This is the most thorough book available, and it will show you everything you need to know and how to sell online courses from your own website, even if you have no prior experience.
This guide will teach you how to:
- how to pick a lucrative course topic
- how to transform your brilliant idea into fantastic courses
- how to create a receptive audience
- how to market and sell your online courses
In a nutshell, if you want to transform your knowledge or passion into a lucrative online course business, this guide is for you.
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How To Sell Online Courses From Your Own Website
1. Why Sell Online Courses
The online learning sector is already massive, and it will only grow as more students opt for online courses to improve their education.
In fact, the global eLearning market was anticipated to be worth over $250 billion in 2020, and by 2027, it is expected to surpass $1 trillion.
As a result, selling online courses is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who wants to share their knowledge while also making money.
Credits: https://sellcoursesonline.com/
I personally know and have advised several entrepreneurs who teach online courses and consistently earn six-figure or even seven-figure incomes.
More significantly, success tales like these aren’t limited to a few make-money online areas. Thousands more artists earn a living teaching yoga, photography, web design, cooking, and a variety of other skills.
Aside from the money, the online course business concept is appealing since you’re essentially selling digital things that you produce once but may reuse and sell for years.
As a result, you’re not exchanging your time for money, which makes offering online courses excellent for scalability.
Furthermore, no other online business strategy will allow you to have the kind of impact that online courses may have on other people’s lives.
Finally, creating online courses does not have to be expensive; you can do it on a shoestring budget of a few hundred dollars.
When all of these advantages are considered, offering courses online has to be the most effective and impactful strategy to develop a profitable knowledge business and get the independence you desire.
It’s the ideal business model for you if you:
- You already have a following as a blogger, YouTuber, or Instagrammer.
- You’re a freelancer or coach looking to transition away from 1:1 employment.
- You already have a successful business and want to diversify your income.
- You’ve been teaching classes in person and now want to take them online.
If you’re fresh to the world of online business, I’m not saying you shouldn’t build online courses. This is precisely what I did when I first started out.
To effectively produce and sell online courses from your own website, though, you’ll need to devote time, money, and effort to the process.
So it’s not the best solution if you’re searching for a quick and easy way to generate money online.
However, if you want to teach online and are prepared to put in the effort, the online course business model is ideal for you.
I’m sure you’re already planning out “what I’ll teach in my courses,” “how I’ll make videos,” and “how I’ll sell the courses.” Don’t worry about these details; we’ll go over them thoroughly in the following chapters.
Before we move on to the next chapter and start working on your courses, I just want you to think that you, too, can teach online and make a living doing it.
2. Find A Profitable Course Topic
It’s time to decide what you’ll teach your students now that you’ve decided to sell courses online. As a result, you must create a profitable online course concept.
The following would be a good course topic:
- something about which you are knowledgeable or skilled,
- something you’d like to share with others,
- something for which prospective students are ready to pay
Essentially, you must identify the sweet spot of your expertise, passions, and market demand.
Develop Concepts for Your Online Course
I had nearly four years of practical experience in the supply chain business when I decided to build my first course.
I knew it was something I excelled at and enjoyed on a daily basis. As a result, identifying my course niche was a breeze for me.
The first thing you should consider is your abilities and professional experience.
Consider what you do on a daily basis if you work full-time in an organization. You may, for example, be familiar with certain processes or software that can be beneficial to others.
You might also be a consultant or a freelancer. In this scenario, take inventory of the services you provide to your clientele.
Similarly, you may be a blogger or a Youtuber, so you should look at the topics you create content around.
Before founding MyExcelOnline, John Michaloudis had worked as an accountant and financial controller for 15 years. He used Microsoft Excel extensively during his business job and even taught other employees how to use it.
So it made sense for him to choose Excel training as his niche when he wanted to start an internet business and eventually offer online courses.
But what if you lack the necessary expertise or work experience?
Don’t be concerned! Because you might have a pastime or a passion that others would like to learn about.
Alternatively, you may have surmounted a personal obstacle in the past that many people face.
3. Create An Awesome Online Course
Many rookie course developers make the mistake of valuing their course based on the number of content or video hours it contains.
They’ll then aim to cram as much stuff into their course as possible, making the process time-consuming and costly, and leaving students with information overload.
Keep in mind that you’re producing a course that promises specific results to a certain audience.
As a result, your course does not need to incorporate everything you know about the subject. Rather, it must include everything necessary to assist your pupils in achieving the desired outcomes.
Design and Plan Your Course
You’ll need to construct an overview for your course before you start creating content.
The course outline (or curriculum) is similar to a plan, and it will help you stay organized and focused when creating an online course.
Begin your course outline by outlining the course’s end results – the problem you’re aiming to address or the desire you promise to fulfill for your audience.
