Want to share your knowledge or expertise? Now’s the time if you haven’t done it yet! With online learning platforms booming, you can sell courses online while helping other people understand a subject you’re knowledgeable about.
Moreover, when you sell courses online, you can also build a community and generate a decent side income. But with so much information out there about how to get started, it can feel intimidating even to know where to start.
But you’re in the right place because here at Time For More Me Time, we aim to help you earn extra income that you can turn into passive income. I’ll walk you through each stage of the process, from identifying a course topic all the way through marketing, selling, and launching it.
How to Sell Courses Online: The Steps to Building a Successful Online Business
Whether you’re a pro in cooking, design, or business, creating a course lets you reach students worldwide. The best about this? You can turn it into a passive income, which means making money while you’re sleeping!
To achieve that, you need the right foundation. Doing the following steps can help you turn your knowledge into a profitable online business—from picking the right topic to marketing and selling your course successfully!
Step 1: Identify a Profitable Course Topic
Before anything else, you can’t sell courses online if you haven’t pinpointed your perfect niche. The best place to begin is by combining something you already know, or are passionate about, with something other people are actually interested in learning.
Listen to Your Audience
The goal of selling a course online is for other people to pay you for your expertise on a specific topic. To identify a topic that has good earning potential, tune into what questions, challenges, or interests you see consistently popping up within your community, social media, or industry.
You might notice people commenting on YouTube videos with similar questions or identify repeated themes in Facebook groups related to your niche.
Analyze Popular Topics and Trends
Another helpful tip for generating course ideas is by exploring popular topics and current trends. While fads are generally fleeting and short-lived, capitalizing on a burgeoning area of interest can give you a significant advantage and accelerate the course creation and marketing process.
You can use a tool like Google Trends to see whether your topic is increasing in popularity.
You can also head to online course marketplaces such as Udemy or Skillshare and explore popular or best-selling categories within their library.
For example, online business experts Jean-Martin Former and Suleyka Montpetit at The Market Gardener Institute launched The Market Gardener Masterclass. This course is an extension of their already established brand and website.
This is a perfect example of a course topic directly correlating to existing, quality content within a particular niche.
Explore High-Demand Niches
While the options for online course topics are truly limitless, some areas have higher demand and better long-term earning potential than others. Some evergreen and generally high-demand industries that lend themselves well to teaching online courses include:
Business and entrepreneurship
Technology and coding
Health and wellness
Creative skills (writing, art, music, photography)
Personal development
Marketing
Languages
Step 2: Validate Your Course Idea
While it’s great to be excited about a particular course idea, it’s important to get feedback from your target audience. There are several effective methods to test your course idea, generate interest, and collect valuable information you can incorporate into your content.
Here are some of the most popular validation methods:
1. Conduct Surveys and Polls
Online surveys or polls can help determine whether people in your audience have an interest in the course topic. These can collect more nuanced information, like what types of content delivery methods your audience prefers or if they have budget restrictions for paid courses.
Social media channels like Facebook or Instagram are excellent places to share engaging surveys, quizzes, and polls.
2. Run a Beta Program
Another common way to test your online course idea is through a paid beta program or early bird pricing incentive.
By offering a limited number of spots to a select group of beta students, you can gather initial feedback to help refine your curriculum. You can also identify any sticking points within the course content or get testimonials before publicly launching it.
Most importantly, you can also get feedback from students throughout the course on what topics they’d like to dive into further in future course modules. If you want, you can even use student questions from Q&A calls to generate fresh ideas for your blog, newsletter, or other courses.
Beta users typically appreciate early access and contribute heavily to the success of your launch because they were vital during the development phase.
Step 3: Create Engaging Content
Now for the fun part—or the part where many course creators get completely overwhelmed.
Truth be told, writing the content and designing your curriculum is one of the most important and challenging stages of building an online course. But it doesn’t have to be terrifying.
