10 Ways to Successfully Build and Sell Online Courses in Any Niche

If you’re trying to make money selling courses online or generate your first online course sale, you’ve made it to the right place!

In this post, we’re going in-depth to answer how you can make money selling courses online, as well as uncover different platforms you can use to build and launch your online business selling courses.

By the end of this post, you’ll have a clear idea of how people succeed in the eLearning industry and how you can be a success as well.

Let’s get started.

Short answer: Yes.

Once you set up your courses and configure a business model to make money, you’ll only have to worry about getting more students.

The beauty lies in the concept that you do the bulk of the building once and get recurring enrollments over time, generating a passive income.

But don’t just take our word for it, the worldwide eLearning market is projected to reach $325 billion in 2025.

After choosing your topic for your online courses, you want to start thinking about how you’re going to make your money.

The importance of setting a solid business model before even the online course creation process can’t be overstated.

You don’t want to build something and then figure out how to sell it. On the other hand, knowing your business plan will help you tailor online courses for specific goals and drive students towards certain objectives.

There are two main approaches when offering online courses — you either offer free courses or paid ones. Each comes with its own tactics and methods of generating money.

This is a proven formula, you should start with it if you’re looking to offer free online courses.

It doesn’t get more straightforward than this. You name a price, they pay, and get enrolled — it’s that easy.

Or is it?

You’ll have to account for a number of things before settling on a price that will ensure the growth and success of your online courses business.

For example, you’ll need to cover the cost of creating and selling courses online, account for the competition, maximize your profits, and more.

Say you want to make a full decent living selling online courses and you set a monthly income target of $5,000/month.

Which is easier: start selling a $50 online course to 100 people a month or selling a $200 online course to 25 people a month?

The answer lies in what you’re selling and who your target audience is.

That’s why successful course creators have a deep understanding of the true value of their courses, and how much their target market is willing to pay for them.

Start by looking at the competition’s prices — cut yours by a bit while offering more value to outshine everyone in your space.

Or at least get enough students to sign up and purchase your courses.

After you calculate all the upfront fees and variables, come up with a number that you’re going to charge your students for.

Make sure to have it in psychological pricing, so if you’re going for $200, offer the online course for $199.95, for example.

This may seem dumb, but it has been proven time and time again that psychological pricing can improve conversions.

Use this method when you’re just starting out to gain experience of the flow of the process with your first course.

When you’re ready, move into the more complicated options on this list.

If you’re leaning more towards coaching services, where you need to talk to your students all the time, then this might be a very good option for you.

Set up your online course material and give students access to it by paying a monthly fee.

Remember, short-term goals are good, but sustainable growth is better and what you should be banking on.

This requires you to be very active with your students.

Make sure to always have a resource (information or a support team) that can help if you’re not available.

You also need to be completely transparent about what they’re getting and when they’re getting it.

For example:

A fitness coach with a $50/week subscription fee for a 2-month program that has clear goals for separate students depending on their state . . .

This makes much more sense than just creating a fitness program that goes on “indefinitely”, with no clear goals other than just getting ripped no matter what state students are in.

Additionally, you can flip the script and offer subscription models for students enrolled in your courses to get premium features, like VIP calls, from you.

Are you a business professional with certain high-level skills that businesses need?

Do you dabble with consulting? If so, then this option is for you.

Businesses would be very interested in licensing your course material if you offer a proven solution for an advanced problem.

For instance:

If you have been in the HVAC industry for years and you’re building a massive course on how to deploy, maintain, fix, and check all kinds of machines in the market, you’ll catch a lot of businesses looking to either train their employees or train their customers on such machines.

And thus, as long your course has detailed and updated material, they’d happily pay you an annual premium price for it.

With this model, you’ll mainly sell course licenses to businesses and not normal everyday consumers.

There’s a huge difference between having students already pay you before launching the course and being all over the place on launch day because you can’t find enough students to sign up.

That’s why companies, like Apple, hype up their products before launching — they create awareness and demand before their products hit the market and that’s exactly what you should do as well when creating and selling an online course.

