A way of maximising your sales and revenue now is through the online market. There are hundreds of companies like yourselves putting all their knowledge online and selling what they know and helping people by creating an online course specific to the market and sectors they know about. So for you, that would be recruitment, but how can you boost your sales using online courses? And how would you go about creating them?

By following these ten steps, you will be able to boost your sales and increase your revenue, as well as maintaining your outstandingly good recruitment business…

1 – Gather all your knowledge and put it into one place:

You’ve been working in recruitment for years right? And you have an extensive knowledge as an employer, and you know what to look for in a candidate which will make them stand out. But you also know what to look for in a client and what makes them attractive to a candidate, utilising this knowledge will boost sales, and boost revenue by selling this knowledge.

2 – Do your market research

When it comes to selling your knowledge and creating your online courses, market research is key. By doing this you’ll be able to see who is selling what and if any of your competitors are doing anything differently to your company. You’ll also be able to see what kind of  market is available for your business to find a hole in and exploit – for example, by doing a brief search on three different platforms I was able to come up with the following results:

online course

The above image is taken from Udemy, an online course selling site. The course itself is based around helping people look for work and find a job and how they can find the ideal job. This course itself is being sold for £45 and having over 1,000 students enrolled in it, the return on investment here is staggering.

online course

Again, the above image is taken from a search on Amazon for ‘recruitment’ as you can see this has generated over 11,0000 results on the search, mainly all books and kindle results. This is another area of the market that could be exploited as people may be more willing to purchase a book with knowledge and tips on how to find a job than follow an online course, but how you present the information is entirely up to you!

3 – What is your expertise? What problems do you solve?

Simple really, recruitment and helping people find work, and helping employers find candidates. But is it as simple as that? Yes, it is, if you are a standout recruitment business in your market with good connections, then you’ll be able to solve any issues that come in the form of a candidate looking for a job, or a business looking for a new employee.

4 – Who will buy your knowledge? What is your target audience?

As shown above, in the previous images, there is a market out there for recruiters to sell their knowledge, but identifying who those people are is the tricky bit. As a recruitment agency, you will have two separate target audiences –

1 – Your clients looking for new candidates and employees

2 – Your candidates looking for work and new opportunities

By separating out your target audience, ou can then specify your courses directly to the target audience so you could have several different courses or just two direct courses, with the vast knowledge you have this should be simple.

5 – Create a customer avatar

Creating a customer avatar and having an ideal target audience are very similar, however a target audience is a generic pool of people (clients looking for candidates & candidates looking for work) but a customer avatar is taking these and specifying them right down to the bones, so an ideal customer avatar would be built either around your businesses qualities, or the qualities of the employer you’re looking to place the candidate with, some of these could be based on the following:

  • Mission Statement – Does the candidate’s ambitions match the client’s goals
  • Candidate experience – Is the candidate experienced in the relevant industry that your client is in

Your avatar almost needs to be a made up person with the qualities of some of your top candidates or needs to have the same ambitions as your top candidates….

For example, the type of new client we would look for is as follows

Let’s call our candidate bob for now…

Bob is a small business owner with a high income but equally high overheads but is looking to cut costs and streamline some of his processes. Bob is looking to reduce the workload on his accounts team and reduce costs by taking on, or outsourcing his accounts and finances to a background company or accountants. Bob’s business has the ability to grow and be a cash rich business by streamlining and cost cutting, bob also wants to be able to work less on his business and in it more by working a 9-5 week and spend more time helping and developing his business and staff.

So for a recruitment agency your ideal candidate would be along the following lines:

We’ll use bob again, we like bob!

Bob is a young ambitious candidate who is focused on helping any potential employer grow their business he is also well presented and ready to take on any new challenges, although Bob has ample experience in (defined area) he would also be willing to challenge himself and gain experience in a new role or sector. Bob is looking to take his experience and apply it within a new business and build a long-term career with the business and work his way to being one of the top employees for said business.

