A-Z Guide to Make Online Passive Income
This is a complete step-by-step guide for course creation, selling and management in 2021.
So if you’re looking for tips on:
You’ve come to the right place.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
According to MarketResearch.com, the e-learning market in the United States alone is projected to grow by $12.81 billion between 2020 and 2024.
With this exponential growth, a lot of solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, side hustlers and freelancers have made (and will make) fortunes through passive income generated by selling digital courses online.
However…
The process of creating, selling and managing online courses can be very intimidating especially when you know nothing and have to start from scratch.
So, in this VERY detailed guide, we will talk about each and every single thing you need to know about making money by creating, selling and managing online courses.
Here’s the big problem:
There are a ton of things that go into creating an online course and it can definitely seem overwhelming when you first start out.
On the other hand, many first-time creators take it lightly and go into it recklessly, ending up with mediocre courses that no one wants to buy.
But, what’s the solution?
The key to streamlining your course creation process is to break every step down and take your time with each one.
Speaking of which, let’s get into the usual steps creators take when structuring, writing and recording content for their online courses.
The very first thing you need to think of is what your online course is going to be about.
Choosing an online course topic is something that many new course creators don’t pay much heed to. They simply look at what they’re interested in and jump in, head first.
Going into it without any planning like this can lead to you spending months creating the online course, only to find out no one wants to buy it.
This may be because there might already be better courses that address the same topic or because your course topic might be too bloated.
So, what do you need to do to come up with a course topic that is genuinely profitable? Let’s have a look:
Firstly, you should be looking to brainstorm a bunch of ideas in order to populate a list of possible topics.
LEARNING OUTCOMES and ASK YOURSELF:
KEY TAKEAWAY:
By the end of this exercise, you’ll have a list of 6 – 9 topics to choose from.
Now, it’s time to zoom in.
The best online courses are the ones that do not deal with broad topics. Instead, they focus on a single problem or technique within that topic.
This is something you should be aiming to do as well.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you choose to address too many things at once in an online course, it will end up becoming bloated and unengaging.
So, how do you zoom in on a single problem or skill? For this, you’ll have to step into the shoes of your potential audience and find out what problems they’re facing.
There are a number of ways to do this such as by browsing online community forums and conducting interviews.
Finally, when you’re done choosing a course topic, you’ll have to perform some market research to find out if there’s any demand for that topic or not.
We mentioned keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush in the section above.
These same tools are going to help you with research regarding your course topic online.
However, before we get to that, the first thing you have to do is gather all information related to the course topic you already know.
You can start doing this by writing down everything you have to offer right off the bat. After that, it’s important to recall any information that you may have forgotten about.
A simple way to do this is to look at listicles related to your course topic online. You can simply do this by searching “Ways to <your course topic>”. Read through these listicles and you may come across a piece of information or content that you already know but may have forgotten about.
Important Note: At this point, none of the information you write has to be overly structured. The goal here is to note everything down so you don’t forget it during the next steps in course creation.
Once you’ve gathered everything you already know, it’s time to look outwards. The internet is definitely your biggest resource but you can also look towards books related to your online course topic.
Is Google enough to provide you with the keywords you need for your online course?
While Google may be adequate enough to provide you with everything you need, it can be a good idea to enlist the help of a keyword research tool such as Mangools or SEMRush.
These tools will provide you with keyword suggestions when you provide them with a “seed” keyword (typically your course topic).
You can then use these keyword suggestions on search engines to gain access to relevant content you may not have already explored.
A very important step that many amateur course creators skip is to create an outline for your course.
Skipping creating a course outline and jumping straight in can lead to a number of problems later down the line such as your course being bloated or you forgetting to put in important information.
Creating a course outline is extremely simple and you can do it on a piece of paper or by using text formatting software such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word.
To create an outline, first, you need to decide on the structure of your course.
An online course typically contains modules and lessons. You can think of modules as sub-topics and lessons as individual chapters that deal with a single element of that sub-topic.
Your outline will consist of the following:
We created an example outline within Google Docs that is shown below:
Creating an outline for your online course in this way will save you a lot of time down the road. Another benefit of this is that you’ll never forget to include anything during your course’s content creation stage.
Apart from the actual outline, another thing you should define at this stage is your online course’s goals, learning outcomes and objectives.
These can be defined as what your course hopes to achieve. It’s what your students will be capable of doing once they graduate from your
LEARNING OUTCOMES and ASK YOURSELF:
KEY TAKEAWAY:
Once you answer all of these questions, you’ll end up with a list of learning outcomes that will be useful not only to your students but also to you (you’ll see how later on in this post).
Finally, we come to the meat-and-bones of your online course: the actual written content.
As you can probably imagine, you have to be extra careful and take your time during this stage.
With that being said, let’s get into how you can write compelling content for your online course:
If you’ve created lecture or presentation slides in the past, you’ll already know this:
Bombarding students with large blocks of text will make your course highly uninteresting and they will not be able to engage with it.
Instead, you should be writing in digestible, bite-sized chunks and letting your audio narration do the elaboration for you.
Avoid writing paragraphs at all costs and make extensive use of bullet points and lists.