What I do in this kind of challenge is remind myself that it’s an iterative process. Next is to start with what I know, create an outline, and then gradually flesh out the content from there. Most importantly, I ensure to organize it in a logical, step-by-step order for optimal comprehension.
Create an Outline
When creating your course curriculum, try to approach it from a student or beginner’s perspective. The course outline will likely closely resemble a book outline: breaking it up into manageable modules or sections, each with a specific focus.
Try to include actionable tips, clear steps, real-world examples, and inspiring anecdotes within each section of the course for optimal engagement and interest.
Select Your Content Formats
While almost all online courses include some form of written text (such as transcripts, notes, or workbooks), diversifying your course format with additional materials is also beneficial.
Think about using things such as videos, images, downloadable audio files, interactive quizzes, and engaging activities or assignments. By incorporating several formats, you create a dynamic learning experience for a range of students.
Research shows that including assessments within your content—especially those with practical, real-world applications—helps keep students engaged throughout the curriculum.
Design for Your Ideal Student
Creating high-quality graphics or templates using easy-to-use tools like Canva will elevate the entire student experience.
Besides, it can help with enrollment, completion, and word-of-mouth referrals. Using consistent branding across all elements of your course (colors, fonts, logos) presents a unified and polished impression to potential customers or students.
Step 4: Choose the Right Platform to Sell Courses Online
Once you’ve created some incredible course content that you’re excited about, figure out the right online course platform. It should meet your unique requirements for course creation, marketing, and ongoing student interaction.
With a huge range of affordable options—and even a few decent free ones—choosing the perfect course hosting platform doesn’t need to be overwhelming.
What to Look For in an Online Course Platform
If you’re feeling stuck and wondering how to differentiate between platforms, you can analyze some of these common features, advantages, disadvantages, or offerings. Also, consider determining which one best fits your course content, ideal student demographic, budget constraints, or technology requirements:
Pricing: Will you need to pay a flat monthly fee, an annual fee, per transaction, or a percentage of sales?
Course creation: Is it user-friendly and intuitive, or will you need previous web development experience or costly outside assistance?
Marketing options: Will you need to do your own advertising or utilize outside marketing tools, or do they offer internal integrations for collecting emails or automating aspects like email funnels?
Payment methods: Are you limited to one or two payment processing gateways?
Customizations: Can you integrate with other programs, personalize with branding elements, and modify existing templates to better align with your existing content or website?
Integrations: Will you be responsible for separately managing tasks, communications, or features, or do they integrate with programs like email marketing services or payment processors to streamline business aspects?
Popular Course Platform Features:
Live Events
Coaching Sessions
Digital Products or Digital Downloads
Social Media Lead Generation
Course Marketplaces
Community Features
Unlimited Courses
Built-In Marketing
Website Builder
Step 5: Set a Price for Your Courses
Deciding on a suitable pricing model for your online course can feel like the trickiest element of launching your program.
The secret is to shift away from associating an hourly wage with in-person tasks. Instead, view online course pricing through the lens of packaging your value, regardless of how long it took to build. With that, it becomes easier to assign a monetary worth.
Some creators base their prices on the market rate: What competitors or similar courses in their niche charge. Others base pricing on the total hours of value-packed content included.
Nonetheless, here’s what to keep in mind:
Price According to Value Provided
Consider the overall transformation or results that someone might gain by investing in your course. From there, try to create different tiered price points offering varying levels of access, community connection, or direct coaching support.
Or consider the bonuses, such as downloadable templates and printable workbooks, along with other relevant materials (if any) included as part of enrollment.
Factor in Competition, Content Quality, and Expenses
After doing some comparative market research—look up similar courses and explore their pricing strategy to establish an industry average within your particular field, factor in expenses.
These expenses include web hosting, software, subscriptions, contractors, assistants, and others. You should also consider the elements that differentiate your program or increase the value of your offer, such as coaching calls, individual feedback, private groups, or even supplemental content formats.
