How Do I Sell Online Courses On My Website?
The flourishing eLearning sector presents lucrative opportunities for edupreneurs to share their experience and get paid. If you are an expert in a topic and want to showcase your skills, you can create online courses and sell them to an audience. All you have to do is create downloadable courses that people can leverage to learn about a new topic or acquire new skills.
But the main mind block educators who are brainstorming about how to sell online courses face is whether to host courses on the marketplace or on their own website. In this article, we discuss why selling online courses from your website is better and how to do it.
Why Must You Sell Online Courses From Your Own Website?
Before getting into how to sell courses online from your website, let's discuss its significance over hosting courses on marketplaces like Udemy.
First of all, we'll see why hosting your courses on eLearning marketplaces is a poor choice for any course creator getting into selling online courses:
- You don't own the platform or the brand
- You don't own the visitor traffic
- You can't keep 100% of the revenue generated
- You can't engage with students
- You have no control over the policies (for example, the refund policy)
Anyone who has been successful selling online courses would tell you that these are red flags. The less control you have over the business elements, the more risk you need to encounter.
If you are not convinced yet, here are some reasons why selling courses from your course platform is the best idea.
Low Start-Up Costs
Creating a course website back in the day was definitely a challenging task. But, thanks to the technological advancements we enjoy today, creating a course platform now doesn't require a hefty budget or investment. There are clone scripts available in the market to clone popular eLearning websites or marketplaces.
Broad Audience Reach
This point might be surprising for many. You might wonder how it is possible to reach a broader audience than well-established eLearning marketplaces like Coursera or Udemy. The answer is simple: creating and selling courses from your own online course platform doesn't compel course creators to be bound by geographical limitations. In contrast, third-party marketplaces set several limitations to creators when it comes to the number of audiences or to whom they can sell your courses to.
Brand Creation And Visibility
Building a brand for your eLearning business is not easy, but it is important for your growth. Hosting online courses on eLearning platforms tends to mask your brand's visibility, as you cannot directly access your audience to build your brand further. Whereas, when you host online courses on your own course platform, it increases your brand's visibility among your target learners.
Freedom To Implement Marketing Techniques
eLearning platforms have their own marketing strategies, which is great to a certain extent, but if you want to focus on the growth of your brand, it is important to have freedom over the marketing techniques. When you put up online courses on your own course website, you can implement marketing strategies like email marketing, social media marketing, running paid ads on social platforms of your choice, and more.
Gathering Customer Insights
When you create an online course platform, you can integrate advanced analytics and reporting capabilities to track customer visits and their behavior to tailor your offerings based on your target audience's expectations.
The High Return On Investment (ROI)
Selling your online courses from your online learning platform is free from listing fees, commission, or other service charges. All these charges stand as a barrier to your revenue growth. Whereas hosting online courses on your own platform lets you keep all the money for yourself. You can set the commission rates and course price the way you want and modify them accordingly, which is not possible when you work with third-party eLearning marketplaces.
Customization Of Your Course Platform
Hosting courses on the marketplace implies you have no control over the look and feel of your course page. But when you create your own course platform, you can implement custom features and functionalities to create highly engaging courses and deliver a great eLearning experience to your audience base.
Sell Online Courses From Your Own Website
If you are looking to have more control over the entire process of selling online courses, right from creating the content to receiving payment, the best bet is to sell courses from your own website. It's the perfect choice if you want to successfully grow your eLearning business and scale it on the go.
1. Brainstorm Course Topic Ideas
If you want to sell profitable online courses, the first thing you need to do is gather course ideas. Ideally, think about multiple content ideas which will help you launch online courses successfully. When choosing topics for your online course, consider the type and content of your eLearning business.
This helps to attract your target audience and builds better market authority for your eLearning business. A great approach to get more course topic ideas for your course is to ask your target audience directly to get a new perspective and review new ideas.
2. Validate Your Content Idea
Once you have gathered good ideas for creating content for your course, validate each option to decide which will work the best. Validating your course idea before selling your final course content will help boost sales and generate more money for your eLearning brand. It is a better way to ensure people will surely buy your online course before going forward with creating the content.
Also, keep in mind that you should never create course content around any trending idea just because it's popular. Instead, develop courses around the topic you have authority in and ensure your target audience likes it.
3. Build A Fully Customized Website
To sell online courses efficiently, you need to create a fully customized website to offer a user-friendly experience for people who want to buy your online courses. Ideally, you want your eLearning website to look unique and professional, which is essential for the first impression among your target audience.
But building your online course platform straight up from the ground can be a costly affair that requires a lot of planning and effort. The best choice would be to use a course management software that works as a website builder to create an eLearning platform or a marketplace like Udemy of your own.
These pieces of software are readymade or clone scripts that come with integrated features (both basic and advanced) to accommodate learners, tutors, and admin on the same platform. It comes with capabilities like dedicated dashboards for all users to manage their courses and monetary transactions efficiently. Look for scripts like Pinlearn that come with an extremely easy interface and efficient capabilities for both tutors and learners.
4. Create An Online Course
Creating a well-structured online course is as important as creating an eLearning website. This way, you can offer an enhanced learning experience and encourage your target learners to buy your courses. When building online courses, consider adding both audio lessons and video lessons. This gives you a clear idea of how to start, what effort to put in, and how much time it takes to launch your course.
Offering a combination of content delivery methods is an excellent way to keep your learners' focus on the content. Ideally, you want to build courses that are interesting and engaging at the same time. The audience perceives online courses based on videos as a higher value product. This also means that learners would be willing to pay more for accessing premium video-content-based courses compared to simple audio courses.
Many creators build successful online courses using drip methodology. It means spreading out course sections over days, weeks, or even months. This helps learners to absorb the content before moving to the next module. You can also deliver the entire course at once so that learners can learn at their own pace.
5. Understand What Makes Your Online Course Unique
To promote and sell your courses effectively, it is important to understand your unique selling propositions or USPs. It is what sets your online course apart from the fierce competition in the eLearning industry. Your course can have multiple USPs, but make sure you highlight the main one to make your course promotions much easier.
Your course niche can help you decide on the unique aspects of your course. Your target learners will immediately identify the value over your competition, which will help you sell your online courses faster.
Conclusion
Creating and selling courses from your online course platform might seem like a difficult task, but it can be highly satisfying and, moreover, profitable if done the right way. As a course creator, you are creating something once that you can sell over and over again. This is a great way for most eLearning brands.
Do you have any valuable tips to share to sell profitable online courses from your own website? We would love to hear from you. Let us know in the comment section below.
