How to make money selling courses online
When Joseph decided to create a course he helped decide on concentrating on a target market of novelists. Novelists who wrote their books with Scrivener. Doing this he generates 20000 to $30000 a month.
He makes more than 1000 a day helping novelists use an app for writing stuff.
As ridiculous as this might sound, Joseph says he was no expert at this and has never written a book.
He bought every book on Scrvener he could lay his lands on. He would study a feature and then record a short tutorial. Short 3 to 5 minute videos were easy to create. And these became the most popular feature on the course.
He created the entire course, learning one feature at a time through the books he bought. As he created this became a big success and one reason people love about Michael.
If you want to create an online course, you need to learn about the course first:
LEARN
When you learn, and document what you learn, you can create a course about almost anything you want.
This can be a huge advantage. The teacher who knows best may not be the ideal teacher, because it feels like they know the most obvious information and they begin to skip over useful things that might otherwise would have been useful.
As a result the students don’t learn everything.
That’s why as a teacher who’s just learning might be able to create a much more valuable course for students.
Today, people are creating courses about almost every topic there is. Here are a few examples:
- Real estate: buying up properties and selling them
- Managing multiple properties
- Drone flying
- Watercolor paintings
- Spiritual secrets
- Copywriting
- Dog training and more
What will you start teaching?
Perhaps you’ve a clear idea already. Let’s move to the crucial next step.
We need to choose a course idea that you are truly passionate on
And two that you can make money teaching about
Choose a Profitable Idea
Let’s talk brass tacks. You can always create a course around what you want. Or you can create a course around what you’re learning.
How to choose something specific?
You don’t want to spend all your time on a course and then finally figure out that no one wants the course.
That might be the biggest mistake most starting out course creators make.
They create a course and then come to the reality that there plenty of students who dont’ want anything to do with the specific topic they create the course on.
However this section will help you choose a profitable idea in the least number of steps.
When you create a course on an idea that’s never been tested before, it could be either that there are not simply many who want or that there idea is fairly new.
You might always want to think that people are going to want what you’re selling. And that always means there will be someone else selling the course.
If you arrive at an idea for a course and if someone sells a course similar to it you’re going to find a new angle to sell the course.
There’s no one specific strategy to understand what to create a course on.
If there’s competition that almost always means a good thing.
There are 3 strategies you can use to come up with profitable course ideas:
- Understand all the people who are already asking questions and who need your advice
- If you’re running a service business understand which things your clients are struggling with most.
- Find their pain and find out ways to best eliminate this pain in the best manner you can. Create an online course that specifically solves these problems.
People generally purchase courses because they want to fix a problem.
They’re learning how to use a software and perhaps they want to lose weight. Perhaps they are experiencing stress and are feeling overwhelmed. They want to touch their calendars first.
People are purchasing courses because they want to get rid of their problems in their lives.
This isn’t simple oversimplification. The problems your friends colleagues and family members are coming to you with: listen to them.
At a few times it’s a problem that needs to be solved immediately. For instance training a dog. Or getting rid of whiteheads.
You can create successful courses solving both kinds of problems. The more specific a problem is, the easier is it going to be for you to solve.
If you’re somewhere where you’re choosing an idea here’s a worksheet to help you. This is a simple way for you to find courses and painpoints and eliminate the same.
Grab the worksheet as it takes just under 15 minutes to complete from scratch.
What’s the next thing to do once you get an idea?
STEP 3: Test Your Idea
To understand if the course idea has some potential it’s pervasive to ask both friends and family. The good news? With the worksheet you get a strategy you can use.
Prior to spending tons of time creating a course make sure you get something that people want to buy in the first place.
Testing Strategy #1: Create a Free, Mini Email-Course
Instead of going all guns blazing with videos and worksheets create a mini course to deliver purely through email.
You don’t want to start with a course site. You don’t need any high-end tools either. Just create a small course and deliver the whole thing by email.
The best thing? YOu’re validating the course idea plus you’re getting paid for the same. Could there be anything better?
Testing Strategy #2: Pre-Sell Your Course
You could also create the course and sell it before you create the course as well. This is called pre-selling the course.
You can create the sales page and ask people to register to purchase. You can collect leads with a coming soon page as well. SImply run ads to the page and get people to sing up.
Set a start date and sell it. You may also create a dummy buy now buttons nd track the number of people clicking on it. This gives you the idea that your idea might have some sense of a potnetial.
Both strategies including creating a mini course or pre selling the course are easy ideas for you to test.
Once you test the idea, the next thing is:
STEP 4: Create a Course Outline
Creating a multi-week course might not be the easiest thing to do especially for first timers. There’s plenty of content to create. You also want the course to be top-notch.
That’s why creating good course content starts with a clear outline.
Whether you’re creating a free email course or paid course, you need to remember a few things at the start:
When people create courses, they need to create some in depth course that might cover everything they know. Don’t do that. That wastes plenty of time.
You can get started with just a pdf or 5 small videos.
