Create and Sell Courses Online from Your Own Site | Scrile Connect

How to Sell Courses Online in 2022

Have you ever thought of taking an extra online course? We believe that the majority of you would give a positive answer. In 2022, more and more people offer private and public courses for those who want to study new niches or develop/increase their skills. 

What would you say if we suggest you start a new online course? Launching a digital business and converting your knowledge and experience into real money is easy. 

The growing knowledge economy, where information is power, has also increased the demand for online courses.The market of e-learning is one of the fast-growing markets in the world and research statistics prove it. According to GMD Research, the global e-learning market is expected to hit the USD 390.6 billion point by 2026, and this is evident through the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.5% that shows an increasing demand and interest in online content and digitalization.

It means that there is plenty of demand for online courses. With the global pandemic having created a surge in e-learning that is unlikely to snap back to former levels, it’s a pretty good bet that online courses will remain a permanent part of the learning landscape.

Though an opportunity of building a profitable business is not the only reason to launch your own online courses. Here are some more catchy reasons:

• Independence. For those who are tired of routine office hours and want to decide when and where they work, building a platform with your original courses would give you the freedom you have always dreamed of. Moreover, if you run your platform with the course, you do not pay any third-party companies for being presented on the market. The total revenue is 100% yours. 

• Direct channel of communication with students. When you have a site with your online course, people know where to find all the information they are looking for. Overview of courses, pricing, reviews, demo videos with course elements, and more exciting components can be placed in your portal. Consequently, the possible audience would not be distracted by information from your competitors. 

• Extend the offer. You are the boss, so you are the only person who decides what will be presented on the site. You can sell online courses and various information products that would complement the core course, or even some physical items like merch to please the loyalty of customers. 

• Increase your audience. When you come to digital space and sell your online courses to a more considerable number of customers. When you sell only offline courses, the number of people you can access is limited. But with online courses selling, you get customers from all over the world. 

Why use a mediator when you can design the course flow up to your taste and budget? Launch your own site for online courses and enjoy all the benefits of the business. 

Though before entering the business of online courses and dealing with marketing strategies, sales funnels, email newsletters, and creating a right impression for the target audience you should figure out if you would benefit  from it.

Who Can Benefit from Creating an Online Course Platform?

Well, it is better for consulting companies and solo experts to give a careful consideration of moving to a digital space. In these two groups we include:

• coaching and training firms
• independent course providers 
• sport coaches
• fitness instructors
• public speakers
• marketing experts
• bloggers and influencers

The reasons why we suggest experienced experts and teams to consider creating their own online course programs are as follows.

Build audience loyalty

For many people it might be a difficult decision to come and hire a consultant to solve their problems, but an online course may become an intermediate step. At first people would come to see your course, get to know you and your business, and it might develop into long  term cooperation. 

Boost the reach

With time, it is more and more difficult for traditional companies to grow their audience without using the internet. If you stick with traditional methods like face-to-face consultations, a strict non-flexible schedule and cash payments only, your business would lose a great number of potential customers. 

With online courses you open your services to people from all over the world and the reach grows exponentially.

Extra bonus for your business

Usually services provided by consulting companies are very direct and the number of people that would come to you and pay for consultations and information products is limited. Creating a course increases the number of your potential audience. 

For a consulting business an online course is a great opportunity to show people that the knowledge that they share with their students is not only theoretical, but also practical and can  be used by non-experts.

As a result, adding online courses to consulting business or training experts has no negative  consequences. Probably at the very beginning it would take more time and attention to set everything up, but in the course of time you will realize that an online course is a logical development for business that is built on providing others with information that they do not know. 

If you came to this part of the article and still did not change your mind, then we are happy to tell you that you are at least mentally ready to launch an online course. There is no doubt that the way to your ideal website with courses, teaching videos and quizzes is tricky and challenging, but with the proper guidance, it would take you fewer efforts than you expect.

Steps to Sell Courses Online in 2022

From our perspective, the journey to a perfect site with your ideal way of selling an online course takes seven steps. We have described each of them for you to make a clear picture and help you understand what you would go through and what problems you might face. Let’s go together through each of them. 

1. Define your niche

At the very beginning, you should choose the subject and theme of the sales. What your online courses would be about, how wide is the topic. You should also decide if your courses would give information in one specific direction, or it would be a resource with general information that helps people to see the broad field of the study. 

