The Savvy Seller with Kristen Doyle

126. Make Your Courses & Memberships Unmissable on Your Website

• Kristen Doyle, TPT seller, SEO coach, and web designer

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Are your courses and memberships getting lost on your website? If potential buyers can’t easily find your offers on your website, you’re leaving money on the table! In this episode, I break down the three essential places where your courses, memberships, and other offers should be featured for maximum visibility.

From optimizing your navigation menu with clear labels to creating dedicated sections on your homepage, I share proven strategies to make your offers stand out. I also cover how to strategically set up your sales pages, addressing factors like design capabilities, checkout integration, and user comfort, so your audience can smoothly transition from browsing to buying.

Plus, I highlight common mistakes that keep your offers on your website hidden (like not including them at all!). You’ll learn how to guide visitors to the right offer without overwhelming them, using things like strategic landing pages. Ready to boost your sales and make your offers on your website more accessible? This episode is packed with tips to help you get there!

01:38 - Three key places that your course and membership need to show up on your website

07:55 - Common mistakes to avoid when listing your offers on your website

10:47 - Strategies for featuring your offers without overwhelming your visitors

12:44 - Specific steps to take this week if you’re featuring courses, memberships, or other offers on your website

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode126

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Kristen Doyle:

I had no idea you had a course about that, or you have a membership? If you've ever heard those words from someone who's been following you for a while, then today's episode is for you. Today, we are making sure your courses and your memberships get the visibility they deserve on your website, so that everyone knows what you offer. If you have courses or memberships, but they aren't obviously highlighted on your website, you're missing out on potential sales and connections with those perfect students or clients for you. Even if you don't have a course or a membership, you might still find some great tips in today's episode for how to feature your other main offers, your services or bundles on your website, because today I am sharing exactly where and how to feature your offers so that they're easy for your website visitors to discover and encourage them to make a purchase. Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like teachers pay teachers, Etsy or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I'm Kristen Doyle, and I'm here to give you no fluff, tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process. Things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automations, and so much more. Let's get started y'all. Okay, let's start with the three key places that your courses and memberships need to show up on your website. First and foremost, you need your courses or your memberships linked in your navigation menu. Your navigation menu needs to clearly show that you have a course or a membership and direct people over to it. When you pick your menu labels, make sure that you are keeping them fairly short, so that they don't take up too much space across the page, but that they are very clear about what you are offering. So instead of using something like "learn", that's a kind of generic name that doesn't really tell me what I'm gonna find when I get to that page, think about using something like horse or coaching or membership, whatever it is that you're offering, so that it's really easy for people to know what it is and find it. If you have multiple offers like this that you need to highlight, you might want to consider one of two things. You can either use drop down menus. So in that case, I would suggest something like courses and coaching for your main top level menu, and then drop downs with the specific offers. Or if you don't want to do drop down menus because you're trying to keep your navigation clean and simple, then you could always link courses and coaching or something like that to a landing page that lists out all of them. Adding your course or your membership to your main navigation menu at the top of the website makes it really easy to find from any page on your site. You might also consider adding links or even the logo and a link to your course in the footer of your website, so that it's shown on every page in the bottom of the site as well. The second major place that you want to add your course or your membership is going to be on your home page itself. My recommendation is that you create a dedicated section on the homepage to talk about your course or your membership, as opposed to just popping it in to some other section, maybe with featured products or something like that. When you create this dedicated section, you want to include, obviously, the name of your offer, and I'm just going to refer to it as a course for right now. So include the name of your course, include an image of some sort that's related to your course, whether it's your logo, mock up of the course content on a computer screen or something else, an image that's related to the course. And then include some text. When you write that text, you need to address the three most important things people need to know about a bigger offer, like a course or a membership. Who is it for? So identifying the target audience. And then, what are the pain points that they have that your course is going to solve? And then, of course, what is that solution so the audience the pain points you're solving, and what is the solution that you're offering? And then include a direct call to action. And when I say that, I mean a button that leads over to the full sales page where they can get all the details and hopefully purchase your course. The exact same layout works for a membership as well. Speaking of the sales page, you need to think about where your sales page is going to live for your course or your membership. There are three main factors I would encourage you to think about when you're deciding where to put your sales page. Now, regardless of what you're selling, a course, a membership or something else, you probably are hosting it on a different platform, off of your main website. If you're selling a course or doing a membership, typically, a platform that is intended for that is going to work better than a WordPress site or other website platforms. So you have some options when it comes to where your sales page lives. It can live on your website. It can live on that course platform, or maybe you're using a third party checkout system. The three main things you want to consider when you're deciding where to put that sales page are, how are people going to purchase? So where is that checkout process going to live, and how can you integrate that into the page? What kind of design capabilities are there on your site, on your checkout platform, on the course platform, and then, of course, what is your comfort level with building the page and maintaining or updating the page on those different platforms? And it really is important to think about your comfort level, whether you are DIY ing this so you need to be comfortable building and designing the page on that platform, or you're hiring someone else to build it for you, but you may still need to go in and make updates. Maybe you add some new bonuses, or you change the pricing. You'll need to be comfortable making those updates as well. In my own business, what I have found to work the best for me is to build my sales page directly in WordPress, and I use the Elementor page builder when I do that, and then I use Thrive cart for my checkout process, and I embed the Thrive Cart Checkout directly onto the WordPress page. Now that is what I have found to work best for me. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing for you. So consider as you are weighing your options, where you're going to be comfortable and where you're going to be able to design the type of page you want. A big reason that I design my pages in WordPress, aside from the fact that I am just very comfortable there, and I know I can do anything I want there, is the fact that thrive cart who I use for my actual checkout and payment processing, their landing page and sales page builder doesn't have very good mobile responsiveness. And I find that for me, I struggle to get their pages to look the way that I want without doing a whole lot of custom code. And I don't want to have to do that. So for me, it's much easier to do it on WordPress, and I'm able to do better mobile responsiveness. So that's why I go that route. But like I said, everyone will have their own best answer for that, depending on your comfort level and the checkout system that you're using. Now that you know where to feature your course or your membership on your website, let's talk about some common mistakes to avoid. These are issues that I see come up over and over when I'm looking at my client's website, and it's something that I try to make sure to bring up and share with them when I notice these things happening. The biggest mistake by far, is just not listing all of your offers on your website at all. And I know sometimes this happens because we're afraid to seem salesy, or maybe we feel like we need to always send potential buyers through a specific funnel that leads to our course or our membership, and we don't just want it out there for anyone to see. But the reality is, people might have heard about your offer, whichever type it is, on social media or on a podcast, and they come to your website already looking for it. So you want to be sure that they have a clear way to find those offers on your website. See what happens if they come to your website and can't find it is typically that they just walk away and you lose out on that potential sale and that potential connection with somebody that you can help and serve and support. Another reason that sometimes people leave their courses or their memberships off of the website is that they feel like maybe the course or the membership targets a very specific audience, and their website is targeting a bigger audience. Or perhaps they have just launched this course and they don't have enough feedback yet, or they aren't sure that it's gonna work yet. For either of those, I would just encourage you, it is not going to get better. You are not going to grow this offer unless you get more people to it. So take that step and put it on your website, even if it's brand new, even if it's a little bit different from your main website's niche, because the worst thing you can do is create an offer that no one ever sees. So just put it on your website, let people see it, and let them decide if that offer is right for them or not. Another common issue is when I see people include their course or their membership on their homepage but not. Not including enough information on the site to really get people interested enough to click over and learn more about it. When you think about where to put your course on your homepage, don't just drop a logo and a title that says, you know, click here to learn more. Make sure that you are highlighting those pain points and the benefits of joining your membership or taking your course. Your visitors really need to know who this is for and what they get out of it before they have to take any action. So make sure that it is visible there and obvious right on your homepage before they have to click over to the sales page. And of course, this doesn't need to be a huge section with all the sales copy that you would include on a full sales page, just highlight the main points right on your home page before they click. If you have multiple courses or memberships like I do, you need a strategy for featuring them on your site effectively, so you don't overwhelm your visitors with too many options. There are a lot of ways to do this. I would start by thinking about how visitors are going to arrive on your site and how they might find your offers. Thinking about who your visitors are and what they need first. One effective approach to this is to give people a way to self identify, kind of like those choose your own adventure books that we used to read as kids. Whether you separate out your offers by pain point that they address, or by what stage of life or business or teaching or whatever your ideal customers are in. Giving people a path to follow a way that They can self identify which offer is right for them can be really helpful. You could do this by creating a landing page that shows all of those main offers categorized by those pain points or stages that people are in, so that they can look at them and determine which offers are right for them. Another option is when you're deciding what to feature most prominently, is to start with your entry level offers.