It can be a good idea to pepper your online course with “quick tips” or “fun facts” after every few slides. These can play a huge role in pulling your students’ attention back to your course slides and keeping them engaged.
Some more things to keep in mind are:
If you’re confused about what and what not to include, don’t worry as there’s a very easy solution to this.
This is where the learning outcomes you defined in the outline creation stage will come in handy.
Whenever you come across a piece of information that you’re confused about including or excluding, refer to your learning outcomes and ask yourself:
“Does this piece of information directly or indirectly serve any of the learning outcomes of my online course?”
If the answer is yes, then include it. If not, exclude it.
It’s important to give as many examples of the concepts you’re teaching as possible.
You want to avoid being the boring teacher who only provides students with theory without any practical application or example for it.
Students have a much better time understanding concepts when they are given clear examples.
When a student reads an example in your online course and understands a certain concept because of it, this will serve as a mini-accomplishment and encourage them to keep going.
On the other hand, if you provide no examples and a student is unable to grasp a certain concept, this will discourage them and they might not continue with your course.
Once you’re done writing content, the next stage is to start recording videos to accompany your lecture slides.
Making course videos is very important as your lecture slides are not going to be enough to compel students to buy your online course.
Before recording anything, you’ll have to decide on what they’re going to ultimately look like. For this, you have three options:
For the first option, you’re going to need a camera, possibly a microphone, a tripod, lighting and a video editing tool.
For the second option, you’ll need screen recording software such as MovAVI and a microphone. You won’t need a camera though.
For the third option, you’ll need a camera as well as screen recording software.
While the third option is undoubtedly the best one, it does require the most amount of effort as well as money that would be spent on gear and software.
Let’s discuss what the benefits are of each option:
Option 1: Videos consisting of you speaking directly to the camera help you personalize your online course and make a more human connection with your audience. You can let your personality shine through these videos to make your online course more compelling.
Option 2: This option helps you avoid having too much text in your course lecture slides as you’ll be explaining them in detail using your audio narration. It’s also a preferable option for people who are camera-shy.
Option 3: This option gives you the best of both worlds. You can build a personal connection and effectively communicate every concept described in your lecture slides effectively. Just be sure to cut between yourself and your lecture slides at appropriate times.
Once you’re done recording videos, you’ll need the help of a video editing tool to properly cut, edit and refine them for your online course.
Some great options for video editing tools are:
If you chose either option 1 or option 3 for video production as described in the above section, you may not have to perform additional audio recording.
However, if you chose option 2, then this stage is highly important for your online course.
Note: Even if you chose option 1 or 3 above, you may still need to perform additional audio recording to make amendments or fix mistakes.
Let’s start off by talking about the gear you’ll need to record pristine audio for online courses:
IMPORTANT NOTE:
When buying the microphone, ensure that it has a cardioid polar pattern or cardioid pattern setting. This is important because mics with cardioid polar patterns do a good job of focusing on the sound coming from in front of them while ignoring surrounding sounds (room ambiance, background noise, etc.)
A pop filter ensures that your audio does not clip and get distorted, particularly when you’re pronouncing consonants such as “B”, “P” or “D”.
A shock mount prevents your mic from picking up any rumble or tapping whenever you put your hands on the table or touch your mic to adjust it.
You only need a boom arm if you have a small desk or are running out of space on your desk because you have other equipment on it. It attaches to the side of your desk and suspends your mic in the air so it’s in front of your face.
The first thing you have to do is find a suitable level for the “gain” on your microphone.
The gain on a microphone essentially defines its sensitivity or input volume level. If you set it too high, it will pick up a lot of background noise. If you set it too low, it will barely pick your voice up.
Thus, you’ll need to perform a bit of trial-and-error. Record your voice at different gain levels to find the one that’s perfect for your particular surroundings.
Another thing that will involve a bit of trial-and-error is your distance to the mic. If you put your mouth too close to it, you will sound muffled. If you’re too far, your volume will be too low.
Similar to video production, once you’re done recording audio, you’ll need an audio editing tool or Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) which will help you clean it up and make it suitable for your online course.
Some great examples of audio editing tools you can use are:
Once you have all your content produced, it’s time to organize it in a meaningful way.
We recommend that you create folders for each content type and separate them accordingly.
Typically, you will have lecture slides, videos and possibly, additional audio narration. Thus, you’d create three folders: one for slides (.ppt files or something similar), one for videos and one for audio.
Once done, it can be a good idea to check again whether all files are in order. After that, refer to your course outline and then, to your lecture slides to ensure everything is in order.
QUICK TIP:
It’s a good idea to have one additional folder to contain all the extra resources you may have collected to put in your online course. These could be images, tables, graphs, infographics, external videos, extra readings, etc.
After you’ve compiled and organized all the content, it’s very important that you go through it from start to finish and comb it for mistakes.
You should do this as many times as possible.
When going through your lecture slides, you should be on the lookout for typos, grammatical errors, technical errors as well as points where something may not be making sense.
You should also look out for sentences or phrases that may be vague or unclear.
If you’ve created videos for your online course, it goes without saying that you should watch them as many times as possible too.
Look out for any weird cuts or points during which the audio does not match what’s on screen.
For example, if your audio narration is talking about something in the previous slide but you’ve already jumped to the next slide on the screen.
