Whether you’re talking to online retailers, brick-and-mortar stores, or businesses big and small, they’ll all tell you the same thing: Black Friday sends their sales soaring.

And the best part? It can do the same for your business!

Picture this: Stores buzzing with excitement, shoppers racing to grab deals, and e-commerce platforms lighting up with a massive surge in traffic and sales. It’s the prime moment to slash prices, put up those irresistible “SALE” signs, and watch customers flood in, eager to spend.

With holiday shopping in full swing, buyers are not just purchasing for themselves – they’re stocking up on gifts for friends and family. Now’s your moment to seize the excitement and transform Black Friday into a record-breaking success for your business!

In this resource, we have collected a list of 55 Black Friday marketing ideas for every kind of business, from physical stores to e-commerce, creators selling online courses to software businesses, and everyone in between.

You can skip directly to the section that interests you:

When is Black Friday?

Black Friday is on November 29th, 2024.

However, most companies start offering discounts by mid-November or the end of October to get ahead of the competition. 

For online sales, this window period is much bigger, giving potential customers time to explore products and experience the feeling of holiday sales.

This means that from Thanksgiving until Cyber Monday (2nd of December), you can go wild and offer special discounts to kick off the holiday shopping season sooner!

Black Friday Marketing Ideas for All Businesses

So, how can you get ready for Black Friday and get the most out of it by the end of the Cyber Monday sales?

That’s easy. 

All you need is an effective Black Friday marketing campaign and get on your special deals to allow online shopping to begin officially!

Here are marketing ideas for every kind of business to rock Black Friday. Whether you run a small local store or an international business, these ideas will skyrocket your holiday sales!

Massive Discounts for Black Friday

The most proven Black Friday marketing strategy? Slashing prices—and doing it generously!

Start with 50% and then go all the way down to 70% off the original price. 

Don’t be afraid to reduce your prices. This is what your customers expect from Black Friday promotions

You can reduce prices to eliminate old stock, bring more foot traffic, attract new customers, or boost sales. In the case of digital products like courses, where it is free to develop a product, you can get up to 90% discounts without hurting your bottom line!

Customers expect massive discounts. Besides, you can always upsell your other products to compensate for this.

Flash sales: A limited-time offer

Black Friday shopping is largely impulsive. 

Flash sales are perfect for increasing impulse buying, and you can incentivize people to buy your courses on the spot.

Create scarcity and a sense of urgency while reinforcing FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) through a limited-time offer and last-minute deals available for a specific period (less than 24 hours) and for a limited number of new sign-ups.

Deal hunters always look for discount codes and thrive on discount seasons.

Promote early

Many businesses expand their Black Friday into a full week or month.

Whichever you choose, you need to remember that consumers’ budgets are limited. You need to be fast so they anticipate spending their budgets for your business.

The best way to do this is to start your marketing efforts and promote your discounts early on.

Some businesses start as early as October to “warm up” customers.

Use countdowns

Countdown timers are a powerful way to trigger FOMO.

As your target audience sees the hours or days dwindling before a discount disappears, the urgency influences their purchase decisions, driving faster action and increasing conversion rates.

This can be a timer or a clock on top of the website:

Black Friday Timer Example by OptinMonster

Make Offer Adjustments

Encourage customers to return for more purchases by offering different discounts every day. There are two ways to do this:

Discount different products: Offer a different category of products or lines of products every day. Let your customers know which products are going into discount every day.

Reduce discounts every day: Start with a high discount and reduce it as you go — 70%, 60%, 50% — this way, the customers will be forced to make their purchases early on and come back for more later.

Showcase your Refund/Return & Exchange policy

Impulse purchase decisions are accompanied by some fear. Countering each fear gets your shoppers closer to a purchase.

That’s where the refund, return, or exchange policy comes in.

By prominently showcasing your policies on refunds, returns, or exchanges, shoppers are more likely to give in to impulse purchases.

Very few customers end up coming back and asking for a refund (especially for digital products).

You can go one step further and offer longer refund policies for holiday shoppers. For example, increasing the refund policy of products from 30 to 60 days for Black Friday may help reluctant shoppers become impulse buyers.

One-time offers to Upsell and Cross-sell

The purpose of Black Friday is to get customers to buy in volume. Upselling (making them buy more) is the best way to increase income while making a discount.

Use the checkout to upsell to a more expensive product, relevant bundle, or other not-discounted products.

Image Source: OneCommerce

For example, the e-commerce store example above offers higher-end models at a discount. If discounted, it’s easy to choose a larger screen or a better model.

Gamify Purchases: Offer Additional Discounts for More

Offer higher discounts if they buy more. Incentivize more purchases by offering incremental discounts for more products:

• 30% discount for 1 product
• 40% discount for 3 products
• 50% discount for 5 products
• 70% discount for 10 products

Plan your discounts accordingly and allow your customers to add more to their baskets for higher discounts.

Be careful to offer discounts that will still allow you to make a profit.

This is easier done in digital businesses that offer seats instead of products like user access or course licenses for businesses.

But your physical store can also offer package discounts to eliminate unsold merchandise that is out-of-season.

Offer a Mystery Free Gift

Everyone loves surprises. So why not offer a gift to your customers?

Here are a few ideas to try:

• Physical Stores: “Buy 10 boxes of chocolates and get a surprise gift box from us” – This could be a selection box set or a holiday basket.
• Digital Stores: “Purchase 10 licenses and get a physical gift to your doorstep” – This could be a t-shirt, a wine box, or art supplies (it has to be relevant to your product).

Offer a Big Gift with a Lottery

You may not be giving away a car, but you can offer anything from a relaxing spa day to a gourmet wine basket. Lotteries are an effective marketing tactic year-round, drawing attention and boosting engagement.

Add a lottery to your Black Friday campaign and let your audience know that anyone who gets $X amount of products on Black Friday will go into a lottery to win a bigger gift. For example:

• Training businesses can offer personalized one-on-one sessions.
• Local wine stores can offer a group wine-tasting experience.
• Specialty shops can partner with other local businesses to offer a premium gift or exclusive product.
• A boutique café can offer a free month of personal training or a group fitness class.
• Fitness studios can partner with other local businesses to offer a premium gift or exclusive product.
• A small local bakery could offer a custom-made cake or dessert catering for a special occasion.

There are countless options for any small business. If you sell digital products, consider surprising your audience with a physical gift. It’s a great way to add a personal touch and enhance the overall customer experience.

Allow Customers to Pay in Installments

For bigger purchases, payment flexibility is essential.

If your products are $500 or more, consider offering payment installments or a buy-now-pay-later option like Klarna and Afterpay.

Enable Loyalty Deals

Do you offer loyalty programs, or are you worried that existing customers who paid a premium for the same products will be annoyed by Black Friday?

All businesses need to keep their loyal customers happy. They support the business long-term and bring revenue every month.

Consider offering a loyalty-only deal:

Physical stores: Can offer additional discounts to loyalty card holders (and increase their sign-ups to loyalty programs).

Software companies (SaaS): Can offer upgrade offers to yearly plans or additional services that are not publicly available.

Digital stores: Can offer exclusive discounts to old customers on products that might not be discounted on Black Friday, e.g., new releases.

Double Loyalty Points

Another way to add value without discount is to offer double loyalty points. If you run a loyalty program, consider giving additional points to loyalty card holders.

You can also combine discounts and loyalties.

Offer loyalty points to old stock or products, and offer double points on purchasing non-discounted products.

This way, you offer value without discounting your important products.

Work with a Charity

Giving for a good cause can loosen the tightest of purses.

Add a charity giveaway and make your Black Friday be for a good cause. This will help you with more visibility cross-promotion with the charity and feel better about it.

Offer $1 per sale or per $X spent on your store to a charity.

You can also have a discount, and offer a product at full price so that you give the discount amount to charity (e.g., 30%).

Collaborate With Other Companies

Software companies and big brands do this all the time.

Don’t go into this alone. Rather, make it work with another company.

Use your email lists, SMS, or other channels to promote your business partner, and your partner will promote you.

Go the extra mile by offering a discount for both of your products simultaneously. This method works incredibly well if you are offering complimentary products!

Create a Gift Guide

Remember, Black Friday is not just for personal shopping.

Many people use it as an opportunity for their holiday shopping. Releasing a gift guide early in November can help your customers prepare for shopping.

Start with crafting a highly relevant gift guide, taking into account your audience’s demographics and the latest shopping trends. This will ensure that it resonates with your customers and aligns with their current preferences.

Then, distribute your gift guide via direct mail, email, your website, and social media.

Use Product Bundles

Why buy one item when you can buy more?

Prepare bundles of complimentary items at a discounted price, or allow your clients to make their own bundles by choosing the products they want to add to their cart.

Offer bigger discounts for bundles than individual products and services, and upsell them.

Category-Specific Discounts

Make your sale more strategic by discounting specific categories rather than applying a blanket discount across all products.

Category-specific discounts can help you manage costs more effectively and maintain healthier profit margins while keeping your profits healthy!

Checkout Discounts

We are not over with upsells!

The best way to sell more is when someone has already purchased.

You can suggest a bundle or additional discount for buying more items at the discount or after the checkout.

This way, your customers have already bought something, their credit card is in the system, and your next sale is just a couple of clicks away.

Utilise Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) Sales

Black Friday might be over, but the savings continue with Cyber Monday.

Retailers launch Cyber Monday deals to entice shoppers to explore online and focus on electronics.

Use this opportunity to revamp your offers and attract customers with fresh discounts. Make the most of Cyber Monday to capture additional sales and keep the momentum going!

Usually, Cyber Monday discounts are smaller and different categories of products. Offer something new over the weekend or Cyber Monday to get a few more sales in the door! 

After-Black Friday sales

And the sales continue!

The best customers are the ones who make repeat purchases. After a customer has bought your products, wait a few days and offer some upsells or suggest other products that complement them.

Think of combining:

• Clothes with accessories
• Courses with a coaching upsell
• Vacations with a car rental
• Electronics with complimentary items

Another option is to finish Black Friday and have a plan to launch your holiday season sales one week later

Go Against the Flow: Anti-Black Friday

Going against the flow and above the clutter of Black Friday.

Whether you don’t like consumerism or want to make an impactful campaign when everyone will be focused on sales, there are great ways to offer alternatives:

• Anti-consumerism
• Go sustainable/green
• Offer for a good cause instead of buying

Here are some great anti-Black Friday ideas here and here.

Social Media Marketing Ideas for Black Friday

Never underestimate the power of social media marketing.

Social media can create anticipation by publishing posts announcing upcoming special offers on your accounts (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn) well in advance. You can also promote your offers as they happen.

Run a Social Media Contest

Run a social media contest to inform your audience about your offers.

A pre-Black Friday giveaway will increase your profile’s engagement and bring new followers to show your offers.

Be sure to use nicely designed banners and instill the “spirit” of Black Friday so they know you will announce your offers soon.

You can also share gift cards with every participant in the contest.

# Don’t forget to use the right hashtags!

Use influencers

Search for and find influencers with whom to collaborate. Ask them to share your offers through a sponsorship or affiliate deal.

Influencers can create stories and posts, pose with your products, or share your marketing material and gift guides with your products.

Work with micro-influencers

Big influencers are expensive and probably not the best choice for your niche audience. Instead, find and work with micro-influencers who are local or already talk about your products.

For example, if you sell sports equipment, talk with popular local athletes, football players, gymnasts, or even school teams.

Sponsor their posts or work with them to create videos around your products.

Use Design & Video

Visuals matter a lot, especially when it comes to social media.

A few weeks before the offers, you can ask your creative team or agency to change the design of your posts, profile pictures, and banners to reflect the Black Friday colors.

This is a strong signal to your followers to expect the offers.

Then, match those designs with your offer banners.

Unique, eye-catching creatives will also attract more people. Do not just use black banners. Use contrast and try video content on stories & posts to attract more attention.

Sell Directly on Social Media

Some social media platforms allow you to sell directly to your followers.

Instagram shopping and TikTok shopping might be the most popular platforms for social selling. 

While social shopping works better for Asian audiences, there are opportunities to sell to Western audiences.

Try to launch your social shop on Black Friday to boost your sales

Email Marketing Ideas for Black Friday

As research shows, email marketing is a very powerful strategy. It has a huge positive impact on the revenue of eCommerce business owners who use a multi-vendor eCommerce platform, especially during the holiday season.

The fact that 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once a month shows that email marketing is an excellent choice to increase your online school profits.

Start working on your Black Friday email marketing campaign at least two weeks before the big day.

Decide what you want to focus on: 

• a new course launch, 
• inform recipients about offers, and invite them to check them out, 
• promote specific products to a closed customer group or 
• offer early-bird access, etc.

Before you hit the send button, personalize your emails and subject lines. Use popular keywords and phrases that will catch the attention, such as ‘Black Friday,’ ‘Cyber Monday,’ ‘Holiday,’ ‘Free,’ ‘Don’t Miss Out, ‘Save,’ and ‘Now.’ 

This should help attract more people to your website and increase your conversion rate.

Grow Your Email List Early

Encourage site visitors to opt-in to your email list to keep up with your course launches and updates. 

If you don’t have one yet, make sure you create your own email list of useful contacts.

Don’t wait until the last minute. Create website banners or opt-in forms in-store to collect emails.

Let your customers know about upcoming offers and email-specific offers.

Abandoned Cart Emails

Before you launch any campaign, be sure you have set up cart abandonment emails. Abandon cart rates can reach up to 70%, and if you can re-engage a percentage of those, you can increase revenues significantly.

Abandon carts remind your customers to finalize the order or give an extra incentive. 

That might be an additional discount, a reminder that the discount is expiring, or another reason to return.

Set Up Email Marketing Funnel for Black Friday

Another marketing idea for Black Friday is creating an email funnel specific to warm your audience.

Start at least a week earlier, even up to a month in advance, warming up your audience, preparing them for the offer, and increasing the email cadence on the week of the offers.

Download our email templates for Black Friday here.

Email Exclusive Offers

An exclusive offer to your email audience can help grow your email list and increase the open rates of your emails.

Encourage your visitors to sign up to your email list for an additional 10% discount for Black Friday.

Sneak Peeks at Discounts

This is one of my favorite warm-up email marketing ideas. Show a small sneak peek into your offers.

Here’s what you can do:

• Announce the days of the discounts
• Show some of the products that will be off
• Share products for wish-listing
• Show a half-covered product or discount

A little mystery can intrigue your customers and create anticipation, but the trick here is to give out a tiny bit of information, enough to excite but not enough to show the full picture.

Black Friday Marketing Ideas for Online Stores

Some marketing ideas work much better for online stores than brick-and-mortar stores. We have collected the best Black Friday marketing ideas for selling online, especially if you are selling digital products.

Send Digital or Tangible Gifts

We all love to feel special and have access to staff that other people don’t. 

