How much money can you make selling online courses

How much money can you make selling online courses

Creating and selling online courses is a thriving international sector. The elearning market was valued at $107 billion in 2015, $190 billion in 2018, and is predicted to surpass $300 billion by 2025 (E-Learning Market Size By Technology)!

Investing in education and lifelong learning is becoming more popular among both older and younger students. Online courses have emerged to fill knowledge shortages. Many people appear to favor the convenience and flexibility of their own homes over the challenges of commuting to physical classes.

And this is ideal for the expanding e-learning business.

If you are not already selling online courses, you are passing up a huge opportunity. You will not be sorry if you are among the first to enter your niche.

But the question remains as to how much money you can make marketing online courses.

Take the quiz below to find out how much money you could make with an online course!

Make Money With Online Courses

There are a lot of factors at work when creating your own online course and the profits you get from the course sales can vary wildly.

For example, as an online instructor you could be earning from a few hundred dollars per year to a six- or seven-figure income. In fact, you could reach up to a six-figure number while treating your course business as a part-time project.

Course creation is only part of the process. The work on marketing and sales, including your personal brand can give you an edge.

How Much Revenue to Expect from an Online Course?

This varies a lot from one online course creator to another. You will have to consider a lot of factors that affect your potential revenue.

• The price of the course: Are you selling a 5$ or a $500 course? This makes a huge difference in how many people you need to sell your course to make your revenue goals.
• Your audience: Do you have an email list? Any social media followers? Do you have a YouTube channel with subscribers? Do you have access to partners and their networks? The bigger, more engaged network, the more customers you can expect to get while doing social media marketing. If you are starting out right now, generating an email list should be the first item on your checklist of your new online course business.
• Marketing and sales experience: Have you done this before? If you already have an online business and have sold products before you are at an advantage and should expect a higher conversion rate from your audience.
• Current customer loyalty: How loyal are your customers? Are they coming back for your new products or disappear? Do you have an engaged customer base?

Even if you’re just starting out, all of the above can be learned, but you should expect a slower start than an experienced entrepreneur.

How can you calculate your potential revenue?

To determine your potential revenue you will need to calculate following:

Revenue = Number of your Audience x Conversion Rate x Price of the Course

If you don’t have an audience yet, you can make some hypotheses based on how many people you expect to reach out to. Do you anticipate 100 subscribers, 200 subscribers, or 1,000 subscribers?

Conversion rates for online courses depend on the subject, the price, and your capability to attract and sell to the right people. You can think of conversions as:

• Low conversions: 0.1% to 1%
• Medium conversions: 2-5%
• High conversions: 6-10%

To see different scenarios and set goals based on them, you can run the calculation on all three conversion rates, 1%, 5%, and 10%.

How can you calculate your potential profit?

In order to determine if your online business is making a profit from selling courses, you must subtract the expenses. Luckily, online courses do not cost anything per additional customer but might have production or marketing expenses. This is how to think about it:

Profit = Revenue – Production costs (fixed) – Marketing expenses – Other related costs

Now you can calculate if your course can be profitable, how much work you need to do, and how much money you can make selling online courses!

Increasing the Value of an Online Course

You can improve the value of your courses in several ways. Before moving on to set your course price on your first course, check out the following factors that can affect your course’s value:

• Your personal brand recognition: how approachable, memorable and visible you are as a person on social media and the web. A brand’s reputation online can be directly affected by mentions of the brand. We suggest that you google your name to find out where you are at and what the internet says about you. For more in-depth results, we suggest that you use a brand mention tool or a social media listening tool.
• Your level of expertise: the more knowledgeable you are in your subject, the more high-quality and unique content you are producing. It will also be easier for you to establish a reputation as an expert.
• The training content at hand: depends on the amount and variety of course content you have created and whether it is ready to be shared with your learners (e.g. blog posts, email marketing sequences, books, videos/vlogs, audio/podcasts).
• The course topic: a successful online course starts with a profitable topic. Your course idea determines whether lots of people will love your course or not and if it’s going to sell.
• The size of your audience: having big followership on social media, an email list, or a number of business contacts interested in your expertise is important. Course creators with a ready-made audience such as established professionals, bloggers/vloggers, people with authority, and celebrities have an advantage over others when starting their own online courses. Their brand recognition helps to boost sales.
• Your audience’s income: consider how much your target audience earns and whether they are willing to spend on digital products, such as online courses. To get a sense of your target audience’s income here’s a simple calculation. Would someone be willing to pay to learn more about what you teach? Do they have a price range? If so, how much are they willing to spend? This will also affect your course pricing – when determining the best course price point, as well as the quality of the course topic.
• The market size & competition: identify how many people are in need of your courses (a solution to a problem) in your niche, and analyze how your competitors are using this information. Conducting market research helps figure out whether there is a real market for what you are proposing to sell or upsell.
• The effectiveness of your site: track your target audience’s customer journey, how they arrive at your online school’s website, how they interact with your pages (landing pages, sales page, etc).

Working to improve these factors can help to promote your online course business and gain greater exposure to online communities or even industry influencers that can help you sell and upsell your courses. If you need help with marketing your school, check how to increase your course sales.

A side-project online course can be a good way to start making revenue until you can switch full-time.

Are Online Courses Profitable?

Yes, they are. Online courses offer one of the best business models to digital entrepreneurs. The demand is rising and people are more than willing to pay for them, and they are one of the top ways to make money online.

This is a great piece of information to start with. However, you will need to research more into your chosen subject to make a new course launch. Creating your first course might seem overwhelming, but it can be surprisingly straightforward using LearnWorlds. We offer the best online course platform to create, market, and sell your online course.

Create a beautiful online school without any technical skills.

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On top of that, when it comes to creating content for your course, you have many options to choose from.

One of them is to reuse your old material, including your:

• Old blog posts (if blogging is part of your business activities)
• Video/Audio recordings (webinars, speeches, interviews, etc.)
• Books/eBooks or other company-related information material

Lowering spending on new content and reusing your old material, can increase your online course’s return on investment (ROI) and your own income. Once you know what your minimum expenses are, all you have to do is put together a worksheet that can easily calculate the equation (Income – Expenses) / Expenses.

Why Sell Online Courses: The Benefits

Launching an online academy can bring you a passive income or a truly impressive new source of revenue, but it can also have multiple benefits for your online course business.

You can use an online course to:

• Enhance your online brand and presence as a whole.
• Establish yourself as a thought leader and a credible source for new knowledge.
• Develop a loyal following of your current clients as the desire for easy and more consumable information continues to grow.
• Bring more opportunities for new, profitable ventures, providing free online courses to attract potential clients and online business leads.

As you would expect in a knowledge society where information is power, utilizing your expertise through online education is a revolutionary way to make money. Also, it can open up a wealth of opportunities for your organization, as well as benefit your community by educating its members.

Online courses can also be a great way to start building your membership site. Membership sites have the advantage of selling subscriptions for a learning community and get recurring income for it.

Over to You Now: Are You Onboard?

Undoubtedly, online learning is the way forward. Course creators have the chance to make money selling courses to create additional sources of passive income or even make a living teaching online from your own website.

Monetize your existing content of training workshops, YouTube videos, podcasts, coaching sessions, and empower people to improve their skills.

The real question is, are you ready to become an entrepreneur, open your own online learning business, leveraging the resources you already possess?

You can start with a 30-day free trial on LearnWorlds and launch your course today!

Create a beautiful online school without any technical skills.

Start free trial