As for audio files, you should be looking out for any points where the audio may be distorted or clipped.
You should also be on the lookout for any points where the audio might be unclear or the volume level low.
If you’d like to add a little more flair to your audio narration, you can consider adding some ambient background music to it.
Important Note: If you choose to add background music to your narration, ensure that it is minimal and not too flashy. You don’t want the music to distract your students from what you’re saying.
We have a post on how you can cut music using Audacity to make it ready for online course narration.
Finally, if there are any last-minute screenshots or images you’d like to add to your lecture slides, you should do so.
Once you’ve finalized your online course, it’s time to publish it.
Here, you have two options:
The first option is much easier but gives you less control. The second option is much more complicated but gives you complete control over how your online course is published and promoted.
We’ll talk about the second option in a later section but for now, let’s talk about option 1:
Online course platforms are wonderful for first-time course creators since they simplify much of the process of publishing your course online.
Furthermore, you’ll have the advantage of marketing your course to an audience that’s already established.
There are mainly two types of online course platforms:
To determine which one would be more suitable for you, you’ll have to look towards your needs and what each type has to offer.
Online course marketplaces are fairly simple to navigate.
They will allow you to publish your course for free and your course will be added to their extensive database.
Your course will be part of a category and sub-category depending on what it’s about. Then, whenever a student searches for that sub-category (or any of your provided keywords), your course will show up in the search results for them to consider.
Most online course marketplaces allow you to customize your course’s landing page according to however you want but that’s about as much control as most of them provide.
You won’t have a lot of control over the way your online course is promoted if you publish it onto an online course marketplace. However, you will be able to benefit from the fact that you can publish your course onto it for free and it will be available to an already-present student audience.
Important Note: While most online course marketplaces let you publish your course for free, they will take some percentage of every sale you make. It’s important to read the terms and conditions to ensure you’re not operating at a loss.
Some popular examples of online course marketplaces are Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, Treehouse, Coursera and many more.
All-in-one platforms share a lot of similarities with online course marketplaces such as they also make your online course a part of their catalog to sell to an existing audience.
However, unlike online course marketplaces, all-in-one platforms give you a lot more tools to work with and also, a lot more freedom.
There’s a lot more room for customization.
You can create your own landing pages and also, use their intuitive tools to market and promote your online course. This is important because it can be very hard to get a new online course off the ground without proper marketing.
Some all-in-one platforms even have useful tools that you can use to create your online course right on the website.
With that being said, all of this comes at a price. Unlike online course marketplaces, all-in-one platforms typically charge a monthly fee along with transaction fees.
If you’re a new online course creator with not much revenue flowing in yet, this option might not be affordable for you.
Some examples of great all-in-one platforms are Thinkific, Teachable and LearnWorlds.
Instead of publishing your course on an already established online course platform, you can also choose to create your own website and host it there.
As you can probably imagine, this option requires a lot more effort, resources and planning. However, it pays off due to the fact that you have complete control over how your online course is hosted, promoted and marketed.
So, let’s talk a bit about the steps involved in creating your own website for an online course:
If you aren’t tech-savvy, the thought of building your own website may be quite intimidating because you may feel you would have to learn to code.
While that may have been the case a decade or so ago, it’s not so anymore. There are a number of intuitive web development platforms which allow you to build your website from scratch visually.
This means you won’t have to learn to code (although it does help) but instead, you can build your website using easy visual, drag-and-drop options.
WordPress is by far, the most popular web development platform out there but its competitors such as Wix and Squarespace are highly simple to use and effective as well.
You can think of a website host as a service provider which allows you to make your created website available to everyone using the internet.
Without a website host, your website would only be visible to you on your local computer.
When it comes to choosing a website host, there are certain factors you need to keep in mind such as pricing, speed and performance. Be sure to do your research well and read reviews of different hosting services before you choose one.
Plugins can be thought of as additional tools that you’ll utilize to streamline or improve different aspects of your website or aspects related to website management.
What are plugins capable of?
You can use them for a number of things such as link management, payment setup, the look of your website and much more.
WordPress has been in the website development game for a long time so naturally, it has the widest array of plugins to choose from.
That being said, its competitors are quickly ganging up on it as well and filling their libraries with useful tools and plugins too.
The key is to do your research and find the right ones which can help you make the website development and management process more efficient.
Once we start describing what seed launching is, you may start thinking of it as an unnecessary step.
However, stick with us as this method has been tried and tested by some of the internet’s most experienced entrepreneurs and marketers such as Jeff Walker.
So, what exactly is seed launching?
You can think of a seed launch as a “test product launch”. It involves providing your online course to a small group of people so they can go through and then provide feedback.
Even though you may have gone over the online course yourself several times and refined it thoroughly, the insight you can get from actual students and peers is invaluable.
They may help you identify certain parts where information may be lacking or vague or they could also suggest alternative approaches for how you explain a certain concept, etc.
Also, seed launching does much more than just refine your online course. It can also help with:
IMPORTANT NOTE:
You can also provide incentives for people to participate in your seed launch such as exclusive access to extra resources or a discount.
The reason why seed launching is so efficient is partly due to the fact that it doesn’t require a full-fledged marketing strategy the way an actual product launch would.
