It's the biggest challenge most people have with their online courses: marketing their course – particularly after launch.

And the million dollar question: what's the best way to do it?

Unfortunately, there's no million dollar answer. It depends.

A lot of the “course gurus” push the idea that Facebook ads are a silver bullet.

And Facebook (or Linkedin) ads are indeed a great way to grow your sales in a scalable way that isn't tied to spending more and more of your time.

But my experience is that for most people, there's such a huge learning curve to getting good at Facebook or Linkedin ads that it ends up being a real barrier to progress. Not to mention the money you can end up spending before you master them (if you ever do).

My advice is to get your first wave or two of sales by other methods. Then armed with the knowledge that there's a real market for your course and a little war chest built up from those sales: hire someone who knows what they're doing to run ads for you.

That's the approach Michael Heppell took, and he explains more in his interview here.

But other approaches work well too. It all depends on your starting point and what you're good at.

Dr Tarique Sani fills his pipeline of course buyers and coaching clients through posting content on Linkedin.

When he first explained that he posts 4 times a day my jaw dropped. That just seemed like an incredible amount of content to me.

But in his interview he lays out his approach to creating content for Linkedin that allows him to be both prolific and productive without sacrificing quality.

Lynn Scott describes how she gets most of her course buyers from her Effortless Leaders Facebook group (and they were also the source of insight and ideas that helped shape her course).

In my wife Kathy's business, the vast majority of sales of courses and memberships come from people who sign up for one of her annual virtual summits.

(You can find out a little bit more about using virtual summits to feed course sales in Jan Koch's interview here. Jan's course is Virtual Summit mastery and he's a genuine go-to guy for summits).

In her interview, Denise Oyston explains how she uses her podcast as the primary source for sales of her marketing course for recruiters.

The overarching message though is that there are many different marketing approaches that work very well indeed for online courses. 

Some are better for high-value courses. Some are better at scale.

But all of them have to be ones that you can do and do consistently.

It's consistency that brings results.