15 Business & Marketing Experts Share Top Tips All Course Creators Should Know

The most common business model in the knowledge economy used to be selling one-off courses, but as the digital economy was becoming more sophisticated, these models evolved to meet the new requirements.

Panos Siozos

Subscriptions and memberships have become the holy grail of monetizing your content, having recurring passive revenue.

Panos Siozos

From the side of customer education, we see more and more businesses using online courses as an amazing marketing tool. Here at LearnWorlds, we say that education is the best form of marketing and the ideal form of customer success you could ever have.

Panos Siozos

64% of learners find it essential to access their training content from a mobile device.

Jo Milonis & Georgia Kontesidou

Video is hands-down the most popular medium for eLearning, but it has evolved along with platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, that have really transformed how users consume videos. We can see that eLearning videos tend to be shorter and more concise, often following microlearning patterns.

Jo Milonis & Georgia Kontesidou

There’s an increase in how data-centric and data-based eLearning is becoming. More and more trainers realize the potential of having detailed metrics and analytics.

Panos Siozos

So we don’t just buy brands, we buy into brands. You want your audience to look at your brand and to look at the people that you’re attracting and to say, “Yes, that’s me, they’re speaking to me.” And these are my people, my tribe. it’s super important that you speak in a way that resonates with your customers.

Stephen Houraghan

If you’re building a brand for the first time, always, always, always start with knowing who your audience is, what segment of the market you’re going after, why you’re different. And put those messages out there into the market in a way that will resonate with your audience.

Stephen Houraghan

Underneath a brand’s DNA are familiar terms such as purpose, vision, mission, and values. It is common to confuse them with marketing, but they are not marketing. They serve as a compass for brands, indicating a brand’s place in the market, the target audience, and the brand’s unique selling proposition.

Stephen Houraghan

You want not just to drive clients and ask them to become your customers – you need to craft a plan that will ensure that your clients get to know, and know you really well; to like you, and like you quite a lot, and then also trust you, and trust you quite deeply. And it gets to the point when the objective of the plan is that there will be no doubt in the mind of your audience or clients that you, in fact, are the solution to their problem.

Ciarán Regan

A lot of people try to mimic their competitors’ successful practices. It’s not about what your competitors are doing well, it’s about what they’re not doing or what they are doing wrong. Look at those bad reviews; where are people disappointed? If you see patterns, you may be able to identify a potential gap in the market that could be filled.

Stephen Houraghan

The fact that you are different will generate that attention where your prospective client can see that genuine benefit that you offer. And then ultimately, this will feed into how you communicate to your prospective clients – the message you want to communicate, the story you want to tell, and this clarity will drive that urgency that you are looking for.

Ciarán Regan

Identify one or two channels that you know your audience hangs out on and then be there often, be there frequently. Then, get a good handle on that channel to ensure that it is performing for you.

Ciarán Regan

The way you build a good brand is through the peak-end rule. The peak-end rule is all about the experiences people have when they’re visiting your website, the better the experience, the more delighted they’re going to feel. And they’re going to talk about your brand. So create amazing experiences, through your content through your product through your virtual seminars, events – whatever it may be to delight people.

Neil Patel

YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world after Google. And we see a lot of people coming to YouTube to simply research for certain items – how amazing would it be if they would find your business, your brand, your service offering?

Patrick Loecken

A YouTube channel gives you the ability to build an authentic connection with viewers.

Patrick Loecken

You need to come up with a great concept of how your channel will look like, what makes it unique, how your content will evolve, what it will cover over time, and so on. That’s the most important thing you should invest your time, money, and everything else on.

Patrick Loecken

It’s truly utterly important to attract people in the first 5 seconds. And also to introduce your brand or your product simply to kind of “catch” people and make them aware of it before they don’t understand it and skip after 5 seconds. So start really high with your storyline and come to the climax right away.

Patrick Loecken

You’ll get a ton of traffic if you send email blasts, push notification blasts, and flash SMSs, right when you publish your video. If you do that, it’ll be the X factor that just helps you grow your YouTube channel.

