Bring More Learners to Your Online Course on Grinfer With Promo Tools

Today, the Internet has invented quite a few ways of promotional strategies that work incredibly well for building a buzz around online learning content. For example, running paid adverts for online courses for targeting the right audience and growing online presence. Creating a blog or forums in your niche for finding users who would want/need your course. Offering a free class or two and then upselling your online course. Or you can upload all your courses on the Grinfer e-learning platform and run promotions via referral links. Having built an impressive set of promo tools for its marketing toolbox, Grinfer helps its authors avoid mistakes and setbacks in promotions. 

In this article, we’ll talk about efficient promo tools that are proven effective in online course promotions on Grinfer and also for driving new learners straight to your course. If you want to learn about these promo tools that will help you increase sales and generate additional income streams – read this blog post and take notes! 

What is a Deal About Promoting Courses Through Referrals Under a Subscription Plan?

Promoting courses with a referral program is one of the most effective strategies used today. However, when it comes down to referral programs on the Grinfer marketplace, there are two important things you should keep in mind. The first one is whether you sell your courses under a subscription plan. The other one is whether you also suggest buying your courses outside of this plan by selling them separately. 

For example, once you include courses in Grinfer’s subscription plan, this can really boost views and increase the total watch time for your courses. And the more watch time your courses get, the more money that goes to your pocket! But first, let’s talk about what the membership subscription is and how it works for selling courses on the e-learning marketplaces. 

No secret, the subscription method for selling all kinds of online services had significant growth in recent years. If we were to describe the concept of the subscription method in general, it would look like: the merchant (e-learning platform) delivers a box of goodness (e-learning content) straight to the customer’s door in return for a fixed monthly fee (membership subscription plan). 

Here are fundamental features of the subscription method:

• Integration with most popular payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, etc. This integration is very important because it provides the most convenient payment method for your customers. Whenever it comes down to the billing mechanism which any subscription method relies on, that’s where it becomes crucial to online courses authors’, as well as the company’s success.
• Free trials. In the case of selling online courses, it becomes possible to provide your students with a free trial. For example, Grinfer offers a 3-days free trial to all the students who want to purchase a subscription plan. Why? To provide users with an opportunity to explore the platform before actually buying anything to make sure that it’s their cup of tea. 
• Control over recurring billing parameters. This involves recurring frequency, recurring period, and the number of payments.
• Dunning management. Provides a possibility to send automated emails to users in case of failed re-bills asking them to update their billing address.
• Tax profiles. Automatically charge a specific tax rate based on the location of the customer.

What are the Benefits of the Grinfer’s Referral Program for Authors? 

If any course was included in a membership subscription plan, then the course builder/instructor makes a profit not just from the total amount of watch time (time that learners spend viewing learning content). Moreover, the author can earn even more money with commission gained through referrals. 

Look at the 2 primary benefits of promotion via referrals on Grinfer: 

• Increases the total watch time for your courses; 
• You earn $15 in commission for each new customer who purchases any of Grinfer subscription plans after a free trial period. Referrals have 30 days from using your link to purchase any subscription in order to qualify you for the commission.

Yes, Grinfer will pay a lump sum for every single student that you bring to the platform. In other words, the more users come to us through your referral links, the more profit you get from this. And there are no worries about keeping track of all the sales through referrals. Grinfer will do it for you! Be sure – you’ll always get your bonus in cash!

But are there even more ways to earn money with referrals? Sure! One of the awesome ways to generate additional profit streams is promoting courses for a separately-sold price via referral links. 

Let’s go into more detail and talk about how it works on the Grinfer eLearning platform. 

Promoting Separately-Sold Courses Via Referral Links. What are the Benefits?

Grinfer provides its authors/instructors with an option to create referral links for the promotion of separately-sold courses. An author can create such links in his/her dashboard and then promote them anywhere via personal network channels. The best news is that the amount of these links is not limited! 

In case any sales occurred, Grinfer tracks all end-users purchases for any courses that have been sold separately through referral links. After this, an author receives a 96% payout which gets calculated from the course’s total cost.  

Well, remember that referral links it’s not just about getting more clicks. It’s also about being on the main page of the marketplace where the highest quality traffic is. These traffic streams can convert clicks into sales much faster and smoother. Basically, once your course shows up on Grinfer’s main page, it becomes much more visible to users. And whenever someone browses around the Grinfer platform, this user will see your course on the main page right away.

