Setting Up and Selling Courses On eLearning Platforms

A growing boom in the popularity of educational courses offered by eLearning platforms attracted more people looking for effective ways to set up learning courses on the Internet. According to a rough estimate, by 2025 revenues on the educational market are expected to be over $320 billion globally. Today, the number of people who are actively signing up for online educational classes constantly grows. Sad but true, unfortunate circumstances caused by the coronavirus pandemic multiplied the amount of learners looking for opportunities to get new sets of skills. New skills can open doors to more jobs and stable paychecks. Can you name more opportunities in online education? Experts say they’ve been earning decent money selling courses online. Nope, not a rumor.

Why is it profitable? Good knowledge sells well. Have an already established business? It can benefit massively from the promotion of courses online and with launching a new source of income. Before planning on launching a course, try to do some homework first. Develop an ironclad strategy for promotion and successful sales. This blog post will go over some hints and tips talking about how to build and launch a course online and put it on sale with the right promotion.

Pick an online eLearning platform to build courses with

Not too long ago, the majority of educational platforms had online courses set up either for internal corporate learning or for the purpose of supporting universities. Or other academic education establishments. However, these educational platforms were not made for building and promoting courses. Today, plenty of eLearning marketplaces to choose from and go in this game without a headache. In addition, nearly all of them offer affiliate programs you can join for a side hustle to add an extra buck to an income. Let’s go over some useful educational marketplaces and resources available online.

Some standalone platforms used by sole entrepreneurs and small businesses:

LearnWorlds –  this platform sets up sales pages that can be tested out through a special simulator available online with no need for actual registration. It also does customize online school, converting and uploading cool content altogether.

Podia – initially was aimed at coaches, but now this marketplace is also good for promoting and selling courses on the Internet. Also, you can promote memberships, downloads, etc.

Digital Chalk – offers various plans supporting and setting up courses online. It fully supports an Object Reference Model designed for sharing content meaning – you can happily build standards-compliant online courses with no complaints. Then import them to any other online marketplaces of your choice.

Thinkific – an online software solution designed and full-featured for building, promoting courses online.

A list of all-in-one platforms for managing a full presence on the Internet:

Academy of Mine –  was built on top of WordPress and mainly utilized by smaller businesses and organizations which want to have all-in-one options. It provides support with quizzing, assessments, continuing education credits, etc. Also, this platform provides useful capabilities for creating a full-featured Web site.

AccessAlly – combines the functionality of selling courses online along with the ability to manage a full-featured membership site. Since it leverages the full capabilities of WordPress,  adding membership features and a learning management system (LMS) plug-in is possible. All these capabilities provide useful features like submitting homework assignments for learners and getting 1-on-1 feedback from instructors.

LifterLMS – the base version is offered free of charge making this platform one of the most popular amongst entrepreneurs. You’ll be asked for payments only if you decide to utilize such add-ons like e-commerce or virtual tools created for managing marketing, integrations, etc.

Grinfer – go to Grinfer’s blog to read more useful information on how to become an author, how to earn money with promo links, and so on. Open your own course on Grinfer for free and reap benefits. Once you decide to create a course, just simply watch a video with step-by-step instructions or contact Grinfer’s marketing team in case you have any questions. Once you set up a course on Grinfer, a course will be promoted online, which also doesn’t cost anything.

Create  and start selling courses online without too much pain

Let’s go over some essential steps that are needed for launching a successful online course. Look at the following outline and think about what would be the best fit for you:

• Use your expertise for building online courses. If you have solid knowledge and skills on what you do and people call you an expert, you have a great chance to build a successful course.

• Not an expert? Teach what you have achieved success in. If you go online to see what kind of things people teach and make money out of it, you will be surprised. There were many silly things which you would never consider money-bringing that actually became bestsellers on the learning market. As an example, look at courses taught by Mari Condo who teaches decluttering for comfortable living. This brilliant guy made a bunch of money telling millions of people worldwide who needed advice and practical tips on how to organize stuff. So, if you have a bunch of awesome recipes that grandma taught you years ago,  you might have a chance to make some extra money by teaching others.

• Learned something useful? Go ahead and share it with other learners! For example, spend weeks reading articles, watching specialized videos, and doing lots of practicing to apply absorbed skills along the way. Create a course covering all topics you learned about providing hints and tips you have collected for helping rookies out there.

Now let’s talk some hints on where to start off with creating a course:

Start with drafting an outline and brainstorm. Think about a few main points that you want to be covering. Then grab a notebook and write everything down. Structure your course by dividing large blocks into smaller subtopics.