Then consider the many stages (milestones) that a learner will need to go through in order to reach the desired goals.
These stages are essentially modules (or parts), and most course makers I’ve worked with keep their courses to no more than 7-8 of them.
Each module should have its own learning aim and contain many lessons.
Individual lessons can be thought of as the steps that your students will need to follow to complete the learning objectives for a specific module.
Before you can finalize your plan, you’ll need to do a lot of brainstorming. I prefer to scribble my thoughts on Post-it notes and hang them on my workplace wall.
After you’ve established an outline for your online course, you’ll need to select how your lessons will be delivered.
You must incorporate video content in your course because the video is the most popular and engaging delivery option for online courses.
Keep your video lectures short, ideally between 2 and 10 minutes, because shorter videos result in increased student engagement.
You should distribute your material in a variety of media, including audio, text, PDFs, and so on, in addition to video.
PDFs are one format that I particularly enjoy. It’s a terrific way to make worksheets, cheat sheets, checklists, case studies, and other materials for your classes.
These support PDFs can help you summarise key points from your lessons, highlight the most important action items, and improve your students’ overall learning experience.
Finally, you must understand that your online course should not consist solely of videos and other pre-recorded content, as your students will quickly lose interest and drop out.
4. Build An Engaged Audience
One of the most common mistakes course makers make is failing to establish an audience from the start.
I find it interesting that so many people are unaware that online courses cannot be sold without an audience.
In reality, most people don’t think about funnels and email lists until their school is up and running, which is why they have trouble selling.
Start growing your email list as soon as you decide on a niche and a course topic so that by the time your courses are finished, you’ll have an audience to sell to.
Allow me to demonstrate how to create an engaged audience for your business. I’ve divided the procedure into three steps.
Step 1: Build a Funnel to Capture Leads
Setting up a lead-generating funnel is the first stage in the process of growing an audience. The goal is to collect your visitors’ email addresses so you may engage them and promote online courses to them.
Make free content on your niche
The initial level of your funnel should always include some free material that visitors may access without having to opt in.
Free content can take the shape of blog articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more, with the goal of providing value and warming up your target audience.
As a result, you can launch a YouTube channel to share videos, a blog to post articles, or a podcast to interview other people in your industry.
Make a Lead Magnet That Works
After you’ve warmed them up with free material, getting individuals to sign up for your email list should be simple, and you’ll need a lead magnet to grab their email.
A lead magnet is a piece of information that is only available to people who join your email list.
So you signed up for a free ebook, a free video training, or even an email course, all of which are lead magnets.
Set Up a Landing Page / Opt-In Form
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a landing page is a dedicated page with the sole purpose of converting your offer. The offer will be a lead magnet in this situation.
Landing pages are quite efficient at converting visitors into subscribers, so you should make one for your lead magnet as well.
On the landing page, you should clearly define your offer and allow visitors to input their information to download it.
When someone joins up, they are led to a page like this, where you may direct them to the following steps and even urge them to take additional action, such as purchasing a low-cost ebook or mini-course.
Opt-in forms are another common technique to collect email addresses, especially on a blog.
Popups are the most common sort of opt-in. MyExcelOnline.com, for example, features a popup form that opens after a user exits the site.
Step 2: Engage Your Subscribers with Email Marketing
It’s highly rare that a new subscriber will immediately purchase your course and become a paying customer. So, for your new subscribers, you should develop and set up a series of automatic emails.
The goal of a welcome email marketing campaign is to deliver value to your subscribers and gain their knowledge, likeability, and trust. You should refrain from selling at this time.
While there are a variety of tactics you can take when designing a welcome series, the first email should always be a welcome/introduction email that is sent out as soon as a subscriber signs up.
You should send at least 4-5 additional emails as part of the welcome campaign during the next 7-10 days, in addition to the introductory email.
Create an email course to teach your subscribers something useful and link to your online course as one alternative.
Another alternative is to develop an email series in which you inform your readers about some frequent industry blunders or debunk some prevalent falsehoods.
Step 3: Drive Traffic to Your Funnel
Driving traffic is crucial to growing your audience, yet it’s also the most difficult thing for course makers to do. You could have fantastic online courses and a killer funnel in place, but without traffic, your business would struggle.
Let me reveal the top six traffic-generating tactics that I’ve discovered to be the most effective.
Use social media to promote your content.
Sharing your material on social media is an important strategy for driving traffic to it. One can target prominent social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and others.
Create a YouTube channel.
YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine, with millions of people using it to watch a variety of video tutorials.
To get started, you’ll need to build a YouTube channel and then routinely upload relevant videos to it.
