Promoting courses can be both expensive and ineffective for many, but there is a lot you as a course provider can do that is completely free. We have gathered all our best tips and methods to give you 5 free ways to promote your courses!

Your own website

A great place to start promoting your courses is on your own website! Your website is a fantastic platform for promoting courses, where you have many opportunities to make potential participants want to sign up.

By writing good course descriptions, posting pictures and other content, it will be easier for others to find you and your courses when they search via, for example, Google.

This is because Google ranks the search results according to how good the web pages are, and how relevant they are to the keywords the person searches for. Because of this it is a good idea to have lots of relevant information on the website, so Google understands that you are the best search result!

Tips for what information is smart to have on the website are:

• As mentioned, a good description of the course, including what topics it addresses, what prior knowledge is needed and certification or proof participants will receive after completing the course.
• Location, instructor, time and date are essential information for the participants. If you want all this in an online registration calendar on your website, you can read more about it here!
• Pictures from previous courses and classrooms are always nice, and pictures do wonders to brighten up the website! If you have the opportunity, a small film clip from a previous course is also fun to watch for potential participants.

Pages on Facebook and LinkedIn

On both Facebook and LinkedIn, it is free to create a page or group for your courses! This can be a great way to communicate with previous course participants, and get in touch with new ones.

Starting a Facebook group centered around your course topic is a powerful way to build a community of people who are potential course participants. Running a Facebook group is also good for personal branding purposes, because it helps you make yourself an authority on your topic.

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, you may want to create a business page so that candidates can find and follow you on the platform, and thus see what you post later on. A business page is like a personal profile, but for your business! There you can enter information about what the company does, contact information and a link to the website.

On LinkedIn, you can promote your own courses by describing them in a post. You can also add posts with pictures and small film clips from the courses. The great thing about LinkedIn is that you do not have to build a large following to reach other users, but rather work to ensure that the content you post is relevant to the audience you have. 

If you get a good response in the form of likes and comments from even a small following, LinkedIn’s algorithm will spread your content organically to the followers of those who have liked and commented. This makes it easy to reach new potential candidates!

Facebook

On Facebook, just like on LinkedIn, it is a good idea to have a business page so that you can spread information about your courses. It’s not as easy to spread the content organically (that is, without paying) through Facebook, but in return it is easier to build a group with former, committed participants and potentially create a community on this platform. 

If you get some previous participants to follow you, posting about new courses on the Facebook page can be a great way to get repeat participants. 

You may also want to create a group on Facebook on the topic of your courses. A group on Facebook is a separate place where Facebook users with their private profiles can become members. Thus, the content shared in the group is limited to only those people who are members of the group. 

Such a group is the perfect place to gather people who have the same interest, and it can be a constructive and educational environment for the members. In addition, you get a perfect platform to promote courses within the topic you know the members are interested in! Cool, right?

Collaborations with other course providers

By finding other course providers that have the same target group as you, and have courses that are complementary to your own, you can work together to benefit from each other’s participants! This is a great way to get in touch with new potential participants in a cost effective way.

Here you can work together and promote each other’s courses on the websites and groups on social media, or even create a combination of the courses to get a special “package deal” to offer the participants! How cool and unique would that be?

Send out newsletters!

Newsletters are a great and free way to reach out to attendees, and you do not need a fancy setup or an expensive service to do so. It works perfectly well to create a joint email and send it out to previous participants (who have agreed to be sent such information of course).

In such newsletters, you can write about what the course company is currently working on, advertise new courses, and sell re-certifications or updated courses to old participants.

Upselling to existing customers is one of the most effective opportunities to increase the revenue of course companies! If you want to read more about how you can do this through FrontCore’s administrative solution, click here!

Livestream on Facebook

In addition to posting on social media, you can also go a step further and stream live. Live streaming has been one of the biggest success stories for social media in recent years, especially on Facebook. Since Facebook launched this feature in 2016, Facebook Live has attracted over 2 billion viewers, attracting 6 times as many interactions, 3 times the average viewer length and 10 times as many comments as regular videos (numbers found via Marketingland). 

Also, the Facebook Live format is perfect for showing parts of your online or e-learning. Examples of other things you can do are having a course-related Q&A (questions and answers), talk about an exciting topic in your field, have a demonstration of something you do during a course, or even offer a free introductory course!

There is so much you as a course provider can do to promote your courses for free! But if you want to be visible to your target group, where they are looking for courses, I would finally recommend checking out FrontCore’s email marketing solution. With the solution you can send out emails to all of your former participants to upsell your courses in just minutes!

To check out FrontCores marketing solution, click here!

Did you like this article? Don't forget to share it: