It seems like everyone is getting into online courses these days.
According to a 2019 study by Global Market Insights, Inc., the online learning market is expected to reach $305.3 billion by 2025. In 2015, the mobile learning market was worth just $7.98 billion. In 2020, that number had risen to $22.4 billion and it is expected to rise to $80.1 billion by 2027.
This is one of the fastest growing online industries and with so many people interested in learning new things, it’s a great time to become an online course creator.
But, before you dive in head first, there are a few things you need to know. In this blog post, we’ll talk about the basics of hosting, selling and marketing your online course.
So, if you’re thinking about starting an online course business yourself, read on!
This is just an overview based on my personal experience working with course creators, interacting with their tech stack, consulting or actively taking part in their marketing and selling strategies.
This blog post contains affiliate links.
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Host your courses: LMS
Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi, LearnWorlds, WordPress with Memberium, LearnDash, self hosted or even self coded? There’s really no lack of options for choosing a learning management system to deliver your online course nowadays.
If you’re just starting, all of these choices can seem overwhelming. If you’re a seasoned creator, then you might be almost happy with your current platform, but frustrated with some of its quirks.
I’ve tried or seen 99% of these platforms in action. None is perfect and your LMS choice can be influenced by price, commission, overall functionality, student and customer support, integrations and your own marketing skills.
Platforms like Thinkific and Teachable are great with student management and course hosting, but they make it difficult to design customized sales pages and build advanced sales funnels.
Kajabi is a great course management platform and even though it does have some funnel-building and even email marketing functionalities, those have their limits.
2.Sell your courses: Sales integration + payment gateway
A very important element of choosing the right LMS for your online course, is figuring the technical part of selling your course. Many course creators build an audience using a regular WordPress website or grow a following on YouTube.
WordPress can become an ecommerce shop with ThriveCart or WooCommerce but pay attention to how these two apps integrate with your LMS and marketing channels. Sometimes something as simple as giving access to a new buyer into your LMS and automatically adding a tag in your email platform can become a pain in the *ss.
Platforms such as Kajabi, Teachable and Thinkific have an integrated selling feature (with sales pages and checkout) but either are too expensive, too complicated or lack advanced sales funnel building features which help course creators increase their average order value. I’m talking about customizing the checkout page, setting up order bumps, upsells (or OneTimeOffers) and downsells.
Many course creators use platforms such as ClickFunnels to create and build advanced sales funnels to sell their courses. In the case of ClickFunnels they can either host their course in the platform’s built-in learning area or choose to integrate it with a dedicated LMS.
When everything fails, you can use Zapier. It’s the ultimate tool for any online business, as it integrates more than 5,000 apps. But even this can’t help a poor choice of tools.
Regardless of the platform you choose, you will still need a payment gateway that integrates with your business. Stripe, 2Checkout and PayPal are the most common choices.
3. build an audience: traffic
This part is where most course creators fail. If they can figure out the techy part of hosting and selling their course, traffic is something entirely different.
There are many strategies to drive traffic to your online course business. If you’re new and have no idea what to focus on, this could help:
If you have time and like to write, SEO could be your game, so start building a niche blog that relies on organic traffic (visits to your website from Google searches).
If you have time, you don’t like to write, but you love video, YouTube could be where you could thrive. There are different strategies to employ on this channel, so make sure you know what you’re doing and have clear expectations of how fast you’ll be able to grow.
If you don’t have time, but you have money, paid traffic could be a great way to get your business off the ground. BUT read this very carefully: if your online business is not optimized, you’re going to lose money. Invest in ads only if you have optimized sales funnels and a sturdy follow-up system to convert traffic into leads and leads into buyers.
Other ways to grow your traffic:
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Partnering up with brands that are already talking to your target market. From guest blog posts to podcast interviews, private community trainings and offering your lead magnet, all are good ways to increase brand awareness and gain more visibility.
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Social channels can help establish yourself as well. Although playing the algorithm game can be a pain, you can still employ the many different social communities on Facebook and LinkedIn to provide value to your target audience. Let’s say you’re teaching parents Montessori techniques. Well you could join mom groups and share some of your best tips, provide advice or stories. Or go straight for the hashtag and create educational content on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Facebook to grow a following.
4.market your courses
If you’re a seasoned course creator, then your business is probably focused on building and marketing courses, more than building traffic. Congrats, you’ve come a long way.
You have all this traffic, but you’re not really seeing a lot of sales? All of the reasons point back to your marketing. And this includes:
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Email marketing: I’ve seen many course creators with huge following, great courses and a community that loves their content, not using their email list frequently or at all. And this includes mistakes such as:
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being irregular with when and how often they email their list.
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not sending sales emails or making them very salesy and awkward.
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not being clear about what their email is all about as they struggle to talk about 1000 different things.
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not having a segmented, clean list so they don’t really know who is still interested, who is a buyer and who is dead weight.
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not using automations to welcome, nurture and follow-up with their email subscribers.
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Sales funnels: Lacking or leaking.
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Copywriting: There’s a lot to be said here. I am writing a blog about this, but here’s the gist of it.
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Stop trying to sell your course to everybody. You can only help a very specific group of people, so make sure you know exactly who that group is, how you can help them and convey that in your copy.
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Your sales copy doesn’t have to be pushy, spammy or annoying to actually convert.
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It’s perfectly fine to have a conversation with the person reading your sales page and it is not weird or bad to write copy that appeals to your audience’s problems and desires.
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Ignoring potential objections is not helping your business. Talk about why they shouldn’t buy, try or invest in your course in your emails and on your sales pages. This will help calm down any fears or doubts your audience might have about investing with you.
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Pricing: It’s perfectly fine to have affordable courses so that everybody can benefit from what you’re teaching. But many course creators are miss-pricing their courses because of false assumptions like:
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Thinking people can’t afford their courses, so they keep them very low-priced. Unfortunately this creates a false perception of the course value and attracts people who are out for a bargain. This doesn’t necessarily make them a good student for your course.
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Thinking making a profit or that money is bad. Running any business with this mindset is just a recipe for unhappiness. You making more money as a course creator impacts everybody in a good way.
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Say you’re able to make $10K a month: what would that mean to your team? Would you be able to use that money to add bonuses or increase wages? What would that mean to your video-editing or marketing budget? Would that help you provide higher quality or reach more students? What if you could use that money to sponsor students into your program? Or give to charity and support a cause you strongly believe in?
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Thinking there’s too much competition and price is the only way to compete. Money is a false objection. If your audience is sold on the value of the potential transformation they can achieve with your course, they will not object to the money they’re asked to invest.
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There’s a lot more to learn when it comes to starting and running a successful online course business. Be sure to do your research, ask questions and get feedback from other course creators before getting started. With a bit of hard work and perseverance, you can create a thriving online course business that brings in passive income month after month.