– Sell through an Online Learning Marketplace
Full Answer
Oct 06, 2020 · Build Your Sales Machine. Selling your online course is a process. While there is a degree of creativity required to produce compelling sales messaging, that too can be accomplished. But you must have a plan before you go to market. Design a funnel by identifying your ideal customer, building a sales page, identifying your traffic sources, and ...
Apr 22, 2022 · To presell an online course, you can create a sales page that explains what the course will be about and when it will release. If you can successfully pre-sell your course, there is no better way to validate your course idea, and you can be 100% confident about investing time and money into turning this idea into reality.
May 09, 2022 · Sell online courses in a marketplace. To start selling from your own site is just one option. Another way to reach your target audience and sell online courses is to put them into a marketplace site – that is, a site that offers a large catalog of options for learners who are looking for courses online.
Selling online courses through your website maximizes revenue. You won't need to spend a dime with an additional platform to build, promote, and sell courses online. You'll do it all from the comfort of your own website. Plus, if you work so hard to sell online courses, you'll want to keep as much of your earnings as possible, right?
Truth is, there is no single best way to sell your online course, but there are some tactics that seem to work pretty well universally. First and f...
It depends on a number of factors. First, do you have a target audience that is really active on one or more social media channels - e.g., Facebook...
Personal development courses can sell very well. As I note in this post on e-learning statistics, the data we have on top online courses "suggests...
In most cases, offering free content is essential - that's why we talk a lot about content marketing here on Learning Revolution. Publishing conten...
As an expert in whatever topic you plan to teach, you probably already have a good intuitive sense of the people who are likely to be interested in...
The best way to generate traffic to your online courses is to get a highly relevant value proposition in front of the right people. Of course, that...
Video is important as a part of delivering an educational experience your learners will find engaging. It's also a critical part of selling your on...
Investing in education and lifelong learning is an emerging trend among both old and young, and online courses come to fill the gaps of knowledge. People tend to prefer the comfort and flexibility of their own homes, avoiding the complexities of commuting to physical classes.
Offering a free course can work for your benefit as it can generate leads for expensive courses or a way to showcase your expertise. Don’t forget, it is the first point of contact to create rapport. We all love good communication, creating relationships and this sense of familiarity is what will help you sell more courses.
A sales page requires two things, the copy and the design . To write the perfect copy, you will need to understand your audience, what they are looking for and how to convince them. We will be going through that below.
Ultimately, the title of your course reflects the name of your brand, your work or training, and can potentially describe you as the best-selling trainer in your field.
The elearning market is expected to exceed $325Billion by 2025 (see above), with a yearly growth of 5% (Global Market Insights)! Becoming an online instructor means you could be earning from a few hundred dollars per year to a six-figure income.
Your testimonials can really come from anywhere — emails, tweets, Instagram posts or comments, blog posts, etc.
When speaking about elearning, we tend to focus on the digital and forget the offline world as if it does not exist. When you will be marketing your online course, you might be focusing on digital marketing strategies, but, don’t forget there are more ways to reach people and sell courses.
Deciding a price for your online course is not easy because most creators don’t know where to start. So they take one of the following approaches to pricing their online course:
Udemy is the largest online course marketplace, and it has millions of students who take courses in virtually any niche.
One of the most effective ways of testing your product idea is collecting direct feedback from students, and a survey is a great tool for doing that.
Not building an audience right from the word go is one of the most common mistakes that course creators make.
The easiest way to validate interest in your course topic is by checking the search volumes for related keywords on Google.
In fact, the size of the global eLearning industry was estimated to be around $250 billion in 2020 and is expected to cross $1 trillion by 2027.
It’s very unlikely that a new subscriber will purchase your course and become a paying customer as soon as they subscribe. So you should create and set up a series of automated emails for your new subscribers.
Selling from your own site is just one option. Another way to sell online courses it to put your courses into a marketplace site – that is, a site that offers a large catalog of options for learners who are looking for online courses. Examples include sites like Udemy and Skillshare. (For a range of options, see this post on Udemy alternatives .)
One of the main upsides of selling online courses – especially on-demand, self-paced online courses – is that they are digital products. This means that the cost of delivering each additional instance of the course after the first one is small – often close to zero. Seems like an obvious point, but I continually see course sellers overlook it as they obsess about saving a few dollars on their online course platform or refuse to invest in high quality instructional and graphical design.
Naturally, how much you charge for your course directly impacts your profitability per course sale and overall. My experience has been that most course sellers do not charge enough, mostly because they have not convinced themselves of the high value their courses. I encourage all course sellers to try the Triple Your Price Exercise as a direct path to higher profitability.
Last, but far from least, the hallmark of a highly successful online course is that it actually leads to learning. That may sound obvious, but if you don’t really understand what your learners need, don’t take instructional design seriously, and don’t have a solid plan for supporting learners throughout the learning process, then the likelihood of the experience really having an impact is low.
For some of these, “your own website” will mean your current, home base website . Popular website builders like Wix and SquareSpace offer basic options for protecting your content and selling it as courses. Stepping things up a notch, there are a range of powerful learning management system (LMS) plug-ins for the popular WordPress platform – like LearnDash and LifterLMS – that give you sophisticated abilities for creating, delivering, and tracking online courses.
The best advice I can give to any aspiring course seller is to start that process early.
( GMD Research ). Within that overall market, the self-paced online learning market in the US is estimated to be worth $15.86 billion in 2021. (Source: Statista)
Keep the domain name you choose simple and relevant to your niche. As long your domain name makes sense for the range of courses you'll build, it's “good enough” to get started. In fact, the only rule you need to follow when selecting a domain name for your website is whether or not it can pass the Grandparent Test.
