How to create an evergreen course, launch it, and sell it with a funnel

If you just starting out your course creation journey, figuring out what kind of course to create can be quite a challenge.

And I'm here to help! In this article, I'll explain what an evergreen course is, and how to create one that sells by covering the basics of launching and promoting your course.

Let's get started!

What is an Evergreen Course?

An evergreen course is a course that is always available to students. You create it once, and it's there, ready and waiting for students, year after year.

The great thing about an evergreen course is that you just need to do the work once.

You can put it together in your spare time in a note taking app of your choice, create slides, record yourself, and when your videos are ready, you can upload them to a course creation platform like SchoolMaker before launching it.

One of the best things about evergreen courses is that they generate passive income once they're up and running.

For example, the course "SEO for Solopreneurs" by Nat Eliason has an evergreen sales funnel, with an entirely automated process for selling, and delivering his course to his students.

His sales page doesn't need to be updated at all since there is no other launch apart from the initial evergreen launch.

There are a lot of benefits to doing so, but going the Evergreen route also has its drawbacks:

How to create an Evergreen Course Funnel?

So you've decided to create an Evergreen online course! That's great news. But now comes the hard part — figuring out how to make an Evergreen funnel.

<p class="tip">What is an evergreen funnel?
It's a system that continually sells your course to new students, without you having to do any extra work. In other words, it's a set of marketing content and automations that do all the selling for you.</p>

<p class="tip">How do you create one?
It's actually not that hard, but you have to take it step-by-step. To create a very simple evergreen funnel, you just need to build a landing page and get traffic to it via SEO, your social media content, or with paid ads. The key is to make your offer irresistible, so people can't help but buy your course. Of course, you can create more elaborated systems with a sales video, long email sequences, and advanced automations, but let's keep it simple.</p>

What to create a great offer

For your Course Offer to be truly impactful, it needs to include:

1. The concrete result your students are going to get by the end of the course
2. A twist, or a memorable element
3. A counter-argument to your student’s main objection
4. Addressing the fears of your potential customers

Here are few good examples of Offers:

The Part-Time YouTuber Academy 👇

Learn how to grow your YouTube channel from 0 to 100,000+ subscribers and transform it into a sustainable, income-generating machine. Without quitting your day job 😉

→ Focus on the main outcome: Grow your YouTube channel into a sustainable, income-generating machine. It gives an even more tangible by being specific with “from 0 to 100,00+ subscribers”.
‍→ Unique and memorable: The part-time aspect is reassuring and memorable.
‍→ Addresses the main fear: “What if I fail?” which the part-time aspect solves because with this course, people don’t have to give up everything to grow their channel.

‍

SEO for Solopreneurs 👇

The minimum maintenance, maximum results guide to putting your traffic & sales on autopilot.

→ Focus on the main outcome: Putting traffic & sales on autopilot.
‍→ Unique and memorable: Memorable oxymoron of "minimum" and "maximum".
‍→ Addresses the main objection: "I don’t have the time or team to grow with SEO!" with “minimum maintenance, maximum results”.

‍

Building a Second Brain👇

A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

→ Focus on the main outcome: “Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential”.
‍→ Addresses the main fear: “Will it work for me?” with “A Proven Method” it will.

How to create an online course landing page that converts

At SchoolMaker, we run a 7-figure course business, our copywriting videos have millions of views, and we even have a copywriting course for our community (how meta!).

So let us tell you… you don’t need all those fancy techniques from the get go.

Does advanced copywriting work to get a lot more sales? You bet it does. But here’s the kicker: copywriting won’t turn a failing product into a money-making machine. Advanced copywriting is best used to turn a solid product into a cash-generating monster.

You’re not there yet. Your only goals right now should be:

1. Validating that people actually want your product
2. Getting feedback from some paid customers

You can worry about optimizing your conversions and building a more complex evergreen funnel later. Right now, we’re aiming for “simple but effective”.

You can start by using this simple structure. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours to write the whole page.

