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How to Successfully Launch an Online Course
15K views
Jun 1, 2024
Launching an online course can be a game-changer for your expertise and income. This guide covers the essential steps to successfully launch your online course. From defining your course topic and audience to creating compelling content and marketing strategies, you'll learn how to build anticipation and engage your audience effectively. Whether you're a seasoned educator or new to online teaching, this blog post will equip you with the tools you need to launch your online course with confidence and success.
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0:00
So today we're going to talk about how to successfully launch an online course
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We're going to go through eight different steps from the very beginning to successfully launching your course
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Also, if you stick around to the end of this video, I'm going to go through how to continually sell your course after the initial
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launch period. So let's get into it. Step number one, choose a topic for your online course. So I have three tips for you here
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The very first of which is choose something that you're good at. So you could be a world renowned expert in the topic
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or you don't have to be that much of an expert to offer an online course. For a lot of people
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it's good to learn from someone who is just a couple of steps ahead
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So if you just learn how to do something, figure something out that was really difficult for you
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you could create an online course of like, Hey, I just figured this out. And now I'm here to teach you how to do this and not have to go through all of
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the trials and tribulations that I went through. The second thing that's really important is to choose something you're passionate about
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So if you're going to go through all these steps that we're going to talk about and have a successful course, it's something that you really enjoy doing
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To do something you're not happy with, you're not passionate about, it's going to make all this a lot more difficult
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And the third area is something that other people are interested. If you have some really
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really niche topic that very few people are interested in doing, it's going to be much harder to sell this course than something that you're good
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at, you're passionate about, and tons of other people are just chomping at the bit wanting to learn about this
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topic. So once you've chosen the topic, it's time to move on to step number two
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If you don't have an existing audience, if you have a huge existing audience, a big email list, huge Instagram following
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you might be able to skip step two and three, but for the rest of you
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I imagine if you're watching this video, you're looking to build an audience and also offer an online course
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Step number two, create a freebie or a lead magnet to get someone's email before you think about
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offering them your course. So the thing is, think of this like dating. It's a process. So you meet someone, then you go out for coffee. Then
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you know, you go out on a couple of days, then your boyfriend and girlfriend, then, you know, things develop from there
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It's really tough to go from not having an audience to offering them your
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thousand dollar course, let's say. So you want to think through the intermediate steps for them to be able to get
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to know you realize that, Hey, you're an expert in this space, and they want to continue learning from you
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So we recommend creating some type of freebie. So this could be an ebook
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a checklist, a video masterclass, an email course that's delivered over a series of a few days
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There are tons of options here, but just think of some intermediate steps. So your course and the results are going to get from that
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And here's where they are today. What's some intermediate step that you can create something to help them get results
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to move them closer to getting to know you and getting ready to purchase a
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course from you. So there's a couple of things you're going to need to effectively do. Step number two
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the first of which is some type of email marketing software. So you can collect the emails and to be able to keep in touch with them later
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The next thing is potentially a landing page software. So that's basically the page you're going to send people to sign up and give
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your email, give their email in exchange for whatever the freebie is
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A lot of times, if you use something like convert kit, the email marketing software that we use
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you can get started for free with email marketing and also landing pages are
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included for free with the software. The next thing you may need is whatever it is that you're going to be giving
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away for free. So if it's like a ebook or guide or something that requires some graphic design
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you may want to use something like Canva to create that another free software
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you can get started with for free. Potentially it could be a video or something else
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You kind of have to think through, you know, what is it that I need to create this freebie
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Then the landing page where they're going to sign up and then the email
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marketing software, where you're going to obviously stay in touch with them into the future
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So one other kind of small bonus tip here is once you've gotten their email and
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given them their freebie is to plan out a couple of other emails to send to them
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Because what might happen is you create the freebie, get their email, and maybe your course isn't ready for another month or two
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You don't want to just not talk to them for that period of time. You want to think through a couple of other things you can send to them that
