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How do you sell a course or programme on Instagram and YouTube?

Akash Gupta Founder, PhantasyLabs Last reviewed 30 September 2026 12 minute read

A coach fills a hall. She speaks for two hours, and at the end thirty people walk to the back table and sign up. The next week she posts the same programme on Instagram with a nice poster and a link. Nobody buys.

So she decides social media does not work for serious programmes. It does. It just needs the order the hall had.

Why does my programme sell at a live event but not on social media?

Because the event did three jobs before it asked for anything, and the post does none of them. In the hall, people spent two hours with you. They heard your stories, saw other people nod, and asked a question out loud. By the time you mentioned the programme, they already trusted you.

A post that says "enrol now" asks a stranger to make the same decision in fifteen seconds, with none of that trust. The fix is putting the event's order back, spread across videos, one page and a few messages:

1. They notice you. A short video reaches someone who has never heard of you.
2. They trust you. More videos, longer ones, and stories from people you have helped.
3. They take a small step. A free class, a webinar or a short quiz, on a page built for it.
4. You follow up. The people who took the step hear from you again, with something new each time.
5. Then you ask. The programme, with a date and a reason to decide.

The way I put it on a call: the need and the path should be shown to people, not the sale. Show someone they have a problem, show them there is a way out, and the programme becomes the obvious next step instead of a pitch.

What kind of videos sell a course or programme?

Videos made for every stage a buyer passes through, not only videos that ask for the sale. Out of any hundred people who could join your programme, only about three are ready to buy this week. The rest are earlier, and they need a different video.

Eugene Schwartz described these stages of awareness in Breakthrough Advertising in 1966. Chet Holmes later put a number on the top in The Ultimate Sales Machine: about three in a hundred are buying now. Treat the split below as a working picture, not a measurement of your own audience.

Take a public speaking coach as the example.

If most of your last ten posts are posters and "only five seats left", you have been talking to the three. A fair starting mix for a month of ten videos is five or six for the sixty and the twenty, two or three for the seventeen, and one or two that ask for the sale. Your own numbers will tell you where to move it after that.

Which platform does which job: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn?

Instagram and Facebook are for reaching new people. YouTube is for trust and for being found when someone searches. LinkedIn is for professionals, when your programme is sold to working people or to companies. The same video can go to all of them, but each one rewards something different.

• Instagram, for reach. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, wrote that in Reels "the majority of what you see is from accounts you don't follow". Instagram predicts whether a person will watch to the end and whether he will share the reel. So the videos for the sixty belong here.
• Facebook, for reach too, often an older crowd. Meta says Facebook Reels shows "content you may be interested in from creators you may not follow", and it also pulls in reels recommended from Instagram. One video, two places to be found.
• YouTube, for trust and search. YouTube's own help page says search ranks on relevance, engagement and quality, and for quality it looks for channels that "demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on a given topic". A person who types a question and then watches you answer it for fifteen minutes arrives at your programme already warm. This is where the twenty and the seventeen go.
• LinkedIn, for professionals. LinkedIn calls itself a community of more than 1.3 billion members. If your programme is leadership, speaking, sales or anything a company pays for, the buyer is here.

A small account can reach new people on the reach platforms. Shubhi Mittal had 84 followers when her second reel with us was watched 344,000 times. The reach came from the video being made for people who did not know her yet, not from her following.

Where should someone go after watching my video?

To one page built for one next step. We call it the bridge, because it connects the video to the programme. Not your home page with ten links, not your whole website, and not a phone number.

A person watches your reel at eleven at night and feels, for the first time, that you understand his problem. If the only thing he can do is "DM me" or call a number, most people do nothing.

A good bridge page does four things, in this order:

1. Says the problem the way the viewer would say it.
2. Shows one short piece of proof: a student, a number, a story.
3. Offers one step, and only one. Join the free class. Take the quiz. Save a seat.
4. Asks for a name and a WhatsApp number or email, so you can follow up.

This works without anyone picking up a phone. For an Ayurvedic doctor we run this for, his pages brought in 441 leads, and 229 people paid on his pages without calling first. You can see how that was built, step by step.

Why offer a free webinar or class before a high priced programme?

Because a big price is a big decision, and people do not make big decisions with a stranger they met in a thirty second video. The free step is your live event, rebuilt online. It gives people an hour with you before you ask for anything.

If your programme runs for weeks, or takes people away from home for days, almost nobody buys straight from a reel. Put something free in the middle:

• A webinar or live class, when the programme is long and people need to feel what learning from you is like. Teach one real thing in it, not a trailer.
• A quiz, when people do not know which of your offers fits them. Five questions, then an answer that tells them where they stand and which step makes sense.
• A short free class over three to five days, when the programme is a skill. One small win a day. By day three they have proof it works for them.

The test for any free step: would someone who never buys still be glad they came? If it is an hour of teasing and a pitch, people can tell.

How do you follow up with people who showed interest?

With a few messages over one to three weeks, each carrying something new, and the ask coming last. The people who signed up for your free step raised their hand. Most of them will not buy on the day. That does not mean no. It generally means not yet.

A simple follow up for a free webinar looks like this:

1. Before: a reminder on WhatsApp an hour before, with the link.
2. Same day: the replay, for the half who could not come live.
3. Two or three days later: one student story that answers the doubt most people had.
4. A few days after that: a reply to a question someone asked in the session, useful for everyone.
5. Then the offer: the programme, the date it starts, and why that date.

Never send "did you see my last message?" If they did not reply, life took over. Arrive with something they have not seen yet.

And count four numbers: who watched, who came to the page, who took the free step, who paid. Without them you cannot tell which part is weak, and you change the wrong one.

Can you sell a retreat or a multi day intensive the same way?

Yes. A retreat or an intensive is the same path with a longer middle. The price is higher, the seats are few, and the date is fixed, so people need more time with you before they say yes.

The good news is that you need fewer people than you think. A retreat for fifty needs a few hundred of the right people on your list, not a million followers. Why do we need millions to start with? We don't need it. We need the right few hundred, and a way to keep talking to them.

What changes for a retreat:

• Past guests become the proof. Short videos of people from the last retreat saying what changed for them do more for the seventeen than anything you say yourself.
• A smaller paid step sits in between. A monthly online session or a one day virtual event lets people buy a small piece of you first. It also keeps something running when a retreat cannot happen for a season.
• People need a place to stay between events. A paid community, where they meet you and each other every month, keeps them close until the next date. Dr Arjun Sabharwal, a kidney doctor in the UK, opened one for his patients in March 2026. It has 255 members and takes about an hour of his time a week. His patients used to get five minutes at the clinic. Here is how it was set up.

Should the expert plan the content himself?

No. The expert should decide what is true and approve every word. The planning belongs to someone else.

Planning content means knowing which stage each video is for, what each platform rewards this month, how to open a video so it is watched to the end, and which numbers to check every week. That is a full job. A coach running batches, or a doctor seeing patients, will do it well for six weeks and then stop, because the people in front of him come first. They should.

That is not a job of an expert, that is a job of a content strategist. An expert is ideally supposed to serve.

So there are three honest options. Hire a strategist and film when they ask you to. Build a small team around you. Or have the videos made without you in front of the camera, from your own words, face and voice, with you approving each script before it goes out. That third option is what we do at PhantasyLabs: videos are made by the clone, approved by the expert. Arfeen Khan, a mind coach with 834K followers, has his story videos carried by his clone. Someone who had met him in person watched one and did not realise it was not him.

Whichever you choose, your knowledge, your stories and your way of speaking stay yours. What you hand over is the mechanics.

Akash Gupta

Founder of PhantasyLabs, part of Peepoye Network. He built a YouTube channel to 12.8 lakh subscribers before building the system that now runs it, and PhantasyLabs produces and publishes video for doctors, coaches, experts and brands. More about us.