Pre-selling your online course is a really good way to validate your idea before spending the time and energy filming the videos, recording the audio, creating the PDFs and all of that time-consuming content. 

There’s no point doing that if you don’t know your audience is going to buy it.

There are a couple of ways to pre-sell your online course. Both of them are classified as ‘launches’ and that includes running a webinar or hosting a challenge. 

In the lead up to this main event, whether it’s a webinar or a challenge. You want to be really active on your socials as well as emailing your subscriber lists regularly so that you are front of mind and providing a lot of valuable content. Once you announce that you are running the challenge or hosting the webinar, your audience knows that they want to be involved. 

As soon as the challenge or the webinar is over, that is cart open. This is when people can purchase your course and enrol, even if you have a predetermined start date a month later. You can absolutely sell your students into your course before it’s created! As long as you give them some content to keep them warm in the meantime, whether that is weekly emails or a freebie that you already have or anything to keep them engaged and looking forward to your course. 

Once that predetermined start date arrives, you open the doors to the course and the content (that you’ve been working your butt off to create) is all in there ready for them to consume.

EXAMPLE: I’m currently running an IGTV series on course creation and the posts that have been going out every week are part of my warmup strategy. I am then hosting a five-day challenge at the end of this month. For the whole month of July, I’ve committed to one IGTV every week, one feed post and as many stories as I can fit into my day. Throughout the month, I will be dropping hints that I’m hosting this five-day challenge. It’s all about mapping your tech stack, finding out what platforms you’re currently using and if you’re using them to their full potential. Once you complete the five-day challenge and you understand the systems that you have or that you need, I will introduce System Savvy which is based around your customer journey and making sure that those systems are set up correctly and supporting you to scale.

In short:

1. Provide value-packed content for your audience.
2. Run a five-day challenge or webinar
3. Open the cart and bring in a group of awesome founding members = idea validated
4. The work really starts; filming, recording and creating PDFs because you know that you have students that are ready to consume the content and implement the strategies.