All you need to do is offer early access to a group of people that you already know.
This group of people could be found through:
Before you actually publish your online course, it’s important to define your personal brand.
This is because having defined a personal brand helps you engage your target audience in a better way.
As a result of this, it can help you boost initial sales and also, find loyal customers that will buy from you in the future and recommend your product to their friends and peers.
So, what is a personal brand?
If you know what a corporate brand is, it’s pretty much the same thing: what your values are and what you hope to achieve with your products (in this case, online courses).
We mentioned how defining a personal brand can help you connect with your audience and that’s exactly where you’re going to look for inspiration for what your personal brand is going to be.
You will have already created learning outcomes and during research for your online course, you will have gone over many problems and issues that your target audience may be facing.
You can then define your personal brand as something that hopes to solve these problems.
Try to make yourself relatable with your personal brand by detailing how you ran into similar problems, figured out how to solve them and now, want to pass your knowledge on.
We’ve pretty much concluded all the steps you need to take to create and publish your first online course.
Now, we’d like to give you some common tips and tricks that will make the process easier and much more efficient.
We mentioned in our content writing section how you should keep everything simple and provide information in bite-sized chunks.
We also mentioned how you should use as simple words as possible and avoid technical jargon as much as you can.
This approach is not only effective within content writing but also within pretty much every other aspect of online course creation.
For example, during your audio narration, you should ensure that you stay focused on the topic at hand and not wander off. Providing unnecessary information within your narration can cause your audience to become bored.
Another example would be during website creation. When you’re first starting out, your website should only have material that supports and promotes your online course only.
While you should also have pages for your brand, they should be brief and concise. Adding large paragraphs of text here is not the way to go. No one’s going to read it and it will only serve to make your website ugly and uninteresting.
When we say “assets”, what we mean are resources that can be reused in future online courses.
These could be navigation menus, templates within editing tools and much more.
If you delete these assets, you’ll obviously have to create them all over again when you create your next online course.
However, if you have them saved, you can simply plug them in and add the new information for your next online course.
It will save you a whole bunch of time and effort that can be spent towards making your next online course the best it can be.
Once again, we may have touched upon this in the content writing section but it applies to pretty much every stage of the online course creation process.
For example, during video creation and editing, you should edit it in a way that’s clear for your audience. Never make cuts that are jarring or confusing.
Another example would be website creation. When you’re creating your website, you should make it in a way so that the interface is intuitive and the audience doesn’t get confused regarding navigation.
Ensuring your audience has the best experience possible at every stage is the key to ensuring that your online course will be profitable.
Typically, online courses focus on teaching one skill or solving one problem sell the best.
You can try making a course that deals with a sprawling topic but they are typically unpopular and only experienced online course creators are able to create a course like that sells well and is engaging.
These days, there are a number of areas that people want to learn about.
The most popular is definitely coding and technology. With everything involving computers these days, people are looking to gather expertise within its different niches.
Another popular category is entrepreneurship and business since turning your hobby into a profitable business is something many young people are interested in these days.
We’ve made a detailed list of popular online course categories that you can check out.
You’re a person with unique experiences, skills and expertise. You can choose to teach these skills to people who want to learn and charge them for it.
You can charge a single lump-sum fee, a recurring monthly fee or a single fee that’s spread out over multiple payments.
Ideation and Niche Selection of Online Courses
How to Gather Information for your Online Course
How to Create an Outline for your Online Course
Written Content Production for your Online Course?
How to produce Video for Content Production?
Audio for Online Courses – A-Z Guide (Setup, Recording, Gear, Settings, More)
Compiling and Organizing Content for Online Courses
Polishing, Finishing and Refining Online Courses
Choosing an Online Platform for your Online Course
Seed Launching your Online Course
Building Your Personal Brand while Launching an Online Course
Website Creation for Online Course
Tools, FAQs, Tips & Tricks to Create Online Courses
The first thing you should do once you finish creating your online course is to pat yourself on the back.
It’s definitely a big accomplishment but the work is definitely not over yet.
In order to ensure that your online course will be successful, you’re going to have to put in a lot of work to market it well.
According to Databox, 90% of web pages get zero organic traffic from Google.
This is largely because a majority of people simply create their product but spend no effort marketing and promoting it.
In this section, we’ll go over different online marketing strategies, how they can help promote your online course and how you should implement them.
Before developing a marketing strategy, you’ll have to decide how much you’ll charge students for your online course as well as how you’ll charge them.
Once you get established within the online course marketplace, you develop a sixth sense for how much a certain online course is worth.
However, for your first online course, it’s going to involve a bit of guesswork and estimation.
Most online courses cost anywhere between $10 to $2000 depending on many different factors such as the course content, the expertise of the creator, the course topic and much more.
They can even go up to $10,000 for custom online sessions and coaching.
We recommend that you price your first online course somewhere between $50 and $200. If it’s a relatively smaller course, you can even go as low as $20. Once you publish the online course, keep a close eye on your sales. If it’s not doing well, you can consider lowering the price even further.
In order to get an estimate of how much you should charge, consider the following factors:
Once you decide how much you’re going to charge, you’ll have to decide how you’re going to charge. By this, we mean how your students are going to be paying for your online course.
