How to Make Money by Selling Online Courses?
This guide will show you how to make money by selling online courses from scratch. If you are new to all of this and don’t know where to start, this practical guide is for you. But first, let’s look at the reasons for selling courses can be a profitable business.
How to Make Money by Selling Online Courses?
The demand for authentic and reliable education is very high, and will grow: by 2026, the global eLearning market is expected to reach $ 375 billion from less than $ 200 billion by 2021. In fact, the market that sells courses is huge and there are hungry consumers out there who want quality courses to improve their skills so that they can improve their work and improve themselves.
What makes the course of marketing a large business market?
The case study conducted by Tomi Mester is one of the best examples. She shared all the details of how she left her full-time job and did the first online course that helps her earn more than $ 10K a month. Nick Stephenson received $ 130,208 in his marketing studies in the first week. John Omar made $ 1 million in one year from his training in iOS app development.
As you can see, selling online courses to make money is a very profitable business model. If you have doubts about why people would buy your study, consider this…
Digital education has provided development. At least 33% of college students take at least one eLearning course. Why? Because it costs well and they study 5 times more than they do in an official college course. And it’s not just students – companies are also focusing on Web-based courses to train their employees. Research shows that this helps organizations to raise funds and increase productivity and performance.
The bottom line is that making money this way isn’t just one gig – it’s the perfect way to do business. You get the opportunity to connect with your students, give them improvements, give them the most advanced courses, and create a steady income. You can make $20 dollars in 5 minutes and sometimes, even more, $50 dollars in 10 minutes.
A Guide to Making Money in Course Sales
The step-by-step guide will show you how to get started and what steps to follow to build and start a course and get your first paycheck.
Step # 1: Create an online course
The success of your business depends on the content – it is a key product and should be relevant and useful. Course development begins by identifying a specific niche in your field. To do this, describe the problem that your target audience is facing. Ask yourself, ‘What problem will you solve?
Let’s assume you are in the customer field and are interested in building a lesson in customer success management. You can start by looking at the courses available in the industry (perhaps the best-sellers) and see what they have missed. Here is a summary of the seller’s course from Udemy:
It offers great value but loses a few key areas such as case studies, customer success framework, how to develop skills to become a customer success manager, and a checklist. Depending on your experience, you can create a better lesson and give more value to your students.
As you can see from this example, finding a problem in your area, you need to do some research. Visit marketing sites to learn what content your opponents offer, point out spaces, and come up with a better course that brings a higher value to readers.
There are many guidelines on the web to help you understand the process in detail. Here are a few key aspects of lesson creation that you need to focus on in this section:
- Make sure your point of view is needed.
- Identify your target audience and understand its profile to make your course attractive and usable.
- Write clear and attractive learning outcomes for your course by focusing on its benefits.
- Create text and visual content for your course.
- The title of the lesson, the content, and the learning outcomes should be consistent. Make sure there are no deviations of any kind.
- Use the appropriate tools and resources for the study.
- Also, check out this online tutorial checklist for more details.
Step # 2: Choose a marketing platform
The three most popular are iSpring Market, Udemy, and Thinkific. Spring Market is best suited for those who want to start selling online courses quickly while enjoying complete control over design, marketing, and sales. You can download ready-made lessons or create them by putting the content together on the platform. Supports all types of content formats (video, audio, text, visuals, etc.) including the pure eLearning SCORM format.
iSpring Market has powerful statistics that allow you to track sales, engagement, and customer satisfaction and offers a high-quality sales panel integrated with your email marketing tool and other apps via Zapier.
Udemy is an easy-to-use platform that allows you to sell your courses to its major users (24+ million). However, this foundation is not really yours – all of these people sign up for Udemy to gain access to courses but you have no emails or other data for marketing campaigns. Besides, there is high competition among writers which reduces the chances of your subjects being selected. The platform is also limited by the type of content you can upload. In fact, you can only create and sell videos designed for video.
However, Udemy is a great solution for young people in teaching, building, and selling eLearning because it offers all the necessary courses to sell options and it is free. But Udemy is probably not a good option to make money in the long run, as it costs from 50 to 80% from each marketing sale of your course, and sometimes, you will find ways to promote your studies on your own.
Thinkific is a platform that provides you with all the features of creating and delivering courses on your branded website and providing solid commerce and marketing tools. Personalized site-building – you can create a sales page for all the courses you have, a course visit for each course, and more. You can also integrate your tutorial site with any other existing website to create a seamless product experience for your viewers.
All in all, Thinkific is a great solution for those who want to build a brand around online courses. However, many of the options they offer can be overwhelming for retailers of new courses.
How to choose a platform that sells the right course?
If you are unsure of which marketing platform to choose, answer the following questions, which will help you make an informed decision. Do you want to launch your ASAP course or are you ready to invest more time on how to deal with complex platforms and find a well-designed market site?
Will you create engaging lessons or combine simple lessons from the text and graphics directly on the platform?
Do you already have a website and want to integrate it with your market to get a seamless product experience?
Do you need access to funnel marketing tools to capture more leads and prospects?
Want to get all the details about user learning activity to see how they like your course and whether it should be improved?
Step # 3: Promote your course
Simply adding your lessons to the sales platform may not generate sales. You have to encourage it hard. Here are some of the best ways to market your course immediately.
Create an email list
Email marketing has the highest ROI among all promotional channels, as it is highly customizable and unobtrusive. Your email list is a great source of sales. You need to collect the email addresses of your users in order to connect and build relationships. There are various ways to do this through your blog, social networking sites, and any other method.
One of the quickest ways is to offer your free course from time to time. It will create buzz and oral marketing will help you a lot. This is the method Omar John used. He made his iOS 7 courses free and got 60K subscribers in two days. How so? His free course was all over the Internet and shared by all major forums and blogs. Later, Omar offered an improved version of his course to subscribers and one email generated $ 700K. So powerful is your list.
Use social media
Social media is a major source of automotive production with more than 3.81 billion social media users worldwide. You can easily connect with your target audience through leading social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Just create accounts, post regularly, or share your latest blog posts, and engage with your audience.
Conclusion
Once you start producing sales, you will look at doing more courses to grow your business and make more money. Therefore, it is important to do business studies and marketing and focus on the most important thing: building new courses. Some platforms allow you to use these processes on autopilot.
ISpring Market, for example, is integrated with Zapier that allows you to connect your marketplace with many other applications, allowing you to make all your workflow. For example, you can automatically add readers to your marketing campaign, enroll new customers in your course, and track your visitors to send them targeted email messages based on their actions.