The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced everyone to stay at home. And to keep the cash flowing, professionals are turning to online platforms. Similarly, soft skills trainers can offer virtual training and consultations too. In fact, there already exist a lot of them around the globe who rely on online media to earn their living through soft skills training.
So, I am sharing the 3 most important tips that will help you join the bandwagon and keep your soft skills training business up and running even from home. Read Carefully.
1. Create an Online Course
The worldwide e-learning market is growing rapidly. So, creating an online course and selling it on platforms such as Udemy, Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, LearnWorlds, etc. is not only great for when you’re working from home; it will earn you even after the pandemic is over.
But you must know that selling online courses requires a significant amount of effort. So, I am sharing a few tips on how to sell a course online, and do it right.
- Identify your audience before creating content. This is the most critical step in offering that genuinely helps.
- Create valuable and easily consumable content. Break your course into multiple lessons appropriately segregated, so that learners can easily come back to where they left off.
- Create a compelling pitch to encourage your audience to read the course description and buy it.
- Market your course on all social media platforms and forums where your audiences hang out.
- Keep updating your course to keep it relevant and useful.
2. Deliver a Live Workshop
With a live workshop, you can help different people at the same time, with the same energy. So, come up with a soft skills training topic that most people would benefit from and create a content outline so that you know what you’re going to talk about in the workshop. Once you have an action plan ready, you can send invitations to your existing clients and also run promotional ads to attract new visitors. Here are a few tips to improve your training efforts:
- If you’re conducting a workshop on a video conferencing platform, try to help participants put the learnings into action. For example, if you’re sharing tips on public speaking, encourage the participants to demonstrate what they just learned during the workshop.
- See if you can split the conference into multiple smaller conferences, and assign partners to promote talking and learning during the workshop.
- Coach one participant so that the rest of them can observe and learn.
3. Offer One-on-One Training
One-on-one training and consultations are usually the easiest. They allow you to customize your training material as per the requirement of the client and provide value. The open feedback system is another reason why people find one-on-one sessions helpful. So, you must take all these factors into consideration and offer value to be able to monetize your skills and upsell other services or content. Here are a few tips that I am sure you will find helpful:
- If you already have a soft skills training course that you think your client would benefit from, you can pitch and try to sell it during the online consultation or training.
- Upsell other training courses you offer to clients whenever possible. For example, you can pitch public speaking training to clients who may be taking vocal and verbal communication training from you.
- If you have an e-book that your clients may like, make sure you bring it up during the session. You can also pitch it in an email after the consultation. But remember, you can upsell only when the clients find your content and training style helpful.
Anyone with the right skills can become a soft skills trainer, but it’s the consistent efforts that will get you business, even during uncertain times like these. So, keep up your efforts and keep growing.
