When it comes time to sell your online course, you need an element of “urgency” in your offer. You need a reason for your prospect to buy now rather than putting the purchase off for another day.

Common ways to incorporate urgency into a course offer include one or more of: discounts, bonuses, and expiring availability of the course itself.

Below are three types of bonuses that work well for digital products. Look at and understand them NOW so that you design them to complement the core course content.

1. Offer a bonus with authentic scarcity.

Authentic scarcity means that this bonus cannot be scaled. There truly is a limit on how many of these are available. This is something that takes your time or your team’s time. It could be a one-to-one consult, personal support from your team, or a ticket to an event.

Currently with the Teach What You Do eCourse Blueprint, I offer a one-hour one-to-one coaching call as a bonus for anyone who registers with the full-pay option.

2. Offer a bonus that speeds up student results.

What can you offer that will help your students get the work of your class done more efficiently and perhaps even with less effort?

This could be a tool, a template set, a quick-guide, or a swipe file that enables students to get results more quickly. If the tool is made by a third party, you might negotiate trial access. Templates give your students a starting place. It might be a template for a legal contract or a patterns for a creative design or a swipe file of emails that can be customized.

Quick-guides or roadmaps could take the form of diagrams that lay out complex implementations, case-studies for replication, or checklists that enable your students to go the extra mile more easily.

With the Teach What You Do eCourse Blueprint, we have a bonus that is a bundle of graphics templates made in Powerpoint that students can use to make logos, slide decks, and lead-magnets. This can speed up the work of making key graphic elements.

Now think about your class and your students. What are the parts that are going to take a good amount of time but that you could help them speed up with a special tool? That just might be your bonus.

3. Offer a bonus that extends after-course results for your students.

To develop this kind of bonus, think about where your students will be at the end of your course. What will they immediately want to do with their newly learned skills?

And now ask yourself: how can you help them in this after-class moment with a bonus?

Might you add one more lesson or mini-course that gets them going? Is there a pattern for additional crafty projects? Is there a walk-through or quick-guide reference that they didn’t need during your class but that they need now?

Figure that out and you’ve got one more bonus.

Students in the Teach What You Do eCourse Blueprint get a bonus called “Evergreen Funnel Workshop for Selling Online Courses.” The core course content covers selling with a live launch, and this bonus gives students a next step, a way to extend after-course results.

Expiring bonuses add urgency to your offer and help your students achieve their goals.

Take some time to think through these three types of bonuses and develop them alongside your core course content:

  • a bonus with authentic scarcity
    a bonus that speeds up student results
    a bonus that extends after-course results

Download your bonus-design quick guide.

Click here to download a pdf quick-guide for designing bonuses: teachwhatyoudo.com/bonus-design