Step-by-Step Guide with Tools to Use, Tips & More
This in-depth guide goes over how to maintain your online course and keep it relevant.
If you’re wondering how to:
Then, you’re in the right place.
We’ve compiled actionable techniques that ensure your sales stay up consistently.
Let’s get started.
Once you have started selling your online course, it’s important to properly manage it as well.
Without proper management, your audience will lose interest, your reputation will be affected and future sales will suffer.
Keeping this in mind…
We’ll detail all the steps you need to take to ensure your online course continues to provide value to your customers and does not become outdated.
Just like any service or business, adding customer support for your online courses is a must.
Your students will come up with queries, questions and issues when they go through your online course so, it’s important that you have proper channels set up to address them.
Customer support can be implemented in a number of different ways.
The main types of customers support are:
Your students will consume content through a number of different mediums such as phones, laptops etc.
Hence, when they have a query, they may want to get in touch via a specific channel so, it’s your job to ensure they are able to do that.
The main types of channels you can consider being available through are:
Naturally, there is a plethora of tools and software available that can help you implement this well.
Tools such as Zendesk ensure that all of your queries are received via these different channels and organized in a single dashboard for you to address.
Note: We’ll go over popular tools that enable different forms of customer support later on in this section.
If you chose to host your online course on a website you built yourself, you can consider adding live chat to that website.
In this way, any visitor on your website can choose to inquire about any issue they have and you can communicate with them directly via live chat.
A knowledge base can be considered to be a self-service page where your students can find answers to common queries and issues.
You can choose to establish a knowledge base by investing in a knowledge base customer support software or you can do it manually.
To do the latter, you’ll need to have your own website where you’ve hosted your online course.
Just add an FAQs page to this website and keep constantly updating it with answers to queries that your students bring in.
Being available on multiple channels and constantly addressing student queries without utilizing a dedicated customer support tool can get very hectic.
Thus, it’s a good idea to invest in a customer support tool that compiles all queries from different channels into a single window where you can analyze and address them.
At this point in your online course selling journey, you’ll ideally be pulling in enough revenue to afford a monthly subscription to a good customer support tool.
Some great customer support tools to consider are:
HelpCrunch is pretty much the Swiss army knife of customer support tools.
It comes with live chat integration, availability on different channels as well as a knowledge base.
You can even set it up to issue alerts whenever a query comes in and isn’t addressed for more than 24 hours.
Finally, it’s also quite reasonably priced at $15 per month.
It’s natural to assume that you’re not going to be available to answer student queries 24/7.
This is where Drift shines compared to its competitors due to its easily configurable chatbot.
The chatbot is able to answer common queries on its own while you’re unavailable.
Furthermore, it also features availability on multiple channels so you can receive queries via email, social media and your website.
It even has a free plan that you can try out.
As its name suggests, this customer support tool helps you with customer queries, live on your website.
In addition to receiving queries via your website, LiveChat also allows your customers to send in queries via email.
It’s quite generously priced at $19 per month.
HelpJuice enables receiving customer queries via different channels such as social media, email and live chat.
However, the part where it excels is its knowledge base features.
HelpJuice is definitely worth considering if you want a customer support tool to establish a decent knowledge base to support your online courses.
QUICK TIP:
We’ve compiled an extensive list of the 25 best customer support tools for online course creators that you can check out to find the best one for you.
For further information on how to perform effective customer support, you can check out our customer support and service guide.
This is the number one reason why many online courses sell incredibly well initially but fall into irrelevancy a few months later.
Depending on the niche of your online course, you may have to update it fairly regularly or from time to time such as every few months.
Remember that new techniques and innovations are constantly being made in every field and you have to account for this.
People are going to stop investing in your online course if they feel that the information it provides is outdated and irrelevant.
Hence, it’s a good idea to set up a schedule or a reminder to perform updates to your online course after a set interval.
If you chose to host your online course on your own website, updating will be fairly simple. All you have to do is update existing slides, maybe record some new audio narration and then re-upload your files.
On the other hand, if you chose to have it published on an established online course marketplace, it may be a little more complicated.
Most online course marketplaces have the option to edit and update your online course.
If the marketplace you chose does not have this option, then, you may have to make changes to your files and reupload your entire online course altogether.
This, as you can imagine, is less than ideal because you will lose all of your customer ratings, reviews and testimonials (something to think about when you’re choosing an online marketplace).
You can check out our step-by-step guide on updating online courses to understand all steps you have to take to keep them relevant.
If you’ve done promotion and marketing for your online course well, chances are that you’re already a prominent figure within your niche’s specific online community.
The key here is to acknowledge the fact that you should not stop your marketing and engagement efforts once you’ve found a customer base for your online courses.
Trust us when we say that if you stop putting in the effort to engage audiences on different online platforms, your audience and customer base will start dwindling.
For example: podcast to promote your online course – You should not stop making more episodes once customers start rolling in.
Another example: social media posts – If you were running ads on Instagram and Facebook, you should not stop doing so once you find customers.
In fact, you should increase your ad budget in order to reach even wider audiences.
Constantly post updates about your online course and its relevant resources on social media.
Quick Tip: You can create several social media posts beforehand and then set a publishing schedule to automate the process.
Consistent community engagement online is the key to ensure that your brand stays relevant and your online course sales rise instead of falling.
We’ve also made a complete guide on community engagement for online courses that you can check out.
Once you establish a loyal customer base and become a prominent member of your niche’s online community, you need to make yourself ready for attacks from hackers.
Note: This is only a concern if you have your own dedicated website. If you merely have your online course hosted on an established online course marketplace, you don’t need to worry about this.
Naturally, having your website hacked when you’re serving several students can be devastating. Hence, you need to be prepared before it ever happens.
Some simple steps you can take to make your website more secure are:
You can also enlist the help of paid security tools to help make your website more secure.
Some examples of these tools are:
This tool makes regular backups of your website and informs you whenever any irregular changes occur within it.
Not only does it back up your website daily but it also stores multiple copies of it across different locations online. Thus, in the event of your website being hacked, you won’t need to worry about losing any precious data.
You can check out our comprehensive review of Codeguard Basic to get an idea of whether it’s the right tool for you or not.
SG Site Scanner is a malware detection tool from the web hosting service, SiteGround.
It’s very easy and efficient to detect any irregularities or tampering by third parties on your website.
Its friendly interface is very easy to understand.
Moreover, it offers manageable reports on a weekly basis that you can analyze to make specific changes to your website.
We’ve tested and written a detailed review of SG Site Scanner that you can read to figure out if it’s suitable for you or not.
Quick Tip: For detailed steps on ensuring effective website security, you can check our step-by-step guide for making your online course website secure.
Conclusively, we just have to emphasize the fact that you need to stay on your toes to ensure your online course stays relevant and keeps finding more customers.
Your online course is a plant that’s going to die if you stop watering it.
Hence, take the necessary steps to ensure that it does not become outdated and keeps churning out revenue for you.
What steps do you take to effectively manage and scale your online course? Let us know in the comments below.
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