Nowadays, the Internet is not quite strange and becoming more and more familiar with everyone in the digital 4.0 world. According to a report, there are nearly 4 billion people going online every year and this number is still increasing. Each person using the Internet for many purposes such as learning, entertaining or communicating.
Not stopping there, they also go online to seek new information and knowledge to learn new things. You are finding how to build an education website with WordPress? There are many tutorial videos on YouTube or Facebook. Or trying to cook some dishes for dinner? You can find some recipes on Pinterest, Instagram or just find out on Google.
The need for seeking and learning new things from the Internet has accidentally created great opportunities for people to make money online. Therefore, there are many Internet users use online platforms to earn money such as blog posts, videos, online books or even online courses.
An online course is another method of selling what you know, selling your knowledge. With this new learning platform, students can learn anywhere, anytime they want instead of having to stick with the teachers at fix time. Nowadays, more and more people are using the Internet for online learning. An online course is supposed to reach more than $240 billion by 2021, according to Global Industry Analysts.
Many people are not confident with their knowledge to impart for others. But in reality, you do not need to be a professional to create and sell online courses. You just need to have knowledge that others don’t know and the topic of your online courses is exactly with the things others are looking for. It can be about developing, music, dancing, cooking, marketing, language, or anything. Many people can earn thousands of dollars per month with online courses about simple things.
If you are planning to create online courses, congratulations, you’ve arrived in the right place. There are many people are creating online courses with useful lessons every day, but only 20% can get over $100 per month.
Almost bloggers always seek for new things, new technology to apply for their online teaching platform and build new and creative courses. However, attracting thousands of viewers to your website doesn’t mean you will get thousands of students signing up for your courses. They still take interest in the content which is the main reasons driving them to pay for your online courses.
There Are Two Key Traits That Decide the Courses’ Success:
- Perceived value of the courses: each course have the different perceived value. You need to set a reasonable price for the course equally with the perceived value it brings to students.
- Content and audience: courses content is pretty much important thing. And you need to choose the right audience who really need your courses to promote, motivate them to pay. For example, you can not sell a course or how to use Photoshop for a child who is trying to learn English.
So, how should you do to monetize your online courses? Here’s step-by-step guide for you if you are struggling with this question.
Choose a Course Topic, Determine Targeted Audience for the Course and Do Market Research
The topic of your course can come from anywhere and any aspect in your life. It can be simply some questions that your friends always ask you for help everyday. Or it’s something related to your work skill (for example: how to use Google Analytics, how to do SEO, etc.). Do you have any previous experience that you want to share with others or any hobby you can teach them such as playing piano, how to get the visa easier and faster, etc. Everything can be the main topic of your online courses.
Every course creator doesn’t want to spend much effort on creating a course that no one buy. There are some topics that many people might want to know, but are they really willing to pay for it? So, before devoting to create the courses, remember to do research who will be the best buyers for your courses and whether or not they’re willing to pay.
However, with these topic, you need to choose the target audience who will probably like and be willing to pay for you. If you already have a good idea of who your audience is, starting explore what their demands are, what problems they are facing. From there, focus on these issues and create the most suitable and perceived valuable courses for them.
If you are not sure what your audience concerns about, you should ask them, explore what they really need. You can even send them survey or welcome email. But, remember to listen to their voice. If you don’t rush, you can create a community for the audience with Facebook Group to connect with the users and get closer to them.
Aggregate these responses and see what the most common topic are to decide your topic areas.
Outline Your Online Courses Based on Chosen Topic
After determining your topic, now you can take your first step on creating the online courses that can help your audience to solve the problem they are facing.
To create successful online courses, you need to outline it first to determine what you’ll put in the course. The content should go deep into the topic and mention important information. It’s also necessary to use easy-to-understand words and sentences. Remember to avoid periphrastically beating about the bush and focusing on main problems.
You can firstly think in terms of chapters or sections inside the courses. A chapter or a section provides the overall subtopic regarding to the main topic of the course. The content of the chapter or section should be divided into lessons and quizzes. A lesson will give you knowledge while a quiz will test you to apply the knowledge. By the end of each course, you can include an assignment or a final test to examine that students can pass the courses or not.
In this step, make sure to create a perfect outline for your course that can help your students take step by step to understand the topic and find out solution for their issues. But, remember to create the outline first, not the entire course content.
Presell Online Courses with a Few Pre-made Lessons
This is the most important step that you should take before carefully create official content for your online courses. Most people will go with the process: generate idea, create online course, publish course and wait for sales. However, almost of them will fall into failure that no one buy for the courses.