For your most frequent buyers, give something extra to keep them happy:

• create special discounts, 
• early access to membership content or even
• send physical products as gifts.

Some ideas for promo gifts are merchandise with your branding, a book you have written, or an activity book. It’s a great way to express gratitude and boost your relationship with loyal customers, and it will also surprise them!

As a digital-first business, sending a physical gift is a big surprise and a great way to connect with customers.

Send Out Digital Coupons

Coupons are one of the best promotional tools you can use to increase your course sales. And they are great at creating a sense of urgency because they have an expiration date.

Share digital coupons through your social media, affiliates, influencers, or email list to get people back to your store for Black Friday.

Optimize Your Homepage/Product Page

It is essential to instill the spirit of Black Friday during the offer period. Many businesses even redesign or change their websites for the occasion.

Focus on your brand colors, add powerful CTAs, and use pop-ups wherever appropriate. Don’t overdo it, or your website will look tacky and salesy.

Your product pages should clearly show the discount and its value to the customer, e.g., “Save up to $500.”

If you want to sell online courses, LearnWorlds comes with the Site Flavors functionality to change your entire online school into a Black Friday theme for a short-term period. 

You can turn back to your original theme instantly.

Use Referral Marketing

If you are already selling, why not sell some more? This is one of the best days to launch a referral program and get even more people to discover your online courses.

Referral or affiliate programs work best for online stores.

Introduce New Products or Pre-Sell

Black Friday offers the best opportunity to introduce a product. 

Whether it’s a new product line, feature, service, or an online course, a brand-new product will get more visibility on the year’s busiest day.

You don’t need to offer a big discount, but you can pre-sell it (if it’s launching soon) or showcase it alongside your offers.

Gather Reviews

Use Black Friday to get reviews from current and past learners while boosting sales. Email and announce on social media that people who leave a review will get an additional discount on their purchase. 

Put it smartly to make it enticing by saying something like “spend 5’ to get a 50% discount.”

Your customers will be happier than ever for getting a product at a discount, it’s an excellent chance to improve your ratings by asking for reviews from happy customers

Optimize Your Page for SEO

Many people look for Black Friday offers through Google. Add your offer as text on your home page or create new pages showcasing your offers.

A dedicated landing page for Black Friday with all the offers (with category filters) will help you appear on Google Searches.

You can also write a blog post announcing your offer a few weeks before. This will get your article indexed. 

Remember to update the article with the complete details when your offer starts.

This way, your pages will rank for Black Friday search terms, and you will receive additional traffic that day.

Use a ChatBot

Black Friday is all about impulse purchases, and you need to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible.

Having a ChatBot available at online stores is one of the best ways to address last-minute customer questions and worries.

It also signals excellent customer support and gives more confidence to customers about return or refund policies.

Here at LearnWorlds, we suggest Tawk.to as the best option for a ChatBot. It’s free and integrates well with our LMS software!

Use Retargeting

Another advantage of online businesses is the capability to directly target their core audiences in a measurable way directly.

You can create remarketing campaigns targeting previous visitors and announcing your offers if you have enough traffic.

This could be combined with abandoned cart audiences or simply showing the discounts on specific products.

Offer Free Shipping

Shipping tends to be a big cost for both consumers and businesses alike. Adding free shipping to orders over a specific amount of products can be a great addition to any offer.

Think of messages like this: “30% off all products plus Free Shipping for purchases above $200. Only for Black Friday orders.”.

Prepare for High-Traffic

One major problem of e-commerce stores is website crashes on days with high traffic.

If you expect higher traffic than usual, ensure your e-shop can handle it.

If you use e-commerce software like Shopify or Wix or a cloud platform like LearnWorlds for online courses, you won’t have any issues.

However, if you have a cheap server package, self-hosted solutions like WordPress might run into issues.

Multiple Payment Options

Credit or debit cards are one of many options in the market.

Offering different payment options is essential for a worldwide audience. Consider addressing your audience by adding more options like:

• Mastercard support
• PayPal payments
• Installments / After-pay / Klarna
• Subscription options (for services or digital products)
• Local payments
• Bank transfers/wire transfers (for more expensive products)

Lucky Draw or Random Discounts

Sometimes, gamifying payments is an excellent way to keep your audience engaged.

Spin-to-win example by Privy.com

Spin-to-win pop-ups, for example, are a great way to engage your audience and get them coming back for more. Have different levels of discounts and allow them to re-spin every day.

This way, your visitors will return daily and increase your purchases.

Add FAQs

Reduce the uncertainty and support costs by pre-answering the most common questions.

Whether it’s costs, returns, refunds, shipping, or any other common question. 

Add the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) on your products’ landing pages to reduce the questions to your support team.

This will also reduce the time your customers need for an answer and get them one step closer to purchasing!

Black Friday Marketing Ideas for Online Courses

Digital products like online courses are great for discount seasons like Black Friday as the marginal cost of producing and delivering them is nearly zero.

Of course, it’s a good idea to discount your older courses and keep your new ones as premium offerings.

Sell Course Bundles

Prepare a bundle offer with three courses sold at the price of two, e.g., “2+1 free” or “3+2 free,” etc. depending on how many courses you have available and can promote.

Offering course bundles is a win-win: you get to upsell, and customers buy at a better price. This trick will increase the average order value and is a good alternative to huge price drops.

Group similar products together so that your students will get a complete bundle. For example, if you are offering cooking courses, think of a “Complete Baking Course Bundle” where you group all your recipes on baking together.

Offer a Free Course

Another promotional idea is offering a free mini-course during the sales period. This can be either a complete mini-course or a course teaser. Use SEO and paid ads to get as much visibility as possible to make the most of this offer.

Free courses are a great way to introduce your work to your audience without asking for any commitment, capture leads, build excitement for upcoming courses, and upsell later on! 

Don’t forget that Christmas and Hanukkah are just on the way

Friends & Family Offers

Create a “plus one” offer, where your customers can buy a course and get a license to share with a friend or a family member.

That could be a couple’s course, a parent-child license, or a gift to their best friend.

You will be offering them a way to connect with their loved ones, and it’s a way for you to increase the visibility of your offering.

Add Value Instead of a Discount

You can avoid discounts by adding more value to your offering.

Consider offering a one-to-one coaching or private workshop to your online courses. Adding premium value allows you to avoid discounting and giving an extra incentive to your customers.

Offer a Physical Gift

Surprise your customers by offering a physical gift related to your course. Paid it correctly, and you can get a loyal customer for a lifetime:

• Art courses paired with art supplies
• Wine sommelier course with fine wines
• Fitness courses with fitness equipment

The options are plenty, and the choice is yours.

Black Friday Marketing Ideas for Software Companies

When you think of Black Friday, you imagine the huge queues in the malls and e-commerce discounts on consumer products.

But big and small software companies have joined the Black Friday craze over the past few years.

Consider these marketing ideas for your SaaS Black Friday offer:

Extra Licenses/Users/Credits

Consider offering additional licenses, users, or credits for Black Friday. 

It’s cheaper for a software company to give more usage-based offers than discounts on price.

This way, you get more product usage and avoid impacting your bottom line with huge discounts.

Bundle Up With Other Software

Many software companies collaborate to offer a co-offer, where your product is being bundled up with another.

Decide a collaborative marketing campaign and a common price for both products.

Gift Another Software

For premium software, consider offering a cheaper complimentary product for free.

Consider which one of your integrations your customers are mostly using, and offer a license to that software in collaboration with them.

Introduce New Features

Are you launching a new feature before Black Friday?

Delaying the launch and offering the feature as an added value to your audience might be a good idea. 

If the feature was intended to be sold as an add-on, it’s an excellent opportunity to get new users to upgrade from a free to a premium version with a free add-on.

Ready to Get Started With Your Black Friday Planning?

Take time to check out your inventory of products, pick the ones that need a boost or already sell well, and get them out to the public. 

Whether you create a new course or offer one as a giveaway, there are many Black Friday marketing strategies to try out, and the choice is yours.

Besides, you know your customers better than anyone else. 

Deep dive into your shop’s analytics to make data-driven decisions. Choose the marketing strategy that best serves your learners’ needs while increasing their chances of responding to your offers.

Start working on your Black Friday deals today, and don’t forget about Cyber Monday, either!

Further reading you might find interesting:

• How to Create and Sell Profitable Online Courses: Step-by-Step Guide
• How Much Money Can You Make Selling Online Courses?
• Starting an Online Course Business from Scratch
• Sell Digital Downloads: The Complete Guide
• 18 Amazing Outline Templates to Use in Course Design [3 Downloadables]
• How to Start an Online School
• SCORM 101: The Definitive Guide to Choose a SCORM-Compliant LMS

The post 55 Black Friday Marketing Ideas to Skyrocket Sales in 2024 appeared first on LearnWorlds.

Since Black Friday is just one breath away from the holiday season—it’s high time you put those discounted price tags out and start promoting and selling online courses to new customers.

Never done it before?

Don’t worry; Black Friday marketing isn’t substantially different from what you usually do. You just need to spice things up a bit. We’re here to help you update your sales page to make it eye-catching, super-attractive, and irresistible!

In this blog post, we have collected 11 great Black Friday landing page examples to inspire you and help you promote your online courses by revamping your landing page design (and messaging).

11 Successful Black Friday Landing Page Examples To Inspire You

Let’s see some examples that will inspire you to build an irresistible landing page for an unstoppable Black Friday weekend and beyond!

#1 Tony Robbins

Industry: Life Coaching
Style: Inspirational/Motivational

Through his 2022 holiday marketing campaign, Tony Robbins celebrates the beginning of the holiday season with a simple, elegant, yet powerful image on the hero section of his landing page. For those who need that extra push, Tony helps them figure out how to start by offering a quiz. Instead of letting visitors leave the site right away, he gives them a reason to stay a little longer, increasing their odds of buying.

 

Tony focuses a lot on the messaging of his offering, through which it’s clear that he wants to empower people. He encourages site visitors to explore the solutions he offers to help them “master every area of their lives.”

The product pages are also super easy to navigate. Each offering leads to a dedicated landing page with more information, bold messaging, and attractive visuals.

#2 Passion for Savings

Industry: Money Management
Style: Product Listing/Blog

Passion for Savings is a website that features coupons and online deals and shares money-saving tips. For its Black Friday campaign, the company featured a hero image showing that the sales season is officially here. A CTA button takes people directly to the main page of interest, intending to lead them to check out the Black Friday deals.

Below the main hero section, you can see a section divider and a clear headline directing site visitors to two other pages—Best Black Friday Deals and Black Friday Alerts. This does so without disturbing the flow of the copy or impeding other critical elements on the page.

The Black Friday Alerts are a great lead magnet for those who want to opt-in to stay up to date with upcoming deals. It’s also practical because it doesn’t ask people for many details – just their first name and email address.

Overall, this landing page is clean and has lots of white space, giving it a proper structure.

#3 EngageBay

Industry: Email Marketing Software
Style: Playful

EngageBay has created a dedicated landing page to promote its big holiday sale, including all significant upcoming holidays (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas). The company decided to combine these holidays in the same campaign. To spice things up, it created its version of holiday sales, giving a unified headline, “Holidays SaaS Deals 2024.”

The main section of the landing page immediately presents the upcoming offering, ‘40% OFF Lifetime’, using bold letters. Visitors are then prompted to provide only their email address to be notified as soon as the offer goes live. This is an excellent and direct example of creating anticipation for potential customers.

An effective marketing strategy always involves talking directly to the target audience and highlighting the benefits without much fanfare (Market better. Sell faster. Support smarter).

#4 RafflePress

Industry: Website Design, WordPress plugins
Style: Informative

RafflePress, a WordPress plugin for building contests and giveaways, offers an excellent example of a giveaway that can be used in any promotional campaign.

The company creates a special offer banner with a countdown timer and quickly describes the sale. At this point, it is important to make it as easy as possible for the site visitor to access the sale and learn how to claim their coupon, and RafflePress does it well.

Apart from that, RafflePress’s Black Friday 2022 deal offered 50 percent off all its plans, which is more visible through its pricing page. From there, you can tell that prices have dropped, offering potential customers the limited LIFETIME opportunity to join.

#5 HandleTheHeat

Industry: Cooking/Baking
Style: Bold, Enticing

Chef and baking master Tessa Arias is behind HandleTheHeat, a successful baking business specializing in desserts and cookie making. In 2021, to take full advantage of the Black Friday season, Tessa built a landing page and promoted her course as part of a discounted bundle.

The course bundle included a hard copy handbook with her baking recipes, a baking class, and a Christmas cookies ebook—all three in one. This discount saved over 50% off the regular price and presented itself as a winning opportunity. To create a sense of urgency, it’s mentioned that this is a limited-time offer.

On the homepage, Tessa encouraged people to sign up for her email list by offering a guide as a free product. This free cookie customization chart is a great incentive to sign up.

Apart from the Black Friday deal, Tessa knew she had more chances to increase those conversion rates by encouraging people to become subscribers first.

After all, email marketing works! You can learn more about it here.

#6 I Create Art

Industry: Online art school
Style: Playful, Educational

I Create Art is an online art school for kids and adults who like to celebrate the Christmas holidays. This becomes obvious as you visit their landing page. For their Black Friday marketing campaign in 2020, they featured their course art boxes and promoted them as holiday gifts.

They also offered theme and bundle boxes, single-box courses, holiday theme boxes, and a special discount on their subscription plans.

The countdown timer to Christmas is the first thing you notice when you land on the page. The Black Friday and Cyber Month deal appears further down the page, but it still stands out compared to other elements, and it’s highlighted with bright colors.

The color combination of red, green, yellow, and black creates playful Christmas-y vibes that get the site visitors in the mood for holidays. It prepares them to step back, unwind, and start investing their money in the best possible way. Besides, art education is all about unleashing your creativity and having fun, which go well with the holiday spirit.

To purchase the courses, site visitors need to enroll in the school and then place their order. This explains why the main call-to-action button remains the “Create Account” button at the top right corner of the homepage.

#7 The School of Calisthenics

Industry: Online fitness coaching
Style: Bold, Inspirational

The School of Calisthenics has built a spot-on landing page that provides the information its target audience needs. 

Their web page is clean, with all the page elements arranged to make the copy easy to read. Each section has its own purpose, giving the page a balanced structure and improving the overall user experience.

In 2021, The School of Calisthenics nailed the page design and effectively communicated the Black Friday special offer.

The clear and bold CTA led prospective customers to a dedicated Black Friday page with a countdown timer and an exclusive 50% off sale.

In addition to training programs, potential customers could enroll in the school and get a membership at half the original price.

The School of Calisthenics focused on FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) with phrases like “Don’t Miss Out” and listed all the subscription benefits, encouraging people to sign up for their courses.

They also explained straightforwardly how people could claim the discount using the Black Friday code at the checkout.

#8 Canine Principles

Industry: Online school for dog training
Style: Informational

Canine Principles is another excellent landing page example that shows how you can entice your site visitors to buy during the holiday season. 

