To sell a course, the right people need to see your offer. Period.

Without eyeballs, there aren’t sales.

Luckily, the process of GETTING eyeballs isn’t confined to a life spent slaving away on social media trying to build an audience.

Because at the end of the day? Audience and leads are actually two very different things.

Audience: A group of people to whom you deliver free content and thought leadership to.

Leads: A group of people who express interest in your offer.

An audience can help you generate leads, no doubt. But do you need a BIG audience to get the leads you need to sell your course? NUP.

In today’s podcast episode, we walk through how to structure a traffic and visibility plan to generate the number of leads you need to fill your course funnel.. with or without a big audience to start out with.

Here’s how to structure a plan of attack, to generate leads to sell your course, how it DIFFERS from audience.. and how it all works together;

1️⃣ Choose Your Selling System

Your selling system is the strategic manner in which you get your offer in front of people. Your first step is to map out what this is for you. Inside of our group coaching program Launchpad, we show you what we recommend at different stages of your digital course business.

For example, when you are FIRST putting together your offer, we recommend a “Foundation Round” launch.

Why?

It allows you to validate your offer PRIOR to putting effort into a big, fancy launch or funnel AND it doesn’t require the NUMBERS in terms of leads, that a bigger launch or evergreen funnel requires.

It also usually converts HIGHER than, say, a webinar launch, because it’s a more personal way of selling.

2️⃣ Do the Math

Based on the selling system you choose, you then need to reverse engineer into the number of leads you need to sell your course. This number will vary based on three things — the number of sales you want, the price point of your course and your conversion rate (which means the percentage of leads that purchase from you).

For example; if you are doing a webinar launch, you have a $1,000 course and want to make 10 sales, you will need 500 leads if you have a conversion rate of 3%.

That number then becomes your ALL IN focus.

The problem? Is that you need to get those leads in the 10 – 14 days out from your sales event. Difficult to do, if you have a small audience and you haven’t put any thought into this in the lead up to that event.

And THAT is why a Traffic and Visibility Plan is so important.

3️⃣ Create Your Traffic and Visibility Plan

Step three is to build out a Traffic and Visibility Plan for generating the numbers you need for your launch (this is the term we used in Launchpad; think of it as a marketing plan).

The big thing to keep in mind here?

That AUDIENCE and LEADS are two very different things. Audience refers to things like your number of Instagram followers, the people who listen to your podcast and even your email list.

Are those things helpful?

YES!

But they are ALL long term plays.

Simply relying on your audience — regardless of the size — to generate the number of leads you need for your webinar might work the first or second time (if you HAVE an audience, that is). But if you aren’t consistently putting effort into traffic and visibility year round as a course creator, your business won’t be sustainable for the long term.

Your traffic and visibility plan is how you start to build the audience and thought leadership you need SO THAT when you get to the “registration” period for your sales event, you have the AUDIENCE you need to generate leads fast.

The key?

A MIX of both long term and short terms plays.

Long term refers to what we call “build” strategies; being the content marketing you do with core content (podcast, blogging, vlogging) and social media (eg Instagram, TikTok) to GROW your own audience.

Usually, this is where new course creators SOLELY focus, and are then disappointed when they don’t get the number of leads they need for their selling system.

Truth Bomb: unless your audience is influencer size massive, OR you have a strong legion of passionate fans, this won’t really work.

That’s why a Traffic and Visibility Plan actually focuses MORE on strategies that involve getting in front of NEW people, and bringing them OVER to your audience. These work alongside your build strategies by allowing you to supercharge your efforts.

Example – Podcasting (long term strategy) v Guest Podcasting (supercharge strategy).

Whilst podcasting is one of the BEST channels for a course creator to focus on in terms of core content for the long term, it’s not going to give you NEW people into your audience fast.

So, you would COMBINE that with guest podcasting, and strategically pitching podcasts with aligned audiences.

The benefit? You can do the math on the numbers you need. For example, you might pitch x10 podcasts with a 25% success rate to appear on two, aligned guest podcasts a month.

Of course there are many other strategies like this; we give you a selection along with estimated numbers and step-by-step templates inside of Launchpad. We’ve also broken out one of our key “buy” strategies — Paid to Grow — into a small low priced mini course if you want to check that out (www.thecoursecartel.com/paidtogrow).

The point is?

You need a way of strategically growing your audience long term AND short term BETWEEN sales events with a strategic Traffic and Visibility Plan so that you HAVE the audience to GET the leads you need for your sales events.

You TURN that audience into leads when you are two weeks out from your sales event; which means warmer leads of which you then require FEWER of because you have higher conversion rates. Rather than frantically trying to generate leads without consistent audience building in between sales events.

So, long story short — do you need an audience for your digital course?

Yes, but it can be really small for the validation process we recommend in Launchpad, and AS you go through that process we will also have you implement and execute a Traffic and Visibility Plan to grow ahead of your first official launch.

By having a system; you aren’t leaving your sales up to chance.. and it’s a beautiful thing.

Keep Listening!

Listen On: Apple Podcasts | Spotify