Having huge launches that brought in 50 or a hundred thousand dollars into their business or even way more than that, and it sounded pretty enticing so after a lot of thinking and a lot of energy and effort and time spent, I finally created my first online course And I launched it, but unfortunately not a single person bought and it was pretty disappointing because I felt like I was doing everything right.
I had spent so much time not only making the course but studying for marketing strategies for how to get it out there and, like I said I put a lot of time into it. So in today’s. Video, I’m gonna be sharing with you things that I think you should know before you ever create your first online course things that I wish I had known before.
I started selling them. The first thing you should know is just something really practical: you can either sell your course to your own audience or you can have it for sale in a public marketplace such as udemy.
But if you have it for sale on your website, then you’re, going to be responsible for finding all of the customers, as opposed to. If it’s for sale on a public marketplace, there will already be some people there.
Who will find it and perhaps purchase it? This is also pretty similar to. If you were making YouTube videos, you could just put them on your own website and that’s. The only place that someone could find them, but then you’re, probably not gonna get very many views.
On the other hand, if you put them here on YouTube, there are millions of people already here watching videos, and so people can just stumble across your videos and watch them, and this leave this right into the second thing that I think you should know before you Create your first online course, and that is that it can be really tough to stuff your online horse.
If you don’t already have an audience now at first. This might sound almost like. It contradicts the last thing. I said because I told you that you could put it for sale in a public marketplace and people might buy it.
But even though that’s, true and you can make some sales on the public marketplace, it’s, going to be difficult to make enough sales to really earn enough money to make it worth your while to create. That course, if you haven’t taken the time and put in the work to build your audience before, you create your course that was one of the biggest mistakes that I made when I made.
My first online course was, I put all the time and energy into making an awesome, really valuable course. But I didn’t know anyone who actually wanted to buy it, and I didn’t have a list of those people.
I didn’t have a following anywhere on social media, and so, when I launched, I was launching to no one there wasn’t. Anyone for me to even tell that my course was available. So no one knew what was available and no one bought it.
The third thing that you should know before you create your first online course is that courses sell for drastically different price points anywhere from about five dollars all the way up to about ten thousand dollars.
People sell courses for those prices and people buy courses for those prices now. The average price transfer course is closer to between ten and two thousand dollars, but that’s, still a huge range it’s, not because some courses are really big or really awesome, and other courses are really small or really terrible.
It actually almost all comes down to marketing, specifically three things. How the course is positioned how the course is promoted and whether or not it gets in front of the right audience. So if you already have a big audience full of the people who are the right fit for your course and you position it as a premium product and you promote it effectively, then you’ll, be able to charge a high end price.
Perhaps a few thousand dollars, on the other hand, if you just put your course up for sale on a public marketplace, you’re selling to people who don ‘ T know who you are, and you’re, just positioning as a budget-friendly course.
Then you’re only going to be able to sell your course for five, ten or twenty dollars and since creating a good course is so much work. I would highly recommend that before you even record the first lesson of it, you really put a lot of thought into how you’re gonna position it and you start building your audience early, so that you later on, are able to charge a Premium price for your course and get well paid for the work that you put into creating the program.
The next thing I think you should know before you create your online course is that there are two different ways that you can host your course, and basically that means that there are two different ways that you can store the lessons of the course and allow your Course, students to access them, you can either sell post them, which means that they live on your website and students go to your website and you are managing the software and managing the students or you can host it on a full feature.
Third party platform that will do a lot of the work for you. If your self hosting your course, then most likely you’ll, do it with a plug-in on a wordpress website. The other option is to use a program like teachable or kajabi to host your course for you now.
This can get a little bit confusing because it can seem very similar to the question of whether or not you are selling your course on your website or selling it on a public platform. But this is really a different issue, because now we’re.
Talking about how your students are actually going to access the materials, so you could sell your course on your website and self host your course or you could promote your course on a public marketplace and have your students access to sit on the marketplace or you can Do a combination of those things in my case at this point, I’m, typically promoting my course selling it on my own website, but then I host a lot of my courses on a teachable, which is a third party platform.
Now this allows me to charge a premium price for my course, because I don’t have a lot of competition on my own site, of course, but it also means that I get to take advantage of the ease-of-use that that third-party host offers.
The next thing I think you should know, has to do with a big misconception that I think a lot of people have, and that is they think that if they don’t have an audience that that’s. Okay, because they can just run Facebook ads or they can just run Google ads and that that can be their shortcut to making sales of their course, and this is the reason why I didn’t build my audience before I created my course.
I thought that I could just advertise it and you can just advertise, but what I didn’t realize was the amount of time and money that it takes to get paid advertising right. It often takes several thousand dollars, and several months before you’re able to start generating sales, that’s, because if you don’t have an audience already, then you are often blindly testing things before you find something that Really works, so what that means is that paid advertising is certainly an option and in some cases it’s, a really good option.
But if you’re just starting out and you don’t have an audience yet, unless you have a fair amount of money to invest, to really build your audience and get that data that you need in order to successfully sell your Course then, I’d, recommend that you first work on building your audience.
The last thing that I want you to know before you create your first online course is that making a living with online courses is not just a pipe dream. When I first started thinking about creating an online course, I was really excited about it.
I was hearing all of these success stories. All of these people who were earning a full-time living are a really good money with online courses, and so I was excited about it, but then, after I launched my course and I didn’t make any sales I started to have my doubts.
I wondered if people really made money this way, or maybe it was all just an illusion. I wondered if all of these success stories that I here ain’t. We’re, really true or if maybe people are making them up, but at this point I can honestly say that it’s, not a fantasy.
It is a reality once I took the time to actually build my audience, and we worked on our marketing strategy to create a sales funnel that guided our prospective customers to ultimately buying the course we were able to start making sales.
I’ve, been selling online courses now for about two years, and every month we’ve been able to sell more and more online courses, and I’m – really excited about this, because not only does it mean that my Business is revenue is increasing month after month after month, which is allowing us to scale the business, but it also means that we’re being able to reach and help more and more people.
Every month, every person who buys one of my online courses they’re, not just buying a course or a bunch of videos and worksheets. They’re buying something that trains them how to get a result that they want in their life, and I just love that I’m able to impact so many more pupils lives with online courses.
Then I would be able to if I was working individually with one person at a time, but something that I’m really curious about is whether or not you’ve already created an online course yourself. If you have tell me in the comments below what your course is about, and if you haven’t tell me what’s, holding you back from actually starting creating the course.