10 Ways To Make Money Selling Online Courses

You’ve heard it before. All of it. And you’ve had it up to here. People shouting from the rooftops. All of them claiming they can teach you how to make money online. You’ve read all of the same suggestions. Promote this. Market that. Make money fast. In your sleep. Without lifting a finger. None of them work because you’ve tried them all before. Right?

You’re a non-believer. I get that. You’re frustrated. Upset. After all, you’re tired of chasing money. You’re sick of not having money at the end of each month. And nothing you try seems to work. Ever. But hear me out for a moment. Maybe you’ve tried to make money selling online courses. Maybe you haven’t. Either way, there is no denying that we are in the midst of a revolution in online learning.

The knowledge and the wisdom you have right now inside of your brain can be unlocked. And it can be used to make money online. A lot of it. Yes, even in your sleep. Why? Because online courses are always available. Always selling. Generating passive income like clockwork. It’s like having a small army of workers selling for you every moment of every day. When you properly structure how you market your online courses the right way, so much is possible.

So how do you do it? How can you actually make money by creating powerful little online courses? Is there some secret strategy to this? And where do you sell your online course once you create it? What platform do you use? Do you create the course on your website or do you use one of the popular education platforms to sell your course?

How To Make Money Selling Online Courses

Most people think they need to be experts to create online courses that actually make money. They think they need specialized knowledge in sizzling-hot industries like web development. While that can help it’s not absolutely necessary when you understand a few things. Most people approach online courses the wrong way. They pick a topic, build a course, and cross their fingers hoping it will sell once it’s done.

That’s not how you approach this. Instead of picking a topic, you must pick a problem. And you must know the person (or avatar) who is struggling with this problem (aka your dream customer). Let me explain it this way. There are so many categories and industries where people need help learning a skill. Let’s say you pick time management. That’s a broad topic, right? You could build an entire course around time management. Will it sell? Probably not.

Instead of picking a broad topic. Find a problem that people struggle with and niche down. Instead of training people on how to manage their time, you could niche down to time management for salespeople. But that’s not enough. You need to go further. Time management for high-ticket insurance sales? Time management for high-ticket life insurance sales?

The further you niche down a couple of things happen. The first is that you can charge more money. Meaning that you will make more money selling your online courses when you get more specific about the problem. An online course on time management might sell for $37. If you’re lucky that is. And it won’t sell much. But an online course specifically designed for high-ticket life insurance salespeople? $1997? $2997? $3997? There is just so much more potential here to make money.

How To Build An Online Course

There are two ways to approach your online course. There’s the lazy way and the hard way. Both will make you money. But the hard way will make you much more money. It’s okay if you want to make money the lazy way. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’ll still need to do work. When I say lazy I don’t mean that it’ll be effortless. It will just be far less effort than the alternative.

The reason? Because when you choose the lazy way there’s less marketing involved. The lazy way relies on existing platforms to do the selling for you. Those platforms may heavily discount your course. That’s okay when you have tens of thousands of sales. But most never reach that point. The truth is that it’s much easier to sell one course for $997 than it is to sell one hundred online courses for $9.97.

That’s why if you’re serious about making money with online courses you must build the online course and have full control over it. That means you need to set up the course using software specifically designed to build and sell online courses. But the cool part is that you don’t need to be technical. There’s no coding or advanced tech skills involved. And you can use premade templates with a drag-and-drop editor.

Once you build the online course, your work isn’t done. You need to start marketing it if you’re serious about making sales. That’s the part that most people struggle with. So how do you actually make money by marketing your online courses? There are hundreds of ways to approach this. But only some of those ways actually work fast enough to count.

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1—Build A Lead Magnet

Creating an online course is not enough. If you want to make money selling that online course, you must bring people into your world. To do that you need to create a powerful lead magnet. What’s a lead magnet? It’s a valuable piece of content that comes in many forms. So what makes it different? Lead magnets are given away for free in exchange for a person’s contact details.

Building a lead magnet doesn’t happen in a silo. It’s part of a larger lead generation funnel. That lead generation funnel has a landing page that must create enough curiosity for a person to want your lead magnet. How? By writing a powerful headline that targets the main problem (pain point) the prospect is struggling with.

Lead magnets are built around a particular problem. Think of it as an extension of your online course. Your online course solves a problem in an in-depth way. Your lead magnet solves a problem in a summarized way. Even if your lead magnet has the same content as your online course but summarized, it will still deliver value. And people will want to get the full version to dive deeper with you.