We call it “the 80/20 sales page” after the pareto principle, which states that 80% of your efforts come from 20% of your effort. And indeed, this simple structure should take you 80% of the way.

Here it is:

1. Hook
2. Problem
3. Solution
4. Results
5. What you will receive & CTA
6. Credibility and Social Proof
7. Satisfaction Guarantee
8. The cost of inaction
9. FAQ
10. Contact

1. Hook

The hook contains:

• The name of your product
• Your online course unique selling proposition (A USP is a complete and impactful sentence that promises the main outcome of your product to your potential customers)
• A CTA (here I recommend a button that scrolls down to part 5: "What you will receive" when clicked

2. Problem

‍Pain: Describe your student's problems
When describing their problems, try to use the exact words that they would use themselves.
Here is an example from the Part-Time YouTuber Academy:

Origin of the problem: Describe the "hidden" cause of these problems
‍Your experience allows you to see the root issues that affect your student. If you could only fix those, everything would be better… This will allow you to introduce your course as the logical solution to your their problems.

Here is an example from the Part-Time YouTuber Academy:

‍

‍Qualification: Who is this product for? Who is it not for?‍

It’s important for people who visit your page to know if your course is made specifically for them, or not. Based on your experience in the topic you are teaching, you should be able to write down a few paragraphs explaining who your course is for, and who won’t be a good fit.

Here are 2 examples from Ali Abdaal's Part-Time YouTuber Academy course:

3. Solution

The solution flows logically from the "Source of the problem"
This is when you present your course as the ideal solution!

For example, in the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, the hidden source of the problem is “making videos in a haphazard manner”, so the solution is to build a repeatable system. The course shows you exactly how to do this.

‍

4. Results

A few expected benefits of your solution
Try to explain these benefits in a concrete, emotional and visual way. For this, you can use examples, images, before-after sections, vivid descriptions, stories...

In this example, each section is a spin on one of three benefits:

1. You’ll take action and (finally) get started
2. You’ll feel more confident in your skills as a YouTuber
3. You’ll never feel overwhelmed again thanks to a repeatable system

‍

‍Storytelling: your story, a real student's, or your future student’s
To make your benefits even stronger, you can tell your own story or that of a student. If you’re not comfortable doing that, you can also start this section with "Imagine if...", and make your students visualize how their life could be different.

5. What you will receive & CTA

In this part you can show the following things:‍

• A Reminder of the title and the USP
• A summary of the content of your course (title of course sections focused on benefits)
• The price of your course
• Call to Action #1: A button to buy your course, which will redirect to your payment page.

6. Credibility

"Who am I?" and your results
Introduce yourself, why you are creating this product and why they should trust you. You don’t need to be a rock star in your niche to be credible, you just need to be more experienced than your reader.

Testimonials and social proof (you can add this later, once you get clients)
You can ask your beta students for testimonials, and use the results they got as case studies.

7. Satisfaction Guarantee

Duration of the guarantee
We recommend a tried-and-true “30-Day Money-Back Guarantee”.

We recommend a generous refund policy: "No strings attached, no questions asked". This shows that you have skin in the game, and will limit your own imposter syndrome.

In this exemple, they offer a 60 days money-back guarantee, which is conditional on completing the material. This can be a good option once your course is fully built out.

8. The cost of inaction

Visualization
‍What will change in your customer's life after they complete your course?

The cost of inaction
‍What will happen to your customer's life if they do NOT buy your product? How will his problem get worse over time?
Here are some copy examples:

• "You have two choices...", and then present the outcome of following your course and applying it, and compare it to the outcome of doing nothing.
• You can ask them "If you do nothing, where will you be in a year?".

Call to Action #2: "Buy the course" — This button will redirect to your payment page.

9. FAQ

Answer to objections that may prevent a purchase, as well as common questions people could ask themselves

• "Will it work if [I have no idea / no time / no education / have not exercised for a long time]"
• "What happens if I'm not satisfied?"
• "Can't I do this on my own / find the information online?"
• "What is the difference with other courses available on the web?"
• "How long will it take to get results?"
• Other questions your students may have

10. Contact

Call to Action #3: "Buy the course"
This button will redirect to your payment page.

