Last week I talked about how important it was to differentiate your course given the huge number of options your potential buyers will have online.

And one of the best ways to do that is to base your course around a unique methodology or “distinctive point of view”.

If you think about it, we all do what we do in different ways.

No one approaches marketing or building courses in quite the same way that I do. And no one does what you do in the exact same way you do it.

Normally we don't make a big deal out of those differences. We get on with doing what we do and getting results for clients and hope those results will speak for themselves.

But in the world of online courses, everyone will claim to get the same big results you get. Your buyers need some way of differentiating between courses and choosing the one that will be best for them.

Differentiating based on a unique approach is particularly powerful because:

• Almost by definition it's very difficult for someone to copy your unique way of doing things (whereas they can all claim they have great service, get great results, etc).
• Doing things differently means it'll feel different to anything your potential customers have tried before. If (like most people) they've tried courses in the past and not had much success, the fact your course does things differently will give them hope they can succeed this time.
• It's much more marketable. For example, no one is going to invite you onto their podcast or webinar to talk about how you do sales training the exact same way everyone else does it. But they will invite you on if you have a new and interesting approach their audience hasn't heard before.

Now when I talk about a unique way of doing things, I don't mean the mechanics of how you run your courses. That's important, but the fact that you split your courses into micro learning or do things more interactively or whatever isn't going to bring floods of new customers to you.

Having a unique approach means teaching your customers how they can do things differently in your area of expertise.

For example, when Brian Dean teaches content marketing for SEO he doesn't teach you how to create content your audience will value. He teaches you how to identify the influencers in your market and how to create the type of content they will value. Content they'll link to and share so more of your audience gets to see it and it ranks higher in searches.

Of course, it has to be valuable to your audience too – but the primary focus is on figuring out the type of content your influencers will link to and share.

When I first heard him express that concept years ago my initial thoughts were “wait, that can't be right…oh hang on…oh…yeah…that makes sense now you think about it…I can see how that works…and actually, it might just work for me”.

That's the kind of reaction you want when potential customers hear about your approach…

…a little lightbulb going off where they're a little puzzled at first, then they get it, then they begin to think “this might work for me”.

That's what powers them to find out more about your course and eventually to invest in it.

And you need to be able to trigger that reaction in just a few sentences. Perhaps with a course name and subtitle or a few bullet points, or an explanatory model.

We'll discuss how to do that in our next post.