2. Study your target audience

Once you have succeeded with the first step, you know what people would acquire with your information products. Use this knowledge to define your target audience and do your best, so they can find out about you. 

Study your students’ behavior, determine what motivates them to get a course, and understand the skills that average students should have to be comfortable with the online course program. 

All this information might seem pretty basic, but knowing it, you can start a course that would please 100% of customers’ interests and make them want to get the course on your portal. 

3. Get to know the competitors

As the online courses market has appeared long ago, some businesses already offer online courses in the same niche. That is why we advise you to check out the courses and sites of your competitors. Go through the overall description, the site’s organization, prices, etc. For a deeper understanding of the online course organization, you can even sign up for a course to see the process from the customer’s perspective. 

• If you do not know any of your competitors, start with a quick Google search. Just google keywords related to your business, for example, “design online course,” “yoga online training,” “social media marketing free online guide.” Go through the results; at the top five positions, you will see the competitors who do their best, so people can come to their sites and buy online courses. These are the businesses you would compete with. 

• If you are into creating more profound research, use special SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. Use them to search with various keywords compilations.  

Note: it is important to highlight reliable services and selling features and things the competitors lack. It is not difficult to copy a good product, but to come up with a new something that no one thought of, takes more effort but becomes a point that makes customers buy your online course instead of your competitors’. 

4. Create a fair pricing list

Even though the market is full of various free information products and online courses, most of them are not as good as well-structured and well-developed but paid online courses. Usually, students of free online courses are left alone. Everything they get is the course recording and no experts’ help or support chat assistance. 

When people with their online course businesses enter the market, they are afraid that they cannot compete with free content. Though there is nothing to be scared of, anyway people who are ready to study or want to get a high-quality product, would come and pay for your course. 

For a change, you can give away some products for free as a bonus gift, but making it free forever takes the bark off the work you have done. If you want to give something for free consider offering demos of several courses. It would help the potential students to decide if they want to purchase the course. 

When you create an online course, you are responsible for providing courses and training that would cost them the money you sell courses for. 

Though if you are in the mood to give some stuff away here are some ideas to make it less economically unfavorable:

• Generate selling leads;
• As a marketing strategy to attract new people;
• Free bonus is a part of another purchase;
• It is a part of a testing or beta program.

If you want to make your courses more attractive from the economic perspective for customers, consider making a flexible sale program. For example, if a part of courses or training were offline, give your regular online clients a discount for taking an online course instead of offline classes. 

Note: To create a pricing list, you also can consider the prices set by your competitors. It is important for you to understand that you as a course creator set the cost of your courses. 

5. Consider alternative options for monetization

Along with fair prices, you can come up with some extra options for making money with your online course. You can sell merch to your students, create additional guide pages, lists of valuable resources, offer options for group trainings and solo classes. 

In general, there are three main monetization strategies used while creating a marketing plan:

1. Subscription offer. Create a course based on membership rules, so students would regularly pay for access to your course video and text files. 

2. Transaction offer. A one-time payment from new students, they get video and text content of your online course for one payment. 

3. Hybrid offer. The most flexible offer as it combines features of subscription and transaction monetization strategies. You create a course and let your students choose what is better for them; to pay more but one time for once and forever access, or regularly spend a smaller amount but do it every month and lose access once they stop. 

6. Chose the software for your online course

 When you have finished up with all the previous steps and have a picture of a perfect online course business in your head, it is time to select the software for your online course website. Being an online course provider that only enters the market, it might be challenging to navigate through the wide choice of options. Here is a simple guide through the most popular types of software. 

• Webinar solutions. If your online training has a live element, consider a solution that allows you to go live and meet with your students face-to-face, even when you are miles away from each other. 

• Learning management systems. In the case of e-learning, such systems are primarily used to create and manage on-demand videos. Still, they also help manage course learning modules, including live chats, quizzes, questionnaires, tests, and special assignments. 

• Training management system. To start a complex site with various online courses, you should provide a user-friendly sign-up and log-in process, several payment options, build an easy to manage timetable, and accessible customer support communication. TMS software would help you to manage all of them.

7. Market and sell your online courses

Congratulations! You have come to the final step. As soon as you are ready to launch the site with your online course, plan the marketing to boost the selling from the very beginning. A well-developed marketing plan would help you get the maximum from your online courses and training programs. 

