Legendary direct response copywriter Gary Halbert liked to pose a question to his trainees during seminars:
“If you and I both owned a hamburger stand, what advantages would you most like to have on your side?”
The trainees usually responded with food feature requests: grass-fed beef, organic ingredients, brioche and gluten-free buns. Others would request lower prices or a killer kitchen staff.
Halbert would then grant each and every one of these requests. In exchange, he wanted only one advantage and maintained that if he had it, his hamburger stand would crush all others despite their perks and fancy ingredients.
Naturally, the students wanted to know what this single advantage was. Halbert replied:
All I want is a starving crowd.
With this thought experiment, Halbert revealed the golden rule of direct marketing: start with the prospect, not the product.
In other words, a purchasing desire is not created by features, benefits, or fancy copywriting. Desire is channeled by those elements, meaning it must first exist within the prospect’s mind.
A “hungry” prospect is starving for a solution. This is your starting point.
This principle becomes even more crucial when creating online training courses. Before you invest time and effort into developing paid educational content, it’s essential to focus on the desires and objectives of the learner first rather than the training you want to create.
Start With the Learner, Not With the Course
Many course creators stumble because they develop content based on what they think people should learn rather than what people actually want to know.
This approach is akin to trying to sell asparagus to children simply because it’s nutritious. If you’re competing against the allure of an ice cream truck, you’re likely setting yourself up for disappointment.
Remember, the most successful courses align with the learner’s problems, desires, values, and motivations. By understanding and addressing these factors, you’ll create content that resonates with your audience and drives engagement.
Start with the learner, and the rest will follow. The process contained within the Empowerment Marketing Toolkit will get you off on the right foot.
Once you understand your audience in the context of what they desire, choosing a topic for your course becomes a much clearer exercise. Here are six ways to nail down a viable topical focus for additional clarity.
1. Be The Market
In many cases, your expertise is the key to the training you’ll create and deliver. This effectively makes you a member of the market, which can give you a significant edge in identifying and meeting customer needs beyond the know-how you’ve developed.
Each of us belongs to multiple market segments without even realizing it. You might be an entrepreneur, a gardening enthusiast, a parent, a comic book collector, a writer, and an occasional woodworker — all rolled into one. This diverse set of interests and experiences provides you with insider knowledge across various potential markets.
Being an active participant in a market offers several advantages:
Natural observation of trends and needs
Fluency in the language of your target audience
Deep understanding of customer motivations and pain points
This insider perspective allows you to identify opportunities that outsiders might miss. You’re not just guessing what your market wants — you know because you’re part of it.
It shows in your work when you’re genuinely passionate and purpose-driven about your market. This authenticity can be a powerful differentiator, helping you deeply connect with customers. For many digital entrepreneurs, including myself, pursuing a business in a market they don’t belong to is almost unthinkable.
For nearly two decades, I’ve been serving people who are essentially like me: writers, content creators, and entrepreneurs who aren’t technical founders or coders. Ironically, this led me to start a software company, but our success in many ways stemmed from the fact that our ideal use case was essentially me. By being my own ideal customer, my team and I gained an incredible advantage in understanding and meeting our clients’ needs.
When you’re part of the market you’re serving, you’re not just running a business – you’re solving problems you’ve personally experienced. This insider knowledge and sense of purpose can be your secret weapon in creating training that truly resonates with your target audience. While you are not at the same level as your audience at this point, you once were, and this is the power of Founder-Problem Fit in action.
2. Evergreen Topics
When considering online education and training opportunities, it’s essential to focus on evergreen topics — subjects that consistently attract large audiences and remain relevant over time. These topics have proven staying power, often spanning decades or even centuries of interest.
Some of the most popular evergreen topics include:
Marketing and small business strategies
Freelancing and solopreneurship
Personal finance and investment
Self-help and personal development
Parenting and family life
Alternative medicine and holistic health
Nutrition and fitness
Arts and crafts
Dating and relationships
Beauty and personal care
Vocational training and skills development
To identify promising evergreen topics, pay attention to successful email newsletters, blogs, and online communities in these areas. Analyze why certain topics capture your interest and what needs they fulfill for their audience. This insight can help you understand market demands and potential opportunities.
To gain deeper insights, consider becoming an active participant in online communities related to your areas of interest. By engaging with these communities, you can:
Identify unmet needs within the market
Spot potential gaps in existing content or services
Build relationships with established publishers and content creators
Many successful email newsletters, for example, rely heavily on sponsorships for revenue. This presents an opportunity for you to approach these publishers with joint venture proposals that offer mutual benefits. By staying attuned to market trends and community needs, you’ll be well-positioned to create valuable partnerships and educational offerings in these evergreen niches.
Remember, the key to success in online education is not just choosing a popular topic but also finding innovative ways to address ongoing challenges and provide unique value to your audience. By surveying the competitive landscape, you’ll discover value gaps and identify potential partners.
3. What’s Already Selling Online?
When entering the competitive world of online education, it’s crucial to understand what’s already selling and how you can uniquely position yourself for success. The key isn’t to avoid competition but to compete effectively by offering something unique and valuable that appeals to a particular worldview.
Most successful information publishers don’t reinvent the wheel — they improve upon it. They take established concepts and add their own twist and language, creating a more valuable or engaging take on the original idea. This approach aligns closely with the principles of instructional design, where you identify existing information and training that people are willing to pay for, then position yourself to enhance both the perceived and actual value of your educational offering.
Uniquely positioning “information” into something your ideal prospect finds compelling is the golden key to success in online training. It allows you to create an offer that’s more appealing than the “competition” so that they’re no longer competition, at least when it comes to your particular learner.