Hover.com. But it doesn’t really matter where you buy your domain name from because they all provide the same basic service. After creating a free account, use their domain name search function to make sure it’s available at an affordable price (usually around $10 USD) so you can pull the trigger on it.
However, it’s not practical to host your course videos directly from your website. If you do, you’ll quickly burn through your hosting service’s monthly bandwidth limits and crash your site. To get around this problem, you’ll need to subscribe to a video hosting service.
With the Thrive Apprentice Online Course plugin, you can quickly create online courses with multiple Modules, Chapters and Lessons. Also, the individual lesson editor works just like the Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads visual editors so you'll have your course built in no time.
These are domain and web hosting, website designing, payment gateways, content details, video, and more. Online course platforms consist of such tools. Hence, all you have to do is create the courses which are helpful for students.
Due to social distancing, people are moving towards online portals. It is believed that earnings from e-courses can become $325 billion by 2025. Hence, running online course platforms is what one should think about. With good teaching experience and interest in sharing your knowledge, this is an opportunity for people to become Digital Teacher.
With its basic plan starting at $39 per month (two months free with an annual plan), Podia seems to be rapidly gaining a lot of momentum.
Photographers, bloggers, and Many other creative people use Skillshare for teaching new skills. In Skillshare, all classes are around 10-25 minutes long, which partitioned into short videos and they are all pre-recorded and self-paced. You can create premium classes for free.
The study platforms work as learning management systems (LMS). The students get trained through virtual classes. These are similar to offline classes. Here an independent instructor is educating the students through video, image, text, audio, and PDF files.
This would include your budget, technical abilities, time, followers, target audience, and revenue expectation.
It can also save your time and you can take sessions from anywhere, at any preferred time. Another benefit of Digital Class world is that whether you are a youtuber, running an institute or having your own education website can use this platform for teaching different education categories.
While the concept and reasoning behind building an online course is simple, the process often isn't. It's more than just uploading a video: it requires you to build out a course curriculum, develop assignments (if you want), design the course pages, promote the course, and more.
In a marketplace, your course is a part of a catalog, and you have the option to customize your course landing page but not much else aside from the course content. Most marketplaces let you publish a course for free but take a share of course sales.
Free or premium, Skillshare classes have three major moving parts: video lessons, a project, and community discussion. Each class includes 20-60 minutes of video, broken down into 2-5-minute lessons. The practical project then ensures hands-on experience. For instance, a social media class project might require students to promote their Instagram account, or a writing class might require students to draft a pitch. Finally, the community portion of a class allows students to post their work.
Why launch your first course on Udemy? Because the platform offers loads of support for creating and marketing a course. For example, if you're not sure if your video lessons are up to snuff, you can submit a sample for review and get feedback on video and audio, along with suggestions for equipment. And for tutorials on planning a course, filming your first video, and related topics, Udemy offers the Teach Hub with tips and tricks.
There are two parts to creating a course on Thinkific: course material and landing page. To get started, choose from the following templates: pre-sell, mini-course, flagship course, membership resource library, and webinar replay. Unlike other course builders, where you start with a blank slate, Thinkific templates provide helpful cues and tips to build a valuable course. Apart from video lessons, the templates are pre-populated with sample quizzes, downloads, surveys, and instructor messages, at regular intervals throughout the course. Add or remove content as you see fit, or follow the template as is.
To create a paid course on Udemy, you first have to apply to become a premium instructor. Once approved, you'll see a series of easy-to-follow steps to help you create your first course. As you plan course content, keep in mind that all courses need at least 30 minutes of video and five lectures.
Online course platforms streamline the process. These platforms offer all the tools you need to develop, launch, teach, and manage an online course— so you can focus on your content.
The biggest reason why people struggle to find the best online course software is that they aren’t sure about what they should look for in a course platform. If you don’t have an understanding of what an online course platform should offer, you’re very likely to make a wrong choice.
People struggle to find the best platform for online courses because they aren’t sure what they should look for in one.
You might have taken a course through Udemy because they’re easily the largest course marketplace out there. They are also a good opportunity for course creators to list their courses.
All you need to do to get started is to create a profile and upload your courses. After that, OpenSesame will put them on their marketplace for sale.
The Essentials Plan costs $120/month for up to 100 learners while the Premium Plan costs $240/month for the same number of learners .
LearnWorlds is another popular online course creator in the market. It has a strong focus on delivering an interactive learning experience.
Thinkific is one of the most popular hosted online course platforms that lets you create and sell online courses under your brand.
All-In-One Course Platforms (Run your Web site and course site together)
You can try LearnWorlds free for 30 days (no credit card required), then pricing starts at $29 per month ($24, if billed annually). The company charges $5 per sale on its starter plan, but no additional fees on its other plans.
LearnWorldsoffers a range of services to help you create and sell online courses using its online course platform.
Thinkific’s Basic paid plan – which comes with a bump in the features you get access to – starts at $49 per month ($39, if paid annually). Definitely worth checking out. (Here’s our complete Thinkific review.)
You can even test them out without signing up through a simulator that LearnWorlds provides. LearnWorlds is also getting closer to an “all-in-one” than other platforms in this category with the full website builder capability it introduced in 2020.
LearnWorlds seems to have a lotof momentum right now. The company positions itself as a “premium” option that provides for high interactivity, social learning tools to complement standard course content, and white labeling.
I’ll also mention that the Thinkific App storereally stands this platform apart from most of its competitors. With the app store, you’re able to easily integrate a wide range of other platforms to help you create more impactful learning experiences and market your courses much more effectively. And Thinkific’s own Spaces feature makes it possible to run compelling cohort-based courses.