Why Create and Sell Online Courses? To profit by doing something you enjoy, at your own time and pace, in the comfort of your own home.
How to create and sell online courses? Following this practical guide we have prepared for you.
Creating and Selling Online Courses: Why This is a Good Idea
If the reasons we mentioned above are not enough to convince you to create and sell online courses, take a look at 4 more excellent reasons that show why online courses are simply amazing:
- Everyone has something to teach: We are shaped by our knowledge, experiences, and perceptions, which can be turned into a course, shared, and monetized.
- They are a reusable feature: Once created, you can redefine, reformat, and resell your course for as long as you like.
- You can help a lot of people at once: Distance learning courses allow you to share your knowledge with many people at once.
- Online courses have a high ROI: Especially if you already have an audience or some online content, courses are a quick way to earn extra money.
As stated in Forbes, “With effort and strategy, online courses can become a revenue engine and powerful lead generator.”
How to Create Online Courses
Now that you understand how interesting this idea is for your personal and professional life, let’s go to the practical part with a basic step by step on how to create online courses.
1.Find a Profitable Course Idea
It is a fact that many people who are thinking of designing and selling courses online have no idea what exactly to teach. So if that’s your case, don’t be discouraged, that’s how it is with a lot of people.
– 10 profitable niches for online courses
To start setting a direction, ask yourself:
- What are you good at?
- What credentials do you have?
- What are you passionate about?
Then consider how you can leverage these skills to provide someone with a transformation.
A transformation is essential. Selling a course that teaches how to make a cake is easy and many people can do it, but sell a course that teaches how to make a special cake that will put you in Masterchef, that’s another thing.
At Coursify.me, for example, we have the Faraz’s Web development School. What does he promise? Teach how to Create Secure and standard Login and Registration system with Email Verification. In other words, provides a specialization that can help professionals to improve their knowledge and advance their careers.
Once you have an initial idea, you will need to find out if there is a demand for your product, if there is an interested audience and if your course is solving their problem.
This is where market research comes in, which can be done very practically with the help of our friend, the Internet.
– 3 Ways to Validate Your Idea Before Creating Online Courses
2. Set Your Income Goal and Raise Your Price
Here’s the secret to making more money: charging more.
It sounds simple, but it’s pretty complicated for most of us. We are caught in the guilt of charging people, in the insecurity about the value of our knowledge, in the fear that people think it is not worth the investment, and so many other insecurities that it is easy to give up even before to begin with.
To escape this cycle that does not lead anyone anywhere, do not focus on money, think about the transformation you are providing to someone.
If your course is valuable, it was well produced and there is a demand for it, there is no reason for you not to charge for it.
And want to know what else? As with many famous brands, we have already noticed here, at Coursify.me, that teachers who charge more for their courses get greater student engagement.
When your course is valued people tend to take information seriously and take the time to learn it.
Also, remember the simple math: If you want to earn $ 10,000 and charge only $ 10 per class, you have to sell online courses to a thousand students. If you charge $ 50, you only need to sell to 200 people.
And don’t forget that students take time and management, so if you have fewer students, you can pay more attention to each one, and in general, they will be more satisfied.
3. Create and record your course content
This step may seem daunting, but it doesn’t need to be.
This is the stage where you really get the hard work done, so it’s good to get organized so you don’t have to redo tasks.
The best way to plan your course is to write a step-by-step outline of everything one would need to do chronologically to get the desired result, a detailed tutorial to learn one thing. Each step becomes a lesson in your course.
– Checklist for Creating Online Courses
For example, let’s go back to Faraz’s Web development School and look at how the course was organized:
Note that classes follow a step by step, and each step has become a lesson that guides the student consistently through the learning.
Remember that the goal of this whole process is to achieve a result, so all steps should lead to that goal.
Now when it comes to actually creating content, Coursify.me is a real help.
You can upload texts, powerpoints, videos and audio interviews.
Not to mention that our content team is blogging every week about how to create and sell online courses, all to answer that question that may come up in the process.
Also don’t forget about our support team. We are always here to assist you.
– Learn how to record videos at home
4. Get your course online
You have created, recorded, refined, tested your course and now it is finally ready for the public to enjoy.
If you are tired after all this work, and fear that publishing your course will be even more difficult, but know that are nothing to fear, Coursify.me is designed to make this mission as easy as possible.
In quick steps you create your account, your page, and upload your content to your online course page.
