Do you have ideas for online training and want to make them come true?
If you are in this post, I imagine so.
Online training has been rising recently, and it is here to stay.
It is a spectacular way to learn and comfortably grow as a professional, and today it is possible to take online courses on anything that comes to mind.
And in this post, I will explain how to sell your product on the Internet.
I will tell you some strategies to publicize and sell your online training, from where you can do it, and I will give you some advice in case you finally dare to sell your first info product online.
Who can sell information products on the Internet?
Anyone can sell courses and products online.
The entry barrier is shallow, so being of legal age, having access to the Internet, and registering on any info product sales platform or with your website, you can now start generating business.
Is this ethical?
Well, it depends on the eyes that look at it…
I will give you my opinion.
I think that the real requirements to sell info products are:
- Have enough knowledge.
- Have enough experience.
- Let there be demand to learn about what you want to teach.
- Time to create a good online product.
I’ll give you my case as an example.
It would not make sense for me to set up a school and train hundreds of people with a master’s degree in digital marketing without first having worked for years in agencies and having offered consulting and online positioning services to other businesses.
If I don’t have that experience with all kinds of companies, being in the mud and applying, making mistakes, learning from them…
How am I going to teach other people to do it?
- First, you need to experience for yourself, and then you will create the formations and courses you want to teach others based on what you have experienced.
- That is what differentiates some formations from others, the experience of the trainer behind them.
- On the other hand, it is essential that people are willing to invest in learning what you want to teach.
- If not… What is the point of wasting time creating a product and selling it on the Internet if no one will want to buy it?
- It doesn’t matter what strategies you make, no matter how good they are, the platform you use, the amount of money you invest in advertising… if you don’t have a demanded info product, it won’t work.
- And finally, I think it is essential to have time to create a good info product.
It is not about doing anything and selling it on the Internet.
That is the big problem today: anyone with a minimum of knowledge creates an ill-conceived rehash and starts selling it. The people who trust it end up disappointed because they do not learn anything of quality.
If you are going to sell an online course or product, you must invest time so that it has a good quality.
2. How to sell information products online
Let’s talk about how to sell an info product on the Internet effectively, following some strategies.
The first thing you should know is that you can sell info products online in two ways:
- As an info producer: You are the person who creates the online course and defines the strategy and channels to sell it.
- As an affiliate: Choosing an info product already created by someone else to help you sell it through recommendations.
Nowadays, you can join anyone, even Amazon.
You can do it with a web page where you add personalized affiliate links to the website where the product is sold online and take a commission every time people buy through it.
You can also recommend it on your social networks or in your emails, in your YouTube videos, or your podcast…
In the end, it is about selling third-party info products and making a profit for each purchase that comes from you.
So, how should you sell your info products online?
Blog
The first strategy that I recommend you apply and that I started using at the beginning is to create a blog.
The blog allows you to position your content in Google so that your page appears in the first results when someone does a search related to what you sell.
If you sell online training, having blog articles that resolve small doubts related to that topic allows you to reach people interested in it.
And if someone is looking for information, they may want to learn in a more detailed and professional way and buy your course.
On the other hand, it also positions you as a specialist in your area.
Writing good articles gives you visibility and shows how much you know about the topic, and you will generate more confidence when it comes to selling the training.
Users already know how you express yourself and explain, and they get an idea of how much they can learn from you.
You can write on your blog and also write articles on third-party blogs.
You may already be familiar with the concept, but this is called guest blogging.
Posting as a guest on powerful blogs in your industry gives you visibility, as you can reach many more people than if you are starting with a small blog and receive little traffic.
In that case, I advise you to create an editorial calendar of publications, both in your blog and in that of third parties, and that you make a list of the sites where you may be most interested in publishing by domain authority, traffic, and topics.
Social Media Content
Another channel that you can use to help you sell info products online is social networks.
The networks, like the blog, allow you to create content related to concerns, doubts, or problems that your target audience may have, which solves your training.
In this way, you are not only positioning yourself again as a specialist in that area but also reaching people who are interested or who are searching for it.
Social networks are not used to sell as such (also, because you can add the direct link to your website or the platform you use to sell in the biography of your profile or your publications).
Social networks aim to educate your audience and make them aware that your info products are an investment that will help them improve their current situation and create a community around your brand and build loyalty.
Like what I told you with the blog, with social networks, I recommend the same: create a publication calendar so that you always have planned and organized the type of content and the days on which you will dedicate Time to creating and publishing them.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies for selling information products online.
Why?
Because if you send emails to your database regularly offering your training while giving tips, reflections on your topic or sector, and experiences. You build trust daily and position yourself above other people who teach the same thing.
And the day the subscriber is encouraged to do the training or has the financial capacity, they will invest in you.
If you have a good number of subscribers, this allows you to be constantly getting sales 365 days a year.
But for this, it is important that you are constant with your emails and that you write frequently.
It is not about writing promptly when you are interested in selling, or once a week since they will never get used to reading you and it is difficult for them to remember you.
Nor is it a matter of sending promotional emails, but of entertaining with engaging content for your subscribers and always relating it to your info products.
When it comes to email marketing, it will depend on whether you sell evergreen online courses or if they are specific editions at different times of the year.
- If it is the first case, the strategy is as simple as constantly sending emails with a good frequency, without stopping every day of the year.
- If it’s the second, even if you don’t stop sending emails to your list to maintain the relationship, the sale of the courses will be made months before the call through a launch where different strategies converge: webinars, advertising, social networks, various sequences of email to anticipate and then sell…
Online advertising
Another way to sell your online courses is to invest in paid advertising.
It can be in search engines such as Google or the Display Network to appear in banner format on other websites.
Or they can be ads that appear to your potential customers when interacting on social networks or watching YouTube videos.
