Selling your online courses through paid advertising can be effective, but when it comes to building trust and rapport with your audience, nothing beats high quality content. After all, when you create high quality content that actually helps your audience, you're demonstrating your expertise by letting them experience it for themselves.

Plus, you're beginning the relationship with your audience by offering them something of real value – information that you've taken the time to meticulously curate.

When I started blogging regularly in 2010, it wasn't with the idea of selling online courses. Instead, I was looking to build up enough credibility to land a book contract (it works for that too!). Since then, I've written more than 500 articles for outlets like the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, Time, the Huffington Post, the World Economic Forum blog, and more.

So when I started created online courses in 2016, I was able to quickly create a new six-figure business, simply by sharing my courses with the loyal audience that I'd built through blogging (I wrote about that process in more detail here).

I'm not the only one who has done this. Online marketing expert Danny Iny, whom I interviewed for my forthcoming book Entrepreneurial You, told me that years ago, he had a disastrous launch for his very first online course – ironically called "Marketing that Works." It sold exactly one copy. He knew he had to market it more effectively, so he started guest blogging aggressively, writing more than 80 pieces in a year. That experience turned his business around and sparked his first real online course success.

The real question, though, is how can you write that much?

Most people have full-time jobs, whether tied to your course or not. Even if we agree that content creation is an effective marketing strategy, most people don't have the time to sit down and write dozens of posts on a regular basis.

How do you know what to write about? What would interest your audience? How can you quickly flesh it out so you're not spending hours second-guessing yourself or trying to make it "perfect" (whatever that means)?