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Online courses can generate substantial income for their creators. Best of all, they separate your time from your income, allowing you to make money while you sleep. Read on and learn how you can start making passive income from online courses.
Generating passive income allows us to build wealth without tying our income to our time.. Of course, there's an upfront time investment to create the course and maybe periodic marketing and maintenance, but creating an online course enables us to make money while we sleep.
Popular online course creators have made hundreds of thousands of dollars from their courses without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of their time. In addition to generating income, creating an online course allows us to establish ourselves as experts in our field while having the satisfaction of knowing that by sharing our knowledge, we're helping others achieve their goals too.
It's important that we choose our niche carefully as it can determine the trajectory of our course's success. We don't want to select a niche solely because it's trending or because we hear other's are making money from it. We have to consider our expertise in the area, our passion, and our ability to distinguish ourselves within the niche.
If we're passionate about a niche and we also have experience in it, creating an online course is much simpler. When we're excited about a subject, that excitement will shine through your presentation and drive us along our journey ensuring we see it through to the end.
If you're trying to think about what you have expertise in, reflect on your past jobs, what you studied in school, and what you're most interested in. Consider the content that you consume, the books you read and whether you're able to offer a unique perspective within the niche. That's how we begin to choose our niche.
For example, maybe you've studied nutrition in school and want to develop a course around cooking with dietary restrictions, or perhaps you're great at creating budgets and want to help others improve their spending. There's an endless array of courses of topics you can teach. If it's a subject you find interesting, you can be others will find it interesting too.
Now that we've chosen our niche, we need to figure out who is going to buy our course, who will be interested in learning more about our topic of interest or who will our course help. Knowing the answers to these questions will help us define our target demographic. Here's a few questions we ask ourselves when trying to figure out who our target audience is:
The more we can define our target audience, the better we're able to craft our course to meet their needs and deliver it in a way that resonates with them.
Once we've decided on our niche and defined our target audience, it's time to get more specific. We need to determine what exactly our viewers are going to learn in our course. A great way to generate ideas on what to include in our course is to find our what people want to learn, and there are a couple of very reliable ways to find this out.
Online forums and search volume provide valuable insight into what people want to know more about. Find a subreddit related to your niche and sort the posts by top. Then browse the post titles and you'll start to gain an understanding about what people who are interested in your niche are interested in learning more about.
By using those popular topics to flesh out the outline of our course we ensure we're teaching the information that most people want to know more about.
You can apply this same method to websites such as Quora and LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, we like following thought leaders within our niche and seeing which of their content resonates the most with their followers and leads to the most engagement.
Part of the way we increase engagement is by finding ways to differentiate our course from others within the niche.
We recommend incorporating unique visuals and animations to complement what's being shown as well as breaking up larger topics into smaller ones. By making content more digestible, people who enroll in our courses are more likely to complete them which ultimately leads to feeling like they've received more value.
Many course creators have found success creating communities outside their course to interact with their students which also allows their students to interact with each other – like a real classroom. Think about creating a Facebook group or a subreddit dedicated to answering questions from students and helping them complete your course.
We have several options for hosting our online course. No platform is perfect, but each offers its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The following are the most popular platforms for hosting online courses:
Except for Kajabi, all of the platforms listed above offer some type of free tier for course creators. Udemy operators primarily on a revenue share model which enables us to create our course without any upfront investment in the course platform software. Skillshare also has a free pricing model but pays royalties on how many minutes students watch out of a premium course.
Many creators flock to Udemy to create their first course, while Skillshare has gained a reputation as one of the best platforms for learning creative skills. With Teachable, we're able to incorporate a wide variety of AI features in our course, while Podria's simplicity makes it easy for us to get our online course up and running.
Thinkific offers creators a wide variety of course templates that help keep your course organized, while Kanjabi's built-in marketing tools allow you to create an online course and then promote it on social media with just a few button clicks.
Every platform has similar capabilities, but different platforms will be a better fit for different creators depending on their own strengths and goals in creating an online course.
In addition to running ads on social media networks, there are dozens of ways to market online courses. We Suggest starting with a website dedicated to your course with content optimized for search engines. From there you can link to your relevant social media accounts where you should also post content about your course.
Some creators have found success writing ebooks about their niche which also promote their course for readers to learn more, and don't forget about creating a course ‘trailer' on Youtube so future students get a taste of what they'll learn.
Offer to write guest blogs for other popular sites within your niche, and seek feedback and reviews every chance you get. The impact of social proof should not be discounted.
Generally, a blend of paid and organic advertising puts our courses in front of our target demographic and boosts sales. Once those sales start coming in, don't stop advertising. See what works, optimize, and refocus to maximize your efforts and ROI.
Maximizing the revenue from our course takes a bit of trial and error. The topic is so popular that there are even courses on maximizing revenue from online courses. When we're promoting a course in addition to other courses within the same niche or topic, it's often wise to offer a bundle promotion where students may save 50% or more by purchasing three or more courses at once as opposed to each course one at a time.
Limited-time sales are also an effective method of creating a sense of urgency and encouraging people to press the buy button. It's better to receive 65% of your desired selling price now rather than 100% of nothing forever.
Before settling on your original sale price, it's helpful to perform competitive research. We like to check out what other creators are successfully selling their courses for and compare their content to ours. Assuming similar quality and duration of content, using other creators' pricing points can help as an excellent guide for determining an initial selling price.
One of the biggest pitfalls in creating online courses is making a course that nobody actually wants. However, this pitfall is easy to avoid if you've properly researched your target demographic and performed the necessary steps to build a winning course outline.
While we've already addressed marketing your course, too many creators take a 'build it and they will come approach'. Building it is no guarantee that they will come, and the odds are better that without a conscious effort to bring them, they won't.
Another pitfall some creators fall into is creating a course in a saturated niche. You may be very passionate about a topic, and you may be very experienced, but if you're not offering a unique perspective beyond what everyone else already has, you'll have a tough time standing out.
While creating an online course may not be easy, it's far from impossible and has proven to be an effective means of generating passive income for thousands. Decide what you're passionate about and what you'd like to teach the world. Chances are, there are thousands of people like you who crave the knowledge you're waiting to share.
Best of all, they're willing to pay for it.
