Formal education was confined to the classroom with chalkboards for centuries. Today, it’s a different story. Anyone can get trained in any niche simply by taking an online course from sites like lessons.com.au and getting a professional certificate for the same. Such lessons from this website create flexibility and self-paced learning to suit your needs. Besides, it enables you to with students in your expertise. Creating and selling online courses has been a great way for educators to package the knowledge and get rewarded for it.
Research shows that the eLearning market size is expected to reach $376 billion by 2026, which means the trend is going to favor educators or anyone who wants to sell their online courses.
Of course, this sounds like the best time to get into the eLearning industry. But how to launch and sell a profitable online course? What do you need? Where to start? How do you get people to buy your online course?
Everything you need to know to sell online courses from your own website will be covered in the blog. Keep reading to know the steps involved to create and launching your online course.
Selling Online Courses From Your Own Website
If you are selling your first online course, you might be first heading to a platform like Udemy to sell your course. Being a free platform that comes with many perks for course creators, these third-party eLearning platforms are the place most creators choose.
However, these eLearning platforms lack the flexibility and control course creators require to create and monetize their content. If you want to reap the full benefits of running a successful online business and make a profit out of it, the best is to sell online courses from your own website. If you don’t have one yet, it’s recommended to use a small business website builder to create your first fully-functional website.
Here are the steps you need to follow to successfully launch online courses and sell them to your target audience.
Find a Profitable Niche
Many creators who have launched online courses struggle to succeed with selling them just because they didn’t choose the right niche. So why is it important to choose a niche before you start creating your course? Online courses are meant to solve problems or help the target audience with anything they are looking for. Your online course has to cover a specific area.
This means you must succeed in meeting the requirements of your target audience with your intended courses. At the same time, you must also stay in your area of strength.
To find the right niche, get answers to the following questions.
-What are you good at?
-What are your passions?
-What topic is your strong area?
Determine and Define Your Target Audience
The ideal place to search for when finding your target audience is to find who is in your network and who your online course serves. If you have a fan base on social media, this is where you have to start working. Finding who your target audience is and where they are, will help you easily market and sell your courses.
This can be your email marketing list or your social media profiles. You can also launch marketing campaigns to reach new people who have not heard of you. Try networking with other course creators who engage with the same target audience so that you get inspiration on how to promote the course.
Find the Ideal Topic and Your USPs
The most successful online courses are the ones with the topic that is relevant to the target audience. Doing this helps you to get access to learners who are willing to learn what you have to teach. Creating a topic for your online course begins with your expertise and how you can bring high value to your audience.
For example, if you are a successful business owner, you can consider selling a course on building a business from scratch. Or, if you have a successful blog or a podcast, you can run online courses to teach others about your success.
I hope you got the point. Once you have expertise in any particular area or you are successful at a particular thing, you have the authority to teach the world how to replicate that success.
Create Content for Your Online Course
Before you jump into content creation for your course, prepare a course outline that highlights the entire script of your course. This will not only save you from hours of editing it will also give a clear idea about how to plan your lessons.
The best way to make your online course rich and interactive at the same time is to use a combination of text, images, PDFs, and infographics. It will not only make your course appealing to your learners but using a combination of textual and visuals will make it easier for them to grasp the concepts easily.
Besides the regular lessons, add short assignments or quizzes to enhance your students’ learning. Accommodate different levels and learning styles to help your students reach new learning levels or brainstorm deeply about a particular concept.
Building Your Online Course Platform
If you want to sell your online courses to your audience from your website, you need a full-fledged online course platform that can host self-paced courses and allow learners to enroll and collect payment. You can even consider running a Udemy-like course platform where you can allow other course creators to host their courses on your platform. But what is the best way to create an online course platform? You can use a professional online tutoring software like Pinlearn, which helps you to create a course platform with essential functionalities and features to host and sell courses. The ready-made software leverages modern technologies to create interactive online courses that actually sell.
Market Your Online Courses
Once you launch your eLearning site, it becomes much easier to promote your courses. Your course website acts as the primary platform for your target audience to identify your tutoring brand, buy your courses, and interact with you. In addition, you can start promoting your online course by creating an email list of your potential learners, creating a compelling course page, and using social media to market your courses.
Before you start promoting your courses, state the USPs of your courses which you can use to create a marketing strategy. Also, establish a solid social media presence to create engagement to target the right audience.
Conclusion
Creating and selling online courses is a rewarding way to share your expertise with the world. At the same time, this is a great way for educators to establish their eLearning business and generate revenue. Selling courses from your own course platform requires a lot of planning and investment, but the rewards are truly incredible. Hope this guide will help you to successfully launch and sell online courses from your website.