But if you are wondering if we are the best choice for those who want to design and sell online courses, no problem, the important thing is to find a platform that offers the following features:
- Be simple to customize: you need to establish a brand and convey reliability and authority to your students. Therefore, you need to be able to quickly design your online courses page without any specific technical skills.
- Allow you to create your own course domain: This also entails the issue of creating authority and showing your audience that you own your business.
- Be responsive: Forget about creating and selling online courses in today’s world if they can’t be watched perfectly on mobile devices.
- Give you total control on enrollment and sales: This is probably the most important point. Some platforms change or discount values from published courses without the instructor’s knowledge or permission. There are also those who deny control over student data. None of this is good for you or your customers, so keep an eye on the permissions and features of the chosen LMS.
- Provide several ways to get paid online: Your students will need to pay and you will need to get paid, so make sure the platform makes this task as simple as possible for both parties.
– Everything you need to know about eLearning platform (LMS)
5. Define your outreach strategy and increase your initial audience
Pricing online courses is a separate issue and we have a lot of content on our blog that can help you with that. So let’s jump to what happens after you decide how much you want to earn.
What we’re going to say may sound a bit shocking, but it works: start by delivering content for free.
Especially if you are a beginner, this will help you attract an audience and convince them why they should invest in your course.
So don’t look at this like giving up your work for free, but as a highly effective outreach strategy.
You don’t have to give a piece of your course for free, it can be another type of content that helps your audience understand what you are selling and proves that you know what you are talking about.
This content can be delivered in different ways, such as:
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
- Webinar
Or, our favorite, a mini course.
A mini course is a great outreach tool and can work like this: If your course consists of 10 lessons, turn the first one into a mini course and use it as a content offering.
– Step by Step to Creating an Online Mini Course
How to Sell Online Courses
Let’s go to the next, very important step: Profit!
To successfully sell online courses, there are two basic steps that we recommend to follow:
1. Organize a Pre-launch
To sell online courses you can use some tricks, and one of them is called “pre launch”.
– How to advertise online courses
Generally speaking, it is about selling your course before you finish creating all the content.
All you need to do this is a well-designed sales page.
Using your sales page, you can work out an email launch strategy to find out what your audience’s primary area of interest is.
This helps you tailor your content to the desires and needs of your audience and gauge interest in your product, which can also help you determine how to price your course.
2. Grow Your Business
Now is the fun part. Once you have established your course and your target audience, it’s time to grow your class.
There are several ways to do this:
Webinars
A webinar is essentially a free live training.
You can promote this event for your mailing and for the general public, but the training should lead to a discounted offer for people who connected.
– 5 Tips for Selling Courses with Webinar
Guest Posts
By writing an article for someone else’s blog or contributing as a guest to a webinar related to your field, you provide free high-value content in exchange for reaching a wider audience.
What’s more, by doing so, you are gaining exposure, recognition and may include a CTA for your own product.
– How to Use Your Blog as a Marketing Tool
Affiliates and partners
As a guest post, a dissemination strategy based on affiliates and partnerships allows you leverage your hearing from someone else’s audience.
We have seen professionals become incredibly successful in offering affiliate offers to someone who focuses on the same audience.
Partnering with digital influencers that have something to do with your product / service is also a very effective method for growing your audience and increasing sales.
Simply contact these people and offer a percentage of the income for each customer they bring.
– What is and why to invest in a Customer Loyalty Program
Social networking
To sell online courses, or even to have a recognized business nowadays, you have to exist on social networks.
Use your Facebook, Instagram, and if you’re selling a service, focus on LinkedIn.
You can export your LinkedIn contact list and add them to your mailing. Joining groups is also a great way to do network and learn what potential leads want and think about your course.
These are just a few outreach methods, there are many others that you can use in your marketing campaign.
Any kind of growth strategy is one way to take your course to the next level, so research tested and approved methods and invent your own, creativity can do real miracles on the internet.
Complete eLearning platform, Coursify.me is the ideal solution for anyone who wants to create, sell and promote courses on the internet without having to invest to start their own business.
Serving businesses and professionals in more than 60 countries, the platform is a dynamic and customizable Learning Management System.
– Whats is a Learning Management System
That means you do not even need to invest in building your own website. The Coursify.me is ready for you to enter your course and create a completely customized sales page for your business.
We have three choices of plans for you to decide which best suits your needs, and the good news is that the Beginner Plan is free!
Visit our website, test the platform and start selling online courses right now.