Should you run a paid Google or Meta Ads campaign for your online course? That is the million-dollar question that you need to answer correctly because it truly is a million-dollar question.

In that, if you answer it correctly, you could become a million-dollar course creator. And I mean a true million-dollar course creator, not one where you got a million dollars in course sales BUT you have to spend $950,000 in ads - that does not make you a million-dollar course creator; that makes you a $50k course creator.

In this article, I am going to give you my very clear opinion on whether you should be running ads for your online course.

Right now, let me answer the question for you… and it may be surprising but the answer is NO, you should not run paid ads for your online course. That is until you have these 3 things in place.

Yes, you heard that right. DO NOT start running Google or Meta ad campaigns for your business straight away BECAUSE you will just be wasting your money.

This is something that I truly believe in because for my course - which once again was about teaching people how to set up and run their own Google Ads campaigns - as I have been running profitable Google Ads campaigns since 2010!

I did not start running ads for the course for the first 12 months and by that stage we were already doing over $100,000 months in course sales.

So, I hear you asking your phone or computer …. WHY?

Why didn't I start running an ad campaign straight away even though I was highly skilled in Google Ads?

And this is because every great marketer knows this FACT about ad campaigns. AND that is that they only magnify the current results you are seeing in your business.

So if your course is currently getting no sales, starting a $2,000 a month sales campaign is only going to result in you now paying $2,000 to prove your course is not selling.

And the reason for why your course is not selling is that you first need to get these things right!

Your Landing Page

If you DO NOT have a high-converting landing page you will just be wasting money, as people will click on your ad (with paying for that click) and then they will come to your landing page and leave just as quickly as you have not been able to engage them with the 5 core things you need to do on a landing page in order to get a sale which is:

1. Grab their attention
2. Generate the emotion of need or desire
3. Position your product as the solution
4. Remove fear
5. And then have an easy-to-use checkout process

Now I know that that is a lot of information BUT if you stick around to the end of this video, I will show you where you can watch some extra free training right here on YouTube where I take you through the top 5 UX principles for high-converting landing pages —- and the best part is that this all backed by data from over 10,000 real-life user tests.

The second reason your course is not selling is that:

Your Pricing & Policies are not set correctly

Before you start a paid ads campaign you need to know that people are actually willing to pay the price of your course.

This is all about finding the right price point for your course. Let me give you a real simple example, one of my mini-courses which I use as a first step to get people to buy my full high-ticket course is a short course that I started marketing at:

- $99 and I would get 1-2 sales a month
- Then I moved this to $69 and got 2-3 sales a week
- Then I changed it to $49 and get 4-6 sales a day
Which the right amount of sales I need in order to sell my goal high ticket course numbers

So what I want you to see here is that this was the same course to the same audience BUT with hugely different results all because I got my pricing right.

ONCE you have your landing page & pricing right THEN you can start a paid ads campaign.