for your product before selling something.

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Step 3: As you engage and gather research and data for your product, you might ask for help. State that you’re an English teacher hoping to help Chinese businessmen become more skilled in English conversation and wanted to get feedback on your course.

Use the feedback to find out what the demand is for learning English from Chinese businessmen and if it’s a need or not. Maybe your assumptions were wrong and the demand from Chinese businessmen don’t meet the expectations. What do you do? Pivot and test a different market like Chinese youth -keep testing until the data validates your product idea.

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How much data is enough? There’s no perfect number but you can gauge from the response to your ideas and the engagement with your course.

Once your idea is validated, continue with the development of your paid product.

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