The most important part of building passive income for your business is learning how to sell more products.
You can (and should) build the best classes possible and create the most amazing webinars in your niche… but none of it will matter unless you learn how to market your info products the right way.
Learning how to sell more online classes and webinars will help you, because you’ll build better income streams and reap more profit, and it will help your customers, because so many more of them will benefit from your knowledge and expertise. In this article, I’m going to show you how to sell more online classes and webinars than ever before.
Quick Sales vs. Building a List
When most people think about sales, they think they should be selling to everyone who will listen. They think about things like television ads, billboards, magazine ads and direct mail. People who build great products naturally want as many people as possible hear about (and buy) those products.
Thus, when many consultants and freelancers start creating info products, they buy tons of online advertising (and sometimes offline advertising) leading directly to their offer. They point their ads right at their sales page, and hope that enough people will buy to offset the cost of the advertisements. They try to refine their sales process so that for every $1.00 they spend they make $1.10 or $1.75 in return.
This can definitely be profitable, if you are willing to put in the time to tweak and test your sales process. But, as you might imagine, it’s not the most profitable way to sell information products for your business.
The best way to build passive income for your business is to build a list. For our purposes, this means building an e-mail newsletter list of people who love what you offer. Rather than trying to survive off of one-off sales made to people who never heard of you before they clicked on your ad, you communicate with your e-mail list by sending out newsletters, tips, and ideas. As you do, those on your list come to know and trust you. They become “true fans” of you and your work.
As you build trust with your list, you can start selling products to your list subscribers. You can sell them e-books, webinars, online classes, membership programs, and more. And they will buy them, because they have come to know and to trust you.
The Real Question Is… How Do You Build Your List?
Because building a list is so powerful, if you really want to sell more online classes and webinars, you need to figure out how to build your list. You need to get as many people as possible who are interested in your niche to subscribe to your e-mail newsletter and give you permission to e-mail them (remember, spamming people doesn’t work… you need to get people on your list who want to be on your list!)
Best of all, you don’t need all that many people on your e-mail list to be able to sell lots of classes and webinars. I’ve seen some people start selling classes and webinars with as few as 500 people on their e-mail list. I generally wait until I have 2,500 – 3,000 subscribers on my e-mail lists before I launch classes and webinars, and they always tend to do very well right from the get-go.
And remember, you don’t need to be afraid of selling to your list. Many consultants and freelancers who build a list get worried that if they sell too much, people will start dropping off of their lists. Guess what? They will start dropping off, and that’s ok. Your primary goal for building an e-mail list is to sell products and services. If people leave your list because you sell to them, they’re not your target audience. Don’t be afraid to sell!
The Best Ways to Build Your E-Mail List
The most important part of building a large e-mail list is setting up your entire website with an eye to collecting e-mail addresses. Your entire site should be geared towards getting people to sign-up for your e-mail newsletter. You can learn more about how to do that in our recent article How to Build Your Online Presence to Build Passive Income.
Once you set up your website the right way, your goal is to funnel as many people as possible to your site to that they can sign-up for your e-mail list.
To date, my most successful website over the past two decades of building passive income received over 100,000 unique visitors per month, year after year… and consistently saw hundreds of people signing up for our e-mail list each week. Needless to say, that site (for one of my consulting businesses which turned into a passive income powerhouse) sold tons of classes and webinars via our e-mail list).
Here’s how I built traffic to that website, and countless others, to get people to sign-up for my e-mail list:
Blogging & Search Engine Optimization
One of the best ways to get people to visit your site and sign-up for your e-mail newsletter is by making sure that when people search for things related to your niche, your website shows up in Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines. The way to do this is through a combination of blogging regularly and focusing on “search engine optimization.”
First, you need to have a blog on your site and be posting new articles to it on a regular basis. An example is our blog at Go Beyond Clients. Another example is the blog on my fundraising consulting site. Having a blog will give the opportunity to post lots of articles showing off your knowledge. It will also give you lots of opportunities to be found in Google and other search engines.
But what should you write about on your blog? There are probably 1000’s of different articles you could write about in your niche. Which should you choose? Ideally, you should choose articles that match the searches people are doing on Google. Sure, if you are an art consultant you could write about Mongolian art in the 8th century, but if no one is searching for that, it won’t do you much good. On the other hand, if people are searching for “best ways to store art” and you write a blog post called “The 7 Best Ways to Store Art” you’ll get far more traffic to that article.
Wondering how to figure out what keywords people are searching for in your niche and how to make sure your website shows up at the top of the search results? I highly recommend this short, free course from SEMRush Academy: Keyword Research Course with Greg Gifford. (This is an affiliate link, but these videos are 100% free.)
Guest Posting
I’ve also had a lot of success with guest posting. Guest posting is where you find websites in your niche that have traffic and that don’t directly compete with your business, and write great articles for them that they can post on their site.
When you guest post, include one or two links back to your site in the blog post you write, as well as in the author bio that you provide with your article.
Guest posting is great because it gives the other site great content, and provides you with links back to your own site. The links back to your site allow people who read the article to come to your site and sign-up for your e-mail newsletter, plus they offer you additional SEO benefits because search engines like Google rank you higher based on the links back to your site.
For more information on building traffic to your site through this strategy, read Neil Patel’s guide The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging.
Social Media Marketing
Another way to build traffic back to your website is through social media. Many freelancers and consultants think that social media is an end unto itself… they think that building huge social media audiences is a great way to make more money… and it can be, but only if you are turning your social media followers into subscribers to your e-mail list.
The truth is that most of the people who follow you on social media won’t see your posts (for example, Facebook will only show your posts to fewer than 5% of your followers, unless you pay for boosted posts or other advertising). For this reason, the best thing you can do on social media is drive people back to your website, where they can sign-up for your e-mail newsletter.
With e-mail, you are in control. With social media, you’re not. That’s not to say that you should forgo social media… you shouldn’t. Just be sure to constantly drive people back to your website so that they can sign-up for your e-mail newsletter.
Paid Advertising
Another great way to drive people back to your website is through online paid advertising. Primarily, this means either paid advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, or paid e-mail blasts to other people’s e-mail lists.
I’ve had lots of success with building my lists through paid online advertising over the years. Just remember that the goal of your paid advertising is to get people to sign-up for your e-mail list so that you can marketing your passive income products to them month in and month out and turn them into raving fans.
One great way to leverage your advertising dollars is to use your ads to send people to a landing page to sign-up for newsletter (and to receive a free special report when they do so). Then, once someone signs up for your e-mail newsletter, you can make your paid offer.
You can see an example of this type of landing page for my non-profit fundraising consulting site by clicking here. (On this link, when someone signs up for the newsletter, they have the chance to purchase a $27 paid webinar). This allows you to make back a portion (or all) of your advertising cost for each subscriber.
For example, on some ads that lead to the above page, I spend 50 cents per visitor, but on average earn 70 cents per visitor. That means that I’m making money for each person who clicks on my advertising, while at the same time building a list that I can sell to over and over again.
More Great Traffic Building Ideas
As you can see, the best way to sell more online classes and webinars is by building an e-mail list composed of your true fans and then selling to your own list. There are dozens of ways to build your e-mail list. Above, I listed the 4 ways I most commonly use to build traffic to my sites and my e-mail lists. If you want more great ways to build traffic to your site and list, I highly recommend the book Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson. You can get a free copy of the book by clicking here. (This is an affiliate link).
Please note that we are proud affiliates of some of the tools listed above. This means that we will earn a commission if you click on some of the links on this page. You pay nothing extra, the commission we earn comes at no cost to you. Fear not, we only recommend products and services that we use, know, and love.
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