That’s why a course outline can help. This is your course curriculum and here’s what to do. Find out the problem your corse solves
Then ask. What are the steps people need to take to get to this goal?
This is how you break the course down to individual single lessons.
For instance a precursor to dating might be flirting. So a mini course would have the fear of flirting at the start. Get their attention. Tell them how to talk.
Each lessons takes students close to the goal of the course.
This is what you want to do with your outline.
When you break down the course to different lessons you can try the same thing for each lesson as well.
Another step to outline the course is this. Don’t add too much content into each lesson.
For a short course, the lessons should be around 5 minutes in length. Don’t create courses that are longer. Students will zone out.
Since you know the purpose behind each lesson, the steps to create the actual content are simple from that point onwards.
STEP 5: Create Your Course Content
Most online courses these days use the video format. There’s always worksheets for them. This helps students implement their learnings as well.
How to create this content?
Know this: the first time you create course, it isn’t going to be great. That’s fine.
When you create and sell online courses, you might want to spare a look at what other people are doing. See the design, their videos and you’re going to imagine not being able to do any of that.
The problem is? You’re comparing yourself to where you are now and to where they are now. That’s a big mistake. You don’t need to do that.
There are issues like bad writing and bad handwriting. Bad presentation.
The 3 videos did well because the content itself was great inside those videos.
Don’t get too invested in quality oif the videos. Your first thought must be to produce content that is high quality. It has to have step by step instructions for people to follow and people are going to love the course you create as a result of that.
The format of the course doesn’t matter: make it text, audio or video.
The most popular formats are videos.
Record camera videos or record a video of your screen or run the audio as you flip through slides.
You don’t need high end equipment to shoot these videos either. Use your phone and there are free editing tools you can always use.
- Open Quicktime Player:
- Choose “New Screen Recording” (in the “File” menu):
- Choose your microphone:
- Click the record button and then click to start recording:
- Click to stop recording:
- Save your video:
Boom. Now you know how to make your videos.
Here’s how you must create worksheets:
Worksheets can take the form of pdf files, so that it’s simple for anyone to download and take a print copy out of.
Create the document in word then save it as a pdf file. You’re done.
Make the worksheets file easy to fill. When you have the content the next step is to create the course outline.
STEP 6: Get Your Course Online
It used to be hard to create the course and get it running. You had to upload each video in one place. You had to have a membership site and you had to fix every little email to your email service. It used to be a mess as always.
Not anymore. You’re not a tech whiz to enable the course up and running.
With any tool you can easily create and market courses with their course page, publish the content, sell the courses and manage all students at one place.
There are several built in tools that can help with your course sales.
You get more control over your course, the pricing and its design.
With your course site you have control over the course the students and the site you run.
Setting a price for the course
For course creators putting a price to the course is difficu;t. However understand this:People like the idea of courses even if they can find all that info for free. Because people can find that doesn’t mean it’s easy for them to run Google searches and find everything on their own. They simply hate the idea of doing so much work.
THey need to find if the information they’re finding is correct and what information is bad and find the difference between a job and being tech savvy.
The alternative is learning everything they can do through a course. That’s the reason this industry is exploding the way it is now.
Time is a valuable thing that we are not going to get back. Paid courses will give the information for fee.
You also get a big community of like minded students along with more things. So don’t undercharge the course experience.
To set a price use the idea called similar outcome approach/.
Here’s how it works:
Think of the outcome that’s going to come with the course. Then ask, Why would someone pay to get the results with a different set of steps. COmpare to other courses, software and hiring methods.
If you can help students with their diet, weight loss and help them live happier healthier lives think of what it’s going to be worth for you. It’s going to be more than a collection of videos and pdfs. THe value is intangible.
So don’t obsess with price optimization. At the beginning just get the target price right/
STEP 8: Get Students for Your Course
At thes start you ideally don’t want to go hunting for students. You should know where your students are and who they are.
That’s why you need the profitable idea and way to test the same first.
When getting students for the course, this is always an ongoing process. As the audience grows, so does the course business.
The best way to get students for the course is to get them signed up to your list. Email list is the best way to make sales online.
The good news is you can make money.
If the goal is 10k nad you’re selling 100 dollar course pitch it to 3300 people and get a conversion rate of 3% alone.
Where are you going to find 3,000 people?
If that song generators I can promise that it’s going to be way easier than that. Get 100 subscribers then the first 500 or 1000 and you’re near;lky going to get 10000 subscribers.
You can always use list building strategies to grow your course.
STEP 9: Launch Your Course
You can always keep the enrollment open for new students or sell it as a one time course that releases once a year.
If you want to solve an immediate need an evergreen course the best idea to go with.
- Describe the PROBLEM:
The course solves a pain point. To start with the launch. You need to remind people the pain they face at the mopmennet. Ou need to show potential customers their pain pont snad stuglels. This helps you connect with them. - Create DESIRE:
YOu need to create a desire by showing how your course differs from what is already present. - Pitch your SOLUTION:
Your potential customers are aware of the problem and want a solution. It’s time to tell them how you can help them. Tell them about the course and how it will solve the problem.