The COVID-19 pandemic that has disturbed the whole world’s equilibrium has a silver lining- People are discovering that making money online by selling courses is possible. But that doesn’t mean it comes easy for everyone. Not all courses are successful and make money as expected.

You need to have the expertise, right skills, passion, and above all, need to work harder to come up with a brilliant idea that sells like hotcakes. You can be an experienced educator or an individual who offers life advice to followers, regardless of the level of expertise.

It’s possible to make money from online courses in several different ways. And all of them suit different goals and purposes. It might take a little longer for some course creators to generate revenue, whereas, for others, it takes very little time.

In this blog, we have included effective ways you can generate revenue with your online courses.

Proven monetization strategies to make money

If you follow the right revenue generation strategies, selling online courses from your own website is a highly profitable business idea. So before adopting any monetization strategy, make sure it aligns with your audience’s preferences and your business goals. Also, when you are creating your online course platform, use a professional course management software to build it around your custom branding. Pinlearn is one such ready-made software that you can leverage to create a full-fledged course platform with capabilities for both learners and tutors.

Here are some powerful and proven ways in which you can make money selling courses online.

Pay-per-course

Pay per course is one of the simplest revenue models where creators can offer access to online courses on an individual basis.

Subscriptions

Another powerful monetization strategy to make money with your online courses is to sell them for a subscription fee. Your learners can access the courses and other perks as a bundle by paying a subscription fee on your online course platform.

You can either charge subscriptions on a monthly or yearly basis. Along with the bundle of products, you can also offer other perks like VIP access, free downloads, and more.

Donations

While this is not a common monetization model adopted by creators, you can integrate it along with other revenue methods. Set up donations on your eLearning site to contribute to your platform to support your offerings.

Corporate account

This is another subscription-based business model that allows special offers to corporates. Corporate access allows businesses to enjoy batch discounts and other perks for a group of users. For example, Udemy offers a special service called Udemy business, specially crafted to help drive business outcomes.

Selling extras

Selling additional eLearning products is another great way to make money from your online course platform. You can sell anything related to your online courses like PDFs, unique infographics, printable revision materials, eBooks, or anything that provides great value to your learners and assists them in their online learning journey.

Affiliate marketing

Another way to make money from your online course platform is by running affiliates on your website. You can join affiliate marketing products to create links that you can use to redirect your learners to a partner website, and if a learner purchases something, you receive a commission.

Running advertisements

Advertisements are a great source of income, and it is easier to implement on your website as well. While ads are intrusive in nature, if you implement them the right way, they can bring in good income if you partner with brands that align with your eLearning offerings.

Tips to help you monetize your online courses better

Creating an online course is the best way to engage your target audience and build a deeper connection with them, all while making money by selling your expertise. Now you are familiar with effective ways you can make money selling courses from your own platform.

Here are some tips you can use while selling your online courses:

Know your why

Before you head to create an online course, you should spend enough time reasoning about why it is important to create an online course. Find the intersection between your skills, passion, and market demands to run profitable courses. Follow your passion, and you must centre your courses around the topics that you are passionate about and have expertise in.

Next, you have to explore your talents. What are you great at? Where do you have experience? If you would offer advice to anyone around your circle, what would it be? If you are passionate about cooking and recipe creation and you post a lot of images on social media, you can create courses on food recipes or anything related to what you are doing, like Food photography.

Listen to your followers

Once you have an idea about what course to create, this time to do some listening and find the interest of your audience. Tune in to the things that happened in the market to find out the questions regularly asked by your target learners.

If you are not getting such repetitive questions, there is a pro tip: Ask them! You can leverage social media stories and polls to find the interests of your community.

Get it out there

The next important step is to test and validate your course idea and content. This is supercritical. This helps you to quickly get the content in the market and start making money faster.

Here are three ways by which you can achieve this.

Host a mini-online course

If you want to get your online course out there in the market, you can host a mini-course or run a free challenge.

For example, Dr Jen Esquer, a physiotherapist, makes courses on mobility methods. She started a mobility challenge that she offered to her followers for free.

This helped her to prepare her community and kick start your sales funnel by collecting email ids of potential customers before the course goes live.

Pre-sell your course

Pre-selling online courses will help you make money before the online course is created.

For example, Matt Kohn, a course creator, made around $30,000 as revenue even before the course was launched.

Understand your sales funnel

To make money from online courses, you need to understand more about the sales funnel. If you get to know where your followers are in the funnel, it will help you monetize better.

At the top of your sales funnel is where you create awareness to your audience about your course. These are your audience who have a problem. So your goal is to educate them about the solution you have for their problems.

Moving down to the middle part of the funnel, some followers understand they have a challenge and are looking for valid solutions.

Finally, at the end of the sales funnel, some followers realise they have a problem, are looking for the solution, and are ready to take action. Considering where your followers are in their journey will prepare you to create relevant content, build trust, offer solutions to learners’ problems, and nurture relationships.

Conclusion

Creating and selling online courses is not simple as it sounds, but it can be rewarding once accomplished. Selling courses on your own website can be more advantageous than selling them on any other third-party marketplace. You lose a share of your hard-earned money as commissions along with content restrictions.

However, running courses on the website under your brand will help you have more control over the content and the money you make. Now that you know the proven techniques to make money selling online courses, try adopting those that suit your business goals.