Understanding funnels and how you can drive interested prospects to your courses, training programs, products, and services can be all too overwhelming.

However, there are three simple steps you can implement to truly push the needle ahead when it comes to getting your content seen by interested eyes, leveraging other platforms for leads, and effectively marketing your course (although, these lessons also apply to other types of products or services).

Let’s get into the meat of what you can do to stop the wheels of your business from spinning for any longer.

1. LEVERAGE UDEMY AS A LEAD GEN PLATFORM

For the uninitiated, Udemy is the world’s largest collection of online courses and serves as an online learning platform for professionals who want to add new skills to their resume. While Udemy in of itself pioneered the online course industry and offered a great platform for you to host your course, you can use it as a part of a funnel to drive traffic off-site, right to your self-hosted course.

If you haven’t put the pieces together, that means you get to keep all of the proceeds instead of a paltry 50% while still having Udemy do much of the marketing. Here’s how it works: First up, you need to upload a ‘teaser’ course to Udemy. This can either be a short or even free course that serves your target niche.

Of note: Despite being short or free, this still needs to be a quality offering that people can derive value from. Udemy has been cracking down on less-than-satisfactory courses of late, and having great reviews as well as adhering to their guidelines is key.

The great thing about Udemy is that they allow you to pitch for your own product (or whatever you want really) in the last lecture of your course.

So, you get to take all these warm to red-hot prospects through a low-cost (or free) course that delivers immense value, then at the end you get to hit them with the real deal (your full-fledged course, service or product), drive them off Udemy and directly to your sales page or website. Do this right, and you’ll get conversions galore. You can also upsell people to any related offering they might be interested in.

2. MARKETING YOUR CONTENT AND DRIVING TRAFFIC

You need to remember that you can’t be perfect or amazing at every aspect of running your business. Being able to recognize what you excel and suck at in your business is an invaluable skill to develop.

When you know what you’re bad at, you can farm out to people who excel in that area and round out If you have any hope of having a successful business that doesn’t work you into the ground one day, you need to cognizant of marketing.

If you’re not going to spend the time and energy yourself to learn the tricks of the trade, you need to be willing to invest into people who are. Below are 3 of the most effective ways you can market content and drive warm traffic.

Content Marketing

Content marketing (provided you’re producing great content) is a fantastic tool. Because if you promote it effectively, you’ll be flooding your site with genuinely interested people who want to hear more about what you have to say and offer.

To a business of any level or size, these warm/hot leads are everything. When you get into the content creation game, you must create content that blows away everything else around it.

As a general rule of them, spending 20% of your time creating excellent, stand-out content, and the remaining 80% promoting the heck out of it is a great starting point. Seriously. Put 80% of your time into getting that piece of great content shared by as many people as possible. Go through and pick out highlight paragraphs.

Use these for emails and Facebook postPick out great sentences for Twitter. Use the blog as a script and make a YouTube video. Pull the audio from the video. Upload it as a podcast.

That’s five different pieces of native content…all derived from one exceptional article.

YouTube (paid and organic traffic)

Next up regarding lead and traffic generation is YouTube. YouTube is right up there with Google regarding being one the most powerful, of the used search engines on the internet.

That being said, find someone with a great grasp on the platform and how to use it effectively. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting a lot of time, energy and money.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are still (and likely will be for a while) an incredibly powerful tool. The amount of data they have access to…it’s simply staggering. And you can use it all to your advantage if you know what you’re doing.

Here’s the thing, though. Facebook ads require money, patience, and testing. Similar to YouTube, you need to either be willing to invest your time and energy in learning the intricacies of Facebook ads or be willing to hire someone who knows what works and what doesn’t.

The bottom line is that you need to produce consistent, high-quality content, and put it every-where where you know there are interested eyes.

3. EFFECTIVELY MARKETING YOUR COURSE

When it comes down to marketing your course (effectively), there are two great ways to go about doing so.

First off, there are webinars. Webinars are a fantastic way to sell your course (they work great for products and services as well) as the visual aspect allows you to engage and connect with your prospects at a high level.

This aspect is key if you’re selling higher ticket courses. Here’s how you can flip one live webinar into a turn-key, high converting lead generation machine that sends loads of hot traffic to your course’s sales page:

1. Build an enticing opt-in page that directs visitors to register for your webinar.

2. Whether it be through paid traffic or smart content marketing, drive traffic from Facebook to the opt-in page.

3. With leads coming in left, right, and center, host and run weekly (or bi-weekly) webinars. Be sure to tweak and improve these as needed. Once you get your opt-in page and webinar are dialed in, you should see 30–40% show up rates to your webinar and 10–15% conversion rates. That’s it for webinars. It’s really quite elegant.

4. You can send emails to your list (you do have an email list, right?). Emailing your list is fantastic because you already have a relationship with them. More often than not, a large percentage of your readers are ready and willing to buy. If you’re not emailing valuable content to your list on a regular basis (at LEAST weekly, but daily is ideal) then you need to start immediately. You can also take this a step further by offering an exclusive beta test to your list. This serves a few advantages.

- It helps foster the relationship with your list as it makes them feel special and respected.

- You can get people to test your course (while you get paid for it). This means you can tweak and optimize as you go, have some funds to drive paid traffic during your launch, and then release a remarkable course.

- When launching to your list, the sequence is rather straightforward. A simple 5–7 day email sequence where you ‘warm them up’ over the first three days before switching to hard selling will do the trick. Between running evergreen webinars and nurturing the relationship with your list, you’ll have more students in your course than you know what to do with.