How to Build an Audience to Buy Your Online Course

Posted 29 August By Hanju Lee—Goals, Inspiration, Self Improvement—No Comments

How to Build an Audience to Buy Your Online Course

If you’ve been following our new series on how to create an online digital course to make passive income, here’s a quick summary and links to each subject.

So now what? Do I just sit around and wait for someone to find me somewhere online and pay me to start the course I created? You can…but it will be crickets for a while. There are sites like Udemy, Skillshare, and Coursera that already have a built-in audience of learners, so if you upload your course by using their platform, they can help you find your future customers.

But if you want to hit it out of the park, let me tell you what I’ve been doing to gain the audience who will be my future customers.

As some of you might know, I am a huge golf-obsessed nut. The experimental project I am working on right now is launching a full-on digital course teaching mental and strategic aspects of the game to help beginners become competitive, single-digit handicap golfers. But I knew that before I start selling the course, I needed to create an audience that would buy from me. So, here are the steps I took to get to where I am today.

I first created a name and a brand for my project. I called it Better Golf Academy and the logo that I created is simple 3 different color circles: Orange, Black, and Red. The order of the colors is significant, as for most golf apps, if you bogey a hole, the default color of the score is orange, the par is black and the birdie is red. So, these colors represent a progression of someone improving from bogey to a birdie.
I created a website. This is where I keep all my content, links to social media, and all my landing pages. I am bringing in traffic to my site through SEO as well.
I created a Podcast. Basically, it’s just me on a mic for 20-30 minutes telling stories and teaching an audience about mental and game strategy. I try to be as entertaining as possible. This has become somewhat popular with thousands of downloads from all over the world. People reach out to me once in a while to thank me or just to encourage me. It’s been a fun experience. Here’s the link.
I created a social media presence. I do Golf News videos and post them on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. I only started this about 3 months ago and I am organically reaching close to 1000 subscribers on Youtube and Instagram. I am having a hard time with TikTok, I only have 85 followers and the views on my videos aren’t as high. I think my audience is too young…lol.
I collect emails. I created a handful of landing pages and incentivize people to download a lead magnet (some type of drill, check sheet, charts…) – giving resources to help people in their game as a trade for their email.

So, through these outlets, I’ve put myself out there and started slowly building my audience as well as building trust and just making friends. All this to avoid crickets. I am not saying you’ll need to do everything I did, but I wanted to show you what’s possible to gain your own audience and how to target the market with very specific and niche-based content.

I hope hearing my journey demonstrates a “fair way” to move forward on a “course” of your own. And if nothing else, let my experience be proof that the things you’re personally obsessed with don’t just have to be a distraction to what you do for a living. It’s a feature, not a bug – put it to work for you in an online course and it can be your best source of passive income.