Many online entrepreneurs opt to start with a lower introductory or founding member’s price. However, they do it with plans to incrementally increase the enrollment cost after hitting a certain threshold or student enrollment goal, such as after selling a specified number of spots.
Step 6: Launch Your Online Course
You’ve officially built an amazing course, and you’re almost ready to share it with the world. Here are the key things to do before launch day.
Build Anticipation with a Marketing Plan
Create excitement by using a pre-launch countdown strategy, like two weeks before opening the doors or a seven-day countdown leading up to launch day.
Use your existing email list, social media platforms, website banners, and any online groups or forums you contribute to in order to drum up interest for the initial launch. Or offer an exclusive early bird pricing discount to further incentivize early enrollment.
Another way to pique their interest is by revealing sneak peeks or glimpses into your online course. Do so with a free masterclass or value-packed webinar leading up to your cart opening date.
Incentivize Enrollment
By incentivizing your target demographic to hit the “buy now” button with limited-time offers, you can increase initial sales. Think about using things like:
Fast-action bonuses
Discounts for the first 24 or 48 hours, like a price increase timer or “last chance” limited availability promotion.
Exclusive bonus available for only a specific number of enrollees.
Doing so increases the perceived value of your course while boosting initial sales and giving you some inspirational success stories.
Use High-Quality Images to Market Your Program
Be sure to highlight your course offerings with enticing, engaging visual elements.
Instead of stock-looking imagery, consider showcasing real photos and videos of your course content, student testimonials, impactful snippets highlighting key takeaways, social proof, or powerful breakthroughs from within your course curriculum.
Most importantly, use compelling calls-to-action. With this, you can strategically craft landing pages designed to capture leads and encourage them to click through for more information. Many popular programs offer the option to preview sample modules of online courses to convert hesitant browsers into eager students.
FAQs
How Profitable is Selling Online Courses?
The profitability of selling courses online varies, but they have the potential to be highly lucrative.
Unlike many traditional business models, online courses can have an estimated gross margin of 90%. This means for a $100 course, your profit could be $90. However, factors like marketing costs, platform fees, and the course’s value influence the actual profit.
Which Website is Best for Selling Online Courses?
The best website to sell courses online depends on your individual needs and preferences. Here are some popular ones and their edges:
- Thinkific: Thinkific is known for being beginner-friendly. It also has a free plan, so you can try it out before committing to a paid plan. The good thing about it? It has great customer support if you get stuck.
- Teachable: Teachable is another popular choice. They have powerful marketing tools built-in, which can save you time and money. The best about it? They focus on helping you sell more courses.
- LearnWorlds: If you want to create an interactive experience, LearnWorlds is a good option. They have lots of tools for adding quizzes, assignments, and community features, keeping students engaged.
- Podia: Podia is a good all-in-one platform, especially if you also sell other digital products like memberships or downloads. Thus, you can keep everything in one place with this platform.
- Kajabi: Kajabi is the most expensive option, but it offers a lot. It’s a complete business platform with everything from email marketing to website hosting. This is a good choice if you’re serious about growing your online business.
Each offers a unique set of features, pricing plans, and integrations. Research to see which platform aligns best with your course type, budget, and marketing strategies.
The best platform for you depends on your needs and budget. It’s a good idea to try out a few free trials before making a decision.
Is it Legal to Resell Online Courses?
Generally, reselling courses you did not create is illegal and unethical without express permission from the original creator. Doing so violates copyright and intellectual property rights, potentially leading to legal repercussions.
However, affiliate marketing, where you promote others’ courses and earn a commission, is a legitimate way to generate income.
Conclusion
Now that you have a better understanding of the fundamentals required to sell courses online, you can create one that people genuinely want to buy.
I know you’re excited to start sharing your wisdom and experience while building a successful course that generates passive income. And I’m telling you that you should start that now.
There has never been a more opportunistic time to share your knowledge, create impact, and successfully sell courses online. So, what will you teach?