The options you have for payment schedules are:
To determine which option would be best for you, you’ll have to look towards your target audience and what their income levels are.
Would it allow them to afford your online course with a single payment? Or would they be more likely to buy your online course if they could spread their payments out?
Your online course is never going to find success if you don’t market it properly.
There are a number of different approaches when it comes to marketing a product online such as:
The last three examples will be explained in detail later on in this post but for now, let’s have a look at what email marketing can do for the promotion of your online course:
According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute in 2019, nearly 9 out of every 10 marketers use email marketing to distribute content organically.
This is because email marketing is one of the cheapest and most effective forms of digital marketing that you can partake in.
So, what exactly is email marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves emailing existing as well as potential customers.
It allows you to introduce them to your product (online courses), provide incentives for buying that product and also, build personal, communicative relationships.
While almost all digital marketers take advantage of email marketing, there are tons of them that go into it without much research and are then disappointed when they don’t see a rise in their customer base.
If you start email marketing without much planning and start sending emails recklessly, you can rest assured they’re going to be marked as spam and never opened.
So, what do you need to do to ensure your potential customers open your email, read it and are compelled by it? You have a few options:
QUICK TIP:
If you’re going to be employing an email marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to make use of capture forms wherever you can.
What are Capture Forms?
Well, these are sign-up forms where potential customers will provide their email to you in order to get the latest updates about your online course.
Naturally, no one is going to give you their email because often, internet users are apprehensive about giving their email out like this since they don’t want to receive spam.
Hence, you’re going to have to use a lead magnet here which entices them to sign and provide you with their email.
Some examples of places where you can have capture forms are:
If you already work within the field which your online course is about, you will most likely already have a sizable email list of individuals that may be interested in your course.
This list will be further populated by capture forms.
Once you have a big enough email list (above 100 emails), you can start developing an email campaign in order to market your online course.
Some great tools that can help you create and manage email campaigns are MailChimp, ConvertKit, Active Campaign, Zoho, Zapier and GetResponse.
SEO marketing involves using optimized content and relevant keywords to direct organic traffic towards your website. You can then direct these website visitors towards your online course.
According to isitwp, 72% of online marketers consider content creation as their most effective SEO tactic.
The type of content creation you’ll be doing is most likely a blog. By writing and publishing regular posts about topics related to your online course’s niche, you can direct relevant traffic towards your website.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you’ve published your online course on an established online course platform, you may be wondering how you can implement SEO marketing.
Well, it’s important to have a dedicated website for your brand even if your online course is not hosted on it.
You should make a website for promoting your personal brand and have external links in it that lead visitors to your online course’s page on that online course platform.
Having a dedicated website is borderline essential because it will be a hub for your personal brand and everything you represent.
Most importantly, you can use it as a tool for writing search-engine-optimized content that will gather organic traffic and bring visitors to your website.
Be sure to have relevant links and Calls-to-Actions (CTAs) within your website at the appropriate places which would direct visitors to your online course’s landing page.
QUICK TIP:
If you used an SEO/keyword research tool such as Ahrefs or SEMRush during course creation, you can also use them to find relevant keywords when writing content for your blog.
According to a study by GlobalWebIndex in 2018, approximately 54% of social media users use it to research products to buy.
This has only increased since then and you would be missing out severely on potential customers if you don’t utilize the power of social media to market your online courses.
Not all social media platforms have the same strengths and features so, you’ll have to utilize them in different ways if you’re going to market your online course effectively.
Facebook has the highest number of users out of all popular social media platforms.
While making regular posts about your online course and its resources on your personal brand page is definitely a thing you should do, utilizing Facebook live is how you’ll really gather organic traffic.
So, what exactly will you do in your Facebook live sessions?
Well, there are a number of things you can do to promote your online course such as giving a sneak preview of it and detailing how it can help people within the relevant niche.
Since you’ll be directly interacting with watchers, you can also take this opportunity to answer any questions and address any doubts potential buyers may have. \
Instagram provides a number of different ways for you to promote your online courses.
The first thing we would recommend that you do is to have scheduled posts ready to roll at distinct times throughout the day.
Typically, any time between 5 pm – 10 pm is ideal. Having a scheduled post every day during one set time is a good way to increase engagement with your brand.
You can spend a day or two crafting several posts and then, you can just schedule them to post every day. You won’t have to worry about manually making a post each day if you do this.
Don’t forget Instagram stories.
Instagram stories are little snippets that are only available to followers for the first 24 hours during which you post them.
You can use these to increase your engagement by giving sneak previews of your online course as well as by asking questions and receiving replies.
Furthermore, since these stories are only available for 24 hours, you can utilize them to have limited-time offers for customers. An example of this would be offering a discount link for your online course for the first 5 people who click on it in your Instagram story.
QUICK TIP:
Conducting polls related to your topic niche in your Instagram stories is an amazing way to increase user engagement.
Lastly, we have Instagram live. You can use Instagram live in pretty much the same way you use Facebook live.
To give brief information about what your online course is about and also, to answer queries from potential customers.
When it comes to organic traffic, Twitter may just be the best social media platform out there for it.
This is because it’s much more intimate than other platforms and allows you to directly participate in conversation with other members of your niche.
