How to Make Money Through Online courses?

Imagine the days before Corona, when you had to travel miles to attend your work and then again travel miles to attend your evening class.

Now the time has changed.

You can work from home and also have enough time to learn new skills from home itself.

The world is shifting towards the online mode of learning. Ed-tech companies like Byjus and Unacademy have become Billion Dollar companies.

Online courses are less expensive than classrooms since there are no costs involved in physical space for the students.

Students are now preferring online courses to learn which is less than one-tenth of the price of that of graduate schools.

They don’t have to take loans and spend years to clear those debts.

And what can be more fun than sitting at your home and take up online courses and learn at your own pace?

If you have expertise in any particular field, you need to make an online course, and here are seven reasons why you should

To make money and earn a passive income lifetime
To build your brand and get recognized in the industry
To create an impact and touch the lives of people
To collaborate with others and become better
To spend ample time with family
To lead customers to your other product offerings
To bring in clients from all over the globe

Sharing your skills through online courses is one of the best ways for you to earn money in less time.

So let’s get started and look at important steps and strategies to get your first online course.

11 Steps to create an online course

Table of Contents

1. Identify your niche

It’s very easy to find your niche. You have your passion and interests and you can make an online course on that.

However, your selection should be something that people are willing to buy.

The topics you can cover are vast including art, personal development, music, gardening, cooking, finance, technology, language, programming, and more.

If you’re passionate about collecting coins and currencies from other countries and you make an online video course on that, people willing to buy that course will be nearly zero.

Also, you have to go as narrow as possible. For example, If you’re a photographer and want to launch a photography course, you need to create it for one topic that you’re master at could be portrait or wildlife, etc, and not photography in general.

If you’re already a teacher or a coach, you can transform the existing programs into an online course. There are examples of several gym trainers, who utilized the lockdown period during Covid-19 to create online gym courses and earned more than what they actually earn.

2. Find out your potential buyers

Identifying your niche is one thing, but you need to have an audience as well.

You can use Google trends or SEMRush to find out if the course that you’re going to create is in demand.

You must also have a rough estimation of the inflow and outflow of your business.

If the courses that you’re going to make are already available, then try to find out what their audience persona is, how much they charge, what’s their syllabus content and how much more value you can provide to your audience.

3. Setting up your budget

You don’t have to spend too much money on cameras, speakers, and tools to begin. Neither should you spend very little that the quality diminishes.

It’s entirely on you how much you want to invest, what’s the ROI that you’re expecting, and what’s the timeline that you want to launch your online course in.

This is an important part which the majority of them fail to do. In the end, your online course is your business. And business must have profits.

4. Start building your audience

The only way you can build your audience is by showing them how valuable your content is.

You can create posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and build followers.

You can also make free online webinars, e-books, guides, or free small online courses to build your email list.

Your free products should be compelling for them to buy your actual course.

You can even have a website where you have long-form blogs which shows that you’re credible in the industry.

If you’re ready to invest, you can even run Facebook or Google ads. You can do this once you have few buyers.

5. Interact with your audience

You can start interacting with the audience and try to find their needs and demands.

The chances of people buying your course will increase when you have a connection with them. Take feedback through forms, polls, mails and also through live sessions on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Respond to every comment, DMs, and mails. It might be tiring but it is equally rewarding.

You need to build up the required anticipation, interest, and desire to buy your course. You should show your authority on the topic and an expert in what they are about to sign up for.

6. Plan the content of your course

By now you must have understood the pain points of your audience which you’re trying to solve.

An excellent course idea would be ‘Modern Interior Design for Bedrooms.’ On the other hand, “Interior Design 101: Everything You Need to Know” does not fix a specific problem.

Trying to supply your learner with all the content isn’t a good idea. You need to provide only relevant content. If they want more, they can come back to you.

But you must not overstuff and confuse them.

If you want to create an ultimate course, then it’s better to create a bundle.

For example, Deepak Kanakaraju has multiple courses such as Facebook ads, SEO, etc and then one bundled up as “Digital Marketing Mastery”

So people will either buy one of the specific courses or the bundle depending on their wish.

Also, structure your course into multiple modules and units so that the buyers can access and learn them easily.

Have animations, slides, explain with white/black Board, Adobe sketchbook, and other tools that you are familiar with.

Have bonus material like workbooks and worksheets which will keep your learners solidified and motivated.

For video editing, you can use tools like Camtasia, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere Pro.

7. Pricing of your course

You need to do market research and find out the average price.

However, try to understand the expertise you’re trying to provide them. If your course is complex, then you can charge more.