Find the perfect duration for your lessons. Overloading lessons with too many details and information can be hard for viewers to absorb and process. So, try to stick to short lessons – about half an hour should do it. This will make it easier for students to follow and complete the course and revise it when needed. Remember, your main goal is to deliver valuable and useful content, not the duration.

Don’t forget about the power of interaction with students. Many experienced online instructors stated that sometimes only about 1-5% of learners can go all the way through and finish the course. It’s easy for students to fall into frustration and quit along the way. So the key here is to keep them motivated on the go. Encourage learners to apply newly gained skills by adding quizzes, downloadables, quests to their assignments. One of the effective approaches is to break down one big project on a series of assignments and let students complete these tasks step-by-step without skipping any parts, even if they didn’t really like something. Motivate students by offering certificates of completion which will depend on the level of grades gained throughout the course.

Learn the pros and cons of making video lessons. No secret, sometimes it may take thousands of dollars to create a good course. However, you can start smart without buying a fancy camera because, for God’s sake, you’re not shooting a Hollywood movie. Go ahead and use your iPhone camera! It can do the job just as well as bring high-quality content to students. You can even use your working desk or a whiteboard for shooting your video lessons. In the process of shooting a video, try to act natural, be positive, and stay focused on the topic you teach. Are you camera-shy? Not a problem! Display a screen while talking to viewers or showcasing slides with key points.

Try to be honest and objective while in a process of setting up a price for online courses. Yes, it can be a challenge, since a correlation between the price of a course and its engagement rate exists. A cheap price doesn’t necessarily mean your course will be engaging many people. However, don’t think like – oh, who will be paying money for the information easily found on the internet for a zero price? The thing is that people are willing to buy content that can help to either solve problems or achieve goals. Plus, people realized – reliable online courses are much more credible compared to videos on Youtube. Typically, courses that talk about “how to do” stuff and provide theoretical approaches have a price range anywhere from  $10 up to $50. If in your course you actually have lots of practical cases that demonstrate effective ways on how to solve a problem, you can start charging anywhere from $100 to $200. Just keep in mind one thing – if you offer a pricey educational program, then think how to provide great customer support to learners and make sure you got it all covered.

Just a hint: Update online courses on a regular basis. Make sure that everything in your lessons is relevant to the topics you teach. Pay attention to such things as titles. Make sure titles do not contain the previous year instead of the current 2020. Otherwise, you’ll see a huge drop in sales because learners might think you’re selling an outdated course.

Make the great courses go on sale

Is a course all set and ready to go online? At this point, marketing comes into play letting the whole world know about it with effective promotion. Promotion doesn’t mean spending an arm and a leg on different ads and doing promo vids with expensive influencers on social media. There are plenty of other options that can cost much less or even nothing, well, except for your time and effort. Let’s cover some most common and clever ways of effective marketing promotions that cost little to nothing.

Pre-order email campaigns – build a good email list and launch a pre-order course campaign offering good deals for early-bird registration. Shoot a short promo video announcing an online course and providing your viewers with more information about this course. Use such marketing tricks like limited-time offers to motivate people to enroll.

Direct sales – this option works great if you have no solid circle of followers yet. This strategy helps to reach out to people who may potentially be interested in your course and are looking for information that you teach. Surprisingly enough, LinkedIn can be used not just for a job search but works well for networking and finding a target audience to do direct sales to. The trick here is to sell without being too pushy on people since you don’t want to be irritating to anybody. Don’t dwell too much on hearing “no, I’m not interested”, which you might hear pretty often. Well, good things come to those who wait. With time your sales pick up. If not, just find another way of online promotion and see if it works better.

Free webinars – schedule a free webinar on a topic related to your course. Announce it via your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. Invite as many people as you can. Tell attendees about interesting cases, common problems, and solutions. Make the webinar engaging and don’t sell your course right away. Instead, ask for an email to send useful materials or a free ebook for example. With webinars, you can not only build an email list but also engage a community and create a circle of followers who will become your students.

Bottom line

Launching online courses is a lengthy and stressful process if you’re looking at it from a wrong angle. To keep yourself motivated and learn more, find success stories about online instructors who made it to the top and still teach successfully. Go on Grinfer’s website and pick through a bunch of courses that’s been created and set up by different authors from all over the world. Grinfer has many success stories about authors selling courses on its marketing platform for free and earning decent money instantly.

Get more info on how to create a course with Grinfer by watching a step-by-step video guide available for viewing in the Grinfer’s blog!