The fact is that advertising is a short-medium term strategy not only to sell your training directly but to generate noise and make yourself known, reaching many more people than organically, your followers.
Usually, visibility and recruitment announcements are made first to make you known, and later they go on sale when users are already aware of the product info. There is trust built through other channels, such as email.
Online workshops
Workshops or webinars are also a very effective strategy to sell your online courses, again for the same reason:
You allow people to get to know your training side and demonstrate your experience and knowledge, which generates confidence before investing in training since it provides security and guarantee.
If you realize all the strategies are intertwined with each other.
Since to get the most significant number of people to attend the workshop, they will first have to find out that you teach it and invite them.
What media are you going to use for them? Well, advertising, social networks, email if you already have a working database.
Do you see?
In the end, it is about complementing the different strategies to have different ways of visibility, customer acquisition, and sales of your info products.
Podcast
The podcast is a strategy I love and one of the latest that I have encouraged myself to implement.
It will not bring you sales immediately, but it will also help you gain visibility and position yourself as a benchmark and specialist in your area.
It is a fantastic tool to generate community, reach more people, and establish an emotional bond beyond the sale.
Because they listen to you and feel you are much closer than reading a simple text, I recommend using the podcast as another channel to get closer to your potential clients for all those who like to communicate.
Membership
Finally, although I already mentioned it to you slightly at the beginning of the post, I wanted to talk to you about affiliation.
Just as you can affiliate with online products and third-party courses, you can also find affiliates who recommend your info products in exchange for a commission.
- It can be mentioning you in their emails to capture potential customers from their database.
- It can be on their networks or those channels where they create content.
- Adding a link or banner on your website or blog.
As I told you, there are many ways to work affiliation, and if you choose the people who recommend you well, you can broaden your horizons toward highly qualified people.
I think that the recommendation is one of the most powerful things when we buy something since it gives us much more security and confidence than if we go blindly without the opinion or experience of a third party.
3. Where to sell information products on the Internet
With all the strategies I have mentioned to sell info products, it is also essential to know where you will sell them.
What platform or space on the Internet are you going to use?
On the one hand, you can create your website to sell your online courses, for example, with WordPress, and integrate it with a platform or payment and management tool with students, as a virtual classroom.
In my case, I use the LearnDash + Thrive Cart plugin as a payment gateway, and it works very well.
You can also use platforms where you can create a specific sales page for training without having a complete website. You can use it to take users from the different strategies (email, advertising, networks.) to that specific URL.
And you can also use specific platforms to sell training.
The most common are Hotmart, Sendowl, Udemy…
The good thing about these platforms is that you don’t have to worry about anything.
You create an info producer user, upload your product online and add all your data at the billing level. They take care of the entire process in exchange for a reasonably good commission.
4. Tips for selling your info products online
Validate that this training is in demand and create a good product
Before launching to sell anything, you must validate if people are willing to pay to learn what you want to teach.
It is something I mentioned to you at the beginning of the post, but it seems to me that I should remind you of it because it is one of the most important things you must take into account.
Of course, if you have competition, it is because it is a validated product and there are customers.
From there, you will have to define your differentiating value to bring something new that makes customers want to learn with you instead of someone else.
It can be at the level of support and personalized treatment due to how the content is delivered (live instead of recorded videos, audios, or group sessions.), due to the fact of having access to life, the number of resources, downloadable exercises, extra training…
I advise you not to differentiate yourself by price because someone cheaper than you can always arrive.
Instead, as I say, make your info products more attractive by providing quality, practical and valuable content and adding value that differentiates you from your competition.
Define your target audience well
You must be clear about what kind of people you will address.
Why?
Firstly, because you cannot create a formation that is going to work for absolutely everyone.
You can create a more generic or more specific and specialized info product, but in the end, you will always go to a student profile.
And second, because when you go to sell it on the different channels, you will have to be very clear about that profile to personalize your communication as much as possible.
In this way, people will feel more attracted, and you will attract much more attention.
They will identify with your message; you will deal with doubts, needs, or concerns that you know they have, and therefore your content will be interesting…
The more you know your potential client, the more you will connect and the more chances you will have that they will trust you to buy your course online.
Create your sales funnel
Do not try to sell directly, but as you have already seen throughout the post, you will have to define a global strategy involving different channels.
In the end, think that a person who does not know you at all or who runs into you will not trust you and buy your formations just like that.
They will have to see how you explain, get to know you a little, what experience and knowledge support you, some opinions or results from previous students…
In short, safety and trust.
Something that you will work on little by little with a sales funnel, starting with educational content that will serve as a test to get to know you and see what you do and sell (blog articles, social networks, YouTube videos.).
You can offer some free content or lead magnet in exchange for them giving you their contact information, to work on that relationship of trust and start selling through emails or personalized advertisements, or by inviting them to an online workshop where they can meet you. Better and in the end, you sell your paid product.
In short, guide them little by little towards the sale using the different online channels to work on trust and authority as a brand.
Copywriting works well
Doing good copywriting is essential to arouse people’s interest and make your online product much more attractive in their eyes.
If you don’t personalize the message, if you don’t use their frustrations, concerns, or needs to create the texts with which you are going to communicate, you won’t get the person to see why it will be worth taking your course and why with you and not any other option on the market.
Copywriting is what will make the person connect with you and visualize how this training will help them grow on a personal and professional level and improve their conditions.
Therefore, although working on the different strategies is essential, in the end, copywriting is always present in all of them because it is 100% about the way you are going to communicate with your potential clients.
The better you use persuasion and sales techniques, the more opportunities you will have to scale your info producer business.
5. Do you dare to sell your first info product online?
I hope the post has been helpful to you, and now that you know how to sell an info product on the Internet, the options you have, and where you can do it, get excited about your first online product.