And have a personalized support system where they can call you or mail you.

Tell them that “you’re always there to support them“.

When they believe you, they will trust your product too and will show less hesitation to buy.

8. Platform to launch your course

Udemy and Skillshare are two popular platforms that can help you to host your online course. However, you need to pay them a commission.

You can have your own website and launch your online course. And for this, you’ll need to pay for the host, theme and have an extra task of structuring and maintaining your website.

Thinkific, Podia, Teachery, and Teachable are good platforms that help you with marketing tools, email marketing solutions, payment gateways, landing pages, etc.

9. Creating a landing page

Consider this as your sales copy where you persuade your learners to buy the course.

It should include but is not limited to

Who can avail of this course
Outline or syllabus of the course
FAQs
Testimonials
Inquiry forms
Call To Action

You can create landing pages using click funnels. It even has Facebook and email marketing automation tools.

John Omar who made millions with his IoS video course has to say this to you

“Build the best possible course in whatever topic you are teaching. There are a ton of free resources out there to learn iOS, but why did our course get 60,000 students in two days and not the others? And why did thousands of people subsequently pay us for our courses? Because we put everything we have into being the best on the market.”

10. Launching the course

Sometime before launching the course you must start warming up all your followers for the course.

You can have online webinars, live Q&A, everyday mails, etc just before the launch which will make the audience feel the FOMO.

Once you launch, notify it through mails and all social media platforms.

11. Marketing the course

You can collaborate with your other industry experts and have interviewed so that/her audience also will start following you.

Create fun and exciting goodies, coupons, free consultation calls, and giveaways for people to participate. This will increase your chances of getting recognized.

Take customer reviews and testimonials and put them up on your website.

Try to be guests across other Podcasts, youtube videos or Instagram lives, etc which can boost your presence in the market.

You can even offer discount deals for a week or month so that your audience can immediately take action.

If you’re stuck somewhere think about how you can add more value to your audience. Speak of the benefits of completing your course.

Four online course entrepreneurs whose story should inspire you to get started

1. Len Smith

Len was a copywriter who had written a book “How to be a copywriter and earn money from home” and had consistent work to make at least $120,000 a year.

Udemy contacted him and they wanted him to turn his book into an online video course.

He developed the course and started earning an additional $2-4k every month.

Once he started promoting, his course income jumped to $6,500 a month.

It took him about 40 hours to make a course initially, but now he spends only ten hours a week on its maintenance and marketing.

His latest course “Copywriting Secrets — How To Write Copy That Sells,” earned $3,000 in the first two days.

If your content is good then you can make a lot of money with online courses in a short amount of time.

2. Rob Percival

Rob Percival was a high school math teacher and today he is earning millions. How did he do that?

Rob made a 30-hour course in coding and web development. It took him 3 months to create and he posted it on Udemy for students to avail themselves it for free.

He got around 4000 students who signed up. Then he put the price back to $199 and he made $15,000 in the very first month,

In his second course on Swift (Apple’s programming language), he brought in $200,000 in the first month and he made a million dollars in a year.

3. MV Priyank

MV Priyank is a wellness coach and a sound healer. He used to earn around 1 lakh INR with his offline coaching and seminars.

He learned about traffic generation, Facebook Marketing, sales writing and launched an online course. Within a year he was able to generate a revenue of 1 Crore INR which is a very big amount in India.

It not only helped him to generate revenue but also made him recognized in this sound healing space and he started getting offline class offers too.

Right now he is more focused on reaching people than making money since he has already made enough money.

All his marketing and sales are automated and he has enough time to spend with his family.

4. Sunny Jain

Sunny Jain is a stock market expert who used to travel around India conducting two-day live training and workshops.

He used to conduct 2-3 workshops per month for around 15-20 members charging 15,000 INR per month in major metropolitan cities.

But this was too much hassle to travel, book hotels and a lot of time were spent in this.

He was training. People were benefiting but it didn’t help him too much personally since he was already a trader and could earn a bigger amount than that in less time.

So he learned all automation processes and launched his online course and he was able to make 18,00,000 INR in just the first 40 days sitting at home.

Conclusion

The majority of people are willing to learn new skills at home without spending a lot of money.

Online learning is going to become a $200 billion industry by 2025.

Online courses are exploding in popularity due to their convenience and affordability.

There are people out there, looking for your expertise.

With your help and skills, they will be able to solve issues in their life or learn how to do something better, more effectively, for cheaper.

Creating a new online course today for them can bring you both money and content by helping them.

Let us know what your new online course is going to be about?