Want to earn money selling online courses while you sleep? Many trainers wish for that. However, when it comes to profitably selling e-learning courses, many face a significant challenge. Find out now how to sell your online courses effectively!
(The original version of this text from 2022 was revised in April 2024 and updated with new insights.)
To hell with the cloud home
Create a nice course, upload it to a learning platform, invite lots of people to the course, and then relax as the course monetizes itself. How nice would that be!
Unfortunately, some preliminary work is indeed necessary for online courses to turn into a nice passive income. In this article, we explain 4 steps to bring your courses to the people. And if you successfully navigate these 4 steps, then – yes, it feels somehow like you're making money with your online courses while you sleep.
Crucial for the success of your online course sales are the contents you offer. Tailor these to your customers' needs! It is also essential how you present your content: Is it clearly arranged on a digital learning platform like blink.it? What live or in-person events do you offer in addition? Do the online course packages meet customer needs?
To achieve financial success with your online courses, 4 steps are necessary.
Step 1: The right distribution channel
Before you sell your online courses, you should ask yourself how best to reach your target audience. Here are five suggestions for successfully marketing your e-learnings, which you can tailor to your audience:
1. Sales platform
With a digital learning platform like blink.it, you can easily create your e-learning offers, and through the integration with the sales platform Digistore24, you can conveniently sell your online courses via blink.it. As a trainer, you save a lot of time and resources. Once your online courses are created, you can flexibly decide when they are made available to your customers. You also have the option to bundle various online course packages for your customers and customize your learning offerings.
2. Free webinars as teasers
Offer a free webinar as an introduction to your course: Here, you personally connect with your potential customers, they get to know you as the course instructor, and you have the opportunity to personally convince them of your expertise and your online courses. Webinars also have the advantage of being location-independent: You can address a very broad target audience, and the webinar participants can flexibly join from any location.
But the best part is that by registering for the webinar, you collect the email addresses of your participants. After the teaser webinar, you can directly contact them and invite them to the corresponding online course, which from this point forward will cost them money.
3. Social media live streams
Depending on the target audience of your online courses, you can also find your customers in social networks. Are your course contents geared more towards younger people? Then focus on platforms like Instagram or TikTok. However, always keep in mind that your online courses should appear professional. Many unqualified trainers offer their online courses on social media, and you certainly don't want to be lumped in with them.
4. Email marketing
How many emails do you receive daily that end up in the spam folder or that you delete after a quick glance? Email marketing plays a central role in customer acquisition, but you need to stand out from the crowd. Convince your customers with a promotional email that fulfills these points:
Address the recipient personally
Choose a catchy subject line that piques curiosity
Keep the text short and concise
Get straight to the point in the first paragraph about what the email is about
Use emoji very sparingly
Leave out all irrelevant information ruthlessly - less is more!
Include a clear CTA ("Call to Action") in the email: via link or button, through which the recipient can directly access your course sale.
Also important: Funny and entertaining sells better! Think of advertisements that you’ve remembered; they were either somewhat funny or particularly appealing. Look at emails from other providers and take a look around in the colorful world of advertising: You'll find plenty of inspiration that you can apply to your case.
5. Referral marketing
Nothing is more valuable than customers who are convinced of your online courses! This is why referral marketing is so effective: Customers share their positive experiences they’ve had as participants in your online courses. Make sure to place great importance on the opinions of your existing customers and implement their feedback and suggestions for improvement as quickly as possible in your courses.
Step 2: The quality of your courses
What sets your online courses apart from others? The answer to this question is the selling point for your e-learnings. But, of course, there are many more arguments for purchasing your online courses, as long as you can meet all these aspects:
Practical application instead of frontal teaching: Listening and taking notes – many still remember that from college and school. But in your online courses, knowledge is applied directly. If you incorporate additional live sessions (e.g., as a webinar), individual topics can be personally communicated and discussed. This significantly enhances learning success because knowledge doesn’t quickly fade away, and open questions can be clarified right away.
Benefit from blended learning: While e-learnings convey content from the perspective of the instructor or trainer, learners can exchange ideas in cleverly integrated live sessions. This opportunity allows for deeper exploration of topics and sharing personal experiences and insights.
Arouse curiosity for further education: To spark potential customers' curiosity about your online courses, it’s important to equip them with interesting and preferably current topics that provide learners with a professional and/or personal advantage. If you then also sprinkle fun gamification elements like quizzes within a learning platform like blink.it and employ clever storytelling in the design, your e-learnings will stand out from the boring mass.
Individual feedback: Successfully completed course chapters motivate learners to continue! On the blink.it learning platform, learners can complete a chapter with a quiz. This way, you assess their acquired knowledge as a trainer, and learners receive feedback on their current progress.
Personal support: To cater to the individual needs, learning behaviors, and character of your learners, you can offer them personal consultation sessions in addition to the online courses. This strengthens the bond, motivates further learning, leads to better learning outcomes, and ultimately to higher customer satisfaction.
Consider personal learning pace: Everyone has different learning methods and needs. You must take these into account to achieve the greatest learning success. Therefore, when creating your online courses, pay attention to the different learning types and ensure that you address every need.
Multimedia online courses: No one wants to buy boring courses! So create online courses that include a variety of media: On the blink.it learning platform, you can incorporate various text, image, video, and audio elements into your learning units (the so-called "blinks"). This makes the courses more varied, interesting, and entertaining. Learning becomes much more enjoyable!
A pleasant learning platform: Ensure that your customers can access your online courses through a platform that is intuitive to use and clearly structured. With the blink.it learning platform, you have a tool that is not only easy and clear for you as a course creator and administrator but also for your course participants. They can quickly understand how to navigate from one learning unit to the next, where to submit their questions or feedback, and how to complete the course overall. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to participate in your courses!
Step 3: Tailored customer packages
You’ll achieve higher sales by offering your customers solutions rather than individual courses. You can create various packages from your services that you offer to your customers individually based on their needs.
Complete package with fixed price: Here, the solution is sold as a package with a fixed price. The package consists of a variable combination of your services, e.g., a workshop, some individual coaching sessions, plus a supplementary online course.
Complete package as individual items: Customers are shown each element in the package with its individual price. They can then remove various offers from the package until it contains all desired components.
License package: You offer the customer access to the course for a specific period, e.g., six months. During this time, the customer can access the course whenever they want. After six months, the license also expires.
Step 4: A positive mindset
It is no longer a secret that the way we think about and feel about a situation determines its outcome. As a trainer or coach, you will be very aware of this when motivating your customers to acquire certain knowledge or skills. You do this through positive encouragement and attentive support, right? So: Motivate yourself to succeed in your course sales!
Make sure to approach all the necessary preliminary work, considerations, and decisions we discussed above with a positive expectation. Those who constantly tell themselves, "My courses aren’t selling" or "How will I ever get customers?" will not have success with their online courses. Pay attention like a fox to your spontaneously appearing thoughts on this topic: They reveal to you exactly how your mindset is, and which preventing or even negative thoughts you urgently need to turn into their positive opposite.
Always stay positive!
As in any other business, selling digital courses requires practice. Do not let your spirits drop if you experience some initial difficulties or if a course doesn't sell well even with a lot of effort. Always observe how your chosen strategies affect your sales, and consistently put yourself in the shoes of your target audience; then after a while, you’ll figure out how to best bring your courses to the people. And eventually, it will feel as if the money is rolling in almost effortlessly...
We hope this article has provided you with some useful tips and wish you fabulous sales of your online courses!
