How to Sell Your Course Before Creating Anything
Does the idea of spending hours and hours creating a new course before ever earning a cent sound like an uphill battle you’re not excited to climb? You don’t have to!
Pre-selling your course, whether it be with a beta launch, founding member launch or a simple pre-sale is a great way to get paid before you make anything! And you’ll be confident that people actually want your new course because they’ve already paid for it.
In this blog, I’m breaking down how to you can pre-sell your next course before creating any of the content.
The benefits of pre-selling a course
The obvious main benefit of pre-selling your course is getting paid before you spend the time creating all of the modules, lessons, and content! Creating a course is a big project, and it can be a little discouraging to spend so much time creating the perfect course to hear crickets when your cart opens.
Pre-selling your online course is also a great way to validate your course idea, and you can even have your first round of students help you create the content they need. Some course creators offer live support as part of a pre-sale, so they can work along with their students and deliver the training, resources, and content as they need it. The insights, feedback, and testimonials you can receive from these initial students can be invaluable!
What you need to know before pre-selling your course:
You need to know a few things before you try to pre-sell your course.
1) Your course promise
Your first round of students will need to know and understand the course promise - aka what end results they will receive by signing up for this course.
2) Your course outline
You’ll also need to have a general outline of your course content and / or the format for the live round. Nobody will sign up for a pre-sell offer if they have no idea about what it’s about! So while you don’t create the content yet, you do need to have it planned and mapped out in a rough plan.
3) Your messaging and ideal audience
Pre-selling is still selling.
In fact, because people will be buying knowing that they won’t have access for a bit, you’ll need to entice them even more, to buy now! Which is why nailing down your messaging and your ideal audience for your course is still key if you are doing a pre-sell launch.
Pre-selling your course:
There are 3 key steps to putting your pre-launch course out there and getting your first students in the doors.
1) Create a pre-selling launch plan
Pre-selling a course is still a launch, and it requires a launch plan. Usually, this is on a smaller scale, but it’s still a launch plan.
You’ll need to map out your content, email sequences, any promo offers and generally create excitement around your launch!
2) Create your course pre-launch goals
It’s a good idea to have some sort of goals for yourself for your pre-launch so you know how you’ll navigate decisions as they come up.
Will you be doing a high-touch live round, so you only want a handful of students to sign up so you can focus more on their needs and learn from them while you work through the course together? If you do, make sure to add that into your marketing plan content -- ‘Only 10 spots available!’
Otherwise, let’s set some other goals around your launch:
How many pre-sell students would you like to have in your course?
What revenue will that result in for your pre-launch?
3) Implement your pre-selling marketing plan
Now it’s time to announce your course to the world! And it’ll b even more exciting to share because you haven’t had to actually create your course yet!
Remember to make sure you get testimonials, suggestions, and feedback from your first students to help with your first official course launch when it’s all ready to go!
Now, there’s no need to make this complicated! You can pull off a simple but super effective launch using my Low-Energy Launching system that I use for almost every one of my launches!
