Earning money while sleeping by offering and selling online courses? Many trainers wish for this. However, when it comes to selling e-learnings profitably, many face a significant challenge. Discover now how to sell your online courses effectively!
(The original version of this text from 2022 was revised and updated with new insights in April 2024.)
To Hell with the Cloud Home
Create a fancy course, upload it to a learning platform, invite lots of people to the course, and then relax while the course converts itself effortlessly into revenue. How nice would that be!
Unfortunately, a certain amount of preliminary work is indeed necessary for online courses to generate a nice passive income. In this article, we explain 4 steps on how to bring your courses to the people. And if you master these 4 steps successfully, then – yes, it feels somewhat like you are earning money with your online courses while you sleep.
Start now with your own learning platform!
Try blink.it for 30 days with all features FREE. Just click on the image – let's go!
Crucial for the success of selling your online courses are the contents you offer. Tailor these to the demands of your customers! It is also crucial how you present your contents: Are they clearly organized on a digital learning platform like blink.it? What additional live or in-person events do you offer? Do the online course packages address customers' needs?
To be financially successful with your online courses, 4 steps are necessary.
Step 1: The Right Sales Channel
Before you sell your online courses, you should ask yourself how to best reach your target audience. Here we provide you with five suggestions for the successful marketing of your e-learnings that you can individually adapt to your target audience:
1. Sales Platform
With a digital learning platform like blink.it, you can create your e-learning offer super easily, and through the connection to 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 determine when they are released for your customers. Additionally, you have the option to bundle various online course packages for your customers and tailor your learning offerings individually.
2. Free Webinars as Teasers
Offer a free webinar as an introduction to your course: This way, you connect with your potential customers personally, they get to know you as the course leader, 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 reach a very broad target audience, and the webinar participants can flexibly join from anywhere.
But the best part is that by signing up for the webinar, you obtain the email addresses of your participants. You can then directly contact them after the teaser webinar and invite them to the corresponding online course, which will, of course, cost them money from this point onwards.
3. Social Media Live Streams
Depending on the target audience for your online courses, you will find your customers in social networks as well. Are your course contents aimed more at younger people? Then focus on platforms like Instagram or TikTok. However, always keep in mind that your online courses should appear professional. Particularly on social media, many unqualified trainers offer their online courses, and you definitely don’t want to be grouped in with them.
4. Email Marketing
How many emails do you receive daily that end up in the spam folder or are deleted after a quick glance? Email marketing plays a central role in customer acquisition, but you must stand out from the crowd. Convince your customers with a promotional email that meets these criteria:
Address the recipient personally
Choose a catchy subject line that piques curiosity
Keep the text short and crisp
Get straight to the point in the first paragraph about what the email is about
Use emoji very sparingly
Omit 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 content sells better! Think back to advertisements that stuck with you. They were either somewhat humorous or particularly attractively designed. Look at the emails of other providers and just browse through the colorful world of advertising: you will find plenty of inspiration to apply to your case.
5. Referral Marketing
Nothing is more valuable than customers who are convinced of your online courses! For this reason, referral marketing is so effective: Customers share their positive experiences as participants in your online courses. Therefore, place the utmost importance on the opinions of your existing customers and implement their feedback and improvement suggestions 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 more arguments to buy your online courses – provided you can fulfill all these aspects:
Practical application instead of frontal instruction: Listening and taking notes - many remember that from university and school. But in your online courses, knowledge is applied directly. If you incorporate additional live sessions (e.g. as a webinar), individual topic blocks can be taught and discussed personally. This significantly enhances learning success, as knowledge does not quickly fade away, and open questions can be clarified immediately.
Benefit from blended learning: While e-learnings convey content from the perspective of the course leader or trainer, learners can exchange ideas with each other in cleverly integrated live sessions. During this occasion, topics are revisited and personal experiences and insights are shared.
Stimulate curiosity for further education: To pique potential customers' curiosity for your online courses, it's essential to equip them with interesting and preferably current topics that provide learners with professional and/or personal advantages. If you also sprinkle in entertaining gamification elements like a quiz on a platform like blink.it and employ clever storytelling in the construction, your e-learnings will stand out significantly from the boring mass.
%20while%20sleeping%20-%20Picture%20in%20the%20text.jpg)
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 as a trainer assess their acquired knowledge, and at the same time, learners receive feedback on their current learning progress.
Personal support: To cater to the individual needs, learning behavior, and character of your learners, you can offer them personal coaching sessions in addition to the online courses. This strengthens the bond, motivates further learning, leads to better learning outcomes, and ultimately results in greater customer satisfaction.
Consider individual learning pace: Every person has different learning methods and needs. You must take these into account to achieve the greatest learning success. So pay attention to the different learning types when creating your online courses and ensure that you cater to every need.
Multimedia online courses: Nobody wants to buy boring courses! Therefore, create online courses that contain different media: On the blink.it learning platform, you can integrate various text, image, video, and audio elements into your learning units (the so-called "Blinks"). This makes the course more varied, interesting, and entertaining. This makes learning significantly more enjoyable!
A pleasant learning platform: Make sure to provide your customers with 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 manager but also for your course participants. They understand in no time how to navigate from learning unit to learning unit, 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: Customized Customer Packages
You will achieve higher sales if you do not offer individual courses to your customers, but solutions. For this, you bundle your services into various packages that you offer to your customers based on their needs.
Total package with fixed price: The solution is sold as a package with a fixed price. The package consists of a variable combination of your services, such as a workshop, a few individual coaching sessions, plus a complimentary online course.
Total package as individual items: Each element in the package is shown to the customers with its respective individual price. They can then remove various offers from the package until it contains all the desired components.
License package: You offer the customer access to the course for a specified period, e.g., six months. During this time, the customer can access the course whenever they want. After the six months, the license also ends.
Step 4: A Positive Mindset
It’s no longer a secret that the way we think and feel about a situation determines its outcome. As a trainer or coach, you are likely aware of this when motivating your customers to acquire a certain knowledge or skill. You do this through positive encouragement and attentive support, right? So: Motivate yourself for the successful sale of your courses!
Make sure to approach all the necessary preliminary work, considerations, and decisions we discussed above with a positive attitude. Anyone who constantly says to themselves, “My courses aren’t selling” or “How am I going to get customers?” will not be successful with their online courses. Pay attention like a fox to your spontaneously appearing thoughts on this topic: They show you exactly how your mindset is, and which obstructive or even negative thoughts you urgently need to turn into their positive opposite.
Always Keep a Positive Outlook!
As in any other business, selling digital courses also requires practice. Don’t let your spirits drop if you encounter some initial difficulties or if a course fails to sell well despite your greatest efforts. Always observe how your chosen strategies affect your sales, and always put yourself in your target audience's shoes; then you will eventually find out how to best bring your courses to the people. And one day the money will flow in almost effortlessly...
We hope this article has provided you with some useful tips and wish you fabulous sales of your online courses!
