How to Use Your Experience in Business to Create a Best-Selling Online Course

Building a sustainable business online is something that gets lots of people wondering how. Entrepreneurs and business professionals keep taking online classes to either boost their skills to catch up with a competitive job market or build an online business of their own. But if you’re already good at business or have valuable entrepreneurial skills, you can use your experience in business to create online courses.  

The E-learning industry is booming right now. So, if you’d shape your business expertise in a form of an online course, this can become lots of people’s bang for the buck. Great knowledge is priceless and best-selling courses are popular among those who like to take classes online. And your specific business skills can also be converted into money through e-learning courses. So, join the top e-learning marketplaces, build an online course, and turn it into a best-selling masterclass! 

In this blog post, we’ll give you some hints and tricks of how you can use your business and entrepreneurial experience effectively for building a best-selling course.

Use Your Marketing Skills And Experience For Building A Best-Selling Course

If you want to start an e-learning business through a website, then use a website you already have as a mediator between you (as an educator) and students. To get to successful outcomes in a shorter time, decide (or at least focus) on one of the niches in which you’re most skilled and knowledgeable. Or do some research and choose the niche on the basis of the current requirements and demands. 

There may be some specific niche websites for this type of product that you can try to leverage. Still, the focus of those sites has to align with your professional niche. Do some marketing research because it is important when you need to find out how much students/learners can pay. And what extra resources they want for mastering the skills. And if you’ll find the niche which remains untapped by the other e-learning websites – that would be awesome!

Use your marketing skills to find out where your prospects lie and how to communicate with them. Here is a quick list of activities where you can apply your marketing skills at:

Market Research. This is crucial because it can really decide on your future failure or success. Since market research is about getting to know if people actually want to buy your product or service, use the following questions for collecting important information:

• What are my potential learners’ pain and pleasure points? 
• What do learners need to get closer to their goals (solving a problem)?
• What do they want, not need?
• What is also really important for your target market? 
• Which websites do learners use? 
• Where do they hang out?

Out of that, you can also shape the price for your e-learning course, as well as use this information for your future promotions and ads.

Convert learners through a tripwire. This strategy works just fine if you’re going to sell an online course. Try “giveaways” and offer a few modules from your e-learning course as the tripwire. Once potential learners recognize the value they gained out of the course modules you offered, their next natural step will be to get the rest of the information. And from your side, a smart move would be to summon up a craving in them to go back to your website/platform to buy the entire course.

Creating a lead magnet. Connect your lead magnet to your landing page. Connect your tripwire offer to another landing or sales page or even your webpage. Core offers use the same strategy. It’s pretty much a step-by-step “gain trust and sell process” just like any other techniques used in marketing.

Establishing a CRM. Develop an email marketing automation system with at least (8–30 mails) depending on the price you want for your product. This goes hand-in-hand together with segmentation, follow-up, and upsells.

Running Facebook ads, Google AdWords, etc.  Run ads on other platforms like Instagram or wherever your target audience might be hanging out at. Use the results of your market research to target your audience and be very specific. The more specific you are, the more sales you can make.

Connecting the landing page to the CRM system. That way you will be able to provide a link in your emails to your “small-dollar offer”. Once somebody clicks on it, he/she on another landing page or sales page where they can buy your course.   

You need to keep being on track to keep up with technical changes constantly (messengers, bots, and other stuff like that).

Use Your Technical Skills For Building Learning Scripts

No secret, there are plenty of widely used applications integrated into e-learning or still emerging nowadays. These applications span a wide range of industries, social, and financial sectors from education, healthcare, finance to the banking sector. Today’s experience shows that online courses do a pretty good job in training people, students on the Internet. E-learning courses are especially useful if you are distant and apart from users. But what are other important aspects out there that help to develop a course that people will be willing to pay for? The answer is online learning scripts. 

Scripts must have the following panels available in them:

• Admin panel
• Instructor panel
• Customer panel
• Android and iOS apps

Distinct features of an online learning script:

• Login/registration/social media logins
• Promo videos
• Quizzes
• Download lectures
• Certificates of completion
• Instructor dashboard
• Questions and answers
• Browse lectures
• Subscription options
• Course listings

Constructive approaches spiced up by various technologies engage more learners and provide a better way of communication. So, build an online class that would make it possible to engage with multiple peers at a time to train them or deliver information.  

