How to Sell Your Own Course Online

Before you start creating your online course, it’s important to put yourself in your students’ shoes. Would they find your course valuable? Would they learn something new and actionable from you?

Do you care about their learning experience or are you only out to line your pockets with their money?

Always remember that if you want evergreen Internet profits, you need to provide as much value as possible to your audience. If you fail to do this and only think about yourself, then your business is not going to last.

Helping people should be your top priority whether you create a video course, a text-based course, an audio course, etc.

Here’s a step by step guide to help you start creating your first course:

1. Choose a profitable evergreen topic

While you can choose to create a course on any subject you want, you want to make sure you’ll actually have enough people interested in your topic.

Helping people is important, but since you’re building a business, you should also want to see a return on your investment and generate a healthy profit.

There are quite a few ways to find a profitable topic:

• Check if there are existing courses on the topic you want to cover. If there are, and it’s selling, then that’s a good sign. It simply means there’s a demand for that topic, and you can create a much better course than your competitors.
• Do keyword research to find out how many people are searching for your topic. If you’ve got a decent number of monthly searches, and there aren’t enough resources on the subject, then you might be on to something!
• Seek out forums in the niche you want to cover and see what kind of problems people are having with. Forums are literally a gold mine so be sure to go through all the threads containing your topic. Create a list of target problems and then create a course around that.

I mentioned ‘evergreen’ because you want to create a passive income stream? If you choose a non-evergreen niche like technology, then your course will become obsolete as soon as that technology becomes outdated.

With evergreen niches, you don’t need to worry about all that. Your course could still be selling decades after you launched it!

2. Test and check if your topic is indeed profitable

This step is very important if you want to avoid wasting your time and money on building a course no one will buy. You can ask the opinion of your family and friends, but they ‘d probably be biased and tell you what you want to hear– that your course is great and it’s going to sell like hotcakes.

If you want to get real world feedback from people you’re interested in selling your course to, then you can try creating a survey and have your target audience answer it.

How?

If you’ve got an email list, you can simply ask them to answer your quick survey. If you don’t have a list, then you need to get creative.

You can maybe create a mini-course on the subject you want to sell and use it as an email opt-in. Drive traffic to your mini-course.

Track how many people visited your site and compare it to the number of people who actually signed up.

If you get a nice conversion rate, then it means your course can be profitable. If you get very low sign up rates, then maybe your idea isn’t very sellable.

Try split testing so you can make an informed decision on whether to continue with your course or just totally forget about it.

3. Create a course outline and write your content

At this point, you should already know your course has an audience waiting to be sold to. The next step you need to do is plan out how you’re going to structure your course.

Creating a detailed outline is very important as you can clearly see which areas you need to cover. Cover the main points in your course– no need to go crazy on the details.

The important thing is you need to get your audience’s problem solved, and you need to make sure your course answers that problem thoroughly.

Break your course into small “bite-sized” sections. Your audience will appreciate you taking the time to make things easy enough for them to understand.

Once you’ve finished the outline, take a moment to review it. Ask yourself if you left anything out and if you think it’s got all the details to help your intended audience. Only then should you start working on the content.

Don’t get too hung up on getting the perfect eBook cover, or the perfect lighting for your videos, or how you’re going to sound in your audio recording.

Some successful entrepreneurs’ first-ever courses were shot on their smartphone or their laptop’s webcam! Whatever content type you choose to go with, your students are going to pay you for your content and your knowledge.

4. Upload your course to your website or a third-party learning platform

Now that you’ve successfully created a great course, it’s time to upload it online so you can start selling it.

There are generally 3 types of places where you can sell your course:

Your own website

Having your own course on your own web property gives you the most control over your product. You can choose your own design and set your own price. You don’t have to give anyone a share of your profits, you get to keep everything!

If you use WordPress, you can simply use a plugin to manage your course and your payments, and you can be in business in a matter of hours! If you use WordPress I can suggest using ClickFunnels as you can simply integrate your sales funnel within WordPress. (See here my review)

Third-party hosted platforms

If you don’t have your own website, or you don’t want to be bothered with setting it up on your own, you can simply host your course on a third-party platform.

These platforms make it easy for you to upload and manage your course, but they do come at a price. Some require a monthly or annual subscription while some require a certain percentage of your sales.

If you don’t have a website yet I can also recommend ClickFunnels as they can also host your landing pages and sales pages.

Online learning marketplaces

Sites like these have become popular in recent years. If you want to get your course in front of millions of people, then this is the best place for your course. The downside is that you have very little control over your course once you upload it.

Most platforms also place a limit on course prices, and they even take a cut of your earnings so be sure to keep this information in mind. One example of an online learning marketplace is Udemy which offers all the tools you need to upload your course.

In addition, Udemy is a very trusted source which can help you generate sales.

5. Promote your course to your target audience

Since you’ve already identified your audience before you even started creating your course, it’s now time to let them know about your course and how it can help solve their pain point!

If you’ve got an email list like I discussed in Step 2, then you have to email them now. Let them know how they can benefit from your course and guide them to where they can buy it.

Make them feel special, offer them something nice as an existing subscriber – maybe a discount code or a free preview.

You can also use free and paid methods to drive traffic to your course. There are many ways you can generate traffic but make sure you target the right audience, so you get good conversion rates.

Use proven marketing strategies to encourage your target audience to buy your course. Know how a sales funnel works so you can entice your leads or prospects to become paying customers.

If you have no idea what sales funnels are and how they can help your business I can recommend reading the book DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson. (Read here my review) In addition, I can recommend the second book of Russell Brunson Expert Secrets which helps you define your message and sell your course (My review).

And remember to ask them to opt-in to your email list so you can contact them again later on.

Are You Ready To Start Selling Your Evergreen Course?

An evergreen course is one of the best ways to generate passive income. While you do need to put in a LOT of work to make your course awesome, you just need to remember the fact that you only need to do the hard work once.

You can create a course in less than a week and have it generate sales for many years to come. Imagine if you are selling several evergreen courses – you can live the life you’ve always dreamed of and spend your time doing what you love the most!

Have you already made some experiences with selling a course online? Let me know by leaving a comment below!