Whenever we, the human race faces an extraordinary situational conundrum, a new revolution often erupts as an adaptation.
Some classic examples include the introduction of the internal combustion engine, the printing press, computer, or the internet. It is no different from the current COVID crises we are all experiencing.
Thanks to the crisis, we have all been forced to abandon the one thing we have been taught to do since birth; socializing. Consequently, we have been forced to stop activities such as one on one teaching, physical meetings, and so on.
Well, they say every cloud has a silver lining, and you might be super fortunate to take advantage of this.
To put things into perspective, Zoom’s popularity spiked to 200 million daily users in March 2020, compared to just 10 million users in December 2019. People have shifted to online learning, making online courses a new lucrative opportunity for everyone that has even the slightest knowledge in any topic.
To all those who are passionate about teaching – it’s your time now. Another thing to mention is while class-related topics have become more lucrative in the recent past due to the crisis, online courses are not limited to class courses. You can venture into different topics such as weight loss and dietary, marketing courses, stock trading courses, dog training course, the list is endless.
Now, I know what you might be thinking 🤔💡, I have these skills that I believe people would be interested in, but how do I turn that into a course? Well, we’ll get into that soon.
It is actually very simple and easy to create your courses online, sell it, and earn profit from it. Now, there are two options to achieve this. You can either build your website, brand yourself, and sell courses through it, or you can sell your courses through various third-party platforms.
Each has its pros and cons and it all depends on your personal preferences, the time you are willing to spend marketing your course, or what you want to achieve.
Why should you create an online course?
The e-learning market is destined to be earning large profits in the coming years. It is predicted that the market will exceed 325 billion by the year 2025 at a rate of 5% year on year.
This means that if you start the right marketing for your online courses then you can earn approximately 6 figure income per year from it. But the profit depends on various factors.
To ensure that you earn a good amount of profit from your online courses and teaching, you must introspect your e-learning business with these questions:
- How good your online courses are doing?
- Are your courses attracting audiences?
- How well is your marketing strategy?
- How good is your sales planning?
- What is the level of your expertise?
Is starting an Online Course Profitable?
To answer this question, we need to focus on two key factors. Is your course rich in content and educative enough? And secondly, how is your marketing strategy?
The step of guaranteeing success is ensuring that you create such an amazing course that people would not only be willing to buy it but also refer their friends.
Secondly, no one will purchase your course if they don’t know about it in the first place. You have to market it and make it visible to your potential customers and wait for the magic to happen.
In summary, these are the factors you need to consider when evaluating your projected level of profitability.
- Your Personal Branding and Promotion
- Level of Expertise in the subject courses you are developing
- The quality of the courses created
- Website Content like blog posts, books, videos/vlogs, audio/podcasts, etc.
- Size of your Audience and your reach
- Email List
- Market Size & Competition analysis
- Your Marketing Skills
- Sales planning
As you can see, all these factors revolve around content and marketing.
Getting a good online presence, an active social network or an email list will give you major benefits, especially when it comes to marketing. But as you know, it’s always crawl, walk, run.
Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get the results you intended during your initial stages of launch. It takes time for you to achieve a loyal audience, and when you do, you’ll need to spend more on the promotion of your brand.
The more the individuals are aware of the name of your brand and the product you sell, the greater the profit you can get out of the sales. Without forgetting that your brand popularity opens new doors of opportunity such as starting a premium live teaching lessons, webinars, and closed groups. Gradually, you will get a better grip on this when you start creating your own online tutoring empire.
How to Create an Online Course
When you decide on starting something new, you need to first plan everything. Good planning and strategy are beneficial as it directs you to focus on the important areas of your online course business.
Here is a step by step guide that will take you through the entire process that is involved in creating an online course while focusing on the important parameters.
1.Decide on a Topic
The first thing that you need to do is to decide the subject for which you will be creating courses. Actually, this is a very easy part as everyone already has an idea of their area of expertise.
Don’t overthink it.
Think of a category that you are most passionate and skilled in, do a simple Google search to see if other people are interested in that topic, and, voilà! You have yourself a topic to create a course on.
Also, if you have expertise in one or more subjects or fields, then you can have courses in more than one category. You can choose to focus on employment specific courses to train people in digital marketing, sales, SEO, content marketing, etc.
The other option is you can have courses in school and college level subjects like English literature, physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, Geography, etc. These subject courses are also doing great these days as every parent is always looking for good online courses and tuitions for their children.
In any case that you can’t decide which subject or field to select for your online courses then you can try these tips.
- Look for the field or subject that you have the most interest and passion.
- Observe in which subjects your friends ask your help.
- Follow the subjects that are popular as “difficult to crack” among your target audience and you find it quite interesting and easy.
