From starting a YouTube channel to selling books, there are many ways for teachers to make money quickly, and the most prominent way among all is creating online courses. eLearning has brought forth convenience, flexibility, and efficiency, and that is why it quickly gained popularity among both students and teachers. Considering the industry trends, the eLearning market size was $250 billion in 2020 and is predicted to grow at 21% in the next six years. As you can see, selling online courses is a lucrative business idea. If you have in-depth knowledge in a subject and valid experience, you can make a stable income from teaching online. Be the first to explore a unique niche, and you won’t regret it.
Best strategies to make money from online courses
If you want to monetize your online courses, you must focus on attracting new learners, keep your existing learners engaged, and promote more. Firstly, understand that your students are different people and might have different reasons to buy your courses. Understanding the varieties of needs of your students can help you create better courses and price them even better.
Let’s look into powerful ways to sell online courses from your own website and make money.
Enhancing the value of your online courses
The success of your online courses greatly depends on the educational content you provide. As it is the core product you present to your customers, make sure it is valuable and relevant to your target audience. Begin by thinking about what you can offer to your target student base. When choosing a course idea, make sure it is in demand among your target market. Adding more value to your online courses helps to make your courses more profitable.
Choose a tutoring platform
The online platform you choose to sell your course determines the amount of money you would make. If you sell your online courses on platforms like Udemy, you won’t have much control over the amount you make as the platform takes a share of it. Whereas if you are running courses on your tutoring platform, you can have complete control over the content and the way you monetize it. The recommended way is to use online tutoring software to help you host, deliver, and sell your courses to your students and manage payment processing, reviews, and many more. Creating online courses is only a small part of the big picture. Including your personal brand through your own tutoring site, managing marketing, and sales, etc., can give you an extra edge.
Provide personalized tutoring
To make your online courses more stimulating, you can use personalized tutoring. Use video conferencing tools like Zoom to take classes in real-time and interact with your students.
You can also charge for personalized coaching, which most of the students would be willing to pay for. You can offer an hour of class every day or weekly alongside your online courses.
Selling subscriptions
For those tutors who have ongoing courses, subscriptions are a great way to make extra income. If you constantly update your learning materials, offer access to your students for a recurring monthly or yearly fee. Selling subscriptions rather than the full course at a single price is the more profitable and a smart way to keep your students always connected with you. If you can offer new modules for your online courses, you must sell subscriptions.
Offering Free courses
While giving off something for free doesn’t align with the concept of making money, it can work as bait to attract students. For example, you can offer a mini-course for free or a few modules for free. This approach is excellent in enticing customers and compels them to buy the whole course. Make the customers register their emails so that you can use them to strengthen your lead base.
Free stuff works as great tools to get the attention of interested learners and show them the value of your course. From there, it becomes easier to present your work and turn them into regular customers and even promoters of your eLearning brand.
Sell extra learning resources
Any additional learning materials that support your online courses and help learners achieve their goals can be sold as an extra resource. You can offer a basic course for a specific price and related resources for an additional cost. Extras can be anything, including PDF, quick revision materials, workbooks, infographics, eBooks, etc. This method works as anything that helps deliver better results for your students is great to increase your money.
Market your course the right way
Creating excellent courses is not just enough to make money; you must take it to your target audience. The marketing activities you perform plays a crucial role in the success of your online courses and their profitability. To make money with online courses, you must embrace email marketing and establish a social media presence to get the results you want. It doesn’t mean that you have to become a professional in marketing activities to promote your courses. Still, you have to make the effort to interact with your learning community online, send emails, find new learners, respond to questions from new and existing customers, etc. Upon completing a course, ask your students to leave online reviews to spread the word about your eLearning brand. Reviewers are a great way to get attention from prospects, gain incoming leads, and more customers in return. In addition, appear on podcasts, host live classes through Facebook live or your own tutoring platform to expand your marketing efforts.
Conclusion
To run a profitable eLearning business by selling online courses, you must have a well-defined business strategy. Being a tutor, use your creative ideas and skills sets to develop great online courses that positively reflect your tutoring business. Getting started with online courses and staying profitable is not easy as it sounds, but you must put in serious efforts to stay consistent and confident in refining the course creation process and strengthening your sales techniques to sell more online courses.