6 – Plan your course structure

Planning your course structure is the most important part of building your course as this comes before you’ve even decided what content you want to include in your course. Building your course structure is how you plan it and how put it together, you can do this by using sticky notes and putting them up on a whiteboard, or a window, or alternatively you could plan it using Excel, PowerPoint or a Trello board. Always plan the structure before you create the content.

7 – Value your test idea

Value testing your idea is pretty close to market research, but you’re not monitoring what your potential competitors are doing, you’re making the most of your current customers and any affiliated people you work with to see if you can get some feedback on your idea and if it’s something they’d be interested in using or buying your product.

8 – Create MVP

Creating an MVP is the first step to building or adding to a mailing list this is where you’ll be able to see what kind of interest you can get into your online product, this will go one of 3 ways –

1 – Gain instant interest and be successful from the get-go and grow rapidly over your products lifetime

2 – Gain instant interest and grow steadily over the lifetime of your product

3 – Completely and utterly fail and leave you to go back to the drawing board to try again and create something new

Creating an MVP can be difficult, or it can be extremely easy, depending on the subject matter, so for a recruitment agency you could have several of these ready for your customers and can base them around things such as blogs, videos or e-books and these could be on the following subject:

1 – How to prepare and succeed in an interview

2 – How to make a good impression with a new employer

3 – How to be the perfect employee

4 – How to recruit the perfect candidate

5 – What to look for in the perfect PA

6 – How to secure the ideal secretary

The list goes on…

9 – Build your list

You may already have a list of customers and candidates, great, but what if they’re not converting or bringing the success you’re aiming for? Then you need to build a new list of new candidates and potential new customers and you can do this by utilising the MVP’s you’ve created and generated. By creating this new list, you will be able to gather interest in your online product but may also find some candidates who you can move into your offline business and put forward for new jobs.

9.5 – Find your platform

Whilst your creating your MVP’s and building your list, you also need to be looking to find the ideal platform to host your courses on, now there are quite a few you can use to do this, but some of the most common ones are:

1 – Thinkific – A personal favourite of ours, this is where we’ll be hosting our Bloody Brilliant Business Bookkeeping courses. The software itself is easy to use and set up it also allows you to create bundles, force upsells and drip-feed your content, in my opinion, the best platform for courses without a doubt!

online course

As you can see it’s a very clean layout, the banners, and course cards are fully customisable so you can design and personalise every aspect of your course so people can recognise it’s your business selling the knowledge.

2 – Learndash – Learndash is very similar to Thinkific, however, it is a WordPress plugin but is a very capable learning platform that will enable you to create 100’s of courses and freebie courses to help grow your customer base and generate new income.

online course

3 – Udemy – As above Udemy is an online learning platform for video-based courses, it’s recently been called the ‘Netflix for education’ due to it having over 9million hours of worth of educational video content as well as hundreds of hours worth of written content. The image below shows just how vast their selection is and shows how many recommendations they can show through to people.

online course

9.75 – Create your content

So you’ve done all of the above and you’re now ready to create your content, this is the easy bit because all your content is in your head, the hard bit is deciding how to put the content into words, do you put into one long online course? Do you put it into several smaller courses? Or do you build it into courses and a series of books? There’s plenty of ways you can build it into a saleable product.

10 – Creating a sales funnel

The next thing you need to do now that you’ve created your content and your course has been built is to create a sales funnel. How do you do this? To create a sales funnel you need to have a combination of 5 things:

1 – Product

2 – Advertising

3 – Strategy

4 – Branding

5 – Prospects

These all then lead into your marketing campaign which will include things such as:

1 – Facebook & Social Media Advertising

2 – Email Marketing Campaigns

3 – Regular prospect engagement

The sales funnel you create will determine how well your product perform.

11 – Affiliate Scheme

An affiliate scheme is also another great way to promote your product as people can do it for you and take a cut of the profit from it (normally between 30 – 50%) this also works brilliantly as people can bypass your courses and become a new customer or candidate, you can also offer the product and affiliate programme to former candiates to aid engagement with them.

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