Learning how to make money selling courses online is just as important as creating the courses.
You might have a well-planned and creative course ready to be launched on your website. But knowing how to give online training and earn money through it makes or breaks the deal.
That’s why we’ve collected some smart tips for you to implement on your Learning Management System (LMS) website. So, you’ll earn some side income as well as make significant profits through your online courses.
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Things to Consider to Sell an Online Course
Before we explore the tips you can implement to make money selling courses online, here are a few things you must consider.
- First, you need a well-planned strategy for creating, marketing, and selling online courses.
- Decide on an excellent hosting platform to make money selling online courses. You can self-host them or rely on LMS services like Teachable, which will take care of your hosting.
- Use the best LMS themes to create a thriving online school. You can utilize LMS plugins like Masteriyo to develop online courses with unlimited lessons and quizzes without hassle.
- The content in your online classes must be appropriately structured and use suitable forms of media like videos, transcripts, etc.
- Ensure you’re integrating safe and secure payment gateways into your system so students can buy your courses without hesitation.
If you’re just starting on the LMS journey, go through our detailed step-by-step article on how to create an online course in WordPress.
Proceed to the section below, where we’ve explained a few clever tips on how to make money selling courses online.
How to Make Money Selling Courses Online? (11 Expert Tips)
There are a lot of ways to make money selling courses online. However, one needs to know the simplest ways to do so.
We’ve put together a total of 11 tips to help you learn how to make money selling online courses effortlessly. We advise you not to miss the last one.
1. Charge Up-front Fees For Courses
A simple one-time charge fee works just as well for online courses if you’re not interested in convoluted payment processes.
Users might prefer lessons with up-front fees to buy the whole course directly before accessing it. This payment model appeals to students because there are no hidden fees included; they get what they pay for.
This straightforward transaction might be just what you need to boost your revenue from online courses.
Udemy does this well with its one-time fee premium courses. You can just add the course you want to the cart, checkout, and get access to the full course without any extra charges.
2. Use a Subscription Model For Recurring Fees
Besides up-front fees, subscription models are the next popular payment system in the online business world.
Using this model, you get to turn your online school into a membership site where users will have to buy a subscription for a monthly or yearly fee.
Further, they’ll need to renew their subscription after this period to continue getting access to the courses.
Naturally, this differs from the up-front fees since you’ll be getting passive income every time a user renews their subscription.
For example, Skillshare uses a subscription model for their Teams Plans. Here, teams and businesses can pay yearly and get access to thousands of classes.
This is the way to go if you’re looking for a steady source of income for a long time.
3. Charge For Course Certification
You may feel like you might not attract enough customers with premium courses. If so, why not just charge for the course certification?
This acts as a positive incentive for users to at least try your course. If they like the lessons and feel like they offer considerable value, paying for their certifications becomes worth it.
Take Coursera, for example. Most of their basic courses are free, but students must pay a certain fee if they want a certificate at the end of the course. They even offer University, MasterTrack, and Professional certificates.
So, you get users interested with free courses and make money through the premium certification.
4. Charge For Extra Downloadable Course Materials
If you have downloadable course materials that allow students to dive deeper into the lesson topic, you might want to charge for it.
Just like you pay for extensions of free plugins to add advanced features to your site, you can make your students pay for additional resources.
After all, you give them easy access to educational materials to further their knowledge. For a small price, they get download links to valuable course resources. A fair deal if you ask us.
5. Sell Your Products And Services Through Free Courses
We know free courses are significantly more appealing compared to premium courses. You can still profit through free courses if you have other products and services you can sell.
For instance, you can create free courses on using your product or utilizing your services best. This helps drive leads and conversions to your products and services, increasing revenue.
If you already have a successful website, you can also create a freely accessible online school as an extension of your business.
Naturally, this will help market your products and services, increase brand awareness, boost conversions, and more.
6. Offer a Tier Payment System
Did you know? You don’t have to stay limited to these two options: completely free or completely gated behind a membership wall.
A middle-ground for you and your students is the tier payment system. Here, you’ll offer some parts of the course for free. However, if they want to continue taking the rest of the lessons, they must pay for it.
It’s like giving a free preview of the course and letting students decide for themselves if this course is what they need before they choose to pay for it.
Another approach you can take is to provide some beginner-level courses for free while locking the rest behind premium access, just like Yoast Academy does.
Naturally, they won’t think twice before buying the rest of the lessons if they find value in it.
7. Pre-sell Online Courses
If you don’t want to spend resources on a course you’re unsure will sell well, how about adopting the pre-selling tactic?
Pre-selling online education means marketing the course before you even launch it.
You can start with a simple poll or survey to understand which online course topics are popular amongst your target audience.
A good WordPress survey plugin will help you achieve that in no time. You can create a simple or advanced survey form with a plugin like Everest Forms and place it on your LMS site.
Analyzing the responses, you can start preparing the most anticipated online course. This way, you know what your users want, and you can rest assured that the course will sell.
During all this, you can promote the course through social media marketing, blogs, and more and build up the hype for when your online course is finally launched.
8. Offer Premium Consulting
The best thing about online courses is that there are more than one or two ways to make money.
If you’d rather offer your courses for free, you can charge your students for one-on-one consulting instead.
You can schedule live sessions for interested students to discuss the course material, answer their questions, guide them through tricky sections, and offer further advice.
This must be available only to students who’ve paid a specific fee for the premium consulting.
9. Sell Course Licenses
Another road you can take is to sell course licenses to established online schools and course marketplaces like Udemy and Skillshare.
You may feel like your website will take time to garner a significant audience. In that case, you can sell instructional videos online to popular teaching platforms instead.
This eliminates the need for a platform to host your online courses. You can create courses, sell their licenses to other parties, and make easy money.
There is no need to spend your time and budget on marketing and managing a profitable online school.
But why limit yourself to that? You can even sell course licenses while running a successful online learning platform. It’s totally up to you.
10. Advertise Your Courses Through Social Media
Advertising your courses is a really important aspect of selling courses. Without an audience, your courses may not reach potential users.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc., are some platforms where you can reach more customers online.
You can have your users share your courses on social media platforms through their profiles and provide them with exclusive discounts. It’s also a good idea to run advertisem*nts for your courses.
Among all that, targeting your audience is vital since different social media users can have different tastes. You’ll have to be the judge of that!
11. Get the Right WordPress Plugin
There are a bunch of LMS plugins in the WordPress depository, all loaded with extraordinary features. It might be difficult for you to choose one from them.
We’ve mentioned Masteriyo at the beginning of this article. Let’s discuss it in two lines.
Masteriyo is a powerful LMS plugin that allows you to create and sell courses online seamlessly and effortlessly.
The plugin has amazing features that help you easily follow the above-mentioned tips. Anyone from an individual instructor to big-time institutions can use this plugin for their business.
It’s responsive, securely coded, and updated regularly to make it accessible, secure, and up-to-date. You can explore its free version and later upgrade to the premium plans.
Wrapping Up with How to Make Money Selling Courses
Creating and selling online courses in WordPress is one thing; making a sizable income out of it is another.
However, implementing the tips highlighted above into your business strategy should help considerably.
You can opt for up-front fees, premium course certifications, pre-selling courses, recurring subscriptions, and more. It’s totally up to what fits your online school best.
Apart from this article, there are more posts about LMS on our blog that might interest you.
You’ll even find comparison articles like Teachable vs. LearnDash and LearnPress vs. LearnDash to help you choose the right LMS tool for your site.
To stay updated on future articles about LMS, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Disclaimer: Some of the links in the post may be affiliate links. So if you purchase anything using the link, we will earn affiliate commission.
