I have been selling online courses for about two years now. I first started on Udemy and made a few hundred bucks a month.
It was a nice gig and paid some bills, but wasn’t anything too crazy. And I certainly wasn’t able to travel around the world with that income.
Then…about a year ago, I decided to take online courses more seriously and began selling on Teachable. That really changed my life.
My first Teachable course did so well that it pays my rent every single month…and then some.
Pretty crazy if you think about it right?
But it wasn’t without a ton of mishaps sometimes large periods of stress and frustration.
However, all of the blood, sweat, and tears were worth it. I’ve been able to travel to cool places like Paris, Guadalajara, and Banff with my online course income.
Since my first course, I have launched other Teachable courses to varying degrees of success.
Some of them replicated my success on that first course. Others completely bombed and rarely sell at all.
But that’s all good news for you because you can learn from my mistakes. I’ve pretty much made every mistake possible haha.
So, I wanted the focus of this blog post to be about things I wished I knew when creating my first online course.
1. Focus on Premium Courses
I like to focus most of my time creating premium courses (priced at $100+ or more).
I do this because it weeds out cheap customers (who are also ironically the most needy). Second, I do put a decent amount of time and effort designing, recording, and editing my courses.
I find that most people really under-price their courses. They offer a ton of great content, but then price a course for $25.
That’s like going to Paris to eat McDonald’s!
At $25 you’re going to have to sell a lot of courses to cover your rent or mortgage!
The good thing about offering premium courses is even you have a low conversion rate, you can still make a few grand a month.
If you sell a course for $200, you only need to sell 5 of them to make $1,000 a month!
I’ve learned that it’s much easier to do that than to sell 100 courses priced at $10.
Premium is the way to go folks!
2. Identify Your Audience
A lot of people focus a ton of time building their online course. That’s great! You should be proud of spending so much time creating a desirable product.
However, they often forget to consider about their audience. Your audience is the most important thing!
If you build it, they will come, right?
Not necessarily…
You want to target the right people to market your course to. You aren’t going to be able to sell many Ferarri’s to homeless guys.
So keep your audience in mind.
Figure out what their pain points (problems) are and how you can solve them.
You aren’t in the game of selling online courses. You’re in the business of selling SOLUTIONS!
No one buys an online course to “learn” something. They buy it to solve a problem they have.
It took me a long time to figure that out, but once I did, my online course income really took off because I was able to target and address the right audience.
3. Always Over-Deliver
Personally, I find that offering a premium course to customers is a little stressful. I know people are paying a good deal of money for my course.
As a result, I have to over-deliver. It’s like eating at an expensive Michelin Star restaurant.
If you know customers are going to be shelling out $200 per person for a meal, your food better damn well be the best they ever had!
That’s why I always try to create good course bonuses and follow up and check on the progress of students.
If someone emails you, try to respond within the first 12 – 24 hours. That shows you’re really responsive.
And once in a while, throw your students a free bone. Maybe it’s a free guide or just some notes you scribbled down.
They will really appreciate it.
The name of the game is to over-deliver. If there’s one thing I learned from business in general, people aren’t necessarily angry when they pay a lot for something.
They’re angry when they get ripped off or when they don’t feel like they got their money’s worth.
Under-promise and over-deliver!
4. Get an email List ASAP
Okay I’m going to be real here…I didn’t start an email list for a long time.
It was just something I put of for weeks and even months at a time.
After all….it can be daunting starting an email list from scratch. And what if no one actually subscribes? You’ll look like a fool, right?
That was my line of thinking. But I’ve now come to realize that it’s just bogus!
These days, an email list is something I get started ASAP even if I don’t have a lot of traffic. An email list will do wonders for any online business.
These are most often your most loyal and devoted fans. These people are giving your their information and agreeing to receive daily emails from you.
If you build trust with them, you can sell them pretty much anything.
Yes, this takes time and hard work, but if you put in the effort, your email list will be one of the most valuable parts of your business.
Once you get your email list, start emailing people daily (even if it’s just to check in).
The point of an email list is to let your potential customers know you personally.
It takes time (sometimes days, sometimes week, and sometimes months) to convert a customer.
Keeping daily contact with them helps shorten that sales cycle, which means more sales for you!
5. Don’t Be Afraid To Sell
I was always a shy person growing up. It’s just who I am. I’ve tried to grow out of it to some degree as an adult.
I think many people have the same problem I do when it comes to selling. They are a little uncomfortable doing it.
And you might think it’s sleazy.
After all…no one wants to be known as a “used car salesman”, right?
But DON’T be afraid to sell.
Don’t be. People WANT their solutions to be solved. If you can offer them a solution, they won’t see it as a sale. They’ll see it as a problem solver.
So don’t be afraid to promote your course to your email list. Don’t be afraid to advertise that course on your website.
And don’t be afraid to ask people to review your course.
The quicker you get over this mental block, the better you’ll be.
6. Learn To Copywrite
Good copywriting is important to selling a course. Copywriting is basically sales and persuasion in the written word.
If your course has a good sales page and is targeting the right audience, you will be a big hit.
The key to good copywriting is just practice. There’s no way around it. However, this is one really important skill to master.
A good way to improve copywriting is just reading good sales pages. That’s why I like to go to successful courses and see what’s on the sales page.
Try to see what makes this course so successful and implement those ideas into your own sales page.
And the best advice I ever got about copywriting is to write in a conversational tone.
Forget what they taught you in school. It’s largely useless in the real world. If you want to sell something to someone you can’t write like an academic.
You need to write like you’re having a casual conversation with a friend.
If you do this, your copywriting sales will get 3x better instantly.
7. Advertising Takes Time
Advertising your course (on Google for Facebook) takes time. Don’t go all in and spend $1,000 in your first month.
The key to advertising is SCALING. Start with a small amount of money. If the conversion rate makes sense, spend more and more.
Scaling up slowly is incredibly important not only to maximize conversions, but also to ensure you’re now throwing money down the toilet.
In general, I like to spend a small amount of money (around $2 – $3 per day) to get some data before scaling up or shutting down the marketing strategy.
And be patient as well. Often times, the longer you let an ad campaign run, the more successful it’ll be.
8. Always Offer Bonuses
Bonuses are incredibly important to sell your course. This is another important copywriting strategy I’ve seen online and it works well.
Basically what you want to do is offer your course a few bonuses to entice students to join.
Bonuses can include a lot of things like:
- A phone call with you
- One-on-one consulting
- Bonus lectures, guides, cheat sheets
- Templates
- ….and more
And be sure to give a monetary value to the free bonuses.
For example, say something like: The value of these bonuses is $200, which is twice what you’ll pay today!
People ALWAYS like getting free stuff. It makes them feel special
Things I Learned From Selling Online Courses
Well, there you have it!
These are the things I wished I knew before I started building and selling my first online course.
And I hope this really helps those of you who are building your first online course.
An online course is a great way to generate passive income to travel around the world. And I’m proud of the income stream I get from my courses.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, just send me a message!
Until next time,
Andrew
Hey Andrew, great tips!
Premium courses are definitely the way to go. They take a bit longer to put together, but as you say, you receive a lot less of the nitpicky people that may have just jumped onto a $10 Udemy special.
What I also find with premium courses is that because the students are so invested, they tend to engage more in support groups & can help out others with the practical things they’ve learned by taking the course.
Do you prefer advertising on specific platforms?
Cheers,
David
Thanks! I definitely agree with you. I still have some courses on Udemy and the return rate is absurdly high 🙁
Right now, I only advertise my courses through Adwords, but will be trying Facebook soon.