Not to say that other social media platforms don’t provide this but Twitter’s user model enables you to converse with potential customers in a much more personal way.
Twitter can be the key to online prominence in your niche.
Be sure to have a profile on Twitter and try to engage proactively in conversations related to your online course’s niche.
This will eventually lead to you becoming a prominent figure within the community and building your authority.
Then, when you market your online course and promote it on Twitter, people will be more likely to buy from you thanks to you being an established figure of the community.
To give brief information about what your online course is about and also, to answer queries from potential customers.
While gathering organic traffic for your personal brand and online course is definitely what the focus should be, the best marketing campaigns feature a combination of organic and non-organic approaches.
When it comes to the latter, one of the most widely used approaches is to run ad campaigns on social media.
Depending on how much you’re able to invest, Facebook and Instagram ads can be instrumental in increasing your reach and promoting your brand to wider audiences.
It’s a good idea to start off small when it comes to running ads to promote your online course. This is because of two reasons:
Hence, start off small and monitor the results. If the ads bring in customers and visitors to your website, then you can consider scaling them up and investing more in them.
If not, then you may have to change your approach when it comes to running ads on social media.
Don’t forget social media management tools.
As you scale your business, it may get quite hectic managing every social media profile by yourself. This is where social media management tools come in.
They make it simple to manage posts and schedules and also provide insights you can analyze to plan what your next move should be.
Some great social media management tools include Social Sprout, AgoraPulse and Hootsuite.
73% of marketers say that webinars are among the best channels to generate leads and convert audiences.
When it comes to converting people who are on the fence about buying your online course, webinars can be the single most powerful tool to help you achieve this.
Furthermore, webinars can be easily integrated into your marketing strategy.
How so?
Well, we mentioned above in the email marketing section how you should utilize “lead magnets” which are incentives for potential customers to visit your website.
One of these lead magnets can be a free invitation to a webinar that you may be hosting to promote your online course.
By clicking on the link within your email and signing up for your webinar, you will have brought potential customers one step closer to buying your online course.
Within the webinar itself, you will utilize its direct communication to build a personal connection with your audience.
Not only this but you can also use it to address doubts and apprehensions that may be stopping potential customers from buying your online course.
A “funnel” in terms of marketing strategies refers to the process and pages that a potential customer goes through which eventually leads to them buying your product.
In the case of webinars, a suitable funnel is supposed to look something like this:
As you may already know, your online course’s landing page will consist of a concise overview of what it has to offer. It will also have a Call-to-Action (CTA) button which enables page visitors to buy your course.
If you’ve never conducted a webinar before, you may be a bit confused about what exactly you should be talking about.
It’s obvious that you’re promoting your online course but constantly rambling about it is going to push customers away rather than usher them in.
Thus, you have to plan this accordingly.
We’ve detailed and summarized different sections that your webinar should consist of:
We’ve already mentioned how the Q&A session will help curb any reservations that potential buyers may have concerning your online course.
In addition to that, the entirety of your online course should be planned in a way so that it emphasizes the uniqueness of your course.
We mentioned in the choosing your online course topic section how you should target a topic that not many of your competitors are tackling.
While this may be known to you, your potential customers may not be aware of this until they actually buy your course.
Thus, it’s your job to make your audience aware of the fact that your online course is unique and provides value that your competitors do not.
Naturally, you’re going to need software for conducting a proper webinar and luckily, there are a number of tools out there that can help you out.
Some of the best ones out there are:
We mentioned above how a “funnel” within marketing typically means the stages that a customer goes through when buying your product.
So, a sales funnel can be defined as the stages or chain-of-events that a customer goes through which involves discovering, evaluating and eventually, purchasing your online course.
You’ll mostly be marketing your course online so your sales funnel will typically consist of online strategies such as email campaigns, social media ads, time-sensitive offers, podcasts, webinars, videos and landing pages.
The concept of developing sales funnels is incredibly deep and there are a number of different strategies you can adapt.
However, at the start, we recommend that you keep it as simple as possible.
Below, we’ve detailed a simple sales funnel that you can implement to market and sell your first online course:
This is the simplest sales funnel you can implement.
The simple idea is to get potential customers invested in your brand by providing genuine value for free initially. Then, you can emphasize the worth of your online course by explicitly stating how it provides similar value in a larger capacity.
If you chose to host your online course on an already established online course platform, then you can skip this section entirely.
This is because such platforms already have established payment methods for their users in exchange for either a monthly fee or a percentage of all sales that you make.
However, if you chose to set up your own website to host your online course, then a reliable payment method is absolutely necessary.
This is because you don’t want to miss out on any payment that a customer may send to you and it’s also essential that all payments be properly accounted for and logged.
The advantage of this is that it gives you complete control and you get to keep 100% of your earnings.
Before we talk about how to set up a payment method, there are some terms which you need to be aware of:
The payment gateway is responsible for securing transaction details that your customers put in and transferring them to the payment processor (explained later).
You can think of it as a tool that provides a user interface to your customers in order for them to communicate with the payment processor.
A payment processor is what’s responsible for communicating with relevant financial institutions to validate the purchase(s) being conducted by your customers.
Payment processors and payment gateways are often used interchangeably and confused with each other.
This is often because of the fact that there are many services that act as both of these things at once.