Neil Patel

YouTube creators are always adjusting, always wanting to change, always wanting to try something, so you have to iterate and adapt. If something’s not working, change it. If something worked in the past, but now all of a sudden it’s not working again now, you have to adapt. Change it. Get ready for whatever’s new. Look at the trends, look at what’s going on, and you can move forward.

Matthew Pierce

One of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs and marketers make when creating YouTube ads is that they just kind of throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. E.g., they repurpose a Facebook ad as a YouTube ad. But the problem is they are two totally different platforms.

Aleric Heck

One of the most important things you have to do within a YouTube Ad – and this is something people overlook – is to actually provide value in the ad itself. This is a golden nugget because it’s small but very valuable.

Aleric Heck

You don’t need fancy equipment or skills to succeed with YouTube ads. Our research has shown that fancy equipment and highly produced videos can actually detract from your message since they make it appear less authentic.

Aleric Heck

You want your content to be highly relatable and personable. I call it PTP, which stands for People-to-People. Whether you serve businesses or consumers, they’re all made up of people.

Mari Smith

Short-form vertical video is the darling of the day, anywhere from five seconds up to three minutes; reels on Instagram. Video makes up 49% of all mobile traffic worldwide.

Mari Smith

Going live on Instagram really helps, live videos are high in demand… Go live at least twice a week and make sure live content is amazing. This will help you get way more followers; it will give you more reach on Instagram.

Neil Patel

Think strategically, like a relationship marketer, and don’t be pushy. Your goal is to build relationships with people by connecting with them. You should genuinely want to know about your audience and show them that you care about them with a passion.

Mari Smith

Content is king, but community is queen! Go ahead and build a vibrant, engaged community either through a Facebook group or other platforms.

Mari Smith

A lot of the budget is being spent on both paid ads, as well as organic. But that doesn’t mean that you need to be a 60/40 split. You can spend more on organic, you can spend more on paid – it’s going to vary per business, and it’s going to be based on what is right for you.

Neil Patel

The first thing you need to ask yourself is how is your current marketing performing? Look at each of your channels, be honest with yourself. What’s going really well? When it’s going really bad – why is that channel going really bad? How are other people doing it better? How can YOU do it better? What you want eventually is all your channels to be in this growth mode. Once you get into this growth mode, you’ll do much better. But again, it takes time right, and that’s okay.

Neil Patel

Social media is great for figuring out what people are looking for right now. Because it takes longer to rank on SEO, see what’s hot on social media and use that to come up with ideas for your content for SEO and more keyword opportunities.

Neil Patel

When it comes to SEO, second biggest gain is updating your content. So I only write four to five pieces of content a month that are new, but we update over 100 pieces of old content a month. By keeping it fresh and up to date, our old content continually ranks higher and we do better.

Neil Patel

Your challenge is mainly the conversion rate and how to make those people convert faster – because maybe they will get there, but maybe it will not happen in a week in a month.

Tetiana Stuzhna

When somebody is looking for a course you need to speak of your course, specifically, you need to mention it in your ad. What do you offer as your unique proposition? And how are you different from your competition?… You basically need to answer the question why you are not your competition.

Tetiana Stuzhna

Google search ads – it’s not an easy system. And, you need to understand that. In order to do it yourself, you need to spend lots of time learning and then making your own mistakes – or maybe you’ll benefit more from hiring somebody.

Tetiana Stuzhna

You need to have a call to action (CTA). If you don’t have a CTA somewhere (e.g., in the headlines of Google search ads), you’re losing a big portion of your potential customers.

Tetiana Stuzhna

Creating high-quality content is quickly becoming the only sustainable way to rank and generate organic traffic.

Margarita Loktionova

Content marketing typically generates three times more traffic than ads. You need to generate a lot of content. You can use social media and tools like Answer The Public to come up with ideas on what you should generate content around.

Neil Patel

Quality plays a key role – more than ever, content needs to be very relevant and resonate deeply with your audience and your prospective clients. For me, that is the true definition of generating demand. It’s that quality content which will form deeper connections with actual people that have genuine problems to solve.

Ciarán Regan

The current approach to content marketing is three-fold – the frequency, the consistency, and the quality of that content. And if you start with consistency and quality, you will be on a strong path, and you can build the frequency over time.