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continues to add value, continues to build a relationship before you have the course that you're going to
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be offering to them. So that moves me onto step number three, which is driving traffic to this landing page
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So you want new people to be coming across your name, learning something from you and then signing up for your email list and getting
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the freebie on the landing page that we created. Our favorite way to do this is obviously YouTube
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So you can create content on YouTube that's even more beginner, let's say than the guide that you give away or whatever the freebie is
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And so for example, for our Instagram course, Louder My Business Partner created all of these videos about Instagram for
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people to sign up to our guide for non Instagrammers. And so what happened is all of these videos
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we basically get a hundred email signups per day from one of these videos
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signing up for our Instagram guide. So we know someone saw one of our videos where we're giving something away for
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free, got our guide, where we give away more for free about Instagram
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And so that audience is kind of primed, interested in Instagram and potentially ready to purchase our course to
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continue their learning. So there are obviously tons of other ways to generate traffic
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It could be through your blog and SEO, and maybe you have a form sign up on your blog where someone downloads your
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freebie lead magnet. It could be generating traffic from Pinterest to your blog
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You could do paid ads. We generally don't recommend paid ads if you're just getting started because what
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happens is you want to make sure you have the right audience and the right offer
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So you might realize if you do ads at an earlier stage that you find people that are interested in maybe getting your freebie
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but they have no interest in paying for a paid course. This is something that can be really, really powerful
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but I wouldn't recommend this the first time you are launching an online course
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Okay. So step four is create an outline for your course. So a couple of things here
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I didn't want you to do this at the very beginning because a lot of the things that we did just previously of creating say YouTube videos and creating a lead
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magnet is you're going to get feedback from all of that. So we create a bunch of Instagram videos and an Instagram guide
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and we started getting feedback from people on what they wanted to learn about, about Instagram, which allowed us to create a better course answer more of their questions and
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maybe what we knew we should have included in our course from day one
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What I would do here, just create the outline. So what are the modules and lessons that you think are going to be really
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important for your audience? Also, you know, you don't want to go further than this and just record the entire course
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Cause I still think there's some more learning that's going to come in the further steps that will allow you to create a better course for your audience
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And also you're not doing a whole bunch of work. If for some reason, it doesn't quite work out how you hoped. Okay
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So once you've got the outline done, let's move on to step number five, which is create the sales page for your course
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So if you use a platform such as Teachable, which is where all of our courses are hosted
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you can create a sales page there that goes through all the different things of
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like maybe an introductory video, you have the benefits of the course, the FAQs, maybe some results you've seen from people
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the outline of what's going to be contained in the course, all of that with the offer for however much your course is going to cost and
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things like that. Once you have the sales page done, then it's time to move on to step number six, which is the actual launch plan
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So you have the page where people are going to purchase the course. Now, you know
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I always think of like kind of working backwards. So you have that's ready
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And then how do you basically, you know, build a bridge from your email list and the audience you have to getting them to
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the sales page and purchasing the course. So what we like to do in a lot of cases is create a webinar
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And so a webinar is really useful because what you can do is you have your email
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list, you have your Instagram following your YouTube following, whatever it is. And you can say, Hey, on July 24th
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we have this webinar where we're going to go through how to sell through Instagram. And so, you know, you have an audience that's interested in this topic
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You can on the webinar, maybe spend 40 minutes teaching them and 20 minutes talking about your course
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And so this is something where it's another way for you to continue to add value
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without someone giving you any money. You'll get a bunch of your email list to sign up
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You'll get people from your other social media and things like that to sign up to the webinar in the webinar at the end of it, you know
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you're going to have the offer for your course. Also once you've kind of given that offer to the webinar audience
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you could send another email to your whole email list saying, Hey, by the way, I just launched this course, you know, for the next week we have the course open
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Here's the price. If you purchase between July 24th and say, August 1st
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you can also post that on Instagram and your other social media. So to let a broader audience know that they might not have been there for the
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webinar, but Hey, here's this course I'm launching. You basically have from now to a week from now to purchase this course at this