For their Black Friday sale, they offered coupons with 50% and 30% discounts, depending on the type of course. They have smartly named the coupons “Blackdog”—an apparent reference to Black Friday that works well with the topic of the courses.

Apart from the discount, the school also offered a free course (3 to choose from), incentivizing more people to sign up.

What we loved about Canine Principles is that the site also includes customer testimonials and features their social media channels and online community. This is an excellent addition to the kind of services they offer.

#9 ThemeForest

Industry: Web design, CMS
Style: Bold, attention-grabbing

ThemeForest performed a … triple attack, announcing what they call “their biggest cyber week sale ever,” with discounts reaching 60%. The sales are communicated in three sections on the page: the upper right, middle, and bottom. 

The main banner in the middle of the page certainly manages to catch the reader’s eye. It is colorful and modern, eluding a sense of excitement without being one bit tacky. To bring the percentage of the sales to our attention, ThemeForest uses a hue of peach that hovers between bold and pastel.

#10 Christie’s Education

Industry: Online learning, Art
Style: Sophisticated, discreet

Christie’s Education offers accredited on-site and online courses in Art history and the Art market. Last year, their Black Friday offer was a $800 discount on self-directed online certificate courses.

The offer is communicated through an elegant, deep-blue banner with a minimalistic design. Instead of being the prominent message, it is discreetly mentioned on the bottom. 

What we love about this offer is how it creates anticipation since it was communicated about two weeks before Black Friday. We can’t help but love its simplicity, which conveys that the quality of the courses, rather than the reduced price, remains their biggest selling point.

#11 Target

Industry: Retailer
Style: Bold, simple

Target announced its 2022 Black Friday sale with a bold black banner. The banner initially announces that the deals are here but does not provide specific information. 

Scrolling down, we see that different categories offer different discounts, either as a percentage of the original price or an amount taken off. We like this approach of offering different discount options as it reinforces the feeling that “there’re plenty of options here.”

We also can’t help but love the simple, elegant design that Target has chosen.

Key Elements of a Black Friday Landing Page

The eCommerce market is on fire every year on Black Friday, warming up consumers for the upcoming holiday sales! 

You’ve got to grab this opportunity and create an effective Black Friday landing page that stands out and encourages people to interact with you. The page copy and website design should lead people to action that aligns with your goals—opting into your newsletter, reaching out to you directly, or buying your course (the ultimate goal).

Here’s How to Sell Your Courses on Your Shopify Store

These are the key elements you need to focus on when building your own landing page to optimize conversions:

• Bold headings
• Powerful copy
• Strong CTAs
• An FAQ section
• Social proof (Case Studies/Testimonials)
• Special offer (e.g. Course Bundles)
• Countdown timer
• Opt-in form

These elements should help you create a landing page that stands out and clearly explains to potential customers what they can get from this year’s online Black Friday sales. Play around to create a landing page template you can tweak and resume yearly.

With LearnWorlds, you don’t need a separate landing page builder to create fantastic landing pages.

LearnWorlds Online School Site Builder enables you to build a landing page, sales page, or product page within a few minutes and with zero coding. Choose from a variety of ready-made templates and customize your landing page with countdown timers, pop-ups, special offers, testimonials, animations, fonts, and more!

Ready to Build a High-Converting Black Friday Landing Page?

The key to an effective digital marketing strategy for Black Friday is to build a landing page that will present your courses smartly while offering a pleasant user experience. 

Paying attention to all the elements outlined above will help you showcase your special course bundle or offer and create a high-quality, amazing landing page that converts.

So, have you prepared your Black Friday deals yet?

Get your free 30-day trial with LearnWorlds today and create your Black Friday deals on online courses with our state-of-the-art platform!

P.S.: Don’t forget to prepare for the other important dates between Black Friday & Cyber Monday. Small Business Saturday is the equivalent of a “Small Business Black Friday Sales” and then get ready for the holiday season for a post-Black Friday sales period:

Dec. 25 – Jan. 2: Hanukkah
Dec. 21: Super Saturday
Dec. 24: Christmas Eve
Dec. 25: Christmas Day
Dec. 26: Boxing Day
Dec. 31: New Year’s Eve

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why do we have black Friday sales?

Thanksgiving in the U.S. is considered the first day of the Holiday shopping season. Many employees take a long weekend off starting on Thanksgiving and take the opportunity to do their holiday shopping. Retailers started competing on opening hours and discounts over the Friday after Thanksgiving, which was eventually named Black Friday.

When will Black Friday sales start?

Black Friday for 2024 is on the 29th of November.

How long do black Friday sales last?

Some offer discounts throughout November, while others offer them only on Black Friday and the follow-up weekend, sometimes including Cyber Monday.

Further reading you might find interesting:

• How to Create and Sell Profitable Online Courses: Step-by-Step Guide
• How Much Money Can You Make Selling Online Courses?
• Starting an Online Course Business from Scratch
• Sell Digital Downloads: The Complete Guide
• How to Create a Course Outline [With Templates]
• How to Start an Online School + Infographic
• SCORM 101: The Definitive Guide to Choose a SCORM-Compliant LMS

The post 11 Successful Black Friday Landing Page Examples To Inspire You appeared first on LearnWorlds.

How does affiliate marketing for online academies work? It’s really simple: you get a unique affiliate link from the academy website or course page you want to promote and attract clicks to it. When someone buys a course through your link, you earn a portion of the revenue. It’s a win-win situation where the academy gains a new student, and you are rewarded for your referral efforts.

Sounds easy right? That’s because it is. With advanced affiliate management systems like the one built directly into LearnWorlds, the process becomes even more streamlined. The Affiliate Management feature is available for any LearnWorlds school with a Pro Trainer plan or higher, making it easy to automate and manage your affiliate marketing efforts efficiently.

What you need is the right strategies and a solid plan to turn affiliate marketing into a profitable and sustainable passive income stream, all while helping others discover valuable educational resources.

Stay put as we go over key considerations, strategies, and tips to help you make the most of affiliate marketing for e-learning.

How Affiliate Marketing Works?

As explained earlier, in affiliate marketing, you promote a company’s product through a unique affiliate link. When someone clicks through your link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission. This is how affiliate marketing programs function, offering a simple yet effective way to generate affiliate income.

To find the best fit for your marketing efforts, you can start researching the best affiliate programs, like the Amazon affiliate program or ShareASale. Each program has different commission rates and payout structures, so you need to choose one that aligns with your audience and business goals.

These are The 25 Top High-Paying Affiliate Networks and Programs

Different Types of Affiliate Marketing

Pat Flynn, a well-known expert in the field of affiliate marketing, highlights three primary types of affiliate marketing (2009) that can help you understand the different ways to earn income as an affiliate.

Each type varies in terms of effort, involvement, and potential reward.

1. Unattached Affiliate Marketing

In unattached affiliate marketing, you have no direct connection to the product or service you’re promoting. As an affiliate, you might use pay-per-click (PPC) ads or other forms of online marketing to drive traffic to your affiliate links.

This type requires minimal involvement but can be challenging to generate trust and high conversions since you are not personally endorsing the product.

2. Related Affiliate Marketing

Related affiliate marketing involves promoting products or services that are relevant to your content but aren’t something you’ve personally used.

For example, if you have a blog focused on digital marketing, you might promote marketing tools or e-commerce platforms that align with your content but aren’t products you’ve personally tried.

This type of affiliate marketing strikes a balance between involvement and authenticity, as you’re still providing value to your audience with relevant recommendations.

3. Involved Affiliate Marketing

This is the approach Pat Flynn strongly advocates for. Involved affiliate marketing is where you promote products or services you have used personally and can genuinely vouch for.

This method often involves creating in-depth product reviews, tutorials, or case studies that highlight your experience. By sharing your thoughts, you build trust with your audience, which often leads to higher conversion rates and stronger affiliate sales.

Understanding these types of affiliate marketing can help you choose the best approach and affiliate marketing strategy when promoting e-learning products like online courses.

Promote Online Courses as a Beginner Affiliate Marketer

Now, let’s say that you have agreed to promote an online academy. How do you go about launching effective affiliate marketing campaigns? Luckily, there are simple ways to ensure that you maximize exposure and profits.

Here are some proven-to-work strategies to get affiliate commissions:

Strategy #1: Create Blog Content

Building high-quality content is crucial for driving traffic and generating affiliate sales. If you already are a blogger, you can use different types of content, such as product reviews, comparison guides, how-to articles, personal case studies, or even in-depth tutorial videos that give details about the course.

These forms of affiliate content can provide immense value to your target audience while creating awareness of the course you are promoting.

Check out 30 Marketing Ideas to Promote an Online Course

Strategy #2: Try Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a powerful tool in digital marketing. If you know people with a big following on platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, X, or Instagram, reach out to them and discuss the possibility of forming a partnership with them and promoting your affiliate offers to their audience.

By collaborating with famous personalities and popular brands while sharing your experiences, you will have a bigger chance of boosting your affiliate income.

Strategy #3: Take Advantage of Social Media

Don’t hesitate to share your affiliate links to your own social media profiles, groups, or pages. If you have a YouTube channel, that’s even better.

As long as you continue to provide value and motivation for people to sign up, more and more will come and gradually start clicking on your links. Your audience will be looking out for those promotions in their social media feeds.

Strategy #4: Build an Email List

A strong email list is a valuable asset for any affiliate partner. By using email marketing effectively, you can send targeted promotions and updates to your subscribers.

Ensure you have an opt-in form on your WordPress site to capture your site visitors’ emails and gradually work to build a connection with your audience. In your emails, make sure to offer content that shows your affiliate link in a strategic position as well.

Strategy #5: Offer Lead Magnets

Give your audience free resources like guides, checklists, e-books, worksheets, or templates that include your affiliate link. Use these lead magnets to encourage sign-ups for your email newsletter, where you can further promote the courses.

Strategy #6: Host Free Webinars

Webinars are a great tool to increase product awareness. To make them work though these live sessions should be informative and offer solutions to problems through the course you are promoting.

You can choose to collaborate with the course owner in a joint webinar as well, to make a bigger impact and answer key questions potential learners may have related to the course.

Strategy #7: Host or Guest a Podcast

Podcasts offer excellent exposure for your promoted products. Whether you are hosting or guesting, be prepared to discuss the product in depth. If you are running your own podcast though, consider inviting the academy owner or course creator to share insights and speak about their work.

Strategy #8: Capitalize on Seasonal Offers

Seasonal offers like Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year’s are the best times of the year to introduce a new product to your audience. People go on a buying frenzy on those dates and the vendors offer great discounts on digital products.

Work with the academy owner that you are affiliated with, and come up with a 12-month promotional calendar that aligns with the academy’s sales events. You can also agree to offer coupons to encourage more members of your audience to purchase.

Strategy #9: Explore Co-marketing Campaigns

Explore co-branded advertising, cross-promotion, guest posting, and other collaborative marketing efforts with the academy owner. Both parties can benefit from gaining exposure to each other’s audiences.

Strategy #10: Invest in Relationship Marketing

Building long-lasting relationships with customers, partners, or prospects in your professional network can help you increase your sales and the possibility of them getting interested in the product you are promoting.

Relationship marketing is all about bringing the product and brand you represent to the forefront and offering a customer experience that is based on mutual trust, recurring customer engagement, and respect toward the customer.

The most effective way to cultivate a genuine connection with your audience is by creating an online community. Learn how to build yours here.

Strategy #11: Consider Dropshipping

Online courses are digital products which means there is a dropshipping option for you right? Well, that’s not entirely true. Combining dropshipping with affiliate marketing is another equally effective strategy you can try out.

By integrating dropshipping into your affiliate marketing business, you can offer physical products alongside the online courses you promote, creating multiple streams of affiliate income.

Best Tips for Effective Affiliate Marketing

To ensure your promotional efforts yield positive results, your strategies must be well-aligned with your audience’s needs and interests.

Here are some key tips to help you succeed in your affiliate marketing campaigns:

• Choose Relevant Courses: Promote courses that are closely related to your audience’s interests and the content you create. This relevance will increase engagement and conversions.
• Select Products You Believe In: Only promote products that you have personally used and trust. Your genuine enthusiasm and firsthand experience will resonate with your audience.
• Provide Value, Not a Hard Sell: Focus on creating content that adds value rather than pushing a hard sell. Emphasize the benefits and how the products or courses can address your audience’s needs.
• Be Transparent About Affiliate Links: Clearly disclose when your content includes affiliate links. Inform your readers that you may receive a commission if they make a purchase through your links. This practice maintains ethical standards and builds trust with your audience.
• Optimize for Search Engines: Research relevant keywords and incorporate them into your guides and reviews. This will improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts boosting your content’s visibility in search engine results and attracting a more targeted audience.
• Monitor and Adjust Your Strategies: Regularly review the performance of your practices using marketing tools like Google Analytics looking into metrics like traffic, click-through rates, and conversions. WordPress plugins can also help manage and optimize your links, allowing you to check what works best, and adjusting your approach accordingly.

If you’re affiliated with a LearnWorlds academy, you can use the comprehensive Affiliate Management Dashboard to track your performance and further optimize your campaigns.

Keep on reading to learn more about this tool and make the most of it.

How to Start Promoting a LearnWorlds Academy

The first step in this journey is to choose your favorite LearnWorlds academies you want to partner with. Then approach them to express your interest in working with them as an affiliate, and encourage them to start using the LearnWorlds Affiliate Management.

As an affiliate, you will need to learn how to use the Affiliate Dashboard. This should help you understand what it can do for you and the affiliated academy.

The following screenshots will give you an insight into the process of becoming an affiliate with a LearnWorlds academy step-by-step:

Step 1: Access the Affiliate Dashboard

Visit our affiliate page to register and log in to your affiliate dashboard. Write down the URL of the academy website you want to promote followed by /affiliate-registration.

For example – https://www.schoolname.com/affiliate-registration. When you land on this page, this is what you will see:

Once you register, you automatically become a LearnWorlds user. Then, you will be asked again to join the affiliate program.

As an affiliate partner, you will be able to sign in each time from this page.

If you are already an academy user, you need to visit the same site to join the program or you can ask the academy owner to add you manually. Once you are in, you will be redirected to your affiliate dashboard.

There is also the option to visit this dashboard directly from the home page as shown below.

Step 2: Set up Your Payment Method & View Your Earnings

From the Affiliate Dashboard, you will be able to see a quick overview of your affiliate performance, your sales, the amount due to be paid, payments received, and more.

While you are there, click on the ‘Set payment method’ option under Actions to choose your preferred payment method option and hit ‘Save’.

Step 3: Create Your Affiliate Links

To create your affiliate links, click on the ‘Affiliate Links’ under the Affiliate Management list.

From there, simply insert a URL to generate an affiliate link for any page of the affiliate website.