Let’s look at the final Copyblogger paid community before the acquisitions, Digital Commerce Academy. Adopting the term “digital commerce” was unique “languaging” at the time, which was the first element of differentiation.
Topic Coverage: We covered subjects also taught elsewhere — course creation, SaaS product development, WordPress theme design, e-book publishing, and more.
Unique Approach: Instead of offering fragmented courses, we consolidated an entire industry — the digital economy — under one roof and a unified term.
Value Proposition: We provided comprehensive training at a more competitive price point that added a sticky community aspect.
This approach defined our position in the digital marketplace: a one-stop shop for digital business education that offered exceptional value.
As you consider your own online training business, think about how you can apply these principles:
What unique perspective or consolidation of knowledge can you offer?
How can you position your courses to stand out in a crowded marketplace?
Remember, success in this industry isn’t just about what you teach — it’s in the unique way you present the information and the perceived value you bring to your learners.
4. Become a Student of Direct Marketing
As a marketer, one of the most valuable habits you can develop is to become a keen observer of direct marketing in action. While most people discard “junk mail” without a second thought, savvy marketers see these materials as a goldmine of information and inspiration.
Take a closer look at the promotional materials that fill your mailbox:
Catalogs
Direct mail promotions
Flyers and brochures
Pay special attention to recurring promotions. If you see the same ad or offer multiple times, it’s likely performing well for the company behind it. Analyze what makes these successful campaigns tick.
Don’t limit yourself to just physical mail. Direct response marketing is all around us whenever there is a request for immediate action (e.g., make a purchase, sign up, call now, visit this website):
Radio advertisements
Newspaper and magazine ads
Infomercials and home shopping programs
Social media marketing campaigns
Even some of the more questionable marketing tactics can offer valuable insights. Study everything from reputable businesses to less scrupulous operators — there’s always something to learn and implement ethically.
By paying attention to direct marketing across various channels, you’re giving yourself an advanced education in market awareness. Here’s how to apply this knowledge:
Identify successful campaigns and products
Analyze their execution, especially in offline channels
Adapt winning strategies for your online training
Position yourself uniquely within proven markets
Remember, you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. By observing what’s already working and finding ways to improve it, you can create more effective marketing campaigns for your training business.
This approach allows you to benefit from the market research and testing done by others, reducing your risk and increasing your chances of success. Combined with a focus on evergreen topics, this strategy can help you develop powerful, targeted marketing efforts that resonate with your audience.
5. Explore the Newsstand
The local newsstand, whether at a local Barnes & Noble or an independent shop, is a goldmine for education entrepreneurs seeking inspiration and potential markets. Despite our now pervasive digital age, print publications continue to exist and thrive, catering to diverse interests and niche audiences — and often reflect the current topics that older consumers are interested in.
Also, if there’s a print magazine catering to a particular market, it’s likely large enough to support a membership site or multiple courses. This is an easy way to gauge if you’re thinking too narrowly about a niche.
Browsing the newsstand reveals an array of specialized magazines covering topics you might never have considered. From hobbyist publications to trade journals, there’s likely a print outlet for nearly every imaginable subject. This diversity presents exciting opportunities for course creators to:
Identify potential markets for their work
Discover new topics to explore
Find inspiration for fresh article ideas
By immersing yourself in the world of print publications, you’ll gain valuable insights into potential markets and spark new ideas for your writing projects. The newsstand remains a vibrant source of inspiration for course creators looking for ideas outside of online echo chapters.
6. To Survey Or Not?
When it comes to market research, many “gurus” tell you to simply “ask” via online surveys. The problem with this approach is that people don’t know what they want, and you can’t trust what they say they’ll buy until they actually buy it.
My approach has always been different: I practice observation “in the wild.” This means monitoring social media and tracking what my own audience opens, clicks on, and says via unprompted email replies.
People often say one thing but do another. If you ask someone what they’ll buy, you might be sorely disappointed when it’s time for them to make a purchase. This disconnect between stated intentions and actual behavior is why we focus on observing real transactions rather than relying solely on self-reported data.
That said, surveys can still be valuable if used correctly. Instead of asking people what they want to buy, focus on open-ended questions about their problems, desires, and needs. For example:
What’s your biggest frustration?
What do you wish existed?
What would help you achieve X, Y, or Z?
These questions require more effort to analyze, but the insights gained are invaluable. They help you identify gaps in the market and unmet needs that you can potentially fill.
If you have an existing audience, surveying can be straightforward. Use tools like Google Docs, WordPress plugins, or software like Survey Monkey. For those without an audience, consider running ads on larger publications or using Google AdWords to drive traffic to a survey landing page. Often, you’ll need to provide an incentive for participation.
It’s important to remember that surveys have limitations. Only certain types of people tend to complete surveys (especially when incentives are involved), which can skew results. Additionally, multiple-choice questions can inadvertently lead respondents or limit their responses.
Despite these challenges, open-ended surveys can provide rich, qualitative data. You can uncover valuable insights by carefully analyzing responses and extrapolating the underlying emotional roots of problems or desires. This approach is particularly useful when refining an existing topic rather than discovering a completely new one.
In conclusion, while observation of real-world behavior should be your primary focus, well-crafted surveys can complement your research and provide deeper insights into your audience’s needs and desires.
Next Up…
You’ve chosen your prospect and market, so next up, you need to work the intersection of both and find your winning difference. This is another way of saying your positioning (or, if you’re very old school, your unique selling proposition). This is a critical phase for all marketing initiatives, especially when selling online education or other forms of information. More soon!