Build Your Business With a Free Tutorial
People love to get free information so using a free tutorial to share your knowledge is a great way to promote yourself and your business. By doing this, you will be establishing yourself as an expert and building your reputation. Then when people need products and/or services, you will be the one they trust and believe.
Divide your tutorial into lessons, one for each day of the tutorial or ecourse. Once you get your lessons written up you want to set them up individually on an autoresponder. There are many autoresponders available for free and for a fee. Some hosts may have autoresponders available as well. WordPress also has autoresponder plugins.
Let’s say you own a home décor and furniture website store. You could set up an ecourse on how to successfully paint a piece of furniture. Your lessons would be something like this:
Lesson 1: Choosing the Right Paint
Lesson 2: Preparing the Piece to Be Painted
Lesson 3: Painting the Piece
Lesson 4: Maintaining the Finished Look
After your lessons are completed, you can set them up to go out each day in a row or separate them by a day or two. It would depend on how many lessons you have and how long you want the tutorial to last.
Separating the information into lessons works better than sending all the info in one mailing because it keeps your name and business fresh in the mind of the potential customer.
When writing your lessons, sprinkle in information about your business and what you offer but try to make it fit into the tutorial so it doesn’t appear too. Offer special discounts for signing up for your ecourse/tutorial.
Be sure to place your contact email in each and every lesson and let the reader know you are readily available if they have any questions or comments.
Another good idea is to have a preceding thank you note with an introduction of yourself and your business along with a summary of the tutorial. This would precede the first lesson. And then once the course is finished you would have another thank you going out encouraging them to visit your site for much more information and to contact you if they have any questions.
You could also let them know about your special deal or discount they receive for taking the course. Be sure to add your social media links so they can easily follow you.
Make them fun as well by adding trivia or little games along with the lesson. Keeping people interested can sometimes take work but it is well worth the time and effort.
If you have any other tutorials, list them as well and be sure to ask them to sign up for your mailing list. These details will go a long way in building the foundation and relationship needed to gain the customer’s trust and patronage.
Once your tutorial is complete you want to start promoting it so people can start signing up.
Add it to your email and networking group signatures:
FREE 4-day tutorial on painting furniture
place your URL here
Promote it on your social media pages and promote it often.
Offer it to your newsletter subscribers and post it on your website/blog.
Advertise it with ad swaps.
Put it on your business card and/or flyers.
Integrate it into your resource box when guest posting or submitting content.
Tutorials can be educational and fun so use them to your advantage and let them help increase your sales and build your business.