You will need to add the public URL of the promoted page into the designated field. You can even get affiliate links for specific product pages chosen by the academy owner, as shown below.

If you want, you can also choose to create affiliate links with coupons. Ask the academy owner for the coupon code to offer your audience a discount.

Here’s how your affiliate links will look like from inside the dashboard:

For more information on how to use the affiliate dashboard check out this Guide for School Affiliates. It should give you all the information you need to navigate through and use the affiliate dashboard effectively.

Of course, our support team is always here to help you should you have any questions about promoting LearnWorlds schools as an affiliate.

Ready to Make Money Online Promoting eLearning Products?

To become a successful affiliate in online education, there is no doubt you will need a well-thought-out affiliate marketing strategy.

Whether you are new to affiliate marketing or looking to optimize your current strategies, understanding the basics and using the right tools can lead you to success. Explore different types of affiliate marketing, join the best affiliate programs, and continuously refine your approach to maximize your monetization potential.

It doesn’t matter if you are running a startup or already have an established online business, being upfront with your audience and maintaining transparency will always lead to better results.

Find out what LearnWorlds can do for you. Get your free trial today!

FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions

Question #1: What are the best affiliate programs for beginners?

Some of the best affiliate programs for beginners include the Amazon affiliate program, ShareASale, and Shopify’s affiliate program. But if you want to become an eLearning affiliate you can start earning commissions by joining LearnWorlds’ Affiliate Program.

Question #2: How do I optimize my affiliate marketing content?

Focus on creating high-quality, SEO-optimized content. Research keywords, use them strategically in your content, and ensure your website is optimized for search engine visibility.

Question #3: What is the typical payout structure for affiliate commissions?

Payout structures vary depending on the affiliate program. Most programs pay commissions based on sales generated through your links, with rates ranging from 4% to 10% or more.

Question #4: How can I improve my conversion rate?

To improve your conversion rate, focus on targeting the right audience, optimizing your content, and providing clear, persuasive calls to action (CTAs). Regularly analyze your metrics to refine your strategies.

Question #5: What types of affiliate marketing are most effective?

Content marketing, PPC campaigns, and email marketing are among the most effective types of affiliate marketing. Choose the approach that best aligns with your audience and business goals.

The post How to Make Money as an Affiliate for eLearning Products appeared first on LearnWorlds.

In this guide, we’ll share ten proven ways to build and nurture a community around your online courses. If you’re just starting out or looking to revitalize an existing community, these strategies will help you create a space where your learners can connect, engage, and grow together easily and quickly.

So, let’s dive in and explore how you can turn your course into a vibrant ecosystem of learning and collaboration.

1. Leverage Social Media Platforms

When it comes to community building, social media platforms are your secret weapon. They’re where your potential learners are already hanging out, making them perfect for extending your course’s reach and fostering connections.
Here’s how you can successfully use different platforms:

Facebook Groups:

Facebook Groups are incredibly effective for creating a sense of community. The familiar interface makes it easy for members to participate, and the ability to create private groups ensures a safe space for course-specific discussions.

LinkedIn:

For professional development courses, LinkedIn is the go-to platform. It’s great for sharing industry insights, hosting thoughtful discussions, and helping learners expand their professional networks.

Twitter (formerly known as X):

X’s fast-paced nature makes it perfect for quick updates, sharing bite-sized learning tips (tweets), and engaging in real-time conversations. If you already have a community on X, you can use hashtags related to your course topics to increase visibility and attract new community members.

TikTok:

Don’t underestimate the power of short-form video content. I’ve seen course creators use TikTok to share quick tips, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and even mini-lessons that drive interest in their full courses and communities.

To make the most of your efforts, you can also follow these best practices to engage your community members on social media:

• Be consistent: Regular posting keeps your community active and engaged.
• Encourage interaction: Ask questions, run polls, and prompt discussions.
• Showcase learner success: Share student testimonials and success stories to inspire others.
• Provide value: Share free tips and insights that complement your course content.
• Be authentic: Show your personality and build genuine connections with your community members.

Learn How to Promote Your Online Courses on Social Media

2. Choose the Right Community Platform

Selecting the right community platform is crucial for long-term success. While social media can be a great starting point, a dedicated community platform often provides more control and customization options.

There are different types of community platforms, but you should pick the one that suits your needs:

• Learning Management Systems with built-in community features (e.g., LearnWorlds)
• Standalone platforms (e.g., Circle, Mighty Networks)
• Forum software (e.g., Discourse)
• Membership site plugins (for WordPress-based courses)

While searching for a platform, you also need to look into many different parameters to make your decision.

Here are some key factors to consider:

Features: Look for platforms that offer discussion forums, member profiles, content organization, and moderation tools.

Pricing: Consider your budget and the platform’s pricing structure. Some charge per member, while others have tiered plans.

Scalability: Ensure the platform can grow with your community.

Integration capabilities: Check if the platform integrates with your course delivery system and other tools you use.

On top of these, a mobile-friendly platform is non-negotiable. Your learners should be able to engage with the community easily from their smartphones or tablets via a mobile app. Personally, I always test the mobile experience thoroughly before committing to a platform.

3. Create Engaging Content

Content is the lifeblood of any thriving community. It’s what draws people in, keeps them engaged, and provides ongoing value.

To create engaging content for course communities, you can try the following:

Curate relevant content: Make it a point to regularly share articles, videos, and resources that complement your course material. This not only provides additional value to learners but also sparks discussions and keeps the community active between course modules.

Use templates for consistent posting: Maintain a steady flow of content using templates for different types of posts. For example:

• Monday Motivation: Inspirational quotes or success stories
• Wednesday Workshop: Quick tips or mini-lessons
• Friday Feedback: Encourage members to share their weekly wins or challenges

This structure helps to stay organized and gives community members a sense of what to expect. Here’s an example of a weekly content calendar for your community:

Incorporate various content types: Offering a mix of content types keeps things interesting and caters to different learning preferences:

• Podcasts: Great for in-depth discussions or interviews with industry experts
• Video content: Perfect for visual demonstrations or quick tips
• Written content: Ideal for detailed explanations or step-by-step guides
• Infographics: Excellent for summarizing complex information

The goal here is to create content that encourages interaction and adds value to your learners’ experience beyond the core course material.

4. Foster a Sense of Belonging

Creating a sense of belonging is crucial for building a strong, engaged community. It’s what transforms a group of people into a cohesive unit with shared goals and experiences.

To do this, you will first need to create a welcoming environment in your community. First impressions matter, so put some extra effort into welcoming new members:

• Personalized welcome messages
• A “new member introduction” thread where people can introduce themselves
• A comprehensive “community guide” document that outlines norms, expectations, and how to get the most out of the community

While your course topic is already a common interest (that’s why your members joined in the first place), try to dig deeper. Establish common interests by encouraging members to share their specific goals, challenges, and experiences related to the course material.

This helps create smaller sub-groups within the larger community where members can connect on a more personal level.

Last but not least, develop regular initiatives to maintain community engagement and strengthen community bonds.

A few ideas you can implement include:

• Monthly challenges related to course goals
• Peer mentorship programs
• Virtual coffee chats for networking
• Collaborative projects that allow members to work together and showcase their skills

Fostering a sense of belonging is an ongoing process. It requires consistent effort and genuine care for your community members, with every interaction serving a purpose. This approach ensures that all efforts are optimized, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where the sentiment of ‘I belong here’ within the members of the community grows stronger over time.

5. Implement Effective Moderation

A healthy, thriving community requires effective moderation as it ensures that your community remains a safe, respectful, and productive space for all members.

Inside this space, moderators are truly the unsung heroes of community building. They are the ones who enforce community guidelines, facilitate discussions and keep them on track, welcome new members, and help them navigate the community. They are the ones who also identify and address potential conflicts while recognizing and encouraging positive contributions.

Well-communicated community guidelines are also of huge help. They help to set expectations for behavior and provide a reference point for moderation decisions. These guidelines should be easily accessible to members and may cover:

• Respectful communication
• Relevant content and discussions
• Intellectual property rights
• Privacy and confidentiality
• Consequences for guideline violations

You may also choose to use automation tools for moderation. While human moderators are irreplaceable, automation tools can significantly lighten the load.

These tools offer keyword filters to catch inappropriate content, spam detection algorithms, automated welcome messages for new members, and scheduled posts for regular community events or announcements.

The key is to find the right balance between automated and human moderation to maintain a personal touch while efficiently managing a growing community.

Read Effective Community Management: Best Practices for Success

6. Encourage Member Interaction

A community thrives on interaction. The more your members engage with each other, the stronger your community becomes. There are also a few things you can do to boost interaction:

Hosting regular chats or live events can create a sense of immediacy and shared experience:

• Q&A sessions where members can ask you questions directly
• Expert interviews with guest speakers
• Virtual coworking sessions where members can work on course-related projects together
• Celebration events to acknowledge member achievements

These events not only provide value but also create opportunities for real-time interaction among members. If you are not yet up for a live event, however, creating discussion threads can also spark great and engaging conversations:

• Weekly reflection threads where members share their progress
• Problem-solving threads where members can seek advice from peers
• “Share your work” threads for members to showcase their projects and get feedback

What’s important in this strategy is to seed these discussions with thought-provoking questions and actively participate in encouraging others to join in. Be careful, though; your role is to facilitate these interactions, not dominate them. You want to create an environment where members feel comfortable and excited to engage with each other.

7. Utilize Notifications Strategically

Notifications are a powerful tool for keeping your community engaged, but they’re a double-edged sword. Used wisely, they can drive engagement; used poorly, they can annoy members and lead to disengagement.

To keep members informed without overwhelming them, you need to find the right balance:

• Prioritize quality over quantity
• Segment notifications based on member preferences and activity
• Use a mix of email, in-app, and push notifications for different types of updates

On top of this, ensure that members have granular control over their notification settings. Let them choose which types of activities trigger notifications. Allow them to set their frequency preferences (e.g., immediate, daily digest, weekly summary), mute notifications for specific threads or topics, or even set “do not disturb” hours.

To drive engagement, use notification triggers for responses to a member’s post or comment, mentions or tags, newly posted content that is relevant to a member’s interests, upcoming events or deadlines, and achievements or milestones reached.

Notifications are all about pulling members back into the community when there’s something valuable for them to see or do. Every notification should provide clear value to the recipient.

8. Develop an Advocacy Program

An advocacy program can take your community to the next level by empowering your most engaged members to become ambassadors for your course and community.

Here’s how you can build an advocacy program:

• Identify and nurture community advocates: Look for members who consistently participate actively in discussions, help other members, share valuable insights, and embody the values of your community.
• Nurture potential advocates: Recognize their contributions publicly, offering them exclusive opportunities or content and seeking their input on community decisions.
• Create referral programs: Offer incentives for successful referrals (e.g., course discounts, exclusive content). Provide advocates with unique referral links or codes and create shareable content that advocates can easily distribute.
• Recognize and reward active members: Feature member spotlights, offer badges or titles for different levels of contribution, feature leaderboards to ignite friendly competition, and exclusive perks or access to special events.

Remember, your advocates are not just promoters of your course or community – they’re valuable partners in your community’s growth and success. Treat them as such, and they’ll become your most powerful asset in community building.

9. Measure and Analyze Community Growth

To ensure your community-building efforts are paying off, it’s crucial to measure and analyze your community’s growth regularly.

Some key metrics to track are:

• Member growth rate
• Active users (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Engagement rate (posts, comments, reactions)
• Content popularity (views, shares, saves)
• Retention rate
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) for community satisfaction

Most community platforms offer built-in analytics, but it’s also a good idea to use analytics tools like Google Analytics to monitor the website traffic to your community homepage and other pages related to it. Social media analytics tools for tracking engagement on those platforms can also be useful, along with a survey tool to help you gather qualitative feedback.

Keep in mind that data is only valuable if you act on it. As your community grows, you will need to adjust your strategies based on data insights:

• Review analytics reports to identify trends
• A/B test different engagement strategies
• Adjust content plans based on what resonates most with the community
• Address any concerning trends (e.g., declining engagement) promptly

While numbers are important, they don’t tell the whole story. Always combine quantitative data with qualitative feedback from your community members to get a complete picture of your community’s health and growth.

10. Integrate with External Tools and Platforms

Integrating your community with external tools and platforms can enhance functionality and provide added value to your members.

Some tools that you might find particularly useful and can streamline the process of managing your community are ChatGPT, X-Ways Forensics (XWF), and any other project management tools, scheduling tools, or webinar tools depending on your needs.

Use ChatGPT for content generation and support. With it, you can:

• Generate ideas for discussion topics or content
• Create first drafts of community announcements or newsletters
• Power a community chatbot for instant responses to common questions

While it is a powerful tool, you will need to review and personalize its output to maintain an authentic voice.

Check these 10 Great Interactive Course Activities to Create With ChatGPT

You can also use X-Ways Forensics for specialized communities that are focused on digital forensics or cybersecurity:

• Organize workshops or challenges using these tools
• Share case studies or tutorials relevant to the software
• Facilitate discussions on best practices and new features

Finally, consider integrating your platform with these handy tools:

• Project management tools (e.g., Trello, Asana) for collaborative projects
• Scheduling tools (e.g., Calendly) for easy booking of 1-on-1 sessions or group events
• Webinar platforms (e.g., Zoom, WebinarJam) for live events

What’s important is to choose integrations that genuinely enhance the community experience and align with your members’ needs and goals.

LearnWorlds offers market-leading integrations that seamlessly connect your favorite tools, enabling you to manage your community from one central platform efficiently. Whether it’s marketing, eCommerce, customer service, business automation, or payments, our platform integrates all aspects of your online business, allowing you to focus on what you do best.

Ready to Build an Online Community Around Your Courses?

Building a thriving community is a journey, not a destination. It requires consistent effort, genuine care for your members, and a willingness to adapt and evolve. By implementing these 10 strategies, you’re well on your way to creating a vibrant, engaged community that adds immense value to your course offerings.

Most importantly, always keep your learners at the heart of your community-building efforts. Listen to their needs, celebrate their successes, and create an environment where they can connect, learn, and grow together.

Building a community takes time and patience, but the rewards are immeasurable. Not only will you see improved course outcomes and increased student satisfaction, but you’ll also create a powerful ecosystem that can become a significant asset for your business.

So, are you ready to take your online course to the next level with a thriving community? The journey starts now, and we can’t wait to see the amazing communities you’ll build! Get started with LearnWorlds today.

Further reading you might find interesting:

• How to Create and Sell Profitable Online Courses: Step-by-Step Guide
• Knowledge Economy: How to Sell Knowledge Online
• How to Start a Profitable Online Course Business From Scratch
• 183 Profitable Online Course Ideas With Examples
• Sell Digital Downloads: The Complete Guide for 2024
• SCORM 101: The Definitive Guide to Choose a SCORM-Compliant LMS
• How Much Money Can You Make Selling Online Courses?