Ciarán Regan

When it comes to content creation, it’s important to prioritize your audience and their needs. Don’t just create something because you think it makes sense. Dig deeper and do audience research.

Margarita Loktionova

You need to cover your topic fully. Address all potential questions related to the topic or query.

Margarita Loktionova

Someone doesn’t just go and buy a product from you. Yes, that’s a portion of the people. But a large chunk of people want to read your blog, get education, and then buy from you.

Neil Patel

It’s very important to provide great, useful, and practical information, but it also matters how you package and present it. 47% of articles with advanced headings are in the group of high-performing organic content. Articles with 7+ images receive 116% more organic traffic than those with none.

Margarita Loktionova

Transcribe your content in different languages – even your products, your ebooks, your courses. It drives a lot of revenue.

Neil Patel

Your first video will be your worst one – that’s so true. So if you are not using video right now, start. Make something, put it out there, and get some feedback.

Matthew Pierce

There’s always an excuse. “Oh, I need this, I need that… I can’t do it because, because, because…” Stop with the becauses! You’re awesome, you’ve got a message, you’ve got a service to sell, you’ve got something that is valuable to your audience – and it is time for you to put it out there! Don’t let perfection stop you.

Matthew Pierce

Just test it out and see what is going to work or what is not going to work. Because what works for my audience may not work for yours. There might be different levels of acceptable things. Keep testing – figure out what will work for you and your audience and what they need; keep focused on that.

Matthew Pierce

Empathy, right? We’re thinking about the person that is going to push play in your video, and we empathize with them – maybe they have things going on, or they’re too busy. Empathizing will make it easier to craft a message that actually helps them. Maybe you’re selling a widget – and that widget is gonna ease their burden – we can empathize with them because we know they have that burden.

Matthew Pierce

Learn to be helpful. As you are creating helpful content – whether that is to entertain someone or do something else – it makes a difference for your audience.

Matthew Pierce

“Customers don’t just follow a linear process in their decision-making process. Whatever a shopper does in between trigger and purchase, they do one of the two: they’re either evaluating or exploring – and we try to bring some order to this chaos.

Konstantinos Papadopoulos

Behavioral biases are the ways that you can actually sneak into your clients’ decision-making process. You can apply behavioral science to decision-making and get customers your way instead of leading them to your competitors.

Konstantinos Papadopoulos

Social norms are one of the most impactful behavioral biases consumers use during their purchase journey.

Konstantinos Papadopoulos

Build ways or platforms to showcase social proof. Google My Business is actually a great way to do that. But, for your courses, do have testimonials inside your landing page, or find a way to showcase that consumers or shoppers prefer you versus someone else.

Konstantinos Papadopoulos

Mobile learning is not about the technology. It’s about the learner.

Jo Milonis & Georgia Kontesidou

The top emerging mobile learning trends are microlearning, video learning, and social learning.

Jo Milonis & Georgia Kontesidou

This year, we see a huge uptake of social learning combined with gamification techniques. For example, challenge apps are really gaining momentum. We can think of this type of learning as peer and accountability learning because the learning goal is no longer personal – it gets shared with other learners that act as your accountability partners.

Jo Milonis & Georgia Kontesidou

A mobile app also means branding. Your school stops being just a website; it becomes an ecology of learning tools. It becomes a more complete offering.

Jo Milonis & Georgia Kontesidou

If you’re using parallax effects, you can control your users’ focus. Parallax scrolling allows us to direct our users’ attention to different elements that we want to stand out from the rest of the website, like a limited-time offer.

Brett Hamilton

The parallax effect is invented to excite, not to exhaust. Make sure you’re not overusing it because overusing this technique could break and not make your users’ browsing experience. Only use it when it makes sense.

Brett Hamilton

It’s important that you have the same appearance for buttons, for colors, throughout your school’s pages. If your brand uses a specific set of colors, you want that to appear throughout the school to strengthen your identity.

Eliza Cani

As you can imagine, there’s a difference between watching a static video and actually interacting with the video and having things pop up on your screen – perhaps a little quiz or information on the speaker.

Eliza Cani

We tend to remember information more if it’s repeated regularly. You can use flashcards or similar tools to lock key pons of your curriculum into your learners’ long-term memory.

Georgia Kontesidou & Jo Milonis