Hello and happy Friday! 🕺🏻

In my last update, I figured out my course niche and mentioned I’m kicking off content marketing. I’ve heard it’s especially important for new creators like me to do this ASAP as it’ll help me start building a reputation and audience.

I spent this week putting together a personal strategy for my content creation and marketing efforts. Here’s what I mean:

Write smarter, not harder

Publishing more articles about learning experience design will help me with marketing my course. And I have tons of blog post ideas saved. But when it comes to actually writing an article, it takes me forever and the perfectionist in me turns it into a bigger thing than it needs to be.

So I’ve been trying some “hacks” to help me write more efficiently. Here’s a fun one I tried this week: Instead of sitting down to write an article, I pretended that I’m replying to an email from an imaginary person.

I like how this writing style is concise while still delivering substance. This works well especially considering people’s attention spans these days.

If you have any writing/content creation hacks, please share in the comments!

Community > audience

One one hand, I don’t want to launch my course to nobody. But my introverted side cringes at the idea of trying to build a “following”.

Fortunately, I’ve come across a piece of advice that reframes this challenge:

Instead of looking for your audience, look for your community.

In the last month of being more active on Twitter, I’ve met some awesome people who are doing cool things in the online learning space. While they may not necessarily be my target learners, creators are always looking for good resources to share with their audience. And we’ve all heard that word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising.

So instead of forcing myself to build an audience, I’m simply going to keep engaging and participating online. I’m hoping this approach will lead to more organic, authentic connections.

Provide value before selling

We all love freebies. We’re also more likely to buy something after a free trial.

Publishing more articles and engaging online ties into this strategy of delivering free value before asking people to buy.

I’ve been pondering the idea of what a “free trial” or lead magnet might be for an online course. Free webinar or ebook immediately comes to mind. But this is something I’ll be researching and brainstorming further.

Coming up

I’m realizing that this whole content marketing and community building phase is gonna need time and nurturing. At this point, I’m not sure what my next progress report will be about 🤷🏻‍♀️. Probably more content ideas. But I guess you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out!

Until next time,

Laraine