With a following behind your brand, this is easy. If you don’t have one, start generating hype and a following for your upcoming online course — pre-sell when you can.

You can do this by talking to prospects in your target audience, like in niche Facebook groups, for example.

Content marketing is also a great way to address your target audience and pre-sell your courses.

Also, don’t discount video content on a YouTube channel because that counts as content marketing as well.

To successfully pre-sell your course, make sure your course topic is in line with what prospects are looking for.

Invite them to free online training, and then announce your upcoming course outline and, of course, give them the option to pay and enroll, right then and there.

That’s how you pre-sell courses online and help build a profitable online course business with a strong foundation.

Upselling is offering a higher-ticket product or service when a customer is keen on buying a lower-ticket version of said product or service.

Upsells are considered one of the best business models to increase revenue, up by 30% for some businesses.

Upselling is both cheaper than acquiring new customers and increases the amount each customer spends, and that in turn increases your AOV.

Course bundles are self-explanatory, just shuffle relevant courses together, add a tempting price tag, and you’re ready for marketing.

Once you have created a big enough library of new courses, upselling course bundles should become second nature for you.

Why?

It’s very appealing for customers to get more courses for a little extra money compared to what they’d have to pay when buying each course individually.

One way this could work very well is by launching relevant courses individually in your community with full-price tags.

And then, when the time is right, you offer a limited-time course bundle that they can only get one time.

In fact, at systeme.io, we have gotten remarkable results using this method with email marketing:

The original offer was a $7 course and at one point of the sales funnel, we offered an upsell of a bundle with 8 courses for $197.

And these were the results for that exact same offer.

Just 14 people got the course bundle, but that resulted in 1.6X more revenue compared to just selling the normal course.

You can use all sorts of marketing channels like YouTube videos, blog posts, and email campaigns to promote your course bundles.

An important note to always remember is to keep the bundle’s courses relevant and fall into a cohesive environment where they can work well together.

Never upsell course bundles too much as they’d lose value in the eyes of customers and students.

Affiliate marketing is a form of monetization where affiliates promote a product or service and then get paid commissions based on their conversions.

It’s similar to word-of-mouth marketing but on a much larger and more organized scale.

For example, an affiliate can get a commission for referring a student that signs up for one of your courses.

This is great because you only pay the affiliate a percentage of what the referred student pays you.

You can take a look at these 50 best affiliate programs to get a clear idea of what works and what doesn’t for you as an online instructor.

There are many platforms that claim to be the best online education platform out there, but the truth is, what’s best is what fits you best.

Before choosing, consider these questions:

Systeme.io is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that’s built for you to create, launch, and scale your online business effortlessly.

Your online business is related to creating and selling online courses and systeme.io has you covered with software and marketing tools like:

And our prices are also as cheap as they come!

Here are our plans:

Thinkific is an online course platform and web-based Learning Management System (LMS) that allows you to create, and monetize online courses and membership sites.

With Thinkific, you can provide training and educational course material in a presentation with PDF files (with text or voice-overs) and video formats.

Thinkific offers 5 pricing plans:

Udemy is a massive online learning site that has a robust system directed at students and online instructors, as well as a course marketplace.

For more than 44 million students, you can upload course materials in video format, and you can add documents and files as well.

The problem though, the only control you have outside your course is pretty much just setting the price.

And while Udemy has no official pricing plans on their website for instructors, it’s free to create and host courses.

However, Udemy takes a 3% cut of each course you sell through your referral links, as well as 63% of any sale where no instructor coupon or course referral link was used — meaning the course was sold at their course marketplace.

With more than 100,000 instructors on board, Teachable is a giant when it comes to creating an online course business or an online school.

What’s neat is that you can set up your own curriculum and then publish it to students in the form of courses, lectures, quizzes, and more.

What’s not so neat is that advanced features like affiliate management are locked behind the higher pricing plans — and both the Free and Basic plans have transaction fees on each sale you make.

Teachable offers 4 plans:

Got questions? We’ve got answers.