In this article I will discuss whether or not selling online courses is still profitable right now in 2022.
This is actually a very common question, simply because everywhere we look people are selling some sort of service, online course or coaching program.
Every advert on Youtube is directing us to an online course, every advert on Facebook is directing us to a workshop to sell us an online course.
So is this industry completely saturated? The short answer is no.
It’s a long way from being too saturated.
But does that mean it’s profitable for anyone to create an online course? No, not at all, in fact, most course creators fail.
Because just building an online course is only part of the process.
Let’s dive into how to create a profitable online course, how much money you can make and the process you should take before jumping right in.
How Much Money Can You Make Money Selling Online Courses?
This is another common question and one that varies from course creator to course creator. It basically all comes down to a number of different factors:
- How much you are looking to charge for your course? I’ve seen courses range from $10 all the way to $50,000 per course
- How many sales are you making per month? Again I’ve seen people make no sales, I’ve seen people make thousands of sales per month
- How big is your audience? The larger your audience (If they are engaged) the more sales you’ll make
- Are you finding customers with free or paid marketing? If you pay for advertisements to drive sales to your business, you then have to factor in that added cost
- What are your conversion rates? How many people are you converting to sales from your audience?
- Do you have any experience building and selling online courses?
As you can see there are so many different factors that will determine your results, it’s impossible to say exactly what you’ll make.
There are course creators who make millions of dollars per month… Yes per month.
There are course creators who never make a single sale.
How Can You Calculate Revenue And Profits For Your Online Course?
Knowing your numbers in any business is super important, I’ll list below some key numbers that you’ll need to figure out within your business.
These will help you understand the potential of your online course and the potential money you could make selling online courses.
I always like to underestimate the number of sales I’m going to generate when creating a business plan.
Firstly work out the answers to these questions
- What’s the price of your course?
- Will you offer different price points/Upsells?
- Will You have a monthly charge for your course?
- What outgoings will you have? (Usually course creation software, webinar software, email marketing software)
Once you’ve done this, these are the important metrics:
- Size of audience
- Conversion rates (How many people will click onto your landing page/course/lead magnet/webinar)
- How many people will then buy
The typical conversion rate is around 1-3% of your audience will buy from you.
As an experienced marketer, you can expect 10% or above to buy from you.
Example:
You sell a course priced at $997 and you currently have an audience of 1000 people. Even if you convert 1% of that audience into a sale, you’ll make 10 sales.
Which is close to $10,000.
So you can see how this can be extremely profitable.
But don’t get too excited, first, you need to build a high-quality audience. Tiktok followers, don’t count!
Pricing Your Course For Beginners
You may read this and think what I’m about to say is crazy, but from helping clients over the years, the best way to create a profitable online course business as a beginner is to price your course high ticket.
A high-ticket course is typically $500 or above. Ideally $1,000 or above works best.
The reason this is so important when you’re starting out is that right now you don’t have a large audience.
So making 100 sales a month at $100 each is super unlikely.
However, making 5 sales a month at $2,000 each is very very likely if you do things the right way.
This way you get to focus on building a high-quality audience and really help people get results.
Most course creators who fail, shoot for the masses and end up with nothing.
You might be wondering why? Well, if I said to you, where are you going to find 100 sales this month, which is 3 per day, you’ll probably not have an answer…
That’s totally fine, but this is why you don’t want to create your course first without knowing how to market it.
So let’s dive into this.
How To Create A Profitable Online Course
Lots of people get sucked into the idea of building an online course business they believe it’s the best way to make money online in this day and age.
Now I’ll be honest, it certainly is one of the best business models on the planet.
If you know what you’re doing.
What a lot of people don’t understand is that in order to make sales, you must have an audience who are ready to buy, and you also must have a marketing strategy in place to generate sales.
Just building an online course and placing links to it on your website, or Facebook page is like opening a shop in the middle of the Sahara desert.
You’ll really struggle to make sales.
Understanding Your Audiences Problems
Before you start creating your online course it’s first important to start building up a small audience.
I always recommend Facebook as a great place to start as it’s a platform that has 2 billion users and prioritizes groups.
People will buy your course if it solves a problem that they currently have, and know they have it.
Knowing they have the problem is key!
How to find out the problems your audience is having?
This is actually quite simple.
Talk to people!
