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Training courses are a common element of many influencers’ content monetization strategies. You can teach people how to develop a desirable skill and scale your revenue over time. Create the training course once, add some updates from time to time, and you can continue selling it.

Selling the training course is where the challenge resides. Most people think the hard part is creating the course, but marketing is always the most challenging of the two to pull off. If you want to give your training course sales a boost, follow these 5 strategies.

Co-Create Courses With Multiple Instructors

When you create a training course on your own, you alone are responsible for the marketing. That dynamic changes if you create training courses with other instructors. Not only does the work get cut in half since someone else is creating the videos with you, but the other instructor is just as responsible for marketing the course.

Partnering up with enough instructors can significantly grow your audience over time. You should only partner up with 1-2 additional instructors per course. This is the perfect blend to ensure communication is smooth and you’re still getting a large piece of the pie.

If you create a course with 4 other instructors, you’ll only get 20% of the royalties and communication becomes more difficult as you add more people to the group. You can reach out to multiple instructors and partner with them for individual courses rather than all of you contributing to a single course together. With this set-up, you’ll be working on multiple training courses at the same time.

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Publish Your Courses On Multiple Platforms

Most of my courses get published on both Udemy and SkillShare. If you only publish your courses on one of those platforms, you are missing out on all of the potential revenue from the other platform. In my case, turning away from one of those platforms would have resulted in thousands of dollars in unrealized income because of narrow-mindedness. 

Publishing your courses across multiple platforms is one of the easiest way to boost your earnings. You’re taking the same exact content and distributing it across other platforms. If I publish a course on Teachable or through my own website, it’s exclusive to those platforms because those are different from platforms like Udemy and SkillShare where it’s hard to sell a training course for more than $10 (the most I currently charge for a training course off Udemy and SkillShare is $197).

Create A Training Course Series

The best product launches and TV shows are done in series. You enjoy the first part of the series so much that you absolutely need the second part of the series. You can create a similar effect with your training courses by creating courses that line up with each other.

People who want to learn how to use Facebook advertising to grow your business may also be interested in learning how they can grow a Facebook Group. These course ideas complement each other and can result in returning customers.

A large percentage of your customers will not buy any of your offers. It’s a small group of your customers who will buy the majority of the products and services you provide.

If you decide to create a training course series, map out different series before you create training courses. Each 3-part training course series can go a long way in boosting your sales. 

Create Free Content That Leads To Your Courses

Students will only buy your course if they trust you. Creating free content gives you the chance to demonstrate your expertise and show your audience you know the topic well. Almost no one will become a customer just from reading a single blog post or watching a single video. 

Some people will binge through your free content for years before deciding to buy anything from you. That’s why you have to keep showing up and producing as much free content as you can. It only takes 30 minutes to produce an 800-1,200 word blog post. If you can publish new content each day and use that content to promote your courses, you’ll put yourself in a solid position to boost your course sales.

Prioritize Email List Growth

Your email list is your most valuable asset. You have full control over your ability to communicate with this audience. While a social media algorithm change can dramatically affect the number of people your content reaches, you can reach all of your email subscribers by sending out an email.

Most instructors sell their courses through email rather than through social media and other platforms. For instructors, social media is best utilized to attract followers to your opt-in pages and offer a freebie in exchange for receiving emails from you moving forward. 

Every top instructors prioritizes email list growth, and you should too.

Those are the strategies you can use to sell more training courses. There are plenty of additional ways you can make money through your content.

Creating new content each day allows you to stay top of mind with your audience. It’s one of the best things you can do to grow your content brand. Not only do you stay top of mind in that moment, but daily content gives you plenty of assets you can promote for years to come.

The blog posts I’ve written years ago continued to get shared across my social networks to this day because they are evergreen content. 

But producing daily content isn’t seen as an easy adventure. It’s one that requires enough ideas and time to create said content. I’ve adopted a variety of content creation schedules over the years, but I’m always at my best when I’m producing daily content or something very close to that amount. 

Coming Up With The Ideas

To produce daily content, you need to come up with at least 7 new ideas each week. The way I see it, that means coming up with either 2 new ideas each day or 10 ideas each week. Having excess content ideas is an important part of the process because not all of your ideas will click in your mind upon a closer look.

