27 September 2024
If you have an incredible online course idea and just need to know the answer to “how do I launch a course?” then I have the answers for you!
I recommend launching an online course when you are clear you have a demand for it. You can start promoting a waitlist for your course initially and, if that waitlist is growing, you know you have a demand for a course like yours.
If you find your waitlist isn’t grow or you need support with honing the messaging for your waitlist landing page and/or defining your online course topic, I recommend carrying out market research to identify the current challenges and desired outcomes of your target audience, this could like:
Avoid the week either side election weeks, and unless your online course is summer or holiday related - you may want to avoid early December launches and launches in late July and August. I have also found the Easter holidays to be a challenging time to launch.
To get the best results from your online course launch, based on the highest converting launches I recommend allocating a minimum of 8 weeks (ideally a minimum of 12 weeks) to prepare yourself and your audience for your launch.
A successful course launch is split up into 6 stages.
Step 1) Warm Up (approx. 6-8 weeks)
The warm up launch stage is all about building and nurturing your audience ready for the launch.
Your content should speak to the desires of your audience, busting any myths & misconceptions in your industry, showing the benefits of your course topic to enable them to build a case in their mind for wanting to do it and answer any internal doubts stopping them from taking action.
You should be focussing on promoting lead magnets to grow your mailing list via paid ads, hopping on podcast interviews, affiliate partners if you have them and social media.
The best lead magnets answer the problem your target audience is most aware of. You could also offer a free checklist related to your course content. It will give them the steps they need to take but won’t educate them on how they need to do it as that will be answered in your online course content. Take a look at my FREE Ultimate Launch Checklist for inspiration.
If you are starting from scratch and have no audience, you will need to allocate more time to grow and nurture an audience via paid ads, affiliate partnerships, social media & podcast interviews.
Step 2) Build Up (4 weeks)
The build up launch stage is all about priming your audience to buy your offer.
Your content is all about building demand, curiosity and anticipation in your audience for what’s to come.
Your free launch event is designed to build trust and credibility in you as an expert and show them exactly ‘WHAT’ steps they need to take in order to reach their desired outcome.
This shouldn’t be ‘how to’ information. The ‘how to’ information will all be in your course.
Your launch event enables them to build the belief in themselves that they can do it.
You’re educating on what and why they need to do these steps in order to position your online course as the logical next step in their buyer journey.
Free launch events can be:
If you’re wondering “how do I announce a course launch?”
The quickest way to grow the audience for your online course launch is by leveraging Facebook Ads.
Let me show you how:
Let's say you have a sales goal of - 20 sales of a £500 offer = £10,000
Based on a hypothetical sales conversion rate of 1% (yours could be much higher than this, average tends to be 3-5%)
You will need 2,000 people signed up to your conversion event for eg, a webinar or challenge
Step 3) Launch Event
This is the launch stage where you deliver your free launch event.
In order to deliver a high performing launch event, you need to deploy attendance and content consumption tactics to ensure your content is watched and engaged with.
Tactics to maximise attendance:
Tactics for content consumption:
Pre-launch event ritual to get you in good energy to deliver your content and feel super sharp and focussed to answer any questions coming through from your audience.
Conversion is the stage of your online course launch where you focus on converting your leads into sales.
One common mistake business owners make is putting so much energy into promoting their launch event that their sales and conversion strategy falls flat.
As an online course launch manager who has worked in the nitty gritty of delivering hundreds of launches - I have seen firsthand how key this phase of your launch is to bring in the sales you want to see.
When planning your course launch, do not make the mistake of falling into the trap of…
❌ Not sending daily emails or social media posts
❌ Not going live in your Facebook group & showing up for your potential clients
❌ No engagement strategy with your potential clients that feels like crickets!
Sales won’t happen if you don’t make your offer visible everyday during open cart.
You need to…
✅ Keep on showing up and sharing the benefits of your offer
✅ Keep on following up with your hottest leads that haven’t bought yet
✅ Keep on sending emails & stay front of mind of the ideal clients waiting to buy from you
✅ If you have a Facebook group for this launch, post in there morning, noon and night
Download my Ultimate Launch Checklist to brainstorm ideas based on all of the sales activities listed.
There is also a common misconception that the longer your cart is open = more sales and this is not the case.
For an online course, I recommend having your cart open for no longer than 7 days.
If your offer is a higher ticket then we recommend leveraging a 10 day cart open to allow for a little more time to build trust before making the investment.
After you have closed the cart, you can boost your launch profit by promoting an upsell to your new students and/or inviting the people who didn’t buy this time to join a downsell offer.
Upsell offers could have more access to you including, live group calls and/or 1:1 sessions to you and your team.
Great downsell offers are much lower in price and have elements stripped out from your signature course or are a lower cost, shorter course which focuses on just 1-2 steps.
Wooo it’s time to celebrate! Your sales are in and now it's time to deliver your online course and complete your launch debrief.
As soon as your warm up launch stage begins, you should be tracking data to ensure you are hitting the right KPIs.
Here is a list of data to track for your launch debrief:
Want better results for your next launch? Your launch debrief will give you the answers.
This data can make all the difference for planning your next launch strategy - leading to increasing launch revenue, knowing what to double down on, what to tweak so you can take your launch to the next level.
To recap, here’s an online course launch checklist to follow (you can download the course launch checklist for free here):
Kajabi
Kajabi is a market leading all-in-one software, you can host your online course on Kajabi but you can also build your website, email marketing + build landing pages for your launch events all from Kajabi. All-in-one tools are typically the easiest to use but they’re higher in cost because of this benefit.
Kartra
Same as Kajabi. Kartra gives you the software to build your course and build your sales pages, landing pages and email marketing all in one tool. Like Kajabi you can also run an affiliate partner program. It’s not as user friendly as Kajabi but it’s still a great all-in-one tool to check out.
Teachable
Teachable offers online course platform software and also has great payment processing software available. You can also run affiliate programs and build sales pages. I don’t really rate the sales page software so if you were to use Teachable I would solely use it for the online course software, checkout processing and affiliate tools only and choose another tool like LeadPages to build your landing pages.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is my go-to email marketing platform. If you choose not to use an all-in-one marketing software, I recommend using ActiveCampaign to send emails to your list and to setup email sequence automations.
ThriveCart
Create high-converting checkout cart pages, affiliate campaigns and use ThriveCart’s ThriveLearn software to host your online course. There is a one-time fee of $495 so you only need to pay once for this software so it’s an amazing option, if you don’t choose an all-in-one marketing software then definitely use ThriveCart as your checkout tool.
LeadPages
You can design gorgeous landing pages with LeadPages. Some of the LeadPages landing page templates come Boost your leads and sales with the Leadpages landing page builder— and, you can get started for free.
Canva
Canva is a free-to-use online graphic design tool. Use it to create social media posts, your webinar presentations, cover graphics for your course modules and more. There is also social media scheduling available.
It’s your time to get your course launched!
Now you know the steps to launch an online course. The online course launch strategy outlined in this blog post has been proven over and over again.
So, what are you waiting for?
Let’s get your online course into the world so you can sell it over and over again.
If you would like clarity over your course launch strategy, send me an email at hello@amyjayne.co or book a free consultation call with me here.
Take the guesswork out of planning your launch with my step by step Ultimate Launch Checklist.
a certified launch manager and online business manager who specialises in helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses. As an Academy of Certified Launch Professionals Launch Manager, Amy regularly manages multi-5 to multi-6 figure launches and has achieved conversion rates of 9.67%-15.65% in 2023 so far. Learn more about launch management and contact Amy here.
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