The good news is that this will not only help you obtain traffic from YouTube, but it will also help you rank in Google for the search terms.
Posting/podcasting as a guest
Guest posting and guest podcasting are two of the most effective ways for helping novices increase their audience.
Guest blogging entails writing content for other blogs, and guest podcasting entails appearing as a guest on other podcasts.
Both of these techniques are designed to get you in front of a broader audience in your specialty. If you routinely write guest blogs or appear on podcasts, you will gradually gain authority and are nearly certain to see results.
Using Affiliates to Drive Traffic
Affiliate marketing is one of my favorite tactics for promoting digital products. In fact, it is one of the major tactics for us at StationX.
So you can contact and collaborate with well-known bloggers, YouTubers, and Facebook group administrators to advertise your course.
Optimization for Search Engines
I am a strong believer in SEO, and if you publish blog entries on a regular basis, you should make use of it. In reality, SEO is one of the primary traffic generators for this and a few of my other blogs.
To get your blog entries to rank in Google, you’ll need to choose the correct keywords, optimize your content (and website) around them, and then establish backlinks to boost your authority in the eyes of the search engine.
However, bear in mind that there is no quick fix for increasing search engine traffic, and it will take months before you see any benefits from your efforts, but believe me when I say it will be well worth the wait.
Paid Ads to Increase Traffic
It’s not as simple to get organic traffic to your website as it was 5-6 years ago. Furthermore, many organic traffic methods, such as Search Engine Optimization, require time to bear fruit.
As a result, you should consider employing sponsored advertisements to generate targeted traffic to your blog posts and landing pages, but only if you have a budget.
There are numerous advertising platforms available, such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and others, and the optimal one for your situation will be determined by a number of factors, including your niche and target demographic.
5. Create An Irresistible Course Offer
You must decide on your price plan and create a sales page before launching your course and selling it to your audience.
These are the two most critical aspects of your offer because they have a big impact on your conversion rates.
It’s critical to get things done correctly, and we’ll focus on that in this chapter.
Price Your Online Courses
It’s difficult to set a price for your online course because most producers don’t know where to begin. As a result, they price their online course in one of the following ways:
- Set a price based on the number of hours of video or other content you’ll be providing.
- Set a low pricing to appeal to a larger audience.
- To undercut competitors, set a lower price.
While these methods make deciding on a price for your course simple, the pricing will not be optimal.
The first issue with low price (say, $20) is that it may result in a higher number of enrolments, but it will not help you maximize your course revenue.
Create the Course Sales Page
A sales page is required to present your course offer. A sales page is a form of landing page that tells your audience about your course and persuades them to enroll.
Your potential clients will decide whether or not to enroll in your course at this point, and your sales page can make or break your online course’s success.
Here are some things to include on your sales page:
- An engaging headline that both captures your reader’s attention and reveals the content of your course.
- A sales video that outlines all of the course’s major features.
- Text that conveys your reader’s problems and persuades them that they must be addressed.
- A description of your course that positions it as a solution to an issue that your potential clients are experiencing.
- Author bio that establishes credibility by introducing you as an expert, and highlighting your experience.
- Testimonials from previous students/clients that aid in the development of social evidence and so increase your credibility.
- The pricing section informs readers about the cost of your offer and what they will receive as a result.
- A risk-free money-back promise that assures your users that their investment is safe.
- Answers to frequently asked topics in the FAQ area.
- Multiple call-to-action buttons to encourage users to enroll in your course.
6. Launch And Sell Your Course
You’ve worked extremely hard to develop an online course and acquire a following, and now it’s time to sell it to them.
This is the most crucial step in the process because everything you’ve done so far will be useless unless you get this part perfect and your subscribers purchase your course.
So let’s start with the two most common ways to sell an online course:
Closed Cart vs Evergreen Courses
You can either sell an online course using a closed cart approach where the course opens for a few days (launch period) for enrollment and then closes.
Or, you can sell it as an evergreen course that is always open for enrollment.
If you follow the first approach, you can open your cart every 2-6 months, depending on the price of your course and the size of your audience.
The course will be open for enrollment for a few days, and once the launch period is over, the cart will close.
Launch Your Online Course
Whether you’re starting a new course or expanding an old one, your launch strategy must be flawless.
So, let’s talk about how to start your online course. Pre-Launch and Actual Launch are the two stages of your course launch.
The goal of the Pre-Launch phase is to nurture and prepare your audience for the launch. You can use email to distribute blog articles, videos, and other educational materials to your subscribers regarding the problem that your course answers.
In terms of email volume, you should send at least four emails throughout the course of seven to ten days.
Give a clue that you’ll be making an announcement soon in the last email you send during the Pre-Launch phase. As of yet, don’t present your course or provide any detailed information about it.
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