Some popular payment processors are:
There’s a high chance you may already have a Paypal account due to how popular and useful it is.
You can use it to conduct transactions online, send money to friends and family and most importantly, receive money from potential customers for your business.
Paypal is widely trusted by business owners as well as consumers alike thanks to its secure ecosystem, ease of use and helpful customer support.
Stripe is an example of what we mentioned earlier: It offers both payment gateway as well as payment processing services.
Their overall fees are cheaper than that of Paypal and their API allows you to integrate Stripe’s interface into your website for free.
Due offers complete payment services that include the payment as well as billing process for freelancers and small business owners.
It’s a great option for an online course creator like you that may have customers from all around the world.
In addition to offering project management and customizable invoicing options, it also features over 100 languages, currencies and tax structures.
Many new course creators don’t bother with taking steps to start a podcast for their online course because they fail to see how it will be beneficial to their bottom line.
So, is starting a podcast to promote your online course really worth it?
While it’s true that it’s difficult to see on the surface how a podcast will help you sell online courses, trust us when we say that it’s an extremely powerful tool for doing so.
We’ve come across course creators who started off selling online courses but ended up having a podcast that was much more popular than their actual online courses.
Once your podcast starts gaining traction, you can easily use it to promote the value of your online course.
Another convenient thing about starting a podcast is that you’ll most likely have all the gear and software you’ll need for it already.
You need a microphone and audio editing software, both of these are something you may have already invested in to perform audio recording when creating your online course.
This makes starting a podcast a particularly low-risk endeavor since you’re not wasting any money on gear or software.
If it works, it works. If it doesn’t you don’t lose anything.
We already mentioned how podcasts can help you promote your online course but let’s have a closer look at how you can achieve that and what its different benefits are:
Naturally, you’re going to be talking about the specific niche that your online course is about within your podcast episodes.
That being said, you should also make it a point to promote how your online course is able to help with certain aspects of that niche.
It can be a good idea to detail how you struggled with many common problems within the specific niche in the past. Then, detail how you overcame these problems and how you’ve shared your solutions to these problems within your online course.
Some things to keep in mind when starting a podcast are:
The first episode of your podcast should focus entirely on yourself. It should serve as an introduction to you, your background, your expertise and why students should trust you with your online course. Make yourself relatable by detailing common problems, how you were able to overcome them and how you want to share that knowledge with others.
Collaborative episodes are key. Discuss your collaborator’s struggle in these episodes and ask them how they solved certain problems within the specific niche. Also, detail how you were able to solve these problems and reiterate that you detail these solutions within your online course.
You won’t unlock the full potential that podcasting has to offer if you don’t collaborate with other members of the community.
We’ve already explained how collaborating can open your brand up to new audiences.
You can conduct collaborative episodes either by inviting prominent figures of the community over to your home or studio, or you can conduct them online via a meeting app such as Discord, Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.
If you choose to record the episode in person, you’re going to have to look towards your mic to see if it has multiple polar pattern modes or not.
If you’re using the same mic you used to record audio narration for your online course, you will most likely have a mic with a cardioid polar pattern.
Check to see if it has other polar pattern modes as well.
If your mic has a bidirectional or omnidirectional mode, you can use this to record the episode as it will pick up both your and your collaborator’s voice.
If your mic only has a cardioid polar pattern, then you need to consider investing in another mic for collaborative episodes. A single mic with a cardioid polar pattern will only be able to pick up your voice and not your collaborator’s.
If you’re recording the collaborative episode online, then you’ll have to invest in screen recorder software such as MovAVI or Streamlabs.
Ensure the software is recording when you start the call.
Once it’s done, you can rip the audio from the recorded screen video and then import it into your audio editing tool.
There, you can clean it up and edit it the way you want to make it ready for your listeners.
Once you’ve implemented effective marketing strategies and found a loyal customer base for your online course, it’s important to take steps to keep sales up.
While running additional ad campaigns for reaching new audiences can definitely work, you also need to be taking steps to ensure your existing customer base remains satisfied.
Satisfied customers are the key to scaling any business as they are the ones who will not only buy future products (any other online courses you create in the future) but will also recommend you to their friends and peers.
When it comes to management and scaling, there are a number of aspects you can look towards such as:
Naturally, once you start having students going through your online course, they are going to have confusions and issues which need to be solved.
Hence, you need to make avenues available to them through which they can contact you easily.
Students will be dissatisfied with your product if they have a confusion and find out they can’t get in touch with you in any way to clear it out. If this happens, they’ll be much less likely to recommend your online course to others.
So, how does customer support work?
There are a number of different approaches when it comes to customer support that you can adapt. Some examples of these are:
The most basic form of customer support is via live chat on your website.
This would be in the form of a chatbox that visitors on your website can send a message to you on. You can then reply to their queries instantly via that chatbox.
Obviously, in order to implement live chat, you’re going to need a dedicated website. So, this option may not be suitable if you’ve hosted your online course on an external online course platform.
QUICK TIP:
Even if you’ve hosted your online course on an online course platform, it’s still beneficial to create your own website to promote your brand. You can have external links to your online course on your website and also utilize it for customer support.