Lead Magnets Help Sell Your Online Course

Most think that if they give away the farm with a free lead magnet no one will pay for the thing that they’re selling. And that is absolutely not true. The lead magnet builds reciprocity. Reciprocity just means that you feel indebted to the person giving you value and you want to return the favor. It’s simply human nature.

That’s why supermarkets give away free food. It’s not because they’re feeling generous or being altruistic. There’s a reason why they’re doing it for free. They know that most people who try it and like it will buy it. Same concept. Different format. You may also see a free 5-minute massage in a shopping mall. That’s their form of a lead magnet. Once they start, they know you’ll continue because you feel indebted to them.

Your goal is to create a lead magnet so good that you feel uncomfortable giving it away for free. That’s how you’ll eventually make a lot of money with your online course. It will feel strange to you. Because you have to put in all this work creating a lead magnet and then give it away for free. But trust the process. And do not avoid doing this.

Your lead magnet should live in a lead generation funnel. You can build that lead generation funnel as a squeeze page or a reverse squeeze page. Squeeze pages are designed to extract contact details by providing the free lead magnet in exchange for their information. A reverse squeeze page provides the value upfront before asking for contact details. Reverse squeeze pages typically result in a higher-quality lead.

2—YouTube Marketing

YouTube is a great way to promote your online course. Simply build free content on YouTube and post those videos. Then turn them into YouTube shorts because those get many more views. The YouTube Shorts will also propel the standard-format videos to do better. What type of videos should you create for free? Videos that tackle the problem your online course targets.

The videos should provide solutions to part of the problem. Again, the YouTube videos are free. And if they’re good they create reciprocity. But they also create authority. Meaning that the prospect who consumed that content and received value from it, now perceives you with authority. That just means they respect you as someone knowledgeable in that field.

Inside your description should be a link to your online course. It should be a trackable link. This way, you know how many people clicked it and how much traffic is flowing through your YouTube content. Take the lessons from your course and recreate them or repurpose them for YouTube. Make the content clear and engaging if you want to succeed.

3—Do A Product Launch

If you have an existing email list you can do a product launch to promote your course. If you don’t have an existing list, you can build one using a lead generation funnel and a powerful lead magnet. Product launches work best when you have an audience. If you don’t have one, then this approach may not be the best for you.

Product launches are the brainchild of Jeff Walker who created the Product Launch Formula. This formula popularized the approach of a 4-day launch. Each day drips valuable video and information to the prospect teasing the launch. On the fourth day, the cart opens for a short period. People are informed that there are only so many spots or so much time to sign up and purchase the offer.

This creates both scarcity and urgency. You can use the product launch formula to roll your online course out and sell it to an existing audience. If you don’t have an existing audience, you can get out there and build one. You can also load the product launch formula on the back of a lead generation funnel and run paid traffic to that.

4—Affiliate Marketing

Affiliates are a powerful way to make money from your online courses. However, signing up affiliates to sell your course relies primarily on your relationships. If you have existing relationships with top affiliates, then you’re ahead of the game. Onboarding affiliates shouldn’t be too difficult. Especially when you build your online course with our software.

However, even if you have no relationships with top affiliates, you can still succeed with affiliate marketing for your course. All you need to do is convince at least one top affiliate with a large audience to promote your course. But that’s not going to happen unless you have a proven track record. Why? Because top affiliates get to pick and choose what they promote. And they always go with either a person that they know, like and trust, or a course with a proven record of sales.

If you don’t know affiliates you can use the Dream 100 Strategy. In The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes introduced the concept of the Dream 100 as a way for small businesses to form partnerships with larger companies. However, it was later popularized by Russell Bruson as a way to target dream relationships in business. These are people with existing audiences or established entrepreneurs whom you would love to partner with.

5—Content Marketing

Although content marketing isn’t the fastest way to make money selling online courses, it is a powerful way to approach it when done right. Content marketing means you’re creating content around the problem and the online course. That content is picked up organically by search engines like Google, Bing, and others.

You do content marketing in many places. But you should first ensure that your online course is hosted on a domain you own so that you can control the marketing. Build that online course using easy-to-use software like ours. Then, you can build content using the same software around the problem that your online course solves.

Build content on your domain but also build content away from your domain. Use popular websites to build that content such as Medium, Quora, and Reddit. Push and promote the original content. Although this doesn’t lead to overnight course purchasers, it will eventually lead to organic sales. After all, that’s the best kind of traffic because it’s highly relevant and you don’t have to pay for it.