Use Your Entrepreneurial/Business Experience To Determine The Structure Of The Course

Start with the Student in mind. Think about what specific outcome should it deliver for students once they’ve taken the course. Focus on the student experience more than the aesthetics of the course itself. More things to consider:

• Will this be delivered using video, audio, documents, slides, or a combination of these? Delivery method should be decided based on the nature of the course. For example, use videos/screencasts for your course if you are going to deliver most of your content on a screen.
• If using videos, don’t create one huge 2-hour video as an online course. Instead, create short 5–10 minutes videos and set them up as lessons inside an overall library/course.
• Specify “course instructions” and objectives as clearly as possible. Let your learners know right from the start whether it is a beginner course or advanced course.  
• Think whether it would be helpful to include quizzes or trivia (for example, in the middle after every few lessons) to keep the student engaged.
• Let students provide feedback on what worked and what didn’t. This will help you do better next time.
• Participate in forums, discussions, and contribute to their communities.
• Be active online socially and look for relevant conversations to join.
• Share long-form content throughout ebooks, infographics, etc., and collect email addresses in exchange.
• Consider leveraging video and podcasts, if you have the know-how to do them well yourself for a low cost. Encourage people to subscribe!
• Build a database to share information and cross-sell.
• Evaluate activities that are getting the most traction and develop integrated cross-channel plans based on the information you’ve collected.
• Focus on what the buying cycle looks like and how to get them to the next step.

Use Any Entrepreneur Experience For Building A Best-Selling Course Because They Work!

In this current Covid-19 situation, many colleges, schools are looking to start their classes online. Lots of business experts feel that the future of learning will be online based too. This recruits more entrepreneurs into starting their business with e-learning. Since there are a few types of entrepreneurship like social, regular, tech entrepreneurship, and entrepreneur with a purpose, then using actual skills and experience is awesome for building online courses/training and very effective.

Here are more skills that you can think of as an entrepreneur where you can apply your experience for creating your best-selling online course:

Building a team

• Types of teams
• Sole founder
• Partnerships
• Hiring
• Co-founder

Business partners

• Outside firm interdependence (B2B)
• Networking for team members
• Networking for mentors/instructors

Risk-taking

• Learning how to take risks in the most productive way
• Assessing your own risks
• Building confidence as a leader

Deciding what to make

• Market research
• Product development
• Finding buyer incentive
• Business plans
• Creating a good business plan
• Unique value proposition

Creativity

• The right questions to ask
• Taking advice with a grain of salt
• Finding resources

Legal issues

• Corporation types
• Patents/intellectual property
• Process of filing a business

Day-to-day governance

• Creating a strategic plan
• Diverging and describing mission and future goals
• Presentation of product
• Audience engaged
• Daily life as an entrepreneur

Deciding if you really need to raise money

• Resourcing planning for what you really need
• Mapping every potential source of money
• Can you consult your way to profitability?
• Should you quit your day job, or work late nights?

Getting things done

• Outsourcing

Finally, try to build your e-learning course in such a way so it would deliver a better learning atmosphere. Lots of online courses offer many engaging activities like e-assessment solutions, quizzes, and gamification to students which provides a better form of engagement than ever. So, put a strong focus on the student experience. This is very important because, at the end of the day, that is what matters most in an online course.

Bottom-line

In 2021, the most high-margin way to make money online is to sell your expertise and your skills. And the ideas that can be suggested for the course’s topic are endless. Use your business experience for building an online course in anything from drop-shipping to selling goods online, etc. 

Taking into account the rising competitiveness of the job market, flexible learning is highly valued today for achieving numerous goals in many aspects of life. So, you can fulfill this demand for flexibility and accessibility through an e-learning course. Plus, you can build it completely customizable for business needs too. 

After you set everything up in terms of the course structure and content, go ahead and contact Grinfer! Turn your course into a full-time income with the Grinfer e-learning platform. You can also get personalized recommendations from Grinfer’s marketing team depending on the skill set you have, career interests, or skills you’re looking forward to developing.