Add your contact of choice:

• Email
• Facebook Messenger
• WhatsApp
• Phone number
• Appointment link (Calendly, Youcanbook.me…)

Once you have your landing page set up, and you connected it to your online course, it's time to launch it. This is where marketing comes into play. You need to get your offer in front of the right people and convince them to buy.

How to get traffic to an Evergreen Funnel?

There are 4 main ways to get traffic to an Evergreen Funnel:

• Social Media content
• SEO traffic
• Paid Ads
• Your email list

How to get traffic with social media

Depending on what platform you're using, you can do different things, but the overall goal will be to get eyeballs on your landing page so you can start making sales.

Here are a few examples of what you could do:

• Add a link in bio to your Instagram that links to your landing page and make posts, stories, and reels sending your people to the link.
• Add a pinned tweet with your course hook and a link to the landing page.
• You can try to create viral TikToks about your topics and redirect viewers to your courses like what Miss Excel does.
• Make a YouTube video to announce the pre-launch and final launch of your course, and continue mentioning it from time to time in later videos while sending viewers to your description.

For example, the YouTuber Graham Stephan links his courses in the descriptions of all of his YouTube videos.

This strategy is pretty efficient, but if you want to do the same, you will still need to promote your course often with your social media, which is not very passive as you still need to create new content regularly.

How to get traffic with SEO

SEO is a marketing strategy that helps in increasing the number of visitors to a website by getting it higher rankings on search engine result pages.

There are two main ways of doing SEO: On-page and Off-page. On-page SEO is about improving the quality of content on your site and optimizing the page for search engines. Off-page SEO includes things like link building and social media marketing.

The first step to do SEO is to identify what your target audience wants. You need to know what they are searching for before you can optimize your website or content for them. You should also make sure that you have good site speed, so that users don't have to wait too long before they get the information they want from your website or blog post.

If you want to dive deeper into this topic, Ahrefs has created a great free guide to SEO which you can read here.

How to get traffic with Paid Ads

Paid ads are one of the most popular ways to generate traffic to your website. It is a type of advertising where you pay for each click on an ad. The more you pay, the more people will see your ad.

There are many types of paid ads: display, search, video, mobile and social media. When optimizing an ad campaign it is important to know what type of ad is best for your product or service and how much you want to spend on it.

There are many different types of paid ads that you can use to promote your evergreen course, such as:

• Google Adwords
• Facebook Ads
• Twitter Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Instagram Ads
• TikTok Ads

Each of these platforms have a ton of resources you can use to get started.

How to get traffic with your email list

"The money is in the list. That’s how we got rich"

Russell Brunson

The idea of email lists is not a new one, but it has evolved and grown over the years. It is now considered as a powerful tool in marketing and an integral part of any successful business. Email lists can be used to sell your evergreen online courses by sending email campaigns to them like the one we prepared for you in our course creation guide.

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How to create the contents of an Evergreen Course?

You can launch your evergreen course in a few simple steps.

First, you'll need to create a course outline. This is the backbone of your course and will help you stay on track as you create it. Your outline should include the topics you'll cover and the order in which you'll cover them.

Next, you'll need to create your content. This can be done in a variety of ways, depending on your style and preferences. You can create videos, write articles, make a PDF, or record podcasts. Just make sure your content is high quality and engaging.

Once your content is ready, it's time to create your course modules. These are the individual lessons that make up your course. You'll need to create a module for each topic in your outline.

Then, it's time to add some finishing touches. Make sure you include a welcome video, an introduction to your course, and a conclusion. You can also add bonus content to keep your students engaged and coming back for more.

If your goal is to create an evergreen course, make sure that the content you create is as timeless as possible so you don't need to come back to it often and make changes.

Also, I recommend pre-launching your course to validate your idea fast and not spend time filming and editing videos for a course idea that will flop.

If it's your first time creating a course, I highly recommend following our free course creation guide, which you can start reading directly by clicking on the book below👇.