So, always try to increase the number of rankings and reviews for your course! The reason is that it works really well for boosting the course’s recognition. The easiest way to do this is to reach out to your learners and ask them to either rank your course or write an honest review. This should increase the course’s chance to end up in a list of best-sellers which are always shown on the main page of the Grinfer website. Once this goal is achieved, sales should become much more consistent for you!

But are there any really effective strategies that Grinfer uses for encouraging users to buy more learning content? Absolutely! Let’s go over them now.  

There is one awesome option that you can try on Grinfer – offer your course(s) as a gift to up to 50 people and drive more users straight to your page. How does it work? Okay, get referral links from Grinfer and then distribute them among your existing audience. Those learners who click on these referral links will be able to access your course for free for the whole month and at any time. The lifespan of such referral links will expire after one month of the promotional period and, therefore, your courses won’t have the “give-away” status anymore. 

Want to know even more about promotions? Here are more effective promotional strategies that work really well for separately-sold courses:

• Public promo. Go ahead and put any course on sale for 7 days each month. Then toot your own horn to let everybody know that your course is on sale! What’s next? Whenever someone clicks on the referral link and starts browsing the marketplace, this person will see a discounted price for your course(s) and feel more encouraged to buy it. The price tag for your course(s) will be switched back to normal once the promotion is over. 

• Private promo. At least once a month, run promotions via your social media channels and get the ball rolling among your existing audience. Let them know that you’ve got an exclusive offer and advertise referral links for your course. Those users, who jump on the marketplace by clicking these links, get a chance to buy your course(s) for a discounted price. While all the other users won’t be able to see any discounts or decreases in price for the same courses. The promotional period lasts for 7 days and then the price gets switched back to normal automatically. 

But all-in-all, when it comes down to referral links, the main goal here is to create a strong call-to-action that will be powerful enough to convince your potential leads to click “here”. Again, do not hesitate to use your private and professional networks for collecting more ratings and reviews from students. And don’t forget about your social media channels and use them for promoting course(s) too! 

Common Effective Strategies for Boosting Enrollment In an Online Course  

Yes, using external marketing resources for your own promotions sounds like a pretty good deal and also seems like a good chance to get more ratings. However, if you really want to get ahead and out beat this competitive race, don’t omit the effectiveness of customized or personalized promotions. 

Just keep in mind, before you dive deep into any promotions – do some research! Know who your ideal learners are and who you should promote your course to. Learn about learners’ pain points and know what their struggles are. Then present your course(s) as a good source of information that offers solutions and clear answers to their ordeal questions.

Here is a quick list of some most popular promotional strategies that generally don’t require a whole bunch of money to invest. If you pick one or two, you can really speed up your promotions and, as a result, sales should go faster too:

• Join a community of people struggling with what you teach, solve their problem, and drag people to your class;
• Word of mouth;
• Create a Youtube video related to your topic and advertise your course at the end of this video;
• Start a niche blog featuring articles and product reviews. This strategy helps to boost recognition for search engines and increase the chances that your site will show up in the top 10 of search pages. 
• Sending out email newsletters with the latest news or updates can also work as an additional referral stream for your blog and website.

The truth is that today’s most effective online strategies used for online courses promotions mainly focus on how to solve others’ problems. So, once you have that in mind, odds are you’ll structure your course around this concept. And this will increase the chances that people will find your content much faster in a vast ocean of digital data! 

Bottom-line

Today, many businesses seem to invent that special sauce whenever it comes to promotions via referrals. Once they put it on rails, everything seems to come their way. If you try promotions via referrals, you’ll be surprised to see how many people out there would happily access your content. They just need the proper invitation and motivation to help them act on your referrals.

Most businesses don’t do well with referrals because they don’t even try. Others try but don’t get it right. Some get it right by luck. But the most successful businesses create an effective method for generating referrals. And, yes, most of the time it works better than any other advertising approach. Finding the right promo tools that will work great for you and sell your courses effectively is a needed skill. What you can do now is to go to the Grinfer platform to learn more about these topics and processes. Or contact our support team at support@grinfer.com and ask for individual free consultation in case of any questions. We will be happy to help!