If You Have a Great Course, The Sales Materials Will Write Themselves
This week, I’ve been writing about how to create an online course.
This is a hands-on, bare-bones experiment because I’m covering the material as I’m learning it. (Slight fib there; I’m travelling this week so I’ve written these articles a few days in advance.)
So far, we’ve covered a few things:
- What an online course should contain (according to me… your opinion might vary)
- How to find out whether or not anyone’ll want to buy your course if you create it
- How to structure your course and what to include
Today, I’m going to talk about how to sell your course. There’s a key thing here though (hence the subtitle of this article.) The better your course, the more you include and the more detailed you make it, the easier it’ll be to write your sales material.
With A Good Product, Copy Writes Itself
The key to your sales material is your contents page.
If you think of a how-to book, the chapter titles are each benefits of their own. “How to get started in DIY” will be followed by “Tools for the Job,” “How To Plan Your Project” and “How to Start Measuring Up Your Materials” or something.
In terms of a sales letter, your skeleton copy is already written:
“In this six hour DVD course, you will learn:
- How to get Started In DIY… Even If You Have NO Experience!
- How To Pick The Best Tools For Any Job… We’ll Even Give You A List So You Don’t Have To Worry
- The Seven Things You Need To Know Before You Start Any Project
- Why Measuring Your Raw Materials Is The Most Important Part Of Any DIY Project… And our Method For Getting It Right Every Time
Assuming you have six hours of material, you’ve got a lot that you could put in a skeleton sales letter.
Add in cute little tricks like giving everything a name and throwing in some niche-specific non-sequiturs, and you’ve already got a first draft of a long form sales letter before you’ve even started.
What’s The Key Benefit Of Your Course?
Any sales letter has a USP running through it. I wrote earlier on in this series that the reason people buy a course is for structured and comprehensive learning. Your USP is something different; it’s why people are going to choose you as their teacher as opposed to someone else.
It might be that you’re the most knowledgeable, comprehensive guy out there.
Maybe you’re the best guy at structuring learning in terms of the steps people have to take.
You might have some secret knowledge that nobody else knows (this is the most common USP in the fitness industry… the five minute secret to weight loss and whatnot.)
Your USP is going to be something abstract and very product dependent, so it’s hard to give advice, but it’s the USP – the reason why you’re creating the course – which is going to trickle down throughout all your other bullet points and sales materials. Take your time working out what it is and the best way to do it.
Again… if you’ve created a great product, then this stage will write itself. A unique product isn’t going to sell itself, but it’s sure going to make it easier to sell itself.
Trickle-Down Sales Messages
Outside of the USP, the sales letters and other things you’ll use are basically the result of stacking the contents of your course on top of each other in different ways. This is true whether your marketing consists of a single Facebook post or a multi-part web of sales funnels which go through stories, testimonials, long-form sales letters and have your reader run the gauntlet before they become a customer.
One more thing on that though; your USP informs the contents, and the contents are also informed by the medium.
USP + Contents Page = Sales Material.
Sales Material + Medium = Your Advert.
An Example Of This
Your USP is that you’ve found an amino acid that’ll burn fat loss quicker than anything else without your customer having to work out.
Your course involves putting said USP into a regular diet. There’s a “chapter” on snack foods.
USP + Contents
Secret ingredient + Snack food = How to make your junk food binges into fat-busting yet delicious snacks.
To get to a useable advert, you need to take into account the media form you’re using.
So for a long-form sales letter, you could have a storyline of a guy who just couldn’t quit junk food and so spent hours in the gym but only got fatter and more miserable. Then he used your secret method of turning doughnuts into fat-melting treats. Now he’s awesome and girls can’t keep their hands off him and so forth.
You can’t just screenshot that story and upload the picture to Instagram. It won’t work.
For Instagram, you take the sales material + medium formula and do something that works.
Maybe a picture of a doughnut along with a caption, “I lost 50lbs eating this snack… which looks like a doughnut but isn’t really.
As you can tell from above… I’m not an Instagram marketer.
The point stands though; the medium is the “second half” to selling a product having got the USP + Contents combo nailed down.