The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating, Selling, and Profiting from an Online Course

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating, Selling, and Profiting from an Online Course

Simply put: You can make a lot of money with online courses in a short amount of time. But first, it’s important to understand why people are buying online courses as soon as they go live. The average cost of tuition and fees at a private institution is $31,231 a year, which has resulted in a 13% increase over just the last five years. But first, check out how much some of these other entrepreneurs are pulling in with online courses. They took three months and about $1,000 to make it. In the first month the class went live, Omar and Arntz made $40,000. Then, when iOS8 came out, they put out an email with the course for $89 and quickly brought in a cool $700,000. Or what about Rob Percival, whose programming courses have earned him more than $1 million in less than a year? Here are the three biggest tips Rob would give new entrepreneurs, like you, about replicating his massive success with online courses (via Business Insider): Figure out what topics are in demand by looking at which courses are selling well already, Make sure your version stands out among the crowd (“The feedback with the web development course was that it was fun — not going into a load of detail about server info they don’t need, but focusing on what they need and building stuff”), And finally, tackle a big topic. For example, should you start with an existing online course tool like Udemy or Kajabi?

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Len Smith was making a good living as a copywriter in England. He had written a book and had consistent work pulling in at least $120,000 a year.

But then Udemy contacted him.

They wanted to turn his book, How to Be a Copywriter and Earn Money from Home, into an online course. He developed the course (along with a string of others) and started earning an additional $2-4k every month.

When Smith started adding a little more time to promotion, his course income jumped to $6,500 a month.

It takes Smith about 40 hours to make a course initially, but after that, he spends only ten hours a week on its maintenance and marketing.

His latest course “Copywriting Secrets — How To Write Copy That Sells,” earned $3,000 in just two days.

Simply put: You can make a lot of money with online courses in a short amount of time.

I’m going to show you exactly how to do that in this article.

But first, it’s important to understand why people are buying online courses as soon as they go live.

Why You Can Build a Big Business from Online Courses

The sticker price for higher education is going up, without aid coming in to match it.

A new study found that college tuition and costs are rising more quickly than financial aid. The average cost of tuition and fees at a private institution is $31,231 a year, which has resulted in a 13% increase over just the last five years.

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Unfortunately, it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Check this out:

Recently, student loan debt has reportedly increased by $77 billion, bringing the United States’ total to a whopping $1.16 trillion.

That’s a lot of money. And it’s a big pill to swallow for young people right out of high school or even adults just trying to keep up with continuing education.

Thankfully, there’s one convenient solution.

This solution lets you learn anytime, anywhere. You can even do it in your own living room.

And it’s inexpensive. So you don’t have to mortgage the next thirty years of your life with student loan debt.

The high price tag of college tuition has motivated people to look for other alternatives. So as a result, the online education industry is expected to grow past $241 billion by 2022.

“The worldwide e-Learning market continues to witness rapid developments which are driving adoption among the academic and business sectors. Robust growth in the online learning market is driven by increasing accessibility and cost-effectiveness of learning and training initiatives.”

Here’s what that means in plain English:

  • Our ability to deliver sophisticated, interactive instruction has never been better.
  • Our ability to communicate complex theories, practically through video, is getting better.
  • And our ability to sit in pajamas on the living room couch while streaming live video and interacting with each lesson module is getting better, too.

There are courses on every topic you can imagine, spanning math to design and general business that people are willingly signing up for every single day.

What does that mean for you?

Sharing your skills through online courses is one of the best ways to make some major bank right now.

I’m going to show you exactly how to do that in the rest of this article. But first, check out how much some of these other entrepreneurs are pulling in with online courses.

Take John Omar and Eliot Arntz. At just 27 years old, the pair joined forces to create an online course on iOS 7 app development. They took three months and about $1,000 to make it.

“The first week was crazy,” Omar said. “We literally emailed every person we knew in tech — from Eliot’s GA students to people who came to an iOS meetup we hosted, telling them that we built a course that would take absolute beginners and turn them into junior developers in about three months of learning.”

They initially required a $99 fee to sign-up for the class. In the first month the class went live, Omar and Arntz made $40,000. Not a bad ROI right out of the gate!

After a few months, growth stabilized and then stalled, so the team did something drastic– offering the class for free ahead of the launch of Apple’s iOS 8. Subscribers came in from all over, and their program was on every site from Reddit to Product Hunt. All of this new publicity generated 60,000 sign-ups to their email list in just two days.

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Then, when iOS8 came out, they put out an email with the course for $89 and quickly brought in a cool $700,000.

Or what about Rob Percival, whose programming courses have earned him more than $1 million in less than a year? His 30-hour course on coding and web development took about three months to create. He posted it to Udemy, originally for free, and got 4,000 students to sign-up.

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Then, he put the price back to its full amount of $199. He brought in $15,000 of revenue in the first month. In the month of August, that number grew to $50,000. And when he released his second course on Swift (Apple’s programming language), he brought in $200,000 in the first month.

You know what my favorite part of this story is? Check this out:

Percival was a former high school math teacher! He was probably making a tiny fraction of this at his day job before. Then all of a sudden he’s pulling in millions a year.

These were monthly numbers he has never seen before in his entire life.

Rob was the stereotypical overnight success (who’d been plugging away for years). But he’s still a regular guy. If he can do it, so can you.

Here are the three biggest tips Rob would give new entrepreneurs, like you, about replicating his massive success with online courses (via Business Insider):

  1. Figure out what topics are in demand by looking at which courses are selling well already,
  2. Make sure your version stands out among the crowd (“The feedback with the web development course was that it was fun — not going into a load of detail about server info they don’t need, but focusing on what they need and building stuff”),
  3. And finally, tackle a big topic.

All of that sounds great, right?!

So what’s preventing you from creating and selling a new online course right now?

The short answer is that there’s a ton of details to figure out first.

For example, should you start with an existing online course tool like Udemy or Kajabi?

Or should you try to manually piece something together with a bunch of different independent software products like WordPress and WooCommerce?

Then there’s the problem of somehow getting people to buy your course (safely, from different countries, with different payment options), and then delivering that course to them (while still restricting access for people who haven’t purchased).

What about continuing to market to these customers after the fact? That way you could upsell them other products or even services to keep working together.

See: It spirals quickly!

Creating and selling an online course suddenly becomes daunting once you start peeling back all of the layers.

Unfortunately, that’s why people often stop right here, at the ‘dream’ stage. Getting your new course from ‘idea’ to ‘live’ seems so complicated and difficult.

So if this all sounds familiar, don’t worry. You’re not alone.

I’m also going to show you, right now, how to overcome all of these challenges.

In the next section below, we’re going to cover the nuts and bolts of creating your first online course. It’s actually a lot of fun when you do it right!

We’ll use Kajabi for this example because it’s the perfect all-in-one tool that combines beautiful design and advanced features while still being user-friendly.

So enough small talk. Let’s dive in.

How to Setup Your First Course on Kajabi

Here’s how to get started building out your first course on Kajabi.

First, go to www.newkajabi.com and click on the “Free Trial” button in the upper-right hand corner.

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From there, enter your desired account information including full name, email, and password. For example, my password is… just kidding.

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