Nowadays, millions and millions of people use the Internet on a daily basis. The Internet is not only a tremendous source of communication, entertainment, and online shopping. But it is also an effective tool to learn new things, exchange knowledge, or even build a business. Many people take advantage of the Internet to get smarter and sharpen their skills. These needs of broadening knowledge and upgrading skills have opened up a great opportunity for all of us to get paid for our know-how. For example, you can create a YouTube channel or a blog sharing what you know on a certain topic. Also, online courses selling is another great way to generate passive income from your know-how.
In this today’s blog post, let’s explore together:
- The potential of the eLearning market
- A successful case study
- Essential steps to create and sell e-courses
The Potential of the eLearning Market for Online Courses Selling
In May 2021, Global Market Insights published a new report: E-Learning Market Size By Technology. Accordingly, the eLearning market size is anticipated to exceed $1 trillion by 2027. In fact, it already surpassed $250 billion in 2020:
eLearning Market Size by Global Market Insights
Besides, the report also indicated that the content providers segment accounted for around 60% eLearning market share in 2019. Especially with the closure of schools and universities globally in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this segment is expected to expand at a substantial growth rate up to 2027.
The statistics brings out an optimistic signal for those who want to try their hand in online courses selling.
Let’s take a look at an inspirational story about Joseph Michael, a founder of learnscrivenerfast.com in the next section. Nearly anyone can find themselves in this story. After reading it, you may be inspired by how an everyday normal guy can become a highly successful entrepreneur by teaching and creating awesome things online.
An Example of A Successful Person
Joseph Michael is a regular dad from Missouri. Like most of us, he had a full-time steady job that helped him get enough money to pay the bills. However, he gradually got bored with living paycheck to paycheck.
Respond to Challenges
In an effort to increase his income, he started finding a side hustle. The first position that he applied for is a pizza delivery job. Unfortunately, he was rejected by 3 pizza companies. This was a really shocking event for him. A middle manager had a wealth of experience at his work but had no experience in delivering pizzas! It was this big moment along with his self-assessment that led him to look for side income online.
As life isn’t always easy, Joseph’s first online job – starting his own blog – was not overly successful. In fact, he didn’t earn any dollar from it but picked up and sharpened his skills of using WordPress and other online tools. This was really the first step for his success but he didn’t realize it at that time.
Make a Killing
His lightbulb moment had finally come to help him make a move when he was reading a blog post about Scrivener. This is a go-to app for writers of all kinds. Joseph used this app to organize notes, collect research, and write content for his blog. In this post, many comments were left to share users’ concerns when using the app. Joseph spent hours reading these comments. Suddenly, he came up with the idea of creating an online course to help people learn Scrivener faster.
Image by Gerd Altmannn from Pixabay
It was also another long journey but this time he was successful. His first online webinar to promote the course made $25,000 in sales in an afternoon. Over the next few months, he could generate $40,000 per month in sales from online courses selling. Later, Joseph left his full time job to spend all time following his dream. You can read a full story about this awesome guy from his interview with Forbes.
Basic Steps to Earn Passive Income from Online Courses Selling
As you can see from the Global Market Insights report and Joseph Michael inspirational story, online courses selling is a highly profitable business model. Just create one course and sell it over and over, you can make thousands of dollars per month. This is a really great source of passive income by re-selling the same online course continually.
However, how can a newbie create online courses?
According to Joseph, one of the most precious lessons he could draw from his journey is: “Take action first (even if imperfect) and the ideas will follow shortly…The key to success is to start taking action right where you are with what you have. You don’t need anything fancy…Or, you don’t have to know everything or even be a huge expert. You just have to know more than most people and be able to portray your lessons in an educational and informative way.”.
So, to support you take action immediately in the right direction, this blog post will show you all the essential steps to make money from online courses selling.
Choose a Right eLearning Authoring Tool
An eLearning authoring tool plays an important role in building valuable courses. Nowadays, there are a bunch of tools in the market. It is hard to know which tool meets your needs perfectly. Therefore, it is really important to make a key elements checklist. The checklist will help you to jot down your special requirements. Thanks to that you won’t select the wrong tool.