The post 10 Ways to Build a Community: A Complete Guide for Course Creators appeared first on LearnWorlds.

No one, ever. (If you do, our BI team is hiring!)

Not having a clear, easily accessible, real-time status overview of your academy can prevent you from uncovering issues timely. You may fail to identify important patterns or even miss the opportunity to celebrate important milestones for your learners!

You may need to check if all learners have correctly completed compliance or onboarding training and even answer these kinds of questions within seconds. (Have you ever been phoned by your boss or your clients to get numbers on the spot? Fun, huh?).

Enter the LearnWorlds Training Matrix.

Mixing, matching, and pivoting enrollment data is in the past.

Say hello to LearnWorlds’ new Training Matrix reporting feature, designed to transform how you track and manage learning progress.

With the LearnWorlds Training Matrix, you can quickly see who has completed which courses and spot those who need more help, ensuring every learner gets the support they need. If someone has trouble with a lesson, you’ll know immediately and jump in with personalized assistance.

Whether running an academy, educating customers and partners, or training employees, this tool has your back.

What is a Training Matrix?

A training matrix is a visual chart that displays the training progress status of individuals within an organization or group of learners. It maps out who has completed which training courses, what skills have been acquired, and identifies areas for attention.

It’s like a detailed, always up-to-date checklist that helps you monitor and manage training progress across your entire team or customer base.

Why Use a Training Matrix?

The LearnWorlds Training Matrix feature is designed to optimize how you monitor and track user progress in your academy. By visualizing the training status, the training matrix brings clarity, transparency, and efficiency to your Learning Management System (LMS) reporting.

Plus, seeing all those checkmarks and progress marks can be motivating to keep up the work you’re doing as a training manager!

But it’s not just for platform administrators. If you collaborate with other instructors, team leaders, or B2B clients, you can also monitor their assigned users’ progress. This means more eyes on the prize and better accountability: you’ll easily track compliance and onboarding requirements, keeping everything running smoothly.

With the LearnWorlds Training Matrix, monitoring your vast training programs becomes a breeze, making the whole learning experience more efficient.

Training Matrix in Action: Top Use Cases Explored Across Industries and Scenarios

Let’s see a few examples based on the most common use cases for LearnWorlds Academy.

B2B Course Sellers

For businesses that sell courses to other businesses (B2B), the training matrix helps manage and monitor the training programs provided to various clients. It allows you to customize training paths for different clients, track their progress, and ensure they gain the necessary skills and knowledge.

This personalized approach enhances the value of your training programs and strengthens client relationships. You can also enable your client’s team leads to see the matrix!

• Gain marketing and sales insights: Analyze training matrix trends to identify popular courses and engaged segments, which will inform targeted marketing strategies.
• Track progress and compliance: Monitor your clients’ employee progress and completion rates to ensure training milestones and compliance requirements are met.
• Enhance client communication and support: Use the training matrix to provide regular updates on training progress, address issues, and build client trust.

B2C Course Sellers

In the B2C space, the training matrix can be used to track learners’ progress. You can recommend relevant follow-up training courses, provide timely support when needed, and ensure a high-quality learning journey. This leads to improved training completion rates, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.

Customer Education Academies

For companies focused on customer education, the training matrix is invaluable. It lets you track your customers’ progress through your onboarding and training programs. By visualizing their journey, you can identify common training gaps and proactively offer support.

This ensures your customers are well-equipped to utilize your product, leading to higher satisfaction and retention rates.

• Customer and partner onboarding: Easily monitor customer and partner onboarding progress and decide when follow-up support is needed.
• Assess training impact on product usage: Extract data to evaluate training impact on product usage, engagement, feature adoption, and support ticket volume.
• Track certifications and compliance programs: Monitor compliance completions and product certifications to ensure correct and advanced product usage.

Partners/Resellers/VARs Training Academies

Similarly, when educating partners, resellers, or value-added resellers (VARs), the training matrix provides a clear overview of their training status. You can ensure that all partners are up to date with the latest product knowledge and sales techniques.

This transparency helps maintain a consistent level of competency across your partner network, ultimately driving better sales performance and customer satisfaction.

Employee Training & Internal Academies

The training matrix is a game-changer for internal employee training. It enables HR and team leaders to monitor each employee’s progress, ensuring they meet their training requirements. Whether it’s to compliance, competency, or career development, the training matrix provides a clear roadmap of each employee’s learning path and highlights areas needing attention.

• Employee onboarding: Easily monitor new employees’ onboarding progress and decide when follow-up support is needed.
• Ensure compliance: Monitor compliance program completion to ensure proper adherence to industry standards.
• Check product knowledge and sales enablement: Track training completion to ensure employees are up to date with the latest product updates.

Tracking Learner Progress With the Training Matrix

Understanding and using the training matrix is straightforward and user-friendly: each row represents a learner—whether an employee, customer, or partner—and each column represents a course you offer.

When a lesson is completed, a checkmark or sticker appears in the corresponding box, while empty boxes indicate incomplete lessons. The matrix uses color coding or symbols to show if a course is completed, in progress, not started, or not enrolled, allowing for quick reference and detailed information by hovering over the boxes.

Tailor Your Data Views: Highlight Key Insights

• Customizable views: Tailor the matrix to show specific user segments or courses based on your needs. You can view all learners or focus on specific segments, choose which courses to display, and concentrate on completion rates or scores. You can use all the segments you created in the ‘advanced user progress reports’ section.
• Exporting data: Export your current view to an Excel file with one click for detailed reporting, further analysis, and comparisons.

Effectively Track Your Training Programs with LearnWorlds Training Matrix

With the new Training Matrix feature, LearnWorlds is committed to providing the tools you need to manage training more effectively and ensure all learners achieve their full potential. Whether you’re educating customers, partners, or employees, our training matrix offers a comprehensive solution to track, manage, and enhance the learning experience.

Stay tuned for more updates and start exploring the benefits of the LearnWorlds Training Matrix today!

The post Introducing LearnWorlds’ Training Matrix: Visualize Your Learners’ Progress at a Glance appeared first on LearnWorlds.

The rapid growth of platforms like Udemy indicates that also individual creators and entrepreneurs decide to turn their expertise into online courses (and a source of passive income).

This isn’t surprising. AI tools make it easy to create educational content, and with course platforms like LearnWorlds, building and delivering online courses has never been easier.

But here’s the thing: Increasing competition in already saturated niches makes it difficult for new educators to sell their courses.

If you’re in this situation, skillfully promoting your course on social media could be a way to break through.

This article will teach you 12 ways to leverage social networks to market your online course.

12 strategies to promote your online courses on social media

Social media is a powerful tool for promoting online courses, offering a variety of strategies to engage potential students and boost sales. Here are 12 tried-and-tested methods to leverage social media for your course marketing.

1. Team up with influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the more effective ways to leverage social media for your course promotion. According to SproutSocial data, nearly half of consumers make at least one purchase a month because of influencer recommendations. And just under 90% at least once a year.

Here’s how it works, in a nutshell:

You identify influential authors and creators with large followings and ask them to promote your course, for example, by reviewing it for their audience.

These don’t need to be TikTok or Insta celebrities with millions of followers.

Here’s an example of a LinkedIn post by Roxana Stingu, the Head of Search & SEO at Alamy, promoting a Blue Array SEO course.

Roxana is a perfect person to promote the course but not because of her follower count. She’s an SEO expert and thought leader and the ‘mere’ 4k followers are a highly relevant audience, closely matching the course’s target customer profile.

Such endorsements drive conversions!

2. Build anticipation with polls

Because of their interactive nature, polls on X or LinkedIn can be an effective way to engage your target audience and promote your course.

Even before it is ready.

Check out this LinkedIn poll by Jan Rutherford in which he asks followers for insights about add-on resources for his courses.

This poll kills two birds with one stone:

First, the poll can build the ante for the upcoming course and lay the foundation for the marketing efforts once the course goes live.

Second, it helps Jan validate his ideas. So that he doesn’t waste time and resources on developing materials that nobody will use.

3. Pre-sell your course and offer early-bird discounts

Another way to build the hype around your course is through pre-sales.

That’s what Rob Eisenberg, the Chief Software Architect at Blue Spire, did when he was launching his Web Component Engineering course.

In his LinkedIn post, he announced the new course, provided details about its contents, and offered a $100 early-bird discount to drive interest.

If it isn’t your first course and people trust you to deliver high-quality content, you may be able to ask customers for money upfront, just like Rob does.

Their willingness to pay early is perfect evidence that there’s demand for such a course. And you could use the money from pre-sales to fund its development.

4. Create trailer videos for your courses

A trailer video can also create a buzz around your course. And boost its sales.

Here’s an example of such a trailer for a University of Leads course ‘Create a Social Media Marketing Campaign’ on FutureLearn.

The video was used to promote the course on YouTube, Facebook, and X.

It introduces the course content, highlights its benefits to learners, and explains how it fits other University of Leeds offerings. And as it features one of the instructors, it’s a chance to build initial rapport with the potential students.

If you’re wondering if it’s worth the effort, videos are 12x more likely to be shared than other types of content and 87% of marketers attribute sales to their video content.

5. Create short videos

Creating YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, or TikToks is another way to harness the power of video to sell online courses.

Hubspot has found that short-form videos have the highest ROI compared to other content types. This may be because video content is easier to digest, and has more potential to go viral. And repurposing videos as shorts is a breeze with AI-powered video tools like Pictory or Submagic.

If you want to give it a bash, here are a few tips:

• Optimize them for mobile devices, as that’s how 75% of users consume content video.
• Add close captions to make them more accessible.
• Deliver value by sharing best practices, mini-tutorials, and solutions to user problems.

If you want to see a good example, check out the YouTube channel of our customer, PT Collective.

To promote their online courses for personal trainers, they post shorts with marketing advice to help PTs grow their businesses.

6. Post it on Pinterest

With over 518 million active users globally, Pinterest is worth considering when designing your course marketing strategy. Especially as 83% of regular Pinterest users make purchases based on the content they’ve seen on the platform.

Whether it’s the right medium to promote your course, depends on your niche and target audience demographics.

Most Pinterest content revolves around cooking, DIY, fashion, home design, travel, and personal growth. The largest user segments are women aged 20-34 and nearly 90% are based in the USA.

Sounds like a good match?

If yes, post your course poster and link back to your course website, just like 5 Minutes for Mom promoting their interactive cooking classes. 30 to 90-second videos are the best-performing Pinterest content, so it’s also a good place to share your course trailer.

7. Use social proof

Sharing customer reviews, testimonials, and feedback with your social media followers can boost your course sales.

People trust positive online reviews or testimonials, even if they are from strangers, more than a company’s marketing pitches. In fact, 88% of consumers find online reviews and testimonials as trustworthy as personal recommendations.

Video testimonials are particularly impactful, but you don’t need to go to such great lengths. Share screenshots of online reviews of your course or emails from satisfied customers.

Just like Chima Mmeje, the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Moz, did in her update post about her 10x Topic Authority course.

8. Create LinkedIn carousels

Buffer has found that LinkedIn carousels get almost as much engagement as videos and images (and way more than text posts).

No wonder. They are visually appealing and help your posts stand out.

Course creators know that and use them for marketing their offerings regularly.

Here’s an example of a carousel created by Beatrize Ronchetti to promote her course for property professionals. It’s made of 7 screens introducing course content, sharing a customer testimonial, and highlighting the course benefits.

Here’s another idea:

Create carousels with useful insights, tips, or best practices from your course to give potential students a taste of the value they will receive once they sign up.

If you haven’t posted a LinkedIn carousel yet, you can upload it as a PDF file. You can create them in no time from templates in tools like Canva.

9. Offer free modules

Free course modules are like free software trials: they showcase the value of your course without satisfying all customer needs.

They get to experience how you deliver your courses and may even learn a thing or two, but to fully realize the course benefits, they need to swipe their credit card and buy the whole thing.

As the content to share is ready, this tactic requires very little effort. All you have to do is upload videos from your course to YouTube.

Here’s an example of such a channel. It promotes an online course preparing British citizenship applicants for the Life in the UK test. The author offers quite a few full-length videos but they don’t cover the whole curriculum.

To increase your YouTube content visibility, optimize your channel for SEO. This helps potential customers find the course via search.

Here are a few tips:

• Include the keywords in the account name, the first 100-150 characters of the channel description, and video titles and descriptions to help YouTube algorithms understand your content.
• Add tags reflecting the course topic.
• Use relevant hashtags.

Useful? #yourewelcome.

10. Leverage paid ads

Paid social ads are the least organic way to promote your courses but they offer multiple benefits.

They get your course in front of audiences straightaway and allow you to address specific user groups. For instance, Facebook enables you to target users based on their interests, age, gender, and location.

You can also retarget them to re-engage people who have visited your course landing page before.

All the major platforms offer paid ads and these come in various forms and shapes:

• Facebook ads include image, video, slideshow, Story, and carousel ads.
  
• Instagram offers photo, video, carousel, Story, and Reels ads.
  
• LinkedIn Sponsored Content comes as a single image, video, carousel, event, document, and thought leader ads.
  
• YouTube ads types include in-stream ads, in-feed ads, and bumper ads (just before the video starts).
  
• Tiktok ads come as in-feed/video, search, carousel, and Spark ads. The latter resemble videos from creators your audience follows.
  

11. Engage audience with quizzes and challenges

CPD Solutions is a UK-based company that offers professional development courses for veterinary surgeons and nurses. One of the tactics they often use to advertise their course is by providing their audience with real-life cases to assess.

For example, in the post below they include an ultrasound image and ask viewers to provide diagnoses. This engages the audience and their comments increase the reach of the post which advertises their U/S course.

Sounds interesting?

Great. Give it a go.

You can also use polls to create quizzes to engage your audience and drive interest in your courses.

12. Run competitions

Competitions can generate excitement around your courses, increase their visibility, and drive bookings.

One of our customers, Droneit, uses them to promote their drone pilot license courses. These are already excellent value, especially when combined with the free upgrades, but the opportunity to win a drone can be the final nudge that some customers need to book the course.

You can also run competitions to promote your courses less directly.

For example, use them as a lead magnet and ask participants to provide their contact details. To grow your email list for future marketing campaigns.

Social Media Course Marketing Best practices

To wrap up, let’s have a look at a few best practices for selling online courses on social media.

Choose the right social media channels: To reach your target audience, pick a social platform where they hang out. For example, LinkedIn is the place to advertise professional courses, and TikTok will work best if you’re targeting 18-34-year-olds.

Vet your partners: When looking for influencers, ensure their profiles are legit. Don’t look at follower count only. Check their activity and follower engagement too.

Track performance: Monitoring user engagement with your posts and conversion rates enables you to identify best performing channels and content, and inform your future social media strategy.

Invest in a social media management platform: Social media tools like Hootsuite or SproutSocial will help you automate your social media campaigns and track their performance.

