Why You Should Sell Online Courses? -

Sell online courses not to sell; do it for establishing thought-leadership, credibility, and expertise.

Are you a business owner? Creative professional? A Consultant? A freelancer? A coach? You already know that personal branding is a must for you to succeed.

To succeed, you need authority. Your potential customers must come to you (and you don’t go around asking for gigs).

One of the best ways to establish authority, to lead with confidence, and to make customers come to you is to teach online courses.

You might not have thought of it as such, but teaching is a show of authoritativeness, credibility, and expertise.

Accordingly, teaching online courses (hint: use Podia or Payhip) helps you (regardless of the type of business you have):

Establish authority (you are the de facto expert) and credibility.
Boosts your confidence (personally and professionally) and makes you more confident.
Teaches you a whole lot of new skills (I mean when was the last time an accountant had to learn how to create online courses, edit videos, and teach?)
Improves credibility in the eyes of your potential clients and existing clients as well.
Allows you to get new clients, without lifting a finger.
Provides you with a base and gives you an excellent opportunity to try new strategies to market your products

Or you could create, teach, and sell online courses (or digital downloads or memberships) just for the business model it is.

You can take any route you want but the numbers don’t lie.

Note: If you can’t wait, just start free trials with either Podia or Thinkific to get cracking right away. Or use Payhip.

How Big Is The Online Course Industry?

Did you know that the online courses market is projected to be a $325 billion market by 2025? TechJury has a few online learning stats that’ll make you fall off the seat.

Here are a few of them:

In 2017, approximately 77% of US corporations used online learning, but 98% planned to incorporate it in their program by 2020.
The US e-learning market could grow by $12.81 billion between 2020 and 2024.
E-learning increases retention rates by 25% to 60%.
The corporate e-learning market could increase by $38.09 billion between 2020 and 2024.
E-learning has led to an increase in income for 42% of US organizations.
A survey of 2,500 companies found that those with “comprehensive training programs” have 218% higher revenue per employee and 24% higher profit margins.
IBM saved approximately $200 million after switching to e-learning.

According to Thinkific, more than 63 million courses were taken online in the year 2020. On average, there are more than 1.5 million new courses taken each week.

Pandemic? Yeah, right. Opportunity to make an impact? Hell yeah!

What Do you Need To Sell Online Courses?

Apart from the basics of online course creation, there are challenges that course creators face, and that doesn’t even include the eCommerce platforms to choose or even making a choice between some of the popular online course platforms.

There’s also the question of picking up an online platform with some non-negotiable features.

If you get past all of the above, what separates the most successful creators in the knowledge economy from the rest? How has the pandemic changed online learning?

And is it too late to put out a course on how to make your own sourdough starter?

The answers are here: Check out the 2022 Online Learning Trends

The team at Thinkific analyzed metadata from the top 20% of creators to discover what exactly it is they’re doing differently to make them so successful.

Now, you can see which trends set the trailblazers apart — and how you can use their tactics to bring in more business and better engage students in 2022.

Take a look to see for yourself…

How do the top creators keep students engaged for longer?
What is their secret to growing their business?
Where do top creators focus their time?
What takeaways can someone just starting out learn from them?

The report is chock-full of insights you can put into action today. Because if you’re still creating courses the same way you were two years ago — you might be missing out on some huge opportunities.

See the 2022 Online Learning Trends

So, why create and sell courses? Here’s why:

Teach Online & You are a certified hustler

Most of us just do what we do even if you ignore the fact that it also takes a bold decision, huge momentum, guts, and a leap of faith. You’d need a whole new set of skills just to teach courses online. For one, there’s the anxiety of showing up on camera.

Moreover, there’s the work of putting together everything you know into little modules and chapters. You might have to dumb down a bit. You’d have to practice speaking slower. You’d have to be more organized.

Teaching online is no joke. It’s a bonafide hustle. If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you so much more better as a person.

Notwithstanding the time and effort it takes to teach online, it’s a call for something new that you might not have thought about.

Online courses make you money

There’s no skirting around this fact. Teaching online courses is profitable. Period.

Besides, there’s no dearth of case studies and success stories of online course creators.

Josh Kauffman was strictly instructed by his father to NOT get into education. For a while, he complied. But it wasn’t until he started his site at PersonalMBA that he saw his business exploding.

Thinkific course creators clocked an estimated $US 650 million in total so far. John Saunders made $100,000 with a single online course.

Want to read more success stories?

Sell Online Courses To Promote your Busines

Let’s say you already have a business. Like most entrepreneurs, you don’t have any more time left to actually launch another business teaching or selling courses online.

Contrary to the usual song-and-dance about “not having enough time”, you should make it a priority. In fact, teaching online should be a marketing strategy.

Further, you don’t have to treat online training or online teaching as another “business”. However, you can certainly think of it as a marketing tool.

How Online Courses Can Work as a Business Growth tool

To illustrate, let’s take a few companies and see what they are doing (you can do this on an individual level too, of course):

Webflow kills it with Webflow University — you should just see how much traction, love, and engagement (not to mention a true community) that the Webflow Academy helps build. Moreover, the training is awesome (not the boring, “duh” kind..).

SEMRush has practically grown a tight community around the SEMrush Webinars and The SEMRush Academy.

OptinMonster throws in a full-fledged academy as a true carrot-at-the-end-of-the-stick if you sign up for some OptinMonster plans.

Astra Theme — the same team that also makes other tools such as Convert Pro and Schema Pro — drive up engagement with their SkillJet Academy.

LeadPages has a series of regular webinars, The Converted Series, and several resources made available for you to learn everything about landing pages, conversions, and more.

If you notice, each of the brands above specifically teach or train in domains that their business is relevant for.

There are several individuals, entrepreneurs, freelancers, creative professionals, and others who do the exact same thing. They teach to establish their credibility, grow their personal brand, and improve their image for potential or existing customers.

In conclusion: Teach it to make it.

Interested in teaching online, start with Podia , Payhip, or Thinkific and get into the groove now.