Just for your reference, ActivePresenter is a powerful tool to create awesome online courses. You can download a free version of ActivePresenter, which is fully functional as the paid version. Then, you can test all features of the application without any functionality or time restrictions. The only difference between the free version and the paid one is that the ActivePresenter logo will be added to the outputs of non-free features until the license is activated.
Create Online Courses
A highly profitable course depends on many factors. But most importantly, it relies on how authentic and valuable your course is. In the interview with Forbes, Joseph Michael shared his experience of how to design awesome lessons.
According to him, creating a course that brings true values to learners is to build a course that solves real problems. A course creator is also a pain reliever. He can become a source of someone’s problems and solve them in a way nobody can. A course creator needs to suffer the same pain. Then, develop solutions to help learners easily relieve those pain. To achieve that, he may need to break complex concepts into small pieces that everyone can understand and learn.
For that reason, you don’t need to worry if there are a variety of similar courses available on the Internet. As no course is perfect, you can find a hole from them. Thanks to that, you can specify what has been missing, what hasn’t been specified from them. Then, based on your experiences to create better courses that can solve the missing parts.
For all detailed steps to create online courses with ActivePresenter, you can take a look at this article.
Select the Online Course Selling Platform
A quality course is a necessary but not sufficient factor. Without a selling platform, no one knows about your course. A selling platform acts as a vending machine or a 24-hour salesman. Therefore, in addition to designing a quality course, you need to think about where your courses are hosted and delivered to learners.
Image by vectorjuice from Freepik
In general, you will have two options: create your own website or use an online courses selling platform. Each of these options will have its own pros and cons, which will be figured out below.
Create a Website to Host and Deliver Your Courses
Creating a website seems to be a daunting task to tech-novices. Fortunately, nowadays, there are many tools available that help to create a website efficiently. With the support of a website builder or WordPress, you don’t need to pay for pricey website creation services. Learning coding skills is also not neccessary.
Pros:
- You’re in complete control of how your website looks and functions.
- The website is yours. Thanks to that, you have full control over customer data.
- You can upload many types of learning content to the website. For example, slide-based courses, video-based courses, or even interactive courses, etc.
- Your business will not depend on other platforms. This helps to minimize the negative effects when other online platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Udemy, etc. ) change their algorithms and rules.
Cons:
- In spite of being supported by many useful tools, you still need to spend at least several days learning to use those tools. The exact amount of time depends on the complexity of the website you want to create and the convenience that support tools bring to you.
- You have to take care of everything on your own: from design, marketing, to sales, payment process, etc.
Upload Your Courses to a Selling Platform
A selling platform seems to be the better choice for those who are not tech-savvy. The most common course selling platforms are Udemy, Skillshare, Teachable, etc.
Pros:
- Using a selling platform requires less technical effort. Normally, these platforms have a user-friendly interface. They offer a great number of built-in themes, features, and tools. Thanks to that, you can upload and put your courses up for sales within minutes.
- You can take advantage of the platform’s available user base. For example, Udemy has 40 million users. Besides, selling platforms will take care of marketing your courses and selling them to their users. The payment process is also included.
Cons:
- You do not own neither the market nor the selling platform. Therefore, you cannot access customer data.
- You need to compete with other providers who sell similar courses. This reduces the chances of your course being selected.
- The types of content you can upload are quite limited. Normally, some platforms only allow you to upload video-based courses.
- The fee charged for marketing your courses is relatively high.
So, depending on your needs, you should consider the above bullet points carefully to decide if you should create your own website or use an online courses selling platform.
Market your Courses
Image by madartzgraphics from Pixabay
Regardless of your platform, you need to run marketing campaigns to promote your courses. It’s essential to create a marketing plan to decide:
- Who are your target customers?
- Where can you find them?
- How will they know about your courses?
- How can they be persuaded to buy your course?
Depending on those factors, you may need to create SEO-optimized articles, build an email list, use social media to generate traffic, etc. All free and low-cost marketing techniques can be found on the Internet.
Those are all necessary steps to create and sell online courses. Hope this article brings you valuable information. You can download ActivePresente for trial as long as you want. This promises to be a powerful tool to help you earn passive income from online courses selling.
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