How to Utilize Content Marketing to Promote eLearning Courses

Content marketing is a proven way to promote any business, brand, and product. In most cases, it is better to go for content marketing instead of paid ads when it comes to eLearning courses. It’s a cost-effective and easy way to spread courses among your target audience without irritating them with ads. But planning content and promoting courses can be difficult without any detailed guidelines. Have no worries! In this article today, we will dive deep into content marketing and help you plan content for your eLearning courses.

Instructors in any niche can utilize content marketing to promote online courses. Especially those who are starting out and running eLearning courses on a shoestring, content marketing is the right approach. And as creating content and eLearning courses are a lot alike, instructors find it easy.

Content Marketing for eLearning Courses

Content marketing is a strategy in which you don’t go to your audience with products; rather, they come to you. Audiences follow your content on the search engine result pages or other areas and end up becoming a customer. So, content marketing’s main goal is to make people aware of the products, business, and brands through content, drive traffic to websites, and boost conversions.

Content marketing is one form of marketing strategy focused on creating and distributing content. It is meant to make people aware of your services or products and results in conversions in the end.

Content marketing for eLearning courses or sites means creating valuable content that is related to your course niche. It’s about making content available for people on search engines or social media channels and encouraging them to take your courses finally.

Why Should You Utilize Content Marketing to Promote Your Courses

There are a lot of reasons to promote your eLearning courses through content marketing. First of all, it’s a proven way to drive traffic to your site. The more traffic you drive to your site, the higher your conversion will be. 

You can not drive traffic to your site just by creating courses. You have to talk about your courses, describe their usefulness, benefits, outlines in different posts. This way, you can attract visitors and convince them to take your courses. This is what content marketing for eLearning courses is mostly about.

“Having relevant content articles on your site and sharing them on social media can put them in front of relevant audiences,” shared Donald Chan, founder at IMPACT.

How to Utilize Content Marketing to Promote Your Courses

There are many ways you can utilize content marketing to promote your eLearning courses. We have shown some of the best and most effective ways for you. 

Take Care of Your Course SEO

Your course description not only has to impress your students but also search engines so that they appear on the search engine result pages for people who are looking for them. Yes, without taking good care of course SEO, you will not achieve this goal. 

Most eLearning platforms take their site SEO seriously without having a focus on the courses. But alongside site SEO, optimizing courses for SEO will bring a better result. You should describe courses in detail, including what topics this course covers and who they are created for.

Tips to Optimize eLearning Courses for Search Engines

• Write SEO friendly course title with the target focus keyword
• Select a short URL and have the target keyword in the URL
• Give a course meta description covering multiple semantic keywords
• Write a detailed course description with keywords and covering key lessons 
• Write a course excerpt that summarizes your course in short
• Define the target audience and talk about course benefits

Fortunately, if your site is built with Tutor LMS, you will have options to add all of these above while creating courses. 

Publish Course Release Blog Post

How do you let your audience know that you have created a new course? Just publish the course and share it on social media? No, you have to take one leap forward from there. Consider publishing a course release blog post with every course and talking a lot about it with a background story.

What to Cover in a Course Release Blog Post

• Describe your course in details
• Talk about special lessons and how they would benefit learners
• State why you have created this course with a background story
• Describe what makes your course different from the other available ones
• Define who this course is for 
• You can talk about any discount you may offer with your release

Cover Similar Topics Before and After Publishing Courses

If you want people to come to your site and take courses, you need to talk about your course topics. Not just after creating courses, you have to start talking about those topics before even publishing the course to give a feel of what this site is about. This would help people and Google to understand your site most. Try to solve people’s problems in different articles. Give them guidelines, publish short how-to tutorials, and talk about how your course lesson can help in that regard most.

Content Creation Ideas for eLearning Websites

Here are some of the content marketing post ideas for your eLearning websites. You can almost have every type of content on your eLearning site.

• Publish a course teaser and ask people what they are expecting
• You have to start creating content around your course topics.
• Divide course topics into small chunks and write blog posts on them
• Publish short tutorials related to your course topic
• Involve your course teacher in creating a related post
• Cover course topic and guest posting on other niche sites

Guest Post on Relevant Third-party Websites 

Publishing relevant content on your site around your eLearning courses is wonderful. There’s another way to reach a new audience with your courses. Yes, you can guest post on relevant blogs and websites and cover content around your courses. Such as, if you are offering courses on website design and development, you can guest post on websites that publish tips, tutorials, and guides around this topic. 

Guest posting is a great way to reach a newer audience. There are some free and paid options available for you. For WordPress and related topics, there are options like WP Hive promotion plans to publish posts. You can place links to your courses on relevant third-party websites, get listed on course round-up (ex- 10 best courses to improve your web development skills), and do many more. 

Publish Students’ Accomplishments With Interviews

Feature your students’ accomplishments, stories, and experiences with your course on your eLearning site. There’s nothing more inspiring than telling your audience how your courses impacted your students’ lives. 

For example, If your eLearning courses are in a professional skill and career niche, find students who have completed courses and made good use of your lessons. Tell your audience how it helped him/her to get jobs or achieve something in their profession. 

No matter the niches your courses are in; you will have students and their stories to cover. And this is what would convince other potential learners to take your courses. 

Tips to Cover Your Students’ Stories

• Cover one student’s story in a single post with a personalized title
• Share students photos and related special moments
• Set up a questionnaire that brings previous and post-course taking state
• Ask what part of the course he/she liked most or impacted them

Covering students’ stories on your eLearning site is not only inspiring but also it boosts engagement. As you are featuring success, your students and their well-wishers will be willing to share this on social media channels and bring you more leads eventually.

Host Webinars and Podcasts

Webinars and podcasts are immensely popular nowadays. As you can host them without renting any conference hall, these have become the replacement of physical meetup. And with advanced tools and social media support to live stream events, this is an easier and most effective way to reach people. 

Did you know you can even take live classes on your eLearning site built with Tutor LMS? Click here to know in details.

But for eLearning courses, your webinars and podcasts should be different from the regular ones. 

Tips to Host Webinars and Podcast for eLearning Courses

• Choose webinars and podcast topic closely related to your courses
• Invite experts in your niche and ask him/her questions on behalf of your audience
• Have your successful students as a guest and ask her/him to share how the course helped
• Address people’s problem in your niche and talk about how your course can help
• Share webinars and podcasts on social media and upload them on your site for people to watch/listen any time in the future.

Offer Free eBooks

Offering free eBooks is another effective way to promote eLearning courses. You can create useful eBooks in your niche and offer them free of cost for your audience. This is also a proven way to boost your email subscription and have returning visitors to your eLearning website. 

You can ask visitors emails to download eBooks and have their consent to send emails and newsletters. Make sure you make your courses linked in the relevant places on your eBook. Cover success stories, give guidelines, and many more. In short, make your eBook as detailed as possible.

Also, you can offer a free eBook with your course. You can say what this eBook generally costs and mention that learners will get this free of cost once enrolled in the course. This way, you can add more value to your course.

Only creating courses and publishing them on your website will not be enough to have students for your courses. You have to promote your courses in different ways. Content marketing is one of the proven ways to promote websites, products, and courses easily. You can go for paid ads, social media promotion, display ads, and more to promote and sell your courses. But content marketing should be your top priority because you can feel its impact in the long run and generally gives consistently positive results.

Do you think we have missed any important point of content marketing for eLearning courses? Please let us know in the comment below. Good luck with spreading knowledge.

Bonus: If you are looking for a complete eLearning solution to switch to, give Tutor LMS a try and thank me later.

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