Simple Ideas to Scale Your Learning Business

1. Add a lead magnet right on top of your website's Home Page

It's a no-brainer, yet most learning business aren't doing it. Take your most valuable resource, talk, or idea that would add a lot of value to your target audience, and put it on your website's Home Page behind an email capture (this is for learning businesses only; if you're in L&D, the strategy for your internal site will be different). 

Put your best foot forward here with your original ideas. Everyone who is your target should feel eager to grab this resource. 

Remember, building your mailing list is the biggest key to scaling your business. If you have no mailing list, that's okay, still create this resource and put it on the Home Page. It's one of the best ways to build that list.

2. Connect all your experiences to a next-step 

I see so many course creators end courses with a "thank you." It's a huge missed opportunity. You go through so much effort to get a learner to join a journey with you, and then you say goodbye. Change it. 

Make sure you leave them with a next step on how to engage with you further, thoughtfully. Don't just list all your products like "Further reading". That doesn't work! At the end of a course, add another one closely connected to the current one. After sharing a model, connect it to a coaching opportunity. After an in-person event, start a series of emails leading to your book. Move them up in what I call the learning value ladder. 

If you have nothing, then have them join a waitlist to something. 

And guess what? Interest in that next step is a better evaluator of your current experience than any survey you can build.

Remember, learning and growth is inspired through journeys; it comes with constant engagement, constant pushes, constant evaluation, constant move-ups. 

Your bigger goal for your audience requires you to keep building that journey. Lead them naturally and thouhgtfully into more. 

3. Validate products and angles before you build fully

Before you make a full course, make sure you do a webinar or focus group and test the value of the learning outcome. 

Before you start a webinar, run a paid ad campaign to test its promise. 

Before you build more content on a topic, do surveys and pilot groups with existing learners to see how it's working and if you are offering something of interest. 

Validation is usually not just for a yes or no answer, it's for a what-angle-to-take answer. What are people interested in? How do we communicate that value? What terms resonate with them? What would they actually pay for, why? 

Don't put weeks and months into something before there's some validation of its need or impact.

4. Have a dedicated community manager

I've heard adult students say over and over that community is a key reason they join learning programs/courses. Yet, most educators create a community and then leave it to stagnate. 

Make sure you engage thoughtfully with learners who have joined you. Keep inviting new speakers to speak to them, do action learning sessions, do fun stuff, do co-works, do whatever works for your community's identity and goals. 

If you can, have someone manage this for you proactively. Someone who cares deeply about building and growing a strong community. 

5. Keep iterating your program to make it world-class (and charge higher)

A great learning product is very, very rare today, especially with all the AI slop. Treat your courses like a world-class asset. Bring the best-possible content, experience, and structure into it to offer the most value for your learner's time and investment. But don't stop there. Most course creators do that - they make the course, price it at X, and then leave it on the website. 

Your goal is to raise your asset's value, just like raising the value of your company or any other asset. Hone your frameworks, elevate your expertise, add, remove, keep offering more value in lesser time. And make sure how you present and structure is modern, engaging, and remarkably high-impact too.

Then, charge more for the same product, brag about the improvements, and inspire more raving fans.

Your checklist

There's so much more we could talk about here (your social media strategy, your B2B scaling strategy, funnels, bundles - marketing is massive, as you know), but with this email, I want to stick with simple actions you can take immediately to help scale.

To recap:

• Have a unifying story and connected loops for all your offerings (CTA at the end of each)

• Run validation mechanisms before building new products

• Have a system for building community with existing learners

• Have a lead magnet right on top of your home page

• Constantly elevate your product quality to offer more value

  
  

Need help scaling your learning business? We'd love to chat!