How To Get More Students For Online Courses

If you don’t want to hustle to find new students for your online course every month, check this out:

We Stopped Using VSLs and Lead Magnets to Sell Our High-Ticket Course – Then Made $141,108.68 in 22 Days. 

Your Audience Is Sick Of Freebies That Don’t Work and Sales Pitches Disguised as “Webinars.” Here’s What Actually Works to Sell An Online Course.

Quick question: How are you selling your course right now?

If you’re like most people, you might be doing it the “Hard Way”, i.e:

1. Set up an opt-in page
2. Run ads to the page to get people to sign up to the webinar
3. At the end of the webinar, pitch your course
4. Maybe you do the “social media hustle” to get clients

OR, if you’re tired of webinars (like the majority of your audience is these days), you might prefer the “Product Launch” method:

1. Set up an opt-in offering a freebie/lead magnet of some kind;
2. Nurture prospects for weeks
3. Write a 15-step product launch email sequence selling your course
4. Rinse and repeat every couple of months
   
   

Here’s the Problem with Trying to Get Students for Your Online Course Using These Methods

 
Right now, it costs anywhere from $5 to $10 for a lead on your opt-in page – and that’s if you're lucky.

After being in this industry for the past 15 years, we’ve found that most  webinars or product launch sequences convert at 3-5%. 

(Again – if you're lucky, and if you're a great salesperson.)

You spend a bunch of money up front, cross your fingers, and hope it sells later…

And unless you have a HUGE marketing budget (at least 6 figures/month) then you’ll struggle to get the volume of opt-ins to make the numbers work in your favor.

Leads slowly trickle in – typically a couple a day (again, depending on how much $$$ you can pump into the funnel per day, which for most businesses, isn’t a lot).

It’s expensive, it’s unpredictable, and it takes forever to grow.

…And then 3-6 months later, you do it all over again.

But the biggest problem with this model? 
 

People Are So, So, So Jaded Right Now From Years Of Freebies That Didn’t Work, And Sleazy Product Pitches Disguised As Webinars.

Your audience’s inbox is filled with lead magnets they signed up for but never even opened.

They’ve watched hours’ worth of webinars by now that nearly all turned out to be 45-minute sales pitches.

They’re tired of overhyped claims and sleazy internet brosephs in their Lambos. 

Do lead magnets and webinars still work?

Of course.

They’re just more expensive to run, harder to get right, and require much longer sales cycles to sell your stuff than they did even 18 months ago.

Want a faster, less complex, and less expensive way to sell your course?

Here's what we prefer to do in our business:

#1: Generate customers daily through a low-ticket funnel. You can use a mini-course, or a template pack, or some other paid product. We prefer using $5 books – typically they take us about 14 days to write (more on how to do this in second).

#2: Nurture those customers as often as you realistically can – we prefer email at a minimum of 3x per week. (although sometimes we send more emails).

#3: Invite book readers to join your course – this can be as simple as saying: “Hey, did you like what you read in the book? I can help you do that. Book a call with me to talk about that.”

That’s it.

Want To Take a Deeper Dive Into How We Turn $5 Books Into 7-Figure Businesses?

Pick up a copy of The One Book Millions Method here. It includes our whole step-by-step game plan for outlining, writing, and launching your book, as well as tools, swipes, and self-assessments you can use to get your book launched as quickly as possible.

Get The Book

In fact, using that same 3-part strategy we launched a book funnel in January of 2021.

By The End Of The Month – 22 Days Later – The Book Had Brought In $141,108.68 In Sales. 

We’d spent $30,510.15 on running ads to the funnel, and made $99,087.30 in revenue (counting funnel sales + back end offer sales).

Just a couple days later (after a few quickie emails to book readers  saying “We’re looking for clients”), and by the end of the month, we’d spent $36,154.67 on running ads to the funnel, and made $141,108.68 in revenue (counting funnel sales + back end offer sales).

We didn’t have to give away all our best stuff for free and spend our time talking to freebie seekers.

We didn’t have to record (and re-record) any webinars, 20-minute VSLs, or spend our days doing Facebook Lives on Facebook.

