How to Create and Sell Online Courses

If you’ve noticed a bunch of “gurus” in your social media feed promoting their online courses, it’s because selling online courses can be a profitable venture.

Why Do People Buy Courses?

Courses generally offer more value over free content. One reason why is because often they are more detailed and packaged in an easier to follow manner. For example, even though we released a detailed 6 thousand+ word post on rank and rent SEO, it is still hard for some people to follow and apply the concepts outlined since those concepts are not provided in an over the shoulder format like they are in our rank and rent SEO course. Additionally, if people have specific questions, they want to ask an expert how to move forward. While a person may be able get a response by simply leaving a comment on free content, content creators are more likely to respond if they are getting paid to do so. We have done decently with the rank and rent SEO course we made with Chase Reiner, and in this article we will explain how we went about actually creating and selling an online course.

Choose Your Topic

While you may not necessarily need to be an expert in a topic to create a course, it really helps if you are. So think about all of the things you are good at and, preferably, have had some level of success with in the past. If the topic you are choosing is competitive, like make money online, we suggest that you niche down like we did with rank and rent SEO, which is a very specific method for making money online.

Become an Industry Influencer

Before you even create your course, we suggest that you create some free content around the topic to build a following and some authority. For example, we created and ranked on Google the article we were discussing earlier, and later created a few YouTube videos around the topic which helped build our authority in the niche. You can also go about creating a Facebook Group and/or email list around the topic, allowing you to build a community that you can promote your course to when it is completed. Although we didn’t have a large Facebook group at the time, we leveraged Chase’s Facebook group to help promote the course.

Partner up with an Influencer/Industry Expert

This can help assure that your course sells and may provide you with some valuable insight from someone who has created and sold informational products in the past before. If someone has spent tons of time building authority and trust in a particular niche, like SEO, it may be worth giving up a portion of your course sales to partner up with them. In our case, partnering up with Chase allowed us to more easily and quickly sell our course, and helped create a more detailed course because two heads are often better than one.

Create a Course Outline Along with a Landing Page

We created an outline that informed the public that the course was going to be 9 videos long and detailed exactly what we’d be covering in each video. This provided people with a good idea of what they would be buying before they purchased the course.

Make Sure That There Is Demand for Your Course Before Creating It

In our case, prior to the course’s creation, Chase posted in his Facebook group asking if people would be interested in taking a rank and rent course. Many people were, so we created it. While it may be difficult to poll an audience, especially if you don’t have a group of some kind, this is an important step to consider since you can avoid wasting time making a course that no one wants.

The other thing we did was create a special presale price for the course and offered it in our webinar. As long as we surpassed a certain amount of sales, we figured that it would be worthwhile to make the course. If you can’t sell enough of them, you can simply refund the people that may have bought it.

Create a Webinar/Course Intro

This is a common practice when selling info products, and doing it well is key to converting a high number of viewers to sales. If you are interested in learning how to create a webinar in an effective way, simply opt-in to some other marketers’ webinars and see how they are doing it. Most webinars that we’ve seen consist of someone presenting a powerpoint related to the topic of interest for about an hour long.

If possible, you should try to get people to email opt-in to join your webinar, allowing you to put them on a drip feed sequence. In our case, we did not ask people to opt-in before getting on the webinar because it allowed us to rank the webinar on YouTube for “rank and rent”. That being said, since we also released part one of the course without an opt-in (as we discuss below), it may have been a good idea to require an email opt-in for the webinar.

In the webinar, make sure that you are providing value and actually showing people how to do the task you want to teach in the course. You should also explain to them why they should care about learning what you are teaching and why you are qualified to teach them. In our case, we showed proof of profitable rank and and rent rankings that we had achieved and explained that we would detail, in a step by step way, how we achieved these rankings.

Create a Teaser

It is important to remember that most people do not buy a course the first time they see one. We created one webinar, as well as a video that was a teaser into the first part of the course. In this video we were not quite selling as much as we were in the webinar. Instead, we naturally just talked about the topic, trying to provide a lot of value to the people who were taking the course.

Drive Traffic to the Webinar and Teaser

Now that you have gotten the promotional assets set up, it is time to direct people to them.

You can drive traffic to the webinar and/or teaser by using the methods below:

1. Rank on Google and YouTube for keywords around your niche. We did this very successfully and it helped promote the course.
2. Link to it in Facebook groups and email lists. Assuming you have already utilized your own group if you have one, you can ask influencers if you could post about it in their groups, or better yet have them post about it.
3. Run paid ads on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Discovery ads on YouTube are cheap and are a great way to drive traffic. We highly recommend using them. If you don’t have a required opt-in to watch your videos, you can also post about your video on Facebook and LinkedIn and run those posts as ads. Keep in mind that the algorithms for these platforms will generally allow you to reach more people for the same price or cheaper if you don’t linking out, thus keeping people on their platform. Make sure you are tracking what your cost per conversion is on your course. As long as the paid traffic is profitable, you can continue running it. If you can get at least a 2% conversion rate on a high ticket course (at least $200), that’s not bad.
4. Link to the video from old content and put it on your website. If there is currently traffic coming to your website, we recommend that you do not let that go to waste. Let people know that you have a free video available to help them learn how to do something.

Create the Course

Assuming you have sold enough of the course in the presale period to make it worth creating, it is time to create the course. Before you proceed, You will need to choose the medium you’d like to use for the course. We chose video, but audio and text can work also. We created a Facebook group where the course members could join in order to view the course and ask questions as it was being made. After the course was done, we uploaded it to Teachable which allowed us to easily put it behind a payment wall. Also, the webinar we initially used to promote the course is uploaded on there as a promotional video.

Continually Promote

Once the course is done, you can continue to sell it over and over again. We recommend using all of the same tactics we mentioned before, focusing mostly on creating organic traffic and building authority in your niche by ranking for topics around the keyword you are targeting and directing people to the course webinar.

Conclusion

Although courses can be profitable, we don’t prefer to use them as a main source of revenue due to the time it takes to create and promote them. That being said, they are a great side income and a viable revenue stream.