Unknown:

Those entry level offers that are either easy yeses or they are the thing that people need before they get to the bigger offer. Those are great ways to get visitors to trust you once on something small, so that you then have the chance through that smaller offer to prove yourself trustworthy for the bigger things that you're going to share with them and invite them to join down the road.

Kristen Doyle:

So you might save those bigger, more premium kinds of offers for follow up sequences, for thank you pages for sharing with people who have already joined some of your smaller offers. All right, let's wrap up this episode with some specific steps that you can take this week. First of all, pull up your

website and check:

is it obvious, right from your home page at a first glance, that you have courses or memberships, or whatever your bigger offers are to offer people? If it's not, then you need to take some action right now. Then I want you to review your home page to make sure your offer is clearly shown on the home page and that you are talking about who it's for, what those pain points are that it addresses, and what the solution is that you're offering. And if you can't say yes to both of those questions, then the easiest thing to do right now is add a link to your menu bar for the sales page for your offer. That is your step for today, and that should take you no longer than two to three minutes if you still have to navigate to your website and log in as an admin. So make that your step that you take right now and then put it on your to do list to either update your home page details about your offer or contact your web designer for some help if you need that. Next week, in our improving and updating your website series, we will be talking about how to optimize your website shop. For right now, focus on making those courses and memberships visible and accessible to your website visitors. If you found today's episode helpful, take a screenshot and share it on your Instagram Stories. Don't forget to tag me@kristendoyle.co. I would love to hear which changes you are planning to make to your website first. Talk to you soon, friends!