And we certainly didn’t have to lurk around Facebook Groups trying to find people to buy our course.

Instead, we simplified our marketing down to just one question:

“How Many Books Did We Sell Today?”

For over 100 years, books have been one of the most consistent and predictable client-getting assets you can use to grow a business. 

Books can help establish your authority as an expert. They can help you grow an audience. They can help you nurture readers and guide them toward your courses, coaching, and more.

Want to See How You Can Use a Short Book To Sell Your Course Without Needing Lead Magnets, VSLs, or Webinars?

Here’s our simple 6-step “checklist” for doing it:

Step One: Write Your Book

The first two non-fiction books that our founder, Mike, wrote back in 2012 brought in 4335 sales in 8 months. 

According to Mike: “I put the books on Amazon. I begged for reviews. I wrote a ton of blog posts. I tried to get on guest blogs, podcasts, email list shares, and more.”

That’s why it took 8 months to sell just 4335 copies. 

As a result, Mike only “made” $9,060.15 from book sales in the first 8 months. 

We actually recommend you DON'T do this.

In Fact, Trying To Sell Your Book On Amazon Is Doing Things The “Hard Way”...

The method we’re showing you in this post is even more effective at selling books and turning readers into students and involves much less hustle, stress, and unpredictability.

However, despite the “low” amount of revenue those first books made, they still worked exactly as planned:

As a result of those sales, Mike’s business ended up with more clients than he could handle – better clients too; clients he had only dreamed about working with before.

By the end of 2015, the business ended up working with over 1,000 different clients. 

And, with the help of these two books, the clients they helped bring in, and the audience they helped to build, Mike was able to work with amazing “dream clients” like Russell Brunson, Mel Robbins, SUCCESS Magazine, Bill Glazer, Brendon Burchard and many others. 

All that to say:

Books Are Incredible Business-Building Tools – But The Book Is Not The Business.

A book by itself makes no economic sense…

(Profit margins are low on shorter books. It takes time and energy to create a book. You need designers, formatters, and editors to put one out worth reading.)

…but a book as part of a larger marketing and sales system is the quick ticket to scaling to 7 figures or more.

Which brings us to step #2 of the process after you’ve written your book:

Step Two: Bundle Your Book With Some Mini-Courses, Template Packs, or Masterclasses

Right now, it costs anywhere from $7 to $20 to sell a $5 book on Facebook. 

Most people aren’t equipped to handle losing $15 for every $5 book sale without going bankrupt, especially if they sell 150 books per day. That’s 150 x -$15 in daily net losses.

This is why people give up on paid traffic. They look at the math and say, “It’s impossible! I’m just gonna go back to spamming Facebook groups for students.”

The good paid traffic strategist says, “OK, I need to find out how to offset that -$15,”.

Put another way: “How can I go from losing $15 for every book sale…to breaking even (or even making a slight profit) for every book I sell?”

Simple: You bundle your book with other stuff for people to buy.

For example, in The One Book Millions Method funnel, we offset that -$15 by offering an “upsell” worth $195. Normally, 10 percent of the people who see that $195 buy it. 

That means we’ve added +$19.50 to the “average order value” and have now turned that -$15 per book sale into +$4.50 per book sale. 

Now, we’re getting paid to put our sales assets in the hands of qualified prospects. Incredible!

 An “upsell” we’ve paired with one of our books in the past

Once you’ve set up the economics to work in your favor, you can move on to getting the book into the hands of your ideal students…

Step Three: Run Traffic To a Simple Webpage Selling Your Book + Mini-Course Bundle

Don’t want to spend hours every day spamming strangers to get them to buy your book? Great – don’t.

Instead, create a simple sales page to sell your book that does three things:

1. Shows people the results you got using your method.
2. Tells people “I’ve also written a book about it – want to check it out?”
3. Then throw in 2-3 additional bonuses with your book to sweeten the deal.

That’s it.

Then simply run a couple of ads which do steps 1 and 2 above.

You can hire a copywriter to do this for you, sure, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Remember:

This isn’t some $997 course or $10,000 coaching program – this is a $5 book.