Post some questions on your social media channels and ask specific questions related to your niche/your potential course.
You’ll notice people will tell you exactly what they are struggling with. This will then verify the demand for your course.
The problems and struggles that people are having, can be an inspiration for course content for you.
So make sure to find out all the problems your potential audience has.
Start Building Your Audience Prior To Creating Your Online Course Business
Before building out the content for your course, start building up an audience and sharing value with them.
This will get them to trust you, build rapport, and in the future, they will be much more likely to buy from you.
You can do this by:
- Creating a Facebook group
- Creating an email list
- Building a following
You want to share why you are an expert in your niche.
Example: Let’s say you’re a nutritionist and want to build a course around nutrition.
Start sharing tips and tricks for people to improve their nutrition for free. This is the best way to build up an engaged audience.
Don’t try to sell to them, just offer free value!
Pre-Sell Your Courses To Guarantee Success
A fantastic way of making sure people will buy your course once you’ve spent weeks or months building it, is to pre-sell it first.
Essentially offering up your course to your target audience, even though it isn’t built yet.
By pre-selling, you can give your business an instant cash injection, which means you can use that money to build out your program.
Eliminating all the risks!
If you make a few sales you can either:
- Offer up some 1-1 coaching in the interim
- Offer a discount
- Offer up some added extras
- Provide extra training or perks
I’ve pre-sold my last few courses and it’s allowed me to create 6 figure businesses, without putting a penny of my own money in.
It also gives you complete confidence that once you build your course, other people will be willing to purchase it.
Mistakes Most Online Course Creators Make
I’m in a lot of online course creation groups on Facebook, especially the Facebook groups run by course builder platforms such as Kajabi, Thinkific, Learndash, Teachable etc.
Time and time again I see people posting about being disheartened that their course which they spent months building isn’t getting any sales.
It always comes down to the same thing.
They aren’t marketing their course correctly. Usually, they are running some sort of paid advertisement and throwing money down the toilet.
I always recommend starting off by trying to sell your course to a warm audience. Essentially an audience that you’ve been adding value to, who know, like, and trust you. As mentioned above.
In the marketing world, we call this ‘Organic Marketing’.
Once you know that those people are buying, then move into paid advertisements, but not before.
If you can’t sell your course to an audience who trusts you, you’ll never sell it to a random audience who has no trust and doesn’t know who you are.
Having A Profitable Online Course With Paid Ads (As A Beginner)
Paid advertising is a minefield and without having an understanding of how you’re going to add value to your potential customer and present your course, it’s a very easy way to lose money.
In a nutshell, the process to creating a profitable online course with advertising is to:
- Create an advert that speaks specifically to your target audience
- Offer them something of value, which helps to show your authority (ideally a webinar)
- Capture their email address to continue adding value and offer your course
- Make course sales from your webinar, email list and sales page.
Once you create a successful advertising campaign you can make crazy amounts of money.
The trick is to be in profit, say you spend $500 to acquire a new customer and you make $1,500 for every course sale.
You are getting a ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) of 3 times. So you can now scale to make more sales.
This is easier said than done, but perfectly doable.
What Are The Most Profitable Online Course Niches?
Creating an online course in any niche can be extremely profitable. But some niches are better than others, simply because there is a larger audience size, and people will be willing to pay larger amounts of money.
The most profitable online course niches are:
- Online Business Building
- Investing/Trading
- Mindset And Growth
- Health And Fitness
- Property
- Marketing
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Artificial Intelligence
Overview Of Creating And Selling Online Courses
A lot of people make selling online courses look super easy. Sure for those experienced who know what they are doing it is.
It’s one of the most profitable business models on the planet and you can make a lot of money selling online courses.
But for a lot of people it’s important to either, learn the skills of marketing/advertising or get someone to help you with this.
I believe that every single person has skills that are monetizable in the online space and that selling online courses is the best way to become financially free.
As well as helping other people learn your skills at the same time.
It’s a win-win!
If you’d like tips on how to sell online courses, feel free to subscribe to my free training that will give you a step-by-step process to build your audience, pre-sell your course and make consistent sales.
The training will also teach you how to create and sell an online course for over $500.
I hope this article (Is selling online courses profitable) has helped you understand that selling courses isn’t easy, but it can be extremely profitable once you master the skill.
Best of luck with your online courses!