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price and be part of the initial launch, the first cohort, whatever you might want to call it
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So I couldn't go through all of the very minute details for launching a course
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but I did put together a checklist to make sure that you go through each of the
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steps of creating a successful launch plan for your course. If you're in a signing up for this checklist
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I'll put a link down below in the description. So after the webinar, the, the launch, you know
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emails to kind of close out, you know, the, the last week before some of the core starts and you get as many sales as
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possible during that time is when we would start actually recording the videos
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for the online course. And so what we like to do, especially for the first version of a course is if it completely bombed at this
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point, no one showed up for your webinar. No one purchased your course
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You didn't waste too much time creating a course that, you know, you had zero sales for, but you did get a ton of feedback along the way
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So if you've got a ton of feedback, then you're sitting down to record the course. You have a good idea of what you should be creating
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So we end up doing for the first version is essentially break up the course
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maybe in four parts. In my example of the course launch starting last day
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you can buy with being August 1st on August 1st or August 2nd
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we would maybe release a quarter of the content. So we really release a quarter of the content
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And then what we might do is have a live session that week to answer people's
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questions and maybe teach a little bit more. And so what happens is people got started. Here's a quarter of the content
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consume that, ask me questions, you're going to get feedback. And maybe there's something you completely forgot about
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And so this gives you a good opportunity to be like, Oh, I didn't record something about this
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And then so you can record that and add it as you add the next set of courses
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And then again, you have a live session. So you have this back and forth of, Hey, here's a bunch of the content, you know, have a conversation
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figure out if anything's missing. Maybe you have to redo one of the modules in your course or something like that
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because forgot something, whatever it is. And so you went through this kind of back and forth with your first students
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And then at the end of it, you have an amazing course that they're super happy with because you were
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listening to all their feedback, creating the content they really wanted. So they got a lot of results and benefits from the course
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You got a bunch of great feedback. And now you have a course that a lot of people gave you feedback on that you can
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continue to sell. So that moves me on to kind of the next phase of selling your course
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So you had a successful launch, but now what? So there's a few things that you could do here
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So you could actually have cohort based courses. So this is really popular right now because I think people get better results if
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they're doing it with other people at the same time. So instead of having one person sign up today and take
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start taking the course one person next week, one person the next week, it's better to kind of have a cohort of, you know
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a hundred people all taking it at the same time, having live sessions
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learning together, and you'll see that people get more results from your courses, or you can actually set up to sell courses on autopilot
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So there's a bunch of tools. This is something that's a little bit complicated to do. I'm happy to do another video about this
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If you write autopilot down below in the comment section, but basically what you do here is you have someone sign up for say your freebie
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And then from there, they get an email to say, Hey, thanks for signing up. I actually have an offer for, you know, my more full course
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You can buy it at this price for the next three days. So it could be your courses close
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but you let it be open for three days and purchase it. Or maybe you have a higher price
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but if someone purchased it during that set period of days, they get a 30% discount or whatever it is
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So there's a couple of different ways to incentivize purchases, where if you just kind of have it open at a specific price
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anyone can purchase it at any time. There's no real sense of urgency
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And so you'll find that it's more difficult to continue to sell something if
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there isn't that sense of urgency, but with cohort courses, you know, something like building a second brain is a course that I'm taking with my
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business partner right now. That course is only offered twice per year. So you can take it in the spring. You can take it in the fall
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You can't take it at any other time or, um, you know, having an offer over, you know
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a certain amount of time to incentivize that that purchase of the course
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that sense of urgency. But again, if you're interested in learning more, write autopilot down below
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but hopefully that answer your questions on how you can successfully launch an
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online course. If you want to learn more about growing an email list
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I encourage you to check out the video up above. Also if you want to learn about how to grow your audience on YouTube
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we have a ton of videos that help you with that. I'll link to those down below. Hope to see you in those and future videos. Bye-bye
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