You don’t need to write some crazy long sales page, you don’t need to be an incredible salesperson, and you don’t need to set up a multi-platform funnel with 247 touch points just to sell your book.

The argument you make on your sales page can be as simple as:

 
After building more than 37 funnels in the past year alone for ourselves and our clients, we have found that simple, mid-length, VSL-free sales pages work best. 

There are a hundred reasons for this: shorter attention spans of today’s market, load speed times, messaging, consumption, simplicity, etc.

Just know: You do not have to write some crazy long piece of copywriting genius just to sell your $5 book.

Once your book starts generating sales, then you can move on to the next step.

Step Four: Go Ahead and Spend More on Ads! (Because Book Sales Are Covering Costs)

The fastest way to become a sought-after expert in your niche is to get your book in the hands of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.

To do this, you’re going to need to leverage paid traffic.

Typically, we’ll aim to spend at least $3,000/day on ads to get our books in the hands of buyers.

But please don't be alarmed by this figure. 

After all, you've already set up the economics to work in your favor by bundling your book with other products. 

As long as you’ve done that right, your ad costs will be offset by your Average Order Value, and you will be acquiring customers at net zero cost (a.k.a “for free”).

Here’s the other cool thing too:

You’re literally in charge of the “faucet” that you’ve built here.

Don’t want to scale to $100k/month? Great, just don’t spend as much on ads.

Your book will still continue to turn strangers into course buyers – but you decide how fast you want that to happen based on how far you turn the faucet.

Then, as more and more people buy your book, you’ll begin to build up a healthy email list – bringing us to step 5…

Step Five: Nurture Book Buyers Into Course Buyers

So people are buying your book now. Awesome! But your job isn’t over…

In any business, you and your client must have a relationship of trust before they’re willing to spend big bucks with you.

Of course, relationships of trust don’t just fall from the sky, so there are two things you can do to help your client trust you:

 
There are a ton of different ways you can do that, but the method we prefer the most?

Email.

We like to send a minimum of 3 emails per week – although sometimes we send a little more.

Our emails aren’t flashy, or controversial, and neither do they adopt some kind of smarmy marketing persona.

Yet email has been our most effective tool for rapidly turning $5 book buyers into $100,000/year clients for a long, long time now.

And now that your book is regularly selling and turning complete strangers into premium, pre-qualified students?

That brings you to step 6:

Step Six: Write Another Book, Or Launch Another Course, Or Keep Selling Your Services – But Do It With ZERO Marketing Expense This Time.

Here’s what you have now:

1. A way to bring customers into your business;
2. The ability to nurture those customers as often as you’re able to;

Now you just need to plug in the third part of the equation:

1. The ability to offer the best transformation and outcome you can at a premium price (so you can have the resources to deliver the best outcomes in your niche).

Here’s the other thing too: You probably have this already with your course – you just need to dial it in.

Whether you’re currently offering only a course to your clients, or you’re also offering 1-on-1 coaching on top, or if you’re offering some other way to deliver a transformation to your students, you now have a strategy that brings complete strangers into your business…

Turns them into pre-qualified buyers…

And leads them to your premium offers on a consistent basis.

Now you can rinse and repeat as needed.

(In fact, our team is currently working on our 6th book soon to be released!)

The best part about all this?

You DON’T need to have a huge team to make this work – you can plan, write, and publish your own book in as little as 14 days with a “one-man band” setup.

You DON’T need to have a huge audience for this to work (in fact, the book is the very tool you can use to rapidly build an online presence in your niche even if you’re currently “unknown”).

You DON’T need to hustle your butt off trying to get students to enroll every day (one of the reasons we love books is because of their ability to turn complete strangers into our newest customers simply by reading the book).

And your book does NOT need to be Shakespeare – nearly all of our books use simple, plain language with no frills, just like this article.

We sincerely believe that most experts are just 1 book away from a 7-figure business.

We don’t just say that because we believe it.

We say that because books have been the very tool we’ve used over the past 10 years to consistently turn $5 book buyers into 6-figure/year clients and students – both for ourselves and for our clients.

Got a course people love?

Turn it into a book too!