Naturally, it’s unrealistic for you to be available 24/7 to answer customer queries. To address this, you can invest in a live chat customer support tool that features a chatbot.
Chatbots are powerful AI-controlled bots that are able to answer common customer queries with ease.
One of the most common forms of addressing customer queries is via email.
You can do this manually by just providing your email at the end of your online course and stating that “If you have any queries, feel free to drop them at <your email>”.
While this may work initially when you only have a handful of students, it can quickly get difficult to manage once your customer base starts to increase.
In that case, you may have to employ the use of an external customer support tool that can help you manage email queries more effectively.
Tools such as these are able to use macros (automation) to address common queries on their own as well as categorize different types of categories into separate folders.
Phones have been used to address customer queries far before the digital age.
This is why many people, especially in the older generation still prefer seeking assistance through a phone call.
Providing customer support via phone calls for online course creators is fairly rare as it can get quite hectic once your customer base increases.
However, in the early days, you can definitely manage it on your own.
You can think of a knowledge base as a self-service page where customers can come to find solutions to common problems on their own.
It’s an ever-growing page that keeps adding solutions as recurring problems and issues arise.
You can implement this manually on your dedicated website (if you have one) by having an FAQs page.
Start by populating the FAQs page on your own based on your understanding of some common problems that your students may run into.
Then, as students go through your course, they will come to you with queries. Based on this, you should keep updating the FAQs page and adding common, generic queries and their solutions to the knowledge page.
There are also some customer support tools that can help you efficiently implement a knowledge base for your online business.
Some examples of these are HelpJuice, AzureDesk and HelpCrunch.
Depending on your online course topic, you may have to update it either every few weeks or every few months.
This is the part where many new online course creators get lazy and sales for their online course(s) plummet.
Keep in mind that in every major field, new discoveries, innovations and solutions are constantly being worked on. You have to keep up with this in order to keep your online course relevant.
Say, you created an online course that details how to perform a certain technique. Then, a few months later, a better approach to that same technique is innovated which is much more efficient.
If you don’t update your course according to this, no one is going to want to buy your online course because no one wants to learn an outdated version of a certain technique.
Hence, it’s important that you stay in touch with the goings-on in your specific community and ensure that your online course stays relevant.
Quick Tip: It’s a good idea to set reminders every few weeks or months to perform research and update your online course accordingly.
One more thing you can do during research is to make use of SEO and keyword research tools such as Mangools and SEMRush.
When you conduct keyword research on your course topic once again after a few months, you may find new keywords or you may find that certain have become less rankable while others have become more rankable.
You should update the keywords within your course content accordingly.
As part of your marketing strategy, you may have employed several techniques to become a prominent member of your niche’s online community.
Some of these techniques may be hosting webinars, constantly posting on social media and starting a podcast.
All of these techniques serve to increase your authority and make you a prominent figure in your niche’s online community.
The thing you have to acknowledge is that people online have very short attention spans and memories. If you stop posting and engaging with them, they will forget about you and your online course(s) very quickly.
Thus, it’s important that you don’t cease marketing efforts once you find a loyal customer base. In fact, this is the point where you should scale them up since you’ll have the money to do so now.
If you started a podcast, invest in better gear to increase its production value.
If you were running social media ads, increase their budget to widen your reach.
If you were posting 20 tweets a day and interacting with 5 – 10 members of the community every day, try to invest time in boosting these numbers up.
Last but definitely not least, you have to take steps to ensure your website is not prone to hackers and/or malware attacks.
This may not be a concern in your initial days but as your brand starts gaining prominence, this can become more likely.
Having your website hacked when you’re serving a large customer base can be devastating and cause you hundreds if not thousands of dollars in profits. It can definitely be something that you can never recover from.
Hence, it’s definitely a good idea to implement security on your website before something like this ever happens.
Note: Of course, you only need to worry about this if you have hosted your online course on your own website. If you’ve published it on an online course platform, they will handle the security for you.
Some steps you can take to increase your website’s security are:
One more thing you can do is invest in some paid security tools that can help you keep your website safe from hackers.
Some popular examples are:
Codeguard Basic is an anti-malware tool from BlueHost which is a popular website hosting service.
It constantly monitors activity on your website and alerts you whenever it detects something irregular.
Furthermore, it makes regular backups of your website and stores them in different locations. This allows you to have access to several backups in case your website goes down or is hacked.
We made a detailed review of Codeguard Basic that you can check out to see if it’s suitable for you as an online course creator.
Similar to Codeguard Basic, Site Scanner is an anti-malware tool from another website hosting service called SiteGround.
Site Scanner is much more efficient at detecting suspicious activity and tampering by third parties on your chosen website compared to Codeguard Basic.
Furthermore, its interface is easy to use and it provides you with weekly reports that are easy to analyze so that you can make changes accordingly.
We tested SG Site Scanner and wrote a detailed review on it that you can check out to determine if it’s for you or not.
In the end, we just have to say that while creating and selling online courses can definitely be very profitable, it’s definitely not easy.
You have to stay consistent during creation, selling as well as management.
Slacking during creation will lead to an unengaging course, during selling, it will lead to no sales and during management, it will lead to a dwindling customer base.
Hence, you need to stay on your toes at all times to ensure your course stays relevant and keeps finding loyal customers.
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