Share your student success stories: Just like testimonials and reviews, they are evidence of your course value and the positive impact it can make. 

Include a CTA button: Your main goal is to drive course bookings, so always add a relevant call-to-action to your social media posts and ads.

Use high-quality content: To stand out from the crowd, your images, infographics, videos, and carousels need to be top-notch.

Is there anything else we should add? We’d love to hear from you!

Final thoughts

As more and more educators, thought leaders, and subject matter experts launch their online courses, the competition can be fierce.

To stand out from the crowd, creating quality educational content may not be enough. You must also get the course in front of the potential audience and convince them you’re offering good value for their hard-earned money.

Social media platforms, the dominant B2C digital marketing channel, offer plenty of opportunities to attract and engage potential customers.

And if you’re still looking for a platform to build, deliver, and sell your course, why not check out how LearnWorlds can help?

The post How to Promote Online Courses on Social Media [12 strategies] appeared first on LearnWorlds.

Honoring your invaluable feedback and reflecting your desire for a more seamless and personalized learning journey, our team has been hard at work to bring you features that not only align with the web platform but also elevate the overall usability and user engagement within the app.

Let’s dive into the newest advancements you’ve been eagerly anticipating

Building a Community within the App

Exciting news for community enthusiasts – the power of social is now integrated into our mobile app! Foster engagement and interaction among learners by utilizing social features within the app, creating a more dynamic and collaborative learning environment.

 

Communicate more effectively, analyze user engagement, and manage spaces with greater ease.

 

1. Effortless communication with @all tagging

We understand the importance of timely communication. Our new feature allows community managers & instructors to quickly broadcast messages to all users in a space by tagging @all. This ensures that everyone stays informed about important news and announcements, boosting engagement and responsiveness.

 

2. Comprehensive data export

Analyzing user engagement and behavior is crucial for community growth. Our full export functionality lets you export community data into CSV or Excel files. This feature is flexible and controlled, allowing you to choose specific spaces and timeframes for your data export. Gain deeper insights and make informed decisions with ease.

 

3. Seamless space management via API

School admins can now perform bulk operations with our enhanced API capabilities. Whether you need to integrate with a third-party system, migrate data, or manage multiple spaces, our API supports complete space management. You can create, delete, and edit spaces, add or remove members, and retrieve all posts for a specific space. With 16 API calls, your administrative tasks just became significantly more efficient.

Creating a Connected Learning Environment

We are building a seamless learning ecosystem where your website and mobile app function as a unified, barrier-free educational platform. This empowers your users to effortlessly switch between the web and mobile versions, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted learning experience.

Multiple login methods for seamless access

We understand the importance of flexibility when it comes to user authentication. That’s why we’re introducing multiple login methods, allowing learners to choose from Single Sign-On (SSO), email and password logins, social logins, and biometric authentication.

This gives users the freedom to access their accounts in the way that best suits them, ensuring a seamless and hassle-free experience.

Add an extra layer of security with email verification support

Building on our commitment to security, our mobile app now supports email verification. This feature ensures that new users verify their email addresses before gaining full access to the app. It’s a valuable tool not just for supporting existing learners but also for attracting and onboarding new users to your platform through the mobile app.

2FA support for smooth & secure login flow

With 2FA now available on mobile, your learners can enjoy the same high level of security & flexibility across all their devices. Protect your student’s accounts with an additional layer of authentication, ensuring their personal and sensitive information remains secure.

Supporting all possible login options is a big step forward in our commitment to flexibility and user convenience. Whether your learners prefer to log in via email, SSO, or 2FA, they now have the freedom to choose the method that best suits their needs, without compromising on security.

Disable multiple sessions for seamless & safe learning

For those who prioritize account security, we’re introducing the ability to disable multiple sessions. This feature ensures that learners can only have one active session at a time, preventing account sharing and providing a smooth transition between the app and web platforms.

Elevating User Experience

Section visibility per tag for targeted content

Tailor your learners’ experience by controlling the visibility of sections on mobile screens based on tags. This allows for personalized content delivery, showing specific course promotions or entire catalogs to different segments of users.

Create micro-flows within the app to cater to the unique needs of diverse user groups.

Tailor your message with variables in text widgets

Make your app interface more dynamic by incorporating variables in text widgets. This enables you to personalize messages within the app, ensuring that learners receive content that resonates with their individual preferences and needs.

Increase engagement with upgraded push notifications

Effectively engage your learners with freshly improved push notifications! Our latest enhancements focus on improving the push notification flow, ensuring you send the most relevant and visually appealing updates. 

1. Live preview of notifications

Experience notifications exactly as your users will see them before sending. This new feature allows you to fine-tune your messages and ensure they are perfect, resulting in higher engagement and satisfaction.

2. Add images to notifications

Make your notifications stand out with images! Adding visuals to your messages will capture attention more effectively and convey your content more dynamically. Whether it’s a promotional banner or a product image, your notifications will now be more impactful.

3. Tagging users for retargeting and segmentation

Our new tagging feature allows you to identify and segment users who interact with your notifications. This means you can retarget them with tailored messages, increasing the likelihood of conversion and enhancing the overall user experience. By understanding user behavior, you can create more personalized and effective communication strategies.

Connect with your users in the most meaningful way!

Adaptive icon support for Android 8 and higher

Stay up-to-date with the latest Android features! Our app now supports adaptive icons, providing an improved display on newer phones, including Android Pixel devices.

Custom notification icon support for Android

Customize the push notification icon on Android phones to feature your logo. Enhance brand visibility and recognition while delivering important updates to your learners.

We’re committed to continuously improving your students’ learning experience, and these updates are just the beginning. Thank you for being part of the LearnWorlds community, and we look forward to bringing you even more exciting features in the future.

Don’t Have a Mobile App Yet? It’s Time to Grow Your Academy And Take Your Knowledge Business Mobile

Notice how mobile apps have already transformed the way we work, travel, shop, and stay connected. Now, it’s time to let mobile apps change the way we learn. What if you could make learning more intuitive, more accessible, and more convenient for your users?

The next level of barrier-free learning is here! Create a learning experience that makes your school stand out by pairing your online training program with a mobile app.

Launch your branded native mobile app for iOS and Android and tap into the benefits of mobile learning for your online school.

Start your free trial or log into your school, navigate to your Mobile App dashboard, and bring your branded mobile app to life!

The post Upgraded Mobile Learning Experience: Community, Multiple SSOs, Email Verification & More! appeared first on LearnWorlds.

By sharing your knowledge and enlightening eager minds through selling online courses, you not only experience the joy of educating others, but you also unlock the incredible power to generate a steady flow of passive income at an astonishingly low cost.

In fact, according to market research, the global e-learning market is poised to reach a $1 trillion market cap by the year 2032. Yes, you read that right!

This mind-blowing figure only reinforces the notion that the opportunities within this lucrative industry are as vast as the cosmic expanse itself. It’s a playground where success knows no bounds and success can be achieved with a stroke of digital brilliance.

You might be wondering, “But can I sell courses on Shopify?” Yes, a lot of successful Shopify sellers are course creators. Many eCommerce businesses and entrepreneurs decide to monetize their audience with online courses and a Shopify LMS (Learning Management System).

What’s great about this is that it’s easy to repurpose existing content. Let’s say you offer product education via video tutorials and PDF guides. You can keep that content and add some gated course material that will provide additional value, like blog posts, recorded webinars, etc., and sell them as a course. You can also include quizzes and offer learners a certificate of completion.

This post covers everything you need to know about how to sell a course on Shopify, including the best Shopify course apps, marketing techniques, and digital products to sell on this popular platform.

How to Sell Courses on Shopify

Selling online courses on Shopify is easy, and anyone can do it – no matter the type of industry your online business is in. That’s why Shopify for online courses is very popular.

There are two ways you can sell online courses with Shopify:

1. Sell a course as a digital product on your Shopify store
2. Sell a course directly from LearnWorlds with Shopify payments

Let’s see how these two ways work.

1Sell a course as a digital product from Shopify

Set up a new product on Shopify, add the pricing information, and create a landing page specific to online courses. Then, you will need to connect to an online course platform like LearnWorlds to enroll each buyer as a student in that course.

In LearnWorlds, account creation and enrollment happen in the background after a purchase. LearnWorlds uses the user’s email as an identifier to link their purchase in Shopify to their LearnWorlds account.

You will need to check the second option of the Customer contact setting, Customers can only check out using email.

2Sell a course directly from LearnWorlds with Shopify payments

The easier way to leverage LearnWorlds’s Shopify functionality for your elearning website is to connect Shopify as a payment gateway. LearnWorlds offers the option to sell your courses via Shopify by fulfilling any online course purchases from your Shopify online store.

When someone buys a LearnWorlds course, they are redirected to your Shopify checkout page, with the course already added to their shopping cart. When they finalize their purchase, they are sent back to LearnWorlds to start their course.

To integrate your LearnWorlds school with Shopify, follow the steps below:

Step 1: Create a Shopify Account

If you don’t have a Shopify Account, create one. The process is straightforward and super easy. You simply need to provide an email address and a few details about what you’re planning to sell.

Then you can choose your shop’s name or leave it for later if you’re still working on it. Once you are in, you will be given your Shopify store URL, e.g., cvworlds.myshopify.com, and you will be directed to your main dashboard, where you can customize your store.

*Should you need help setting up your Shopify store and selling courses, contact Shopify support directly to help you out with your inquiry.

Step 2: Go to LearnWorlds Dashboard
Then log in to your LearnWorlds account → Settings. Click on ‘Financial’ → ‘Payment Gateway.’

Step 3: Choose Shopify as Your Payment Gateway

Once there, select Shopify as your main payment gateway. Fill out your Shopify URL (The Shopify URL ends with myshopify.com).

Paste the Admin’s Access token that you have set up in Shopify, add it in the respective field, and hit Save.

Step 4: Sync Your Courses

Now, a new button will appear to allow you to ‘sync’ your accounts and add your products. Click on ‘sync’.

When the synchronization process is complete, you will get a message that says your products – courses have been added to your Shopify store.

Then click ‘Save’ at the top of your screen, and you are ready!

Every time you make changes to any of your courses at LearnWorlds, you will need to make sure that you sync your accounts again so that courses are effectively updated in your Shopify store.

Also, ensure that ‘Accounts are required’ is enabled in your Shopify store. To do this, go to your Shopify admin > ‘Settings’ (at the bottom left) and then ‘Checkout’. In the Customer Accounts section, click the third choice.

7 Best Shopify Apps to Sell Online Courses

If you want to sell online courses on Spotify, there are some apps you need to become familiar with to make the process easier for you and your clients.

While building your online store, check the following apps on the Shopify App Store or use them as integrations to market and sell your online courses effectively.

1LearnWorlds

Learnworlds is the top online course platform in the market and has integration for Shopify payments. It offers everything you need to create, market, and sell online courses and can easily be connected to your Shopify store or your website. LearnWorlds is better than any Shopify course app with a direct LMS-Shopify integration, offering a great learning experience for your customers.

2Active Campaign

When connected to your Shopify store, the Active Campaign software can help you send targeted messages to your learners at the right time using personalized marketing automation, email marketing, and advanced segmentation, improving your customer experience automation.

3HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you to carry out, track and measure your online marketing activities. When connected to Shopify, this software can integrate your online store data with the leading mid-market CRM, marketing automation, and customer service software.

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you carry out, track, and measure your online marketing activities. When connected to Shopify, this software can integrate your online store data with the leading mid-market CRM, marketing automation, and customer service software.

4Tawk To

Tawk.to is a live chat application that enables you to chat with prospective customers and website visitors. It can be used to make the customer experience smoother – therefore increasing customer satisfaction – by providing real support and service to your customers through a ticketing system that integrates with your Shopify store.

5Google Analytics

With Google Analytics, you can check how your marketing campaign performs and gain insight into consumer trends. It provides you with reporting and real-time store statistics to find out where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing on your website.

Keep in mind that Google Analytics is also a great tool to track and optimize your SEO efforts and can give you a better understanding of your audience, e.g., telling you which terms they’re searching for on the search engine, thus helping you adjust your messaging to get more course sales.

6Referral Candy

With ReferralCandy, you can build a referral program to leverage your customers’ network and promote your product or business to their families and friends. ReferralCandy automates this process and helps you boost sales, build social proof, and increase customer retention.

7Fomo

Fomo helps you increase conversions and create instant social proof. It does so by displaying recent orders, product reviews, and other customer behaviors on your Shopify storefront so that store visitors can see that people trust your business, thus reassuring them that they should do the same.

There are thousands of apps you connect to your online store on Shopify. Choose wisely the ones that are more likely to improve the functionality of your store, enable you to sell the types of courses you want, and make the eCommerce process easier.

5 Types of Shopify Digital Products to Sell on Your Shopify Store

Shopify is undoubtedly one of the best eCommerce platforms out there due to its ease of use and value for money. With it, even if you are a beginner, you can easily set up your eCommerce store or website, grow your business, and start selling a wide range of products worldwide. With the added advantage of SEO optimization for your ecommerce platform, you can ensure higher visibility in search engine results, attract more organic traffic, and ultimately increase your chances of reaching a wider customer base.

The best thing about Shopify is that it works for any business and industry you’re in, allowing you to sell many types of products – from physical products to digital goods and other services, including the following:

Type #1: Online courses

It is possible to sell online courses on Shopify as products by connecting Shopify to an online course platform – you create the course on the course creation platform and sell it on your Shopify store. LearnWorlds & Shopify can be directly integrated. In fact, you can sell online courses directly from LearnWorlds with Shopify using payment processing.

Check out the example of Supakit on selling courses on Shopify and find out how they deliver them through LearnWorlds.

Struggling to pick your next course idea? Let us help you decide. Watch our FREE webinar Choose Your (Next) Course Idea and learn how to dicover and choose the perfect course topic for you and your audience!

Type #2: Digital downloads

Shopify allows you to sell digital downloads, including ebooks, email templates, videos, songs, and graphic art. To do this, you first need to download the ‘Digital Downloads’ app inside Shopify and then add your products. Shopify offers a step-by-step guide on how you can go through this here.

For example, a good example of digital products would be marketing ebooks.

Type #3: Memberships

One of the things Shopify is proud of is the ability it offers to its customers to sell memberships and subscriptions. So let’s say you’re an online coach, and you want to share gated content with your clients – you can choose to offer access only to your subscribers, offering different services and resources depending on their membership level.

LearnWorlds offers a robust community where you can enroll users by adding a membership fee via your shopping cart to your LearnWorlds community.

Type #4: Services and consultations

Shopify enables you to offer your services or consultation. If you are a financial advisor or a career consultant, you can sell your services online and encourage people to book an online or offline one-to-one appointment with you.

Type #5: Experiences

If your business or online store is offering an experience, e.g., a trip or adventure, spa therapy, wine tasting, or networking events, you can sell tickets to that event through Shopify.

