A dream for many freelancers: Earning passive income with online courses. The catch: Creating and successfully offering your own online courses is easier than you think! We reveal three proven expert tips on how you can sell online courses – and a special way to become a pro yourself.
Time is the most important resource we have. So stop with 'time for money'! – Dennis Tröger
Teaching new knowledge is time-consuming. Every freelancer who earns a living as a trainer, coach, or speaker knows that. However, the internet also offers alternatives today: Online marketing expert Dennis Tröger has extensive experience in creating and marketing online courses and knows: Passive income through online courses is definitely possible – if you know a few tricks.
Reading Tip: Last year, Dennis shared his experiences with us. You can read about his experiences with blended learning, marketing online courses, and blink.it in the blog.
Dennis revealed the three most important tips for beginners, with which he successfully offers online courses.
3 Tips to Sell Your Online Course Automatically
The following three expert tips from Dennis Tröger will help you to plan, create, and effectively offer your own course:
Tip 1: Just Start!
Maybe you've been thinking for weeks or months about whether you should venture into online courses. You wonder how much effort a course requires, whether you can really make money with it, and what your customers will say. This wastes valuable time. Make your decision and set clear goals. Dennis reveals why particularly small courses are successful:
The viewer wants a solution to their problem. A small, compact course on a topic is a thousand times more sensible than trying to create THE huge course with 50 hours!
So you don’t have to fear a huge amount of work to offer a good online course that can be easily marketed. With little time investment and some patience, you can generate passive income.
Tip 2: Be Concise!
Not only should the course be short: Your content too! Design individual learning units as compact as possible. With videos, you can achieve this most easily: Instructional videos have been one of the absolute top learning methods for years, as they can perfectly represent many different contents through varied and clear information delivery. At the same time, you achieve a personal connection with your customers through videos – even without being physically present.
Make sure that the individual learning units do not become too long. Based on experience, three to five minutes per unit or video is a perfect compromise between information volume and participants' attention.
Tip: You can easily shoot high-quality videos with your smartphone without expensive equipment! Learn everything about filming online courses with your smartphone here.
Tip 3: Find Balance in Marketing!
Only when you address the right target audience and design your offer attractively can your content turn into passive income.
There are two serious mistakes that you must avoid: Too aggressive marketing and too lax marketing. The goal is to find a balance so as not to scare off customers. After all, a purchase is a commitment:
If you ask a stranger 'Will you marry me?' and they don’t want to, you can still ask, 'Okay, would you like to go for a drink first?'. Make a lovingly informal offer! – Dennis Tröger
Dennis' sales tip in practice: Offer your course actively – clearly show your potential customers that you offer this course, for example, on your website or on social media. But offer more than just an active offer! Information and smaller (free) offers should also be available. This way, you can reach both willing buyers and hesitant customers.
Conclusion
An online course does not sell by chance, but through clarity in positioning, value proposition, and pricing strategy.
Successfully selling online courses means more than just providing content. It is crucial that you start small, focus on the specific problems of your target audience, and structure your content so that it is easy to consume and can be applied directly.
At the same time, a conscious marketing strategy is needed: be visible, build trust, and design offers so that they can attract both willing buyers and hesitant prospects.
When content, price, and communication harmonize, there is no pressure sale, but a logical next step for your target audience. Only then do online courses sell not aggressively, but sustainably and with a good feeling on both sides.
Updated on 26.02.2026
