Welcome back, and today I wanted to talk about how you can sell courses online. There's so many different answers to this question, so let me kind of go through it with you and go through the different methods I've used in the past.
What Are Your Options?
First of all, the broad question is, how do I sell courses online? Well, there's two primary ways that you can do it. Number one is you can sell on Udemy.com and other similar online course marketplaces. You can actually take the same course that you publish on Udemy, which is the biggest online course marketplace at the moment, and you can take that same course and publish it on all these other marketplaces. That's a good strategy because now you're able to not only have the income from you to me, but also these other marketplaces.
It diversifies and spreads out your income, spreads out your risk, and it's a really good strategy. It's a strategy that I employed as well.
The second way that you can sell online courses is through your own sales funnel, through your own self hosted online course platform. Right now there are a couple of good platforms for that. One of them is called Thinkific.com and the other one is called Teachable.com. When you put your course on one of these platforms, it's different because it's not a marketplace. There's no competition, there's no other instructors, it's just your course landing page and you now have full responsibility to sell your course.
You Need This to Help Sell Your Course So in order to sell your course, then what you need is a sales funnel. The sales funnel is a simple series of steps that people will follow and then eventually land on your course landing page and buy your course. Understand that it takes about 6, 7, or 8 exposures to an ad before people decide to buy from you.
What you want to do is set up a series of either emails or communications or Messenger Bot messages that go out to your audience so that you slowly but surely warm them up to buying your course. Now that takes time. It takes time to set up, but once you set it up it's an automated system that continues to sell your courses day in and day out and that's awesome.
So you have the marketplace model and then you have the sales funnel model and in my opinion, the sales funnel model is far better.
How I Sell Courses and Use Sales Funnels
In my case, I have about 60 plus online courses. 52 of them are on the marketplaces like Udemy or these other marketplaces and 8 of them are self hosted. I actually make a lot more money, even as much as 10 times more, on myself hosted courses than I do in my marketplace courses.
And the reason for that is there's less competition; there's no competition. I get 100% of the revenue versus sharing the revenue, and I've set up an automated system to be able to market these courses at a much higher price point.
So when you combine a much higher price point with no competition and you don't have to revenue share at all with a marketplace, that has the makings for a highly profitable business.
Those are the two main ways that you can sell your online course. Now if you're asking about ways to market your online course, that's another question and I might answer that in another article, but let me tell you for now what I would do is I'd be looking for people who already have the audience. People that you want to sell your course to, find those people online and do a joint venture with them.
Set up an affiliate arrangement with them, make it so that they benefit from you offering your course to their audience. That's one of the easiest ways to do it is to set up an affiliate arrangement.
Split your revenue 50 / 50 with that person that owns the website, that owns the Facebook group, that has a Youtube channel that has your audience; the audience you're trying to target. Split the profits with them and you'd be amazed at how much money you can make and how quickly you can make it by bringing in an affiliate, somebody who has a vested financial interest in sharing their audience with you so that you can make sales very, very quickly.
If you're interested in the online course business be sure to follow my content. I'm putting together a Fast Start Guide, to give some tips and tricks to help you get started in the online course business. Be on the lookout for that link in a future article. All right, I hope you enjoyed this article and I'll see you next time.