Pros And Cons Of Selling Online Courses

If you want to make money online to travel, selling online courses can be a good business model. 

Online courses in a good niche can make hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars every month. And best of all? A lot of this income can be passive income.

In fact, selling online courses is one of the passive income streams I use to fund my international travels. So I’m very grateful for that income. 

Now, it takes a lot of work to sell an online course. But if you do it right, you can make a decent amount of money too.

I’m going to discuss the pros and cons of selling online courses in this blog post so you can get a better idea of what to expect.

My Experience With Online Courses

I started my first online course by selling on Udemy. Udemy is basically an online market place for online courses. 

You can enroll in courses from a variety of topics ranging from computer programming to drawing/art to music lessons to finance. 

The good thing about Udemy is they drive a lot of traffic to their website through advertising and marketing. 

As a result, Udemy is a good platform for beginners especially if you don’t have a big audience yet.

But you can make A TON more money by hosting a course on your own website. Udemy takes a big cut of your earnings.

In fact, Udemy regularly took 50% of my sales!

Well, that didn’t fly with me. So I decided to host my own website and drive traffic to it. 

That’s when I started selling online courses through Teachable.

Teachable is a great option to host your online course. They have a good free option (that takes a small cut of your sales). 

They also have paid hosting plans that allow you to make coupons, engage in advanced marketing, and a lot of other cool stuff. 

Anyways, my first course on Teachable actually ended up doing pretty well (a grand or two every month). 

So after that success, I started several other online courses. Some have worked out well and some bombed. 

But anyways, that’s enough rambling. Let’s discuss some of the pros and cons of selling online courses.

Pros Of Selling Online Courses

There are a lot of benefits to selling online courses:

1. High Margins!

One of my favorite things about online courses is that they are such high margin businesses.

In fact, I really don’t have much expenses to support this business.

My online course business has two real expenses. The first is paying for the basic teachable pricing plan – which comes out to about $40 bucks per month. 

I also spend some money on advertising. This past month, I put a daily budget of $40 – which turns out to be about $1,200 per month.

Other than that, I don’t have many expenses.

This is great because it makes the business really scalable. If you generate more revenue and your expenses don’t increase you’ll do really well!

With online courses, it’s not uncommon to see net margins (after all expenses) in the 70% range!

2. Passive Income Baby!

I love passive income. I think it’s the holy grail out of all income streams.

Passive income just means you do some initial work and collect on the cash flow for life.

Your online course doesn’t need to rest. It can make you money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

Sure, you have to deal with things like customer support, answering student questions, updating content, and so on.

However, the income stream is largely passive.

You are not trading your time for money anymore. And I absolutely love that.

I love just being able to take a vacation for two weeks on the whim and still see sales come in.

If I took a vacation from my desk job, I wouldn’t be getting paid for that time off!

Never underestimate the passive income potential of an online course.

In fact, there are so many things you can do to automate your course to make it more passive.

For example, a big part of my online course sales funnel is my email list. I have automated emails for a lot of my courses. 

This means new email subscribers are getting a daily email for 100+ days.

And eventually some of those emails subscribers turn into paying customers 🙂

3. High Sales Price

I typically design my courses to be premium products. This means I produce great quality content and charge a premium for it all.

I currently have several courses out there in various niches. My lowest priced course is $90 and my highest is $350.

When your courses are priced at that range, you really don’t have to sell a lot of copies to make money.

If your course is priced at $200, you only need to sell 5 copies a month to make $1,000!

$1,000 bucks can cover rent (and then some) in most cities around the world!

As a result, I try to tell people don’t worry so much about traffic.

What is more important is targeting the RIGHT audience and how many people you are converting.

All the traffic in the world doesn’t make a difference if you don’t have the right audience.

For one of my courses, my website only gets on average 150 hits a day (or 4,500 hits per month).

But that one site still generates over $2,000 per month in profit.

You don’t need a huge home run to make decent money from your courses.

4. Courses Can Be About Anything

I love how you can make an online course about pretty much anything.

Courses that target the “big three” niches are the typically best: (1) Health/Fitness, (2) Making Money, (3) and Love/Dating/Relationships.

If you have any courses in those areas, you should do pretty well.

You can also design and sell a course from your own experiences.

One of my good friends is a really amazing yoga teacher.

Anyways, she told me a bunch of guys have approached her for personal sessions because they want to know the basic fundamental yoga poses so they don’t look stupid in class.

So, I helped her create a course around that and she’s making a few grand a month now.

As you can see, you can create online courses based on your hobbies and interests.

And you’d be surprised by how many people have the same interests and would pay for a course like that!

Cons of Selling Online Courses

Now, selling online courses is great and all, but there are also a few drawbacks…null

1. You Need An Audience

One thing I totally underestimated when it comes to selling online courses is the power of an audience. When I built my first online course, I really didn’t have an audience.

I mean I had just created my website and didn’t even have my email list.

As you might have guessed, my first course struggled for a long time. 

You need to build an audience before you can sell an online course.

No, you don’t need thousands and millions of fan boys and fan girls to make good money. BUT you need to have a small following.

That’s why I always tell people to create blogs to supplement their online courses. The blog is what gets you discovered so you can sell your course.

2. It’s A Ton Of Work!

No one will admit to this, but teaching is hard work.

Okay…maybe it’s not as hard as teaching in person like your third grade teacher…

But you still have to plan the course, write the script, record the video, and then edit and maybe even reshoot portions of the course.

That all takes time and energy and it can be grueling. In fact, it regularly takes me at least 2 – 3 weeks to build an online course from scratch.

My best advice is to not focus on making everything “perfect”. That’ll just drive you crazy.

3. Buyer Intent Is Low

I think one of the biggest challenges people underestimate is buyer intent.

Some people wake up in the morning and remember they have to get more tooth paste or makeup.

But most people don’t wake up in the morning and say “I have to buy that cooking online course before my date tomorrow night!”

Online courses aren’t normally something people think about buying.

As a result, it takes a decent amount of persuasion and good copywriting to get those sales.

Final Thoughts On Creating & Selling Online Courses

Overall, if you want to create another online income stream, selling online courses is a good strategy.

It takes a ton of work to build your audience and sell to them. However, it’s totally worth it.

Online courses are great, high margin passive income streams. Plus, you can help a bunch of people achieve their goals and dreams with your online course.

It’s a win-win for everyone!

P.S. if you want to make money selling online courses, I would highly recommend hosing on Teachable.

Not only do they have great free tools to help build your business, but hosting on them can actually boost your Google SEO rankings significantly.