Remember that experiences are very popular on social media channels, so make sure to inform your social media followers about your offerings.

How to add digital products to Shopify

Here’s a mini step-by-step guide on how to add a digital product to your online store:

1. Add the Digital Downloads app from the Shopify Store
2. Create a product
3. Go to the Digital Downloads App
4. Attach the file

If you offer multiple files, you will need to create an archive file, e.g., a .zip.

For more complex products like online courses, it’s better to use a learning management system like LearnWorlds to offer a valuable learning experience to your learners.

How to Market Your Courses (Resources)

While investing in the power of your Shopify store is wise, it’s important to also keep true to your core digital marketing strategy.

To help you out at LearnWorlds, we offer a range of free resources that are available to you, including the following eBooks:

1. The Ultimate Guide To Selling & Marketing Online Courses
2. How to Thrive in Affiliate Marketing
3. Selling Courses Through Email Marketing
4. The Essential Guide to Selling Online Courses Using Facebook Ads
5. The Definitive Guide to Social Media Platform Content Types

Take Your eCommerce Business To The Next Level

Selling online courses on your Shopify store is a great way to upsell your current services. Every eCommerce entrepreneur selling digital products on Shopify or even physical ones through dropshipping can accompany them with an online course on how to use them. If you are stuck optimizing your supply chain, a digital product is a great way to add more value or upsell with unlimited stock.

While you’re at it, make sure you use every tool or app to help you get the most out of the Shopify platform to offer your customers the best.

Of course, there are many Shopify alternatives and WordPress Plugins out there to host your online business, yet we do suggest Shopify as the top eCommerce platform in that category, with tons of plugins to help you!

LearnWorlds offers direct integration with Shopify and is always here to help you out, offering the best resources and the right source of inspiration to help you get started on your every journey. In addition to optimizing your e-course sales on Shopify, consider implementing a QR generator to provide seamless access to your course content and enhance user engagement. Cheers to your success!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Can you sell courses on Shopify?

Yes, there is the option to use Shopify for online courses and sell them as digital products. However, you will need an LMS as a plugin or integration to deliver the courses.

Shopify is great but will not work so well for education or online learning alone. We suggest you use Shopify eLearning in combination with an LMS provider, like LearnWorlds, Teachable, or Thinkific, to deliver the learning experience your learners need.

What to Sell on Shopify?

You can sell any kind of physical or digital product, and there is also the possibility of selling software on Shopify. Here are some examples of trending products you could sell:

• Online Courses
• Toys
• Shoes
• Pens and pencils
• Decorative bottles
• Drills
• Cutters
• GPS navigation systems
• Bras
• Motor vehicle parts
• Office chairs
• Projectors
• Kitchen towels
• Digital artwork
• Eyebrow enhancers
• Neon signs
• Tablet computers
• Water bottles
• Lockout tagout kits
• identity theft protection service
• Adjustable bed

Can you sell video courses on Shopify?

Shopify allows you to add media to your digital products, including videos, into your online courses in the same way you would add an image or 3D model. Follow these guidelines from Shopify to learn how to do it step-by-step.

Can you sell a service on Shopify?

Yes, you can sell a service as a digital product and connect it to your scheduling tool or email software, or personally reach out to your client for the next steps of the service.

Do you need a business license to sell on Shopify?

In most cases, you don’t need to have a business license to sell on Shopify. However, there are however specific exceptions where the country, city, state you live in, or the type of business you operate will require you to have one, so it’s best to check that prior to launching your online store or creating your online course.

Does Shopify work for education?

Shopify is a great tool, but it will not work so well for education or online learning alone. We suggest you use Shopify eLearning in combination with an LMS provider to deliver the learning experience your learners need.

What is the best Shopify theme for selling online courses?

There is no “perfect” Shopify online course theme. Any theme that fits your industry will work great for selling online courses. Next-generation LMSs like LearnWorlds offer landing page templates and themes that are specialized in selling courses. It’s better to use a LearnWorlds landing page template for courses and use Shopify as the payment gateway.

How is Shopify for eLearning?

Using Shopify for eLearning is relatively easy. There are two ways to offer online courses with the platform:

• Selling access to a site with gated course content: create courses as gated content and sell membership access to your customers. You can sell videos on Shopify, pages, blog posts, webinars, audio files, etc. On Shopify, online classes will have limited functionality, but you can use external tools, e.g., Zoom or Skype, to carry out live 1:1 or group sessions.
• Selling online courses via an LMS or course platform: use an LMS to host your online courses, add more interactivity, get access to advanced reporting tools, and secure the smooth delivery of learning experiences on various devices. Simply create the course on your chosen LMS, connect it with Shopify, and sell it as a product.

What are some popular Shopify online course plugins?

There are no Shopify online course plugins per se, but you can connect your online course platform with Shopify and sell your course via it. Some of the most popular platforms for creators are LearnWorlds, Kajabi, Thinkific, and Podia.

The post How to Sell Online Courses On Your Shopify Store (Guide) appeared first on LearnWorlds.

Knowledge is the most valuable resource we possess. The thirst for learning has fueled the rise of knowledge entrepreneurs.

Whether you are a blogger, vlogger, educator, or creator, people seek out your knowledge and value it by spending time engaging with your content. The time has come to leverage your expertise by selling it.

LearnWorlds enables creators to package their knowledge as an online course, coaching, or digital product and sell it to their audience. Start monetizing your knowledge with a 30-day free trial of LearnWorlds:

What is Knowledge?

Knowledge is an awareness of facts, a familiarity with individuals and situations, or a practical skill. (Wikipedia)

Knowledge vs. Information vs. Data

But, you might ask, what is the difference between knowledge, information, and data?

The following are simplified definitions of the three concepts based on the Oxford Dictionary:

• Data are facts and statistics. These are the building blocks of knowledge.
• Information is learned or provided facts. It is data we collect or learn from others.
• Knowledge is the collection of data or information in a meaningful sequence. In this case, it leads to understanding and the ability to use it to provide value.

The pyramid of Knowledge. Knowledge is on top, the middle layer is Information and Data sits on the bottom.

How to Monetize Your Knowledge & Expertise

Knowledge is a valuable resource and can only be acquired through rigorous studying, practicing, and collecting information. Selling knowledge is lucrative and can be a very profitable business.

Having the expert knowledge (or know-how) that others seek can be packaged as an expensive digital product or training program.

Here are different ways you can profit from your expertise:

• Online Courses / Training
• Community & Membership Sites
• Coaching
• Consulting
• Newsletters
• Books / Ebooks
• Podcasts
• Video
• Tutorials
• Templates
• Events & Webinars

Online Courses

If you want to earn a high income from home, online courses are one of the best ways. Whether you’re a teacher, accountant, doctor, or someone who loves the topic they are an expert on, online courses can easily be your profitable way to earn an income on the side of whatever else you do.

Online learning is highly valued, and the trick is to deliver knowledge interestingly and help your students achieve the promised results. Premium courses offer difficult-to-find knowledge or use an instructor-led approach like one-on-one or group live lessons to deliver impactful results.

P.S.: LearnWorlds is the best option for selling online courses, coaching, and training to your audience:

Corporate Training

A more advanced form of course is selling corporate training. Companies often pay for employee training from external experts.

An external expert is a subject-matter-expert who sells their expert knowledge. In this case, your target audience is corporations looking for digital transformation, upskilling, or reskilling employees.

Community & Membership Sites

Membership sites are best suited for continuous education and a sense of community. They are for highly engaged learners who come back for more.

Platforms such as WordPress offer membership plug-ins that help you sell access to members of your site. Squarespace, Wix, and other website builders provide similar solutions. But, the best way to create a membership community is with specialized software.

P.S.: Did you know you can host your premium community or sell subscriptions through LearnWorlds as well?

Coaching

Coaching might be the best option for you if you’d like to teach others one-on-one. You could coach individuals in person or online (e.g., via Zoom) or charge for group coaching sessions where multiple people learn together under your guidance.

Coaching is about leading people to self-realization rather than providing the solution, as consulting does. It’s also an easier way to start, and there are many online certifications and training to become an online coach.

Consulting

Consulting takes many forms, but the goal is to provide a solution based on your experience. In the case of consulting, the customer pays you directly to provide targeted knowledge or expertise in a topic they don’t have the expertise.

Consulting is there to tackle a problem and get direct access to a solution. So, whether you offer B2B consulting on business, marketing, or financial topics or industry-specific ones, a consultant can be a high-paying one-off service or a multi-year contract to deliver expert-level work.

Newsletters

Newsletters are the new trend in paid subscriptions. More and more experts are figuring out that building an email list might be great, but monetizing it with premium content is easier than selling other digital products.

Many influencers already have a premium newsletter, especially in B2B industries. While not a new idea, it’s been on the rise over the past few years, and many tools like Substack offer an easy way to build a newsletter and monetize it.

Growth-Waves is a premium newsletter on B2B Marketing that features topics such as SEO, SaaS, Case Studies, Community-Led Growth, and more.

Books / Ebooks

Packaging your knowledge in a book is always on-trend and can also help you develop your personal brand. Even without making splashes with sales, having a book featured on the social media platforms you are using is enough to position you as an expert on a topic.

And, you can easily self-publish to marketplaces like Amazon or sell ebooks from your website.

Podcasts

Podcasts are quickly becoming one of the most popular ways to distribute information online. You can reach out to potential customers through podcasts and promote your expertise while they listen on their commute, while exercising, or even while working.

While you may only know free podcasts, premium podcasts exist inside membership sites, such as Patreon and Spotify.

Video

Creating YouTube videos or TikTok shorts and sharing your expertise for free is a great way to build an audience. You could shoot tutorial videos, explain difficult concepts, educate your audience, or share valuable life lessons.

While the biggest creators can make a lot of money from advertising share due to their large followerships, knowledge creators are more suited to affiliate marketing, sponsorships, or selling their own products.

Templates

If you use templates for your business or know that they could help others in their business ventures, consider selling them on your website or through an online marketplace like Etsy or CreativeMarket.

Creating these templates will require some upfront time, expertise, and energy. However, once you prepare them, you can sell them repeatedly without much effort. It’s a great way to earn passive income with the knowledge you already have!

Events

Webinars, seminars, and workshops are another way to turn the information you know into revenue. They can be free to grow your email list or promote another product.

Paid webinars or physical seminars can be one-off masterclasses, workshops, or specialized topics with high audience interaction.

Offline experiences come at a premium, while online experiences can reach a wider audience internationally. Consider your options, and launch the right event for you, depending on the demand!

Step-by-Step Guide to Monetize Your Knowledge

In a digital world, knowledge has become the most valuable commodity, and it’s only becoming more valuable with time.

People are looking to learn new skills and improve their lives. They love to learn from experts in the field and look for creators who can help them reach their learning goals and guide them through the chaos of information toward true knowledge!

The good news is that you no longer need technical knowledge to create your course or ebook. You can use an all-in-one platform like LearnWorlds to create, sell, and earn from your knowledge online.

Step 1 – Equipment and tools

You already have the essential tools to start your business: your smartphone or laptop. Ideally, you need a good microphone, which should cost no more than $25-50.

Then, you need a platform to host and sell your knowledge products.

Here is what you need to start selling your expertise:

• A smartphone (or laptop)
• A microphone
• A learning platform like LearnWorlds

Step 2 – Plan the content

As an expert, you will need to create content for your audience. Whether you are creating an online course, book, or workshop, you need to plan your content.

Find any material you already have, and create a plan to create what is missing.

You will act as an educator, creating a step-by-step plan to impart your knowledge to your students.

Then, you need to decide on the various formats you need, for example:

• Text
• Video
• Presentations
• Podcasts
• Live sessions

Map out your content, and create a comprehensive plan for what to work on.

Step 3 – Create the content

Now, it’s time to put that content plan into action.

You will need to start writing your content and scripts, shooting the videos, or preparing your presentations for the live sessions/workshops.

You might even need to rework some of the previous material, such as PDFs, templates, checklists, or anything else you already have, in a format that will be useful for your customers.

Step 4 – Upload your content to a platform

Choose the right platform to sell your knowledge.

We recommend LearnWorlds for most knowledge products like:

• Courses
• Training
• Community / Membership Sites
• Coaching Programs
• Digital Products

With LearnWorlds, you get a user-friendly e-learning platform with powerful marketing tools to sell your products. You can monetize your knowledge and your audience with educational products, sell subscriptions or offer digital downloads of any kind.

You can also host digital products on your own website or marketplaces like:

• Amazon
• Etsy
• Udemy

Step 5 – Sell your knowledge

Then, you need to focus on your online business, promoting and selling the product itself. Even the best products can’t be sold by themselves, and you will have a difficult time if you are competing in a marketplace.

First, you must build an audience base, such as YouTube Channel subscribers, a LinkedIn audience, or an email list.

Then, you need to capture the audience’s attention and promote your product with a compelling offer.

Read our ultimate guide on selling online courses, to learn how to use the same process to sell any knowledge product.

Final thoughts

We’re all knowledge workers now, whether we realize it or not. The rise of digital products means people create value on a never-before-seen scale.

Selling your knowledge is a simple but effective way to put your skills to work for you; this includes everything from writing an e-book to creating an online course.

You only need some original content and the right platform to launch it.

Take advantage of the growing creator economy and join the knowledge economy. Shape the future of humanity by sharing your knowledge with the world!

And, if you already have a digital business, knowledge products such as courses and education programs can support your business as upsells, marketing lead captures, or even new revenue streams.

Don’t miss out on the Knowledge Revolution; join LearnWorlds.

The post Knowledge Economy: How to Sell Knowledge Online appeared first on LearnWorlds.

However, the key to make money on YouTube is to produce quality content that your viewers will enjoy, find helpful, and create a personal brand people will trust.

By result, you will be growing your views, subscribers, and create a healthy revenue stream from your video content.

Here are the top 7 ways to monetize your YouTube Audience:

Way #1: Join the YouTube Partner Program

Becoming a YouTube partner comes with some minimum eligibility requirements and rules you need to comply with. YouTube has updated their monetization guidelines on June 13th 2023* to reduce the threshold for access to YouTube’s Partner Program:

1. Follow all the YouTube monetization policies.
2. Live in an eligible country or region.
3. Have no active Community Guidelines strikes on your channel.
4. Have a linked AdSense account.
5. a) Have more than 3,000 valid public watch hours in the past year or b) 3 million valid public short views.
6. Have more than 500 subscribers.

The expanded YouTube Partner Program has expanded in 99 countries and still rolling out to the rest of the world.

You can apply to join the YouTube Partner Program by following the process below:

1. Sign in to YouTube
2. In the top right, click your profile picture and then YouTube Studio
3. In the left menu, click Earn
4. Select Apply Now to get started
5. Click Start to review and Accept Base terms
6. Click Start to set up an AdSense for YouTube account, or link an existing active on

Remember! The key to increasing your YouTube fanbase and getting views is to create entertaining video content that provides real value.

