Where Is Your Online Course?

by Lele Nairn

Online courses seem to be all the rage today with regards to making money online. With so many websites offering to host courses on their websites and offering you a percent of every sale, why not! On the other hand, you could also host your own online class on your website if you had the right software in place to do so.

Really quick, what is an online course? An online course is your opportunity to teach others about products/services that may already be delivered online and possibly when you’re not available. So, it’s delivered digitally where the student can learn at his/her own pace. Realistically, you can teach as many courses as you can create! The beauty about online courses is students can really get a lot of value out of them if you load them with great content.

What’s more, those rave reviews will help sell more people to buy your course. Imagine, if you made just one sale per day of your course at $30 and you did that every day of the month. Roughly that’s 30 sales x $30 per student = $900 in gross revenue per month. Not bad. So, is that kind of potential income worth it to you to create your own online course(s)? From experience, I know it is.

HOW DO YOU CREATE AN ONLINE CLASS?

In a nutshell:

1. Come up with a topic to teach that you’re passionate about and know inside and out. It also helps if it’s something people hire you for or maybe from a book you wrote, etc.

2. Create a lesson plan around that topic that includes 10-100 (or more) lessons.

3. Decide what format you’ll deliver these lessons in: written, audio, video or a combination.

4. Decide on a price you’ll charge for folks to access your online course. Price it to sell (i.e., $19.95+) and/or consider the fact that your course might help other people make money from what they’ll learn from you and then you could charge a higher amount in the $100+ range, etc. It’s up to you how much of a marketing effort you put into your class. I’d offer discounts periodically to encourage signups.

5. Decide how you’ll host and deliver your online course. Will it be through Thinkific, Udemy, Podia, Lynda, SkillShare, Teachable or other like websites where you benefit from their large student body to see your course and take a percent of sales while they handle all the maintenance and technical delivery of your course … or will you host it on your website, maintain all the controls, responsibilities and take home all the profits! If you only get 3-30 students a month at $30 a pop, for example, it would seem better to host your online class yourself and keep all the profits. If, on the other hand, you were to score 300 or more students at one of the aforementioned websites, then it might be wise to give a percent to one of them to manage the volume of traffic, bandwidth usage, etc.

6. Decide what level of support you’ll offer your students. How will you communicate with them, how often, not at all, etc.

So, there you have it. In a nutshell, those are some of the things to consider when thinking about creating an online class. Again, the money could be great if there’s a market for your course.