How I got 30 new students without running Facebook ads

As you know, I love me some Facebook ads. 

But just because I know a lot about ads doesn’t mean that I’m constantly running them for my own business.

In November 2017, I was in a place where I wanted to launch a Facebook ads training course, but I wasn’t ready to spend any money on advertising.

I didn’t have much of a budget to spend because I’d had a couple of rocky months previously. And I didn’t want to advertise and do a huge launch for a course that was so new.

I wanted to test out my course first and make sure that people liked it. And then I could use their feedback and testimonials (and the income I earned from a small launch) to do a bigger launch later that included Facebook ads.

Here’s a little back story…

I created a Facebook ads program as a part of a collaboration with another entrepreneur in August. And I was just sitting on this course for a couple of months. I was not sure how I wanted to launch it and start getting more students to join.

When I sat down to create a sales page, I realized that I wanted to rework the whole course!

I spun my wheels for a few weeks (can you relate?) and then I decided that I needed to launch the course and THEN fix the issues that I wanted to change.

Which leads me to…

Tip #1: Start launching and selling the program BEFORE you have all the content ready. 

I called this a beta test phase. I offered the course at a lower price to have students go through and give me feedback.  

I made a sales page for the course, even though I hadn’t recorded all of the videos yet. And I started getting students enrolled. The students knew that they the course was still in creation mode and they wouldn’t have access to everything from day one.

This was extremely motivating for me to finally make the changes and re-record some of the videos in order to get the new course finalized and deliver what I promised.

Tip #2: Start with your personal network.

After I made a sales page, I thought about all the people who I’ve met in person and on social media who might be interested in my offer.

I made 2 lists:

List 1 = People who I thought would be interested in joining the course.

This was really easy to get started. I’d had a lot of people talk with me about Facebook ads in some capacity. So, I added their names to my list. I also thought about other people who I was friends with or knew through Facebook groups and put them on my list too.

List 2 = People who I thought would be good referral partners.

These people were my ad management clients or ad coaching clients. I knew that they weren’t beginners and wouldn’t really benefit from or be interested in my course. But I also knew that they were well-connected and might have people in their networks who would be interested.

I wrote personal emails to all the people on these two lists. 

For list 1, I told them about my new course and invited them to join. 

For list 2, I asked them to share my new course with anyone in their network who might benefit.

Tip #3: Post on social media.

I mostly focused on posting on my personal page and in a Facebook group where I’ve been an active member for 3 years. Both of these Facebook areas were places where a lot of my ideal students were hanging out.

I’m not going to give you too many details about what I posted and when. Because Facebook has rolled out some big algorithm changes since I did the launch. And I don’t know how effective the types of posts that I did then would be now.

My overall advice here is to deliver value first. Don’t go spam a bunch of groups and your own friends with salesy, “Buy Now” posts. 

Tell the story of why you created your new offer. Talk about how it’s different than your other offers. Give some tips about your topic and invite them to join your program if they want more information.

My Results

As you already know, I got 30 people enrolled in my brand new FB ads course. I’ll break it down a little more.

I sat down on a Sunday afternoon and started reaching out to people on my lists. I didn’t hear much back for the first day or two.

I did have one friend sign up early on. She’s a friend who I have known for years and I had talked to multiple times about Facebook ads. When she joined, I felt happy but I didn’t know if that meant that I had a winning offer. [Big time limiting belief = This is a fluke. No one else will want this. Just because she signed up doesn’t mean that anyone else will, etc.]

Then, on Wednesday of that week, my phone started to go off with alerts from Paypal! Every entrepreneur’s dream!

I discovered that one of my former coaching clients (someone from List 2) had posted my offer and a link to my sales page inside her Facebook groups.

And people were running over to sign up! I couldn’t believe it!

I actually didn’t expect people who didn’t know me at all to want to join this thing! But there they were.

I ended up getting 10 of my first 30 students from my client sharing my program with her community.

Then, in the next few days, my personal contacts started joining as well. I’m not sure of the breakdown of who I contacted personally vs. who joined from seeing my posts on social media, but the other 20 students came from both of those places.

So, I got my first 30 students enrolled in my course. I got feedback and then when I decided to invest in some ads, I got 15 more students by spending less than $40! But that story is a whole different blog post.

All of these students enrolled in the span of about a week. I didn’t have any deadlines or special prices or anything fancy like that. And I didn’t spend ANY money on advertising!

Do you feel like a launch like this is something that you could do to increase momentum and buzz for your business?

I bet you could!

And that’s why I have a 60 minute workshop inside my marketing program, Attract Your Tribe - How to Launch…for Free!

In this training, I’ll take a deep dive into this strategy. You’ll get…

Inspiration for writing personal emails to your contacts. 

I’m NOT going to give you scripts or templates to use for this. Unlike some marketers out there, I don’t believe that you’re going to get the results that I got just by copying my words. So, I’ll show you some real examples of the emails that I sent, but I won’t encourage you to use them as a script for your own emails. 

Instead, I’ll help you focus on taking my inspiration and then executing the emails in a way that feels authentically you. That’s the only way to get great results.

Strategies + examples of social media posts that get people interested in your offer. 

There’s no perfect formula for this. But I can give you some ideas, examples and strategies for you to test to see what works best for you and your social connections. I’ll even include an example of how I got results from doing an Instagram story!

Energy clearing + alignment. 

Instead of obsessing over the perfect words for your emails and social media posts, it’s more important to get your emotions in alignment with your goals. From there, you’ll write effective copy for your launch. 

During the training, we’ll work through some limiting beliefs that are holding you back from taking action and get you moving forward. And we’ll clear them away so that you can move forward to bigger and better!

Sound good?

How to Launch...for free! shows you how to do all of this and more.

When you join Attract Your Tribe Marketing Membership, you'll not only get this in-depth training on how to launch for free, you'll also get awesome Facebook ads training to help you get even more results!

And lots of magical mindset resources that you won't hear from any other marketing expert.

Join Attract Your Tribe and get instant access to the training -- How to Launch for Free

Pssst...if read this post and you noticed yourself thinking thoughts like -- "Well that worked for her but it could never work for me" or "My offer isn't good enough to get those kind of results" or "I'm too shy to reach out to people over email" -- then, you'll definitely want to join me for this live training so we can clear those limiting beliefs out for good!

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