Alternatively, you can try out other methods to get a public opinion as mentioned below:
- Win the opinion of your audience via email: Ask your family and friends what they think about the topic you want to venture into. Alternatively, submit your list of ideas to your audience for online courses and invite them through a survey to choose a course subject. This should assist you in determining which network is most on-demand.
- Ask your fans on social media: forming a group or a survey on either Facebook and Instagram (or both channels) and asking them directly is another powerful way to draw people in and gain feedback. With people from your network, you can also create a community, ask for their answers, and find out which is the most famous.
- Invest in your expertise: it might be an excellent place to start if there is a subject that you think you ‘own’ and have professional knowledge of. The best way to start with online courses is to share your expertise, especially if it is for a highly valued niche subject.
2.Research on your Online Course Subject
Once you decide which subject you want to create the online courses, then the next step is to research your selected subject, make notes, and prepare study materials.
These notes will help you in two ways. One is that you can refer to them when creating the course so that you don’t miss out on important points and the second one is that these notes can be developed into study materials for students. These days almost every online course provides its subscribers with study materials in pdf format.
3.Make a structure of your Online Course
You cannot just start your course from anywhere. When you begin to teach something, whether it’s online or offline, you need to start with the basics then go to advanced topics.
In the same way, when you have everything ready for the course then you need to plan the structure for easy tracking and follow up both on your end and your customers.
Planning the structure involves many factors such as:
- With which topic to start the course
- Rearranging the topics in a way that you start with the basics and end it on an advanced level.
- Laying out the subtopics within a topic lesson
- Planning the content of the lesson so that students can connect one lesson to the other when you progress with other lessons.
- Thinking of innovative ways to make your lesson engaging and fun to learn.
- Researching ways to make difficult topics easy for students to learn.
4.Create your Subject Content for the Course
Your content in each lesson decides the quality of your online course. People will take up your course only if you have good content.
You should scan for any digital material if you have been making content, from insightful leaflets to Word documents with useful data that you can use. Do you write a blog, for instance? Did you document the last workshop, training, or webinar of yours? It is a good starting point to reuse old content, particularly if this content has not been seen by many eyes yet.
You can still create new content, of course. It can take a while to make educational videos, but right now, it is the most popular and sought-after form of online learning.
5. Selling your Online Course
As previously mentioned, you can either build your own website and sell your course through it or you can browse through the available e-learning platforms where you can create and market your online courses.
While designing your own website may sound like a more lucrative option, it requires a lot of time and effort and can be quite a challenge if you are just starting or have a limited budget. However, you might have to create one if you are planning on having multiple related courses.
Alternatively, if you are just planning to create one course or different related courses and don’t want to spend so much time and effort on developing a personal website, you can opt for third-party platforms.
These platforms allow you to host your courses on their servers, market your course through their website, and create access points for your customers.
Here are some of the most popular online courses hosting platforms.
- Thinkfic
- Teachable
- Spayee
- Learnworlds
- Kajabi
- Learndash
- Podia
- Ruzuku
- Academy of Mine
- WizIQ
- Udemy
- Shaw Academy
- Skillshare
- LinkedIn Learning
Other factors involved in Creating an Online Course
The process of creating a course does not end here. Once you have decided on the subject, planned out the course and the content, and selected the platform to sell your course, you need to enhance your marketing skills as well. Along with the marketing skills you will need to focus on other factors too. These are:
- Setting the Price: the price you set might depend on the length of the course, the effort, and the content you have put in. The price parameters also vary with your brand recognition and credibility that you have earned in the market. If you are new to this then you can start on less and then gradually when you earn the recognition you can increase the price.
You should also research how your competitors are pricing their courses because, in the end, customers always end up comparing the prices of several courses before finally purchasing one.
However- and this is really important- don’t fall to the trap of thinking that setting low prices will bring you more sales. It will surprisingly give you negative results and here is why. People often perceive the price as a measure of quality.
Low prices are associated with low quality and vice versa. Therefore, you might end up making more sales if you set high prices compared to low prices, but also make sure the quality is top-notch.
- Course Title: An attractive title wins the race. Don’t you get lured by unique out-of-the-box titles on the internet that you feel the urge to see what is it? The same happens with selling the online course. If you have catchy titles like “Expert guide to..”, “Ultimate guide to…”, “How to …”, “Solve within Minutes ….” Then you are sure to lure your audience.
- Promote your course: Promoting your course on various social media platforms LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. is the key to reaching your audience as well as increase your customer base. Tell your followers what’s unique about your course and its benefits and convince then how your course can help them get ahead in life.
Conclusion
Creating a great course is not an easy task to do. It requires a lot of effort, determination, and hard work. But once you start and establish yourself, you can actually see the worth of all that effort being paid off quite well.
Many educators have successfully established their brand online and launching great courses. They had all at one time started from scratch and made it into big profits so you can do it too.