Sometimes you’ll feel good about an idea only to then not feel it when it comes time to creating the content. This is why it’s important to come up with more ideas than you need. There are plenty of places you can go for ideas. A book’s table of contents, a YouTube channel, and podcast are some of the many places you can go for new content ideas. If you are looking for additional ways to come up with content ideas, consider these 30 ways to come up with more content ideas.

Creating The Content

Once you have the ideas in place, the next step is to flesh out the content. Before you start creating the content, come up with an outline. The outline acts as your guiding compass so you know the direction of your piece before you get to work. It’s the equivalent of wanting to share 3 steps to achieve a certain result and knowing what those 3 steps are before you start working on the content. 

The content won’t create itself even if you have the outline. Schedule a time each day to produce new content. I like to write blog posts in the morning, create videos in the afternoon, and interview podcast guests in the evening. Each of these activities takes me close to 30-45 minutes per day on average.

When you think in terms of writing 1,000 words per day rather than writing a blog post each day, it doesn’t sound as bad. Writing 1,000 words for most people will take just 30 minutes. As you write more content, you can write the same amount of words in a shorter amount of time.

Post Production Work

Part of publishing daily content is going through all of the post-production work. This includes editing, uploading your work, finding the right picture(s), optimizing your content, and hitting the publish button among other things.

I do the post-production work away from content creation so I’m able to fully focus on content creation when that’s what I’m supposed to do.

I don’t create a YouTube video and then immediately proceed to edit it, optimize it, create the thumbnail, and publish my work. I create multiple videos in one sitting and then walk away. I then pick a time later in the day to complete all of the post-production related tasks. 

You can make the post production work as detailed or minimal as you desire. I prefer to keep it to a minimum (i.e. no music in my podcast) so I can sustainably produce more content. 

The reason most people don’t produce daily content is because they don’t break down what type of work daily content entails. Most people can produce daily content on a single platform with less than an hour of effort per day. When you break down any goal, it instantly becomes easier to achieve.

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Not every self-published author’s business begins and ends with writing books. Some authors take a single book and turn it into a legacy brand. They take their writing and turn it into a variety of income streams, and some authors make an entire career out of one book.

How does that happen? How do some authors turn a single book into their entire business? We’ll explore some of the strategies you can utilize to turn your book into a profitable business.

Turn Your Book Into Other Assets

A book is written content. If you take that content and distribute it via a different method, you can create more offerings. Many nonfiction authors take their books and turn them into training courses. 

The book is the less expensive version fo a training course while you might get more time with the author via the training course. While training courses are the most obvious path, don’t just stop there.

You can also turn your book into a presentation and talk about it at a variety of events. The better your book performs from a sales perspective, the easier it will be to secure these types of talks. In the early stages of your journey, secure as many podcast bookings as you can. This will help build your brand and possibly land you those big talks later on. 

I wouldn’t go into a book with the goal of landing talks for it because that’s very hit or miss. However, it’s a possible scenario. 

An easier route is to turn your book into a coaching program. Some of my readers schedule strategy calls with me where we talk about their businesses and how I can help. Using this strategy has allowed me to secure multiple clients for my podcast coaching services. 

Write A Book Series

Never stop at just one book. The best way to sell your books is to continue writing more books. Each book you write will bring attention to your older content, and readers who enjoy one of your books are likely to buy your additional books.

If you view each book as a potential speaking topic, you’ll increase your range of speaking topics by writing more books. You can take the same approach with training course and coaching topics.

Writing more books is the best way to grow your self publishing brand. It allows you to multiply what is already working, and each book you launch will help you further refine the process.

Include Affiliate Links In Your Books

Not only can you make money through the book royalties and promoting your products, but you can also generate revenue through affiliate links. Anytime you mention a product or service that has an affiliate program, use your affiliate link in the eBook.

When people click on the link and buy what you’re recommending, you will earn a small commission. You don’t want to spam your book with affiliate links because that would create an unenjoyable experience. However, you can include affiliate links when they make sense and include a “Resources” Page at the end of your book and use affiliate links for each of the resources you recommend.

Create Merchandise

It’s getting easier than ever to create merchandise using sites like Zazzle. If you have a cool saying or artwork in your book, you can turn that content into shirts, caps, mugs, and everything in between.

You can also sell prints and other merchandise on Etsy to further expand your book’s earning potential.

The key to turning your book into a profitable business is to think beyond the book. Create multiple income streams around the same work so you can diversify your revenue and expand in multiple areas.