Rule number one in YouTube marketing states that videos need to deliver a high-quality experience to stand out from other content. With today’s viewers becoming experts at discerning what is good and bad, video creators must provide top-notch visuals or audio so that people will reward them with the desired viewership.

Also, the more videos you upload the more are your chances to reach the required hours of watch time. Consistency in releasing videos is also key to a healthy and growing channel.

Once you tick all of the requirements, you get access to YouTube monetization features – like getting ad payments (from ads inside your videos) and membership perks.

A green ‘$’ sign next to the videos in your Video Manager indicates that you are ready to start earning money on the side.

As a YouTube creator, you will need to go to your profile and access YouTube Studio.

• From there, click ‘Monetization’ to see your revenue options.
• To turn on your monetization settings for your YouTube videos, click on a video you have uploaded, and then choose ‘monetization’ from the left menu. Go to the right part of the page and change the monetization option to ‘On’ for the specific video.
• For more information on how to do this, watch the video below:

Way #2: Use Sponsorships

An excellent way to make money through YouTube is using sponsorships. To get a sponsorship from a brand, you first need to build a YouTube audience.

Johnny Harris presenting Ground News

If you already have a respectable fanbase and you are after the big fish, you may approach popular brands within your niche who are willing to pay you and create sponsored content for them. Such content may be sponsored product placements in your videos, where you sell short mentions or recommendations on brands that want more exposure.

In case your videos perform well, your advertising revenue can range from $20 to $50 per few thousand views you get on your channel.

According to John Lincoln – digital marketing strategist and CEO of Ignite Visibility, mid-level YouTube influencers typically charge $20 per 1,000 subscribers or $2,000 per 100,000 followers.

Sponsorships work mainly because of the increasing popularity of influencer marketing and YouTube is the best platform for such campaigns. In contrast to other social media channels, on YouTube, you are able to charge more for sponsored content simply because the video is more expensive to produce.

If you are on the lookout for influencer marketplaces you can add your channel to any of the following platforms to increase your chances of getting found by brands:

• Intellifluence
• Heepsy
• Grapevine Logic
• Influencity
• Afluencer
• Izea

As a YouTube influencer, your audience is more likely to trust you when it comes to buying decisions and would take your product recommendations seriously. However, it is important to be transparent about it and explain to your audience why you are partnering with a specific brand in the first place. If you are honest and true with your fanbase, chances are that you will attract exactly the audience you are looking for and you will gain valuable YouTube views.

Keep also in mind that when you handle sponsorships, you will need to indicate when the content you are showing is paid/sponsored. Read all about YouTube‘s disclosure policy here.

Way #3: Launch an Online Course

If you’ve ever thought about turning your knowledge into online courses, now is a great time to get started. With the popularity of online learning growing every day, there’s a huge demand for quality courses. And with the technology available today, it’s easier than ever to create and sell online courses.

An example of selling online courses through your YouTube Channel

First, you need to determine what kind of course you want to create as a content creator. Do you have expertise in a particular subject or skill? Are you passionate about teaching others? Once you’ve decided on the type of online course you want to create, it’s time to start planning. What will your course cover? How will you structure it? What materials will you need?

Answering these questions will help you create a detailed plan for your online course. And once you have a plan, it’s simply a matter of putting it all together and making it available for sale. With online courses, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.

Experts say that current and future trends in the eLearning industry prove that it is a field of continuous innovation. Besides, the e-learning market size is expected to grow beyond $375 billion by 2026.

Selling online courses offers a great opportunity to make money if you don’t want to use video ads or solely rely on them as your main source of revenue.

Online courses can work as a great way of creating an additional money stream. If you have expertise in a particular subject, you can offer your knowledge to others without the need for any teaching experience.

All you need to know is how to create high-quality content that educates. The good news is that you are already doing this as a YouTuber. You can easily reuse your videos and add a few more to create your first online course.

To help you out, online course management platforms like LearnWorlds can help you build your online school by providing you with the best platform and tools that can host and deliver your learning content, manage your learners, and communicate with your students.

Need proof?

Check out the School of Calisthenics which uses the LearnWorlds platform, offering video tutorials and online courses to educate its students. The School of Calisthenics utilized its social media and YouTube followership to get more than 40,000 students in less than one year, without relying on YPP monetization or sponsorships:

School of Calisthenics on YouTube

Download the School of Calisthenics case study, and start your own free 30-day trial to sell online courses with LearnWorlds.

Aside from online courses, you can also use an elearning management system like LearnWorlds to sell other digital products like ebooks and checklists. For example, if your subject is cooking then it would be relevant to offer a checklist on how best to prepare meals at home or in restaurants respectively.

Think smart and out of the box: create a unique blend of online tactics and combine forces with all the tools you have within your reach. For example, select to nurture your VIP followers by showing personalized content of your courses only to YouTube premium subscribers.

Way #4: Use Google AdSense

As a YouTube partner, you need to use Google AdSense to receive payments for advertising on your videos.

Google AdSense is a platform that allows businesses to buy ad space. As soon as a business purchases ad space, YouTube places its ads on videos like yours as they see fit – most probably through algorithms.

The money collected through the ads placed via AdSense is generated on an ancillary basis (cost-per-click or cost-per-view basis), depending upon what advertisers prefer.

An ad view counts as an ad watched for 30 seconds or halfway through, whichever comes first. A typical charge is 18 cents per view. This means that if you have 1,000 views and 10% of the viewers watched the ad, you could make about $18.

What is important to understand here is that your earning potential depends on how often the video ads play on videos that offer advertiser-friendly content and how often your viewers interact with it. As you would expect, this is directly relevant to how many viewers you get.

However, it also depends on the popularity of your chosen niche or subject.

A YouTube channel that talks about the following topics are easier to be monetized using Google AdSense:

1. Unboxing
2. Technology & gadget reviews
3. Health & fitness
4. Yoga
5. Cooking
6. How-to videos
7. Top X videos
8. Beauty & make-up
9. Travel vlogging
10. Fashion & styling
11. Haircare & hairstyling
12. Gaming
13. DIY crafts
14. Drawing tutorials
15. Music & dance tutorials
16. Baby videos
17. Pets & animals
18. Education
19. Celebrity interviews
20. Digital marketing & blogging
21. Animated stories
22. Motivational/inspirational videos
23. Gardening
24. Lifestyle
25. Screencast videos

Choosing any of the above topics to build content can boost your ad revenue, which is currently the most common form of revenue on YouTube.

However, you should know that the ad revenue you get from using Google Adsense is split between you – the content creator – and YouTube, and falls to 55% and 45% respectively.

Receiving payments through ads is the default option, but not the only one and using it along with other methods as mentioned in this list, will help to increase your revenue stream at large.

Way #5: Sell Memberships

When it comes to selling memberships, one thing is for certain: they are effective.

As a YouTube partner, you can sell Patreon-like channel memberships to your subscribers. Make note that you have to be at least 18 years of age and have more than a 30,000 subscribers fanbase.

With a channel membership, your viewers pay a monthly recurring fee – anything between $0.99 to $100, to get access to members-only incentives, special emojis, badges, extra videos, shoutouts, and other features like Super Chat which is used during live streams.

Keep in mind! Creator perks offered to members need to comply with YouTube’s community guidelines.

Super Chat allows viewers to add highlighted comments in your live stream pinning them there for a specific amount of time depending on how much they pay.

GIF Source: The Verge

The ‘Join’ button on a channel indicates that it is offering a membership subscription which provides exclusive content to those who choose to opt-in.

Mikefalzone’s YouTube channel

YouTube comes with multi-level (up to 5) memberships allowing you to organize the perks you offer and who gets them.

For example, level 1 members could win badges when they leave comments; level 2 members get to participate in live streams while level 3 members have exclusive access to more videos on your channel.

Travel vloggers Simon and Martina are offering tier-pricing memberships on three levels:

Simon and Martina’s YouTube channel membership description

When clicking on ‘Join’ you get a message that shows the different levels of pricing. Navigate through all three to find out what each type of membership offers.

By offering channel memberships, you can earn a lot of money. However, you need to be aware that you get 70% of the earnings and the remaining 30% goes to YouTube.

Learn more about how to earn money through channel memberships here.

There are more ways to offer membership to your audience, using:

• Patreon (memberships, private videos, polls, etc)
• IndieGoGo or Kickstarter (for one-off projects)
• LearnWorlds (your own membership website)

Way #6: Sell Branded Merchandise

Selling branded merchandise is another way to monetize your YouTube channel.
Any type of product can be used for merch purposes so if you are an entrepreneur with a product already in place, you are one step ahead.

Most YouTubers choose to create and sell custom products such as t-shirts that have the logo of their brand on them – which is a good choice, but there are many other product ideas you can try out.

Marques Brownlee, an American YouTuber known for his technology-focused videos, sells merchandise through his channel. Going by the ‘MKBHD’ nickname, Marques creates content on tech products and shares reviews on his channel.

In the following video, MKBHD talks about the brand new M2 MacBook Air, giving a first in-depth review of this Apple product.

What’s great about creating videos like these is that they give Marques the opportunity to feature his own merch in the video description below and encourage people to check it out.

MKBHD’s video description

For this YouTube video, Marques shares the link to his Amazon page that tells people what equipment he is using and adds another one directing them to his merchandise page.

On Marques’s Amazon page, you can see him selling a large variety of merch ranging from branded t-shirts, pins, pillows, notebooks, hoodies, and stickers, to wristbands, beanies, hats, and AirPods.

Merch on the MKBHD store

As you can see opportunities here are endless for YouTube creators since you can sell anything you consider relevant to your content or niche.

Having a separate website to allow buyers to browse and purchase your products is a must. To be able to link your product page from your videos, bear in mind that you first need to ensure that your merchandise site is on the list of merchandise sites approved by YouTube.

In terms of product manufacture, supply, and delivery, you will need an eCommerce platform like Shopify or Dukaan, which can be easily connected to your YouTube channel.

Finally, through YouTube’s merchandise shelf, you are also allowed to sell merchandise but you need to be over 18 years old and have more than 10,000 subscribers.

Need some inspiration on how to start selling merchandise? Check out these 10 successful merchandise stores by YouTubers who are killing it.

Way #7: Earn from Affiliate Programs

When it comes to monetizing YouTube, affiliate marketing is your best friend. The earning potential through affiliate marketing is unlimited and YouTube is the most suitable platform for it.

The way affiliate marketing works is simple.

As a content creator, you become an affiliate of a company that wants to promote its product or services. You start talking about their product inside your videos, and you use discount codes or trackable links directing people to the product page. If those people you referred buy the product, you get a percentage of the sale.

This is all possible through the affiliate link which helps brands see where the buyers came from. The affiliate link is added in the description of every video you upload that promotes the product.

To become an affiliate marketer, usually, you reach out to interested companies or they come to you.

Sites like ShareASale, Amazon Associates, CJ Affiliate, and Rakuten Marketing, can help you find suitable brands to partner with. When browsing their products, you need to make sure that the brands you choose to work with, have a product that is related to the content you create.

Once you join an affiliate program and you agree on the commission rates, you are ready to start advertising.

YouTuber Dusty Porter creates high-quality videos talking about technology, gadgets, and video games, and works as an affiliate marketer.

Dusty Porter’s YouTube channel

On his channel, Dusty shares with his YouTube audience tutorials, guides, and online reviews on many products talking about the tech side of things including software and hardware. Under his videos, you will see affiliate links directing to company sites that he has partnered with.

In this video tutorial on Nintendo Switch, he gives out discounts to people who are clicking on his affiliate links to buy from Bluehost and Doordash.

Affiliate links in a Dusty Porter’s video description

While Dusty is encouraging his viewers and subscribers to buy from certain companies, he is giving them the incentive to get the product or service they need at a discounted price, and at the same time, he is getting a percentage from the profits. It’s a win-win.

Also, he makes sure to let his audience know about it, saying that this video description contains affiliate links:

Dusty Porter’s disclaimer statement on affiliate links

Affiliate marketing can work regardless of having only a small number of subscribers because quality here is more important than quantity. All you need is an audience that trusts you enough to buy these products, which you have preferably previously
tried and tested.

Need more information about affiliate marketing? Download our ebook guide here.

You can also join LearnWorlds Partners Club and review LearnWorlds’ top course platform on your channel if you have a relevant audience!

Ready to Make Money on YouTube?

Before we pass the torch over to you, we have some important updates to share. As of April 2021, YouTube is allowing ads to run on more types of content, which unlocks bigger monetization opportunities for content creators.

Changes made to YouTube’s advertiser-friendly guidelines, present fewer restrictions on monetization options (from partially monetized to fully monetized) and affect creators who are part of the YouTube Partner Program.

Now you can immediately tell if a video is eligible for full or partial monetization by looking at the color-coded icons in YouTube Studio.

• The green icon indicates that a video is eligible to earn full revenue.
• The yellow icon indicates that a video will display limited or no ads.
• The red icon indicates that a video is ineligible for monetization.
• The grey icon indicates that a video has been manually turned off by the creator.

YouTube wants to move specific content areas from yellow icons to the green icons and will make changes to the following types of content:

Educational content: expanding monetization of educational, documentary, or news content that may feature violent interactions with law enforcement, recreational drugs, or drug-related content and sensitive events.

Controversial issues: expanding monetization around controversial issues where content isn’t graphic and it’s an objective discussion of controversial issues.

Adult humor: expanding monetization in the area of adult themes delivered through the context of humor.

Profanity: allowing full monetization of content that makes use of moderate profanity within the first 30 seconds of a video.

Such policy changes are important to take note of if you are considering creating content that covers any of these areas.

While it’s possible to earn money through YouTube as a content creator, it won’t be as easy because there is intense competition.

Applying these monetization methods can give you the tools you need to start earning money without the need to have a million subscribers on YouTube. One of the things you can start doing right away is creating an online course that will open up the revenue stream for YouTube monetization.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How much money do YouTubers make?

As a YouTuber, you can earn anything between $0.01 to $0.03 per ad view on a video. Per 1K video views, you can make $3 to $5, and for a million video views, your revenue can be as high as $5,000.

How many views do you need on YouTube to make money?

Each time someone watches your videos and sees an ad, it counts toward your account. The potential to get paid really begins at 10,000 views.

How many subscribers do you need on YouTube to make money?

As a YouTube creator, to earn money directly, you must have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last year. As soon as you reach that threshold, you can apply to become a part of YouTube’s Partner Program, which enables you to sell advertisements, subscriptions, and channel memberships.

How much would a YouTuber with 100K subscribers make?

Having 100,000 subscribers and posting two new videos per week can earn a YouTuber $600 to $1,000. In ad revenue, this amounts to about $2,400 to $4,000 per month.

The post How to Make Money on YouTube: 7 Ways to Monetize for 2024 appeared first on LearnWorlds.