6—Webinars

Webinars are a great way to make money selling online courses especially when your courses have high-ticket prices. Webinars are an ideal way to sell things that are $997 and up. They work by breaking and rebuilding false beliefs. People have false beliefs about many things. And those false beliefs stand in the way of the sale.

False beliefs come in many shapes and forms. People harbor false beliefs about products or services without even knowing it. Those false beliefs stand in the way of the sale. Maybe they’ve had similar experiences with online courses that didn’t pan out. And they’ll subconsciously equate your course with that one because of their false beliefs.

People also harbor internal false beliefs. Meaning that even if they believe your online course could help solve the problem, they don’t think they’re personally capable of doing it. Maybe they’re not smart enough, skilled enough, hard-working enough, or something else. They also harbor external false beliefs. They might think even if they’re capable of something, time or money will get in their way.

If you want to learn more about how webinars work, check out the Perfect Webinar Blueprint here. You should also grab a copy of Expert Secrets to understand exactly how to build webinars the right way to make money as fast as possible by selling your online courses. There is a way specific structure for building the webinar to maximize your chances for success.

7—Paid Ads

Paid ads are a surefire way to make money with your online courses. However, paid ads should only be run to a front-end offer such as a lead generation funnel or a webinar funnel. This way, you can maximize your chances of converting browsers into buyers. And even if they don’t buy, you can ensure that you build your email list.

Paid ads bring people into your world through powerful funnels. Without a funnel, you’re throwing money away. Funnels help you make money by gaining someone’s awareness and converting it to interest. It then moves them through other stages that create desire and help the prospect take action. That means either filling out the lead form, an application, or buying the thing that you’re selling.

Before you start running paid ads, ensure that you understand what you’re doing. Start with top-of-funnel ads to build awareness. Then continue using ads and email marketing to move those people down through the funnel and eventually towards the action you intend them to take. There are so many facets to paid ads. But this is a great way to turn on the faucet for sales very fast.

8—Facebook Groups

When you understand your dream customer and who they are, you can find them in Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups are a goldmine. They offer tremendous untapped potential. But they must be tapped the right way. Not by spamming or requesting endless friends. You must approach Facebook Groups from the angle of giving. Meaning that you must give value first.

When people see you giving value inside of a group, it creates reciprocity. They feel somehow indebted to you for helping them. And they naturally become curious about who you are. They’ll click on your profile to get a quick summary. That’s why it’s important to maintain a professional profile with information about who you are and what you do.

You must give without the expectation of things in return. If you don’t seem authentic, this strategy won’t make you money and it won’t help you sell your online courses. But when done the right way, it can turn your Facebook profile into a lead-generating machine. Yes, it is that powerful. Especially when you target the right Facebook Groups.

9—Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the most powerful organic marketing methods. It’s fast and it’s free. All the world is connected on social media and you can create an audience of millions of people in a short period. Yes, it takes hard work. But it’s by far the best and fastest way you can sell online courses beyond running paid ads.

So how do you use social media marketing to make money selling more courses? You must build an audience in a specific niche. It must be related to your online course if you want to supercharge sales. Focus on all the objections people have. Go in-depth with videos. And make sure that your social media profile has a link to your lead generation funnel or even a hero funnel.

A hero funnel is similar to a lead generation funnel. Except that it doesn’t always rely on a lead magnet. Sometimes it can be used to simply join your list or your newsletter to bring people into your world. It then delivers some form of value. That can be a video with some information about you, social proof, and so on. It can also be used to get people to follow you across all your social media accounts.

10—Pinterest

Many people sleep on Pinterest. They don’t think it can help them sell more online courses. But it can. Pinterest is a massive search engine with a wide organic reach. And by posting relevant images and using Pinterest the right way you can extend your organic reach and sell more courses. You can use Pinterest for marketing in a few different ways.

The first way is to create simple Image Pins. Image Pins are seen all over Pinterest and they’re very popular. But you must approach it the right way with beautiful graphics. You can hire someone on Fiverr to help you or even use Upwork or Freelancer. Create beautiful pins with optimized descriptions and hashtags that point to your content.

The other types of pins are video pins, product pins and rich pins. Video pins are powerful and can be used to push people into your lead funnel or even to webinars. Product pins can be used to sell products. Rich pins update when a page updates with information such as pricing and other details. But the focus to sell more online courses should be on Image Pins and Video Pins.

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