Is Selling Courses Profitable? Make Money Online with Online Courses

If you are already an expert in a field, whether in your current job, as a freelancer, or as a coach, you can incorporate that knowledge into a high-value course and sell it for years to come.

And while creating, launching, and marketing an online course takes a lot of upfront effort, their earning potential skyrockets (especially when compared to many other ways to make money online. we are talking about).

Courses and other knowledge products like e-books are called passive income. It just means that once the initial time and effort are invested, with just a bit of regular maintenance and marketing, you will be able to continue selling and making money with them for months and years.

So how do you go about developing your course? One of my favorite online course success stories comes from Bryan Harris of Videofruit, who built and launched an online course in just 10 days that earned him $ 220,750!

To achieve this impressive goal, Bryan followed a four-step process to discover, validate, and launch his course:

Phase 1: Explore and discover the best topic for her course from her most popular blog posts. This ensured he knew the content was already valuable to his audience.

Phase 2: Validate that people would pay for his course by surveying readers and getting pre-orders. (This is an important part that so many people forget. Never spend a lot of time building something unless you know there's a paying audience for it).

Phase 3: Quickly write, save and edit the course content. Since he already knew there was demand, it made sense to create the content as quickly as possible. He could always go back and update or modify based on feedback from his initial students.

Phase 4: Launch the course on its mailing list. The success of your course comes down to presenting it to the right people. And your audience, no matter how small, is usually the best place to start. That said, you need to have a clear idea of ​​your launch plan before you go live.

Now, what if you don't have a blog with popular posts? Or an email list to market? Let's see how you can build your online course without prior experience:

Start by taking other courses that interest you: Not only does this important competition and opportunity analysis, but it also gives you an idea of ​​what a course could or should look like and what it should look like. How is the rhythm? Is it via email, video, or in-person chat? Once you've figured out what your course should look like, it's time to decide what it should include. These same courses are a great starting point. How can you make your course better or more interesting? Do you have an experience that others don't?

Choose your niche and check the demand: The golden course mix is ​​when you can find an in-demand niche that aligns with your unique skills and experiences. A great way to do this is to use Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner to find the average monthly search volume for keywords related to the course content you offer. Are people actively seeking quality information on this topic? Of course, if you're already creating content for a blog, coaching service, or site like Medium, you can test the application for free this way, just like Bryan.

Find your partners, collaborators, and niche champions: As you create your course, look for notable people who are also creating content in the space. Observe how their business operates and incorporate this into your plan. You can also reach out to any influencer and make them affiliates for your course. This way, they'll be enticed to share your content with their audiences (which can be an important way to generate your first sales – which is useful if you're using one of the best CRMs for small businesses – and start building your community!)

Create a killer course experience: Once your course is validated and in the process of being validated, you need to determine how people will take it. Most course creators choose to host their courses on their websites. This way they get the full value of bringing customers back to their site regularly. I host my courses from a subdomain on my site so I can easily add more. The course experience is also incredibly important. And after trying most of the solutions, I highly recommend Teachable, an online platform designed specifically for lessons.

Build your audience on a course community: If you're just starting to build an audience and want to leverage communities that are already actively seeking content, you can choose to host and sell your online course on a site like Skillshare or Udemy. These are easy and cost-effective ways to build an audience and test your niche to see if there is a demand for that product.

Market Your Course: The beauty of using a course to make money online is that you can keep selling it for as long as you want. Look for niche communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Reddit that could benefit from your content. Post on relevant blogs and sites. Look anywhere you might be able to meet the right people. With just a few hours a month, you can continue to generate sales.