[Tyler] Hey, this is Tyler, and in this video, I'm going to talk to about creating free content
that attracts your ideal customers.
So once you've got your course created, one of the best ways you can attract students
with your course, is to create some free content, get that content online, and let it do the
work to attract your ideal students, your ideal customers, to you.
So in this video, I'm going to walk you through 5 steps to creating content that attracts
your ideal customers.
I'll give you an example of an article we created to help our community and actually
ended up attracting more customers us here at Thinkific.
So the first step to creating content that attracts your ideal customers is to identify
who your ideal customer is.
So you got to think about who that target audience is because if you don't know who
your target audience is, it's going to be pretty tricky to find them on the Internet.
So you want to think ahead of time, who is most likely to take your course, who is your
course most going to help, and who is that ideal student for?
Once you have that clarity of who you're trying to reach, who your course is for and who your
content is going to be for, then the next step is to identify a specific problem that
they're facing.
So that’s step two, is to identify a specific problem, or pain point that target audience
is facing.
And the best way to figure out what those problems and what those pain points are, is
to look on the internet and find questions that your target audience is asking.
And there are a lot of places you can find people asking questions.
One of them is Cora.com.
Start typing in some keywords related to your course, your industry, your niche, and you'll
see people asking questions about that topic on Cora.
Again, a question is a reflection of a pain point or struggle that somebody's facing.
It's something that they're stuck on, and they're going to the internet asking questions
to try to get the answers to help them solve the problem.
So Cora is a great place you can go.
Another place you can go is Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups, and pay attention to the
questions people are asking within those groups, and again you're looking for groups that are
related to your topic, to your industry.
Another place you can find questions is in the comments sections of blogs about your
topic, and also in the reviews of books on Amazon that are related to your topic.
A lot of complaints, frustrations, and questions appear in those comments and in those reviews
on blogs and books about your topic.
And the best place to get some questions from your audience, if you have an audience, is
to ask them directly.
So if you got people on the email list.
send them an email that says, “Hey what are you struggling with?
What questions do you have about this topic?”.
If you've got a business already, and you have questions coming in through customer
support, pay attention to those questions that people are asking your support team,
those are a great indication of pain points and the struggles that your customers are
already facing, and are looking for some answers to.
Another thing you can do is survey your audience.
Just send them a quick survey, whether it’s through email or through social media, and
get them to fill out some of those questions.
So that you get some of that feedback and learn a bit more about what struggles and
what challenges they are facing.
So that’s step two.
So once you get some of those responses, and you have a good idea of what some of the questions
your target audience is asking online, now what you want to do is create a piece of content
that answers that specific question.
And don't hold back, try and create the best piece of content online that addresses that
specific question.
If you found other articles on the internet that cover the same thing, take the best from
all those articles, and even more to it and try to publish the best article on the internet
the answers that question.
In the long run that will outrank those other piece of content and those other articles
that are already on the internet, and you'll start to attract all those people that are
searching Google, or search some forums, searching some blogs and they're searching for the answer
to that question people are going to start recommending your article as go-to resource
for them to find the answers that question.
Step for, is to create what I call a content upgrade.
So this is a free resource that you give away from your piece of content, so if it was an
article for example, at the end of the article you want to give away something that they
would actually have to download, and give you their email address in exchange for it.
You might call this a lead magnet, I would prefer to just call it a free resource, or
a content upgrade.
It could be some additional training, maybe a checklist, or a worksheet, or you know a
PDF document, or a summary of that longer article that you just published.
Something that complements the content that you published, and that's helpful for them,
and the reason you're doing this is because you want to be capturing the email addresses
of those people who just consumed your free content.
If you don't capture their email addresses you have no way of contacting them afterward.
They might move on to other websites, and never come back and find your site again.
So, you want to give them something that has an incentive for them to give you their email
address.
Step 5, is one somebody is on your email list, in your newsletter.
Step 5 is to guide them through a sales process of some kind.
So nobody's just going to magically and rolling your course.
You actually have to introduce your course to them.
So you can do this in the emails that you sent to those people who have just recently
read your free content.
You might invite them to the webinar, where you introduce your course them.
You might even send them directly to your core sales page, but the important thing is
that you do have some kind of sales process that takes people from just a casual reader
of your blog, or maybe a listen to your podcast, or a view of your videos to now considering
taking your course.
There needs to be a process in the middle there that helps bridge the gap.
So those of the five steps to creating free content that actually helps attract your ideal
customers and your ideal students for your online course, and I'll just wrap up with
a very quick example.
So at Thinkific, one of the questions that we get a lot from our community of online
course craters is how do I price my course?
I've created my course, but I don't know what to charge for it.
We get that question coming through our Facebook group, I've seen it asked another Facebook
groups, book reading courses online.
It gets asked our support team, through customer support, so I know this is a topic and a challenge
that a lot of course creators are facing.
So what I did, is I went out and scared the internet for a bunch of resources on how to
price your online course.
I talked to a bunch of course creators, I talk to people here at the team at Thinkific,
and I ended up writing the longest article on the internet that I found so far on how
to price your online course, and that's exactly what I called it.
How to price your online course.
It helped all the people in our community who are struggling to price their online course,
but it would also do because it was such a helpful piece of content, was it got shared
around the web, and it tracked the other people who are not even using Thinkific yet, who
are also wondering the same thing, how do I price my online course.
They ended up finding that article, in the article is a content upgrade, a worksheet
you can download.
If you're trying to figure out how to price your online course, that gets people in our
newsletter, and once somebody is in our newsletter, we offer them a chance to try our software
Thinkific to help them create and sell their online courses.
So that article, free piece of content, solves a very specific problem that our community
was facing.
It helps our existing customers, and it brought new customers for Thinkific as well.
So that's just an example of how you can implement these five steps in your business, and with
your online course, providing that free content that helps your target audience with a very
specific problem.
Make sure you get them on an email list, and once they're on an email list you can introduce
them to your online course, or any other products and services that you offer.
So thanks for watching and I'll see you in future videos of TeachOnlineTV.