Use an Online Training Course to Obtain Prospects
By Dan Grijzenhout
One of the more difficult components to building a presence online and obtaining qualified
prospects at the top of your sales funnels is that of building your e-mail marketing lists.
You start by purchasing your message management system, you build your e-mail templates,
you set up your auto-responders, you prepare your gifts for give-aways to entice people to
signup and you build your lead capture pages.
Then you go about advertising your lead capture page access points on various social media
platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest, you create a few marketing videos
on YouTube, create some backlinks and then you hope your marketing engine works, people are
attracted to your funnel entry points, they sign up for their gifts and your newsletters and
you gain them as prospects.
In general, this is how it all works and almost everyone trying to sell online is using
some form of this strategy. You check your messaging system a few times a week and you see
a few signups occur and then you try to generate sales from them through periodic e-mails to
them containing more information, offers, etc.
You watch carefully and you reach milestones, 100 subscribers, 200 subscribers, 500, etc.
This is hard work and it is slow but once you attain larger numbers of subscribers, you do
have a good base to market to whenever you come out with something to sell.
Here is something else for you to consider doing though that could surprise you in its
effectiveness of reaching people and building a subscriber base. It is hard work up front but
it can pay some very significant backend dividends to you.
Try building an online training program on a recognized training site and offer it to
people at no charge through your Lead Capture system (offering free course coupons for example).
In comparison to the earlier approach, within your e-mail auto-responder system, you work hard
to create a gift you can give people that they would value enough to signup for to your newsletters.
These consumers because they have done this many times before, know that they will be
trading their anonymity in order to get the valued gift and they know they will start receiving
marketing e-mails from you shortly thereafter - most of them see this as a sacrifice they need
to make in order to get the gift - so you get some and lose others.
Alternatively, if you put together a course that teaches them something valuable that
they can sink their teeth into for an hour or so and go back to as often as they want to refresh,
and you offer it at no charge or at a discount to them, they will often flock to take the free
or discounted course. So set a price on the course and regularly give out discounts through
your Lead Capture focal points.
This sets value to the course content at the retail level and the discounts offered give
them a deal on receiving this content which if they do perceive the value to be worth it, you
earn some revenue from what you are giving them as your gift in effect to them - once a student
of yours, you can leverage the course they are taking to make sales on other courses you are
offering or other content you have available for purchase.
When you were just trying to fill your own e-mail lists doing your own advertising in
the first e-mail building example above, you were just reaching only a few people or you were
paying to reach larger quantities of consumers with a price attached that you had to pay in
order to get their attention. Online training sites bring potentially millions of additional
people to you, raising awareness of you through the courses you provide and those sites market
on your behalf.
I am not saying you should use this strategy instead of your other strategies, but in
addition to it. After all, the idea is to raise as much awareness of your enterprise out there
as you can which implies trying to be seen everywhere to maximize the exposure of your sales funnels.
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