5 ways to use Instagram to sell your courses online

Nov 3, 2020

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Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms around. It’s also a great place to sell your online courses. Let’s go over an example of someone who has had success with it, as well as 5 ways to use Instagram to sell your online courses.

How a Kajabi Hero used Instagram to sell courses

Kajabi Hero Frida recently used Instagram to help sell her course on pelvic floor yoga. For her first launch ever, she made $31,000 in her first month. She shared a few tips on how she made this happen.

Frida has been building her brand on Instagram with useful, relevant posts about yoga. She nurtured her ideal client on Instagram with different yoga videos every week. Once she had her courses ready on her website, she used Instagram to promote her course.

“What I specifically love about Instagram is the interaction between me and all my followers,” Frida said.

Here are five specific tips for Instagram mastery and monetization (indirectly).

#1 Build an Instagram following around a niche

Instagram is a great platform to help knowledge entrepreneurs build a passionate following. Ideally, this would be like Frida’s case: your following is aligned to the subject or niche you’re selling a course around.

The best-case scenario is having your Instagram audience before you’re selling anything. That way, your following is organic and passionate for the things you produce. When you start selling online courses, it’s a natural extension of what your Instagram followers expect from you.

How to build your Instagram following

The best way to build an Instagram following is to consistently post useful, valuable content in a visually-pleasing way. We’ve put together 40 ideas on what to post on Instagram to help you get started. You should also lean on your own expertise in your space on what your audience wants.

Using hashtags to boost your following

You can include multiple hashtags in your posts to potentially get additional followers. Adding hashtags puts your posts into different algorithms and areas for it to be discovered. Here’s a video walking you through how you can better use Instagram hashtags.

Optimizing your Instagram posts

Along with good content, make sure you’re following the best practices for your images and videos. The correct image sizes and video sizes will give your content the best chances of succeeding.

The right sizes don’t matter if you have bad pictures. Here are 6 tips for taking better photos for Instagram.

#2 Create Instagram posts promoting your courses

The best way to promote your courses on Instagram is with high-quality posts outlining the value for your potential customer. Make relevant, useful posts that delight your audience. We’ve put together a post helping you to promote your courses on Instagram.

Resist the temptation to constantly post promotional content on Instagram. Nobody likes being told to “buy, buy buy” all the time. Find the right balance between direct promotional content and other valuable Instagram content for your audience.

Instagram does let certain users add links to Instagram Stories. But, this is only available to verified users and those with a large following. Until you get there, you only have the link in your bio. You can use tools that make your bio link more flexible and usable.

#3 Buy Instagram ads promoting your account or digital products

Instagram has a great platform for buying ads to promote yourself and your products. You can use it to guarantee that your target audience sees you and what you have to offer.

The Instagram ad platform can be used to:

Drive people to your online course
Grow your brand’s awareness by driving people to your site
Grow your following, so you can do organic promotions down the road

Be sure to use the Facebook Ad targeting platform versus just promoting your posts within Instagram. This gives you access to enhanced targeting capabilities so that your ads are reaching the exact people you want to target.

#4 Use influencers to promote your courses

Instagram is full of influencers. It’s not just The Rock or Kylie Jenner, as Instagram is filled with various “micro-influencers.” These are people with a strong but not staggering following of passionate audiences. It’s people like Kajabi Hero Frida, who has “only” 6,000 followers but was able to turn that following into tens of thousands of dollars with a single launch.

You can use influencer marketing to tap into many of these micro-influencers to help promote your digital products and courses. For a fee, you can use some of their audience credibility to sell your online courses.

You can identify micro-influencers yourself by searching for hashtags that are relevant to your brand and courses. A sweet spot for followers is typically those with 1,000 - 100,000 followers. Research those you’re interested in to see if their audience is right for you and aligned with your brand.

You can then reach out directly to the influencer through Instagram DM to start the conversation. You can structure payments in whatever way makes sense for both of you: upfront fee, pay-per-performance, long-term cut of profits.

You can also lean on an influencer marketing agency. This will be more expensive than doing it yourself but could pay off depending on your campaign and the influencer you’re targeting.

#5 Keep an eye on the latest Instagram features

Instagram Shopping is a feature that makes it a great experience to shop on Instagram for physical products. Right now, you can only sell physical products with this feature. But, you can imagine a future where they expand to digital products.

Sign up for the latest updates from Instagram and keep an eye on marketing news. You want to be first in line to try out the new features or at least, be aware of them. Once these roll out, you should test out how these new features impact your marketing funnel.