Therefore, instead of sitting there and waiting for buyers, you should try this process: generate idea, outline the courses, create 1-2 first lessons/sections, presell the courses, gather feedback, edit and create the courses according to the feedback, create official course content, launch perfect course and get sales.
This idea comes from the fact that the second time you do anything will be better than the first time. Therefore, you should start with about 20% content of your courses first. Then, presell the courses in your platform or any page for that courses. You can also do marketing, launch promotion, promote, etc. to get first sales. You can check this article to discover how to pre-sell your online course before creating them.
When the first customers come to your courses, you can collect feedback from many forms such as directly sending messages, sending emails or survey. By launching your course with only the first 1-2 sections of your course created, you can get feedback from your students (they’ll let you know what they think in the course discussion section). From these feedbacks, you can adjust and update the content or method or anything that your customers review and start to create full content of the online courses. This step ensures that your final product is the best one and help you to avoid the failure.
Officially Create Online Course with Attractive and Impressive Teaching Methods
There are tons of plugins that can help you to create an online course on your website, such as WordPress plugin like LearnPress, LifterLMS, Sensei, etc. or other LMS like Teachable, Moodle, etc. Users who are using WordPress website can go with LearnPress which is FREE to use. This plugin is voted to be the best LMS WordPress plugin that can help instructors to create and sell online courses with lessons and quizzes. There are over 50,000 users trusted and used this plugin on their website. Besides, LearnPress has tons of free and paid add-ons supporting more function for an e-learning website. You can start with free plugin and add-ons first and decide to pay for premium add-ons later.
Creating courses on the website provides you a variety of teaching methods such as text, video, infographics, audio, graph or chart and anything else that can deliver knowledge. You should include at least 2 methods in 1 lesson. Let’s imagine how your students will feel if they need to keep scrolling down and down to read the whole wall of text in a lesson? Of course, that lesson will become so boring. Therefore, try to make your lessons attractive and impressive in order to keep your students go with you to the end of the courses.
For example, if you are teaching how to use LearnPress Assignment add-on, it should be better to start with both text instruction and tutorial video content.
This is the most time-consuming step when creating online courses. During the process, remember to make lessons relevant to others and create same logo or color theme appearing in all lessons. Before releasing the courses, remember to double check and make sure all elements work well.
Choose Platform to Sell Your Courses
It’s Also Important to Choose the Way You Sell Your Online Courses. There Are Two Main Ways:
- Selling in a marketplace such as Udemy, Coursera or SkillShare, etc. They provide online courses service for many instructors in many different areas. The advantage of this method is that you just need to upload your course into the platform and wait for the students (through the marketplace, the affiliate program, etc.). You don’t need to set up or take any complicated works. However, by going with this method, you need to compete with other instructors who also create online courses in this platform. There are many famous teachers, speakers, and instructors who are using this marketplace to sell their online courses.
- Selling the course in your own website. As I mentioned above, if you are finding ways to create the website to build online courses, you can start with WordPress and LearnPress LMS plugin. You can easily download and install LearnPress on your website. These options have easy creation and upload like the course service marketplaces. But, you can control everything in your website, from the domain, design of website, policies,… The default payment for LearnPress courses is PayPal. But there are also other methods if you wish to use.
Besides, if you want to save time on creating the website, you can go with premium WordPress theme which is suitable for an online learning website based on LearnPress. There are tons of pre-made templates that include unique designs and well-organized layouts. Besides, with this template, you don’t need any coding or programming knowledge. Just one click, all demo content will be imported to your website. You just need to edit the content and image with your brand images and information.
The theme package also includes LearnPress plugin and bundle of premium add-ons supporting more function for LearnPress. You just need to create and sell online courses with LearnPress without doing any complicated work.
Most of the above options don’t require exclusivity so that you can sell your courses using both types of the platform above. Even so, be sure to read the terms of service on the marketplace before offering your course on multiple platforms. There might be restrictions with items sold in the marketplace.
Market and Promote Your Online Courses
Notwithstanding you use any platform, you should promote your online courses. Even it’s a marketplace where there will be traffic to your courses, you still need to do your own marketing campaign. A marketing plan should be proposed before implementing. You need to choose marketing tools you will use such as social media, advertising, Facebook ads, Google ads, affiliate marketing, etc. and choose the place you want to do marketing, where you will find your target audience.
Keep Your Course Content Up-to-Date
You should check your course content regularly every few months to ensure the information is still relevant. Outdated information will take the students far away from your courses. And remember to check all the links and videos inside the lessons to make sure that they are working well.