At this stage, the information about your audience and their preferences that you got on the second step would help you a lot. Promotion of the platform and your brand is an essential part of any marketing plan. Basic knowledge of social media marketing and sales funnels would help you. If you know nothing about it, there are various online courses to help. To become an expert in promotion, we recommend you check out one of them. 

In general, sales funnels help business owners to turn visitors to their sites into actual customers and students. The majority of experts come up with four main stages of the sales funnel: awareness, interest, decision, and purchase. Every more or less successful business has its own version of a sales funnel that helps managers to convert strangers into a loyal audience.

Many businesses work hard to build a social media strategy to increase the brand’s awareness in the digital space. Launch a profile on various popular social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Develop profiles along with the site and convert social media audiences into customers. Take the benefit from using popular hashtags and participating in giveaways. 

Email marketing is one of the tactics that has already been used for years. If you have an email database check out various email marketing tools like HubSpot and Mailchimp. They are easy to use and help with the automatization of email newsletters. 

An additional list of tricks to develop your marketing strategy:

• Consider advertising on social media with popular influencers;
• Study the SEO basics;
• Enable Google Ads.

How to Choose a Way for Online Course Monetization

With time the market of e-learning has developed several most popular approaches for selling online courses and trainings; the list includes:

1. Online course marketplaces
2. Social media platforms
3. Membership websites:

Let’s look at each one to figure out each of the strong and weak aspects. 

Marketplaces with online courses and trainings

People are already familiar with marketplaces that offer different goods, from clothes and gadgets to particular services. Consequently, there are e-learning platforms; a list of the most popular online courses and training platforms includes Udemy, SkillShare, and Course Online. 

It is a good option for solo course providers to try the business. Everything you have to do is come to a marketplace site and get permission to place your online course or training class there. 

Why is a marketplace a good solution for your online course?

• No need for a course host to know the code.
• Assistance from the marketplace customer support team. 
• Massive platforms with many people starting their search for an online course they need. 

Why shouldn’t you share your online course on marketplaces?

• Style and design restrictions for online courses.
• Limited options for files that you can share with your online course.
• All marketplaces take a commission fee of your income each time you sell the course. 
• Course providers do not have access to the customers’ email lists.
• Huge rivalry among all the presented online courses.

Social media platforms

In 2022 social media has become an essential element of people’s routines worldwide. So there is no surprise that some small online course creators have chosen Instagram or YouTube as a mother platform for their online course program. 

Indeed, if the course works well without unique quizzes and tests built with UX/UI standards, social media platforms are probably the solution you have been looking for. 

Why pick social media platforms to host an online course?

• It has all the essential features to launch an average online course: live streams, the possibility to post photo and video files, build guides (compilations of existing posts), direct and group messaging, etc. 
• You can create both public and private pages for your online course.
• It is free to launch an online course. 

Why should online course providers refuse to start a course on a social media platform?

• It is not the original goal of all social media platforms, so they are not created for online courses.
• Many people come to social media to have fun and get away from their work or study. 
• Social media pages are easy to be hacked, so the possibility of losing your online course is pretty high. 
• There are no options to integrate the online course page with any payment solution. 

Build a site for your online course from scratch

If your online course is great, and you do not want it to have any technical weaknesses or to be presented on the same platforms as your competitors’ courses, then consider creating your own website from scratch. 

Creating a site for your online course you can be sure that everything would be unique, no one else could come and place their courses there. The site is created and operates only for your information products and courses. 

Why is a personal site a solution that every course provider should opt for?

• You are the only one who has access to the platform’s settings. It is up to you to decide on the number of landing pages, sign-up and login route, email newsletter subscription option, etc.
• The site is originally created to please your online course’s needs. It is important that no one can come to you and make you change any guide page, video course, etc. 
• Course providers can place there all the information about the online course (covered topics, list of activities, pricing, sales terms, etc.)
• As you are the business owner there is no set commission on the online course revenue, you get 100% of the money you have earned. 

What can make you refuse to create a site from scratch for an online course?

• Lack of coding experience.
• Course providers are the only people responsible for their online course selling and audience success.

How to Build an Online Course Site | Scrile Connect Solution

As you know above we have mentioned lack of coding experience as one of the points that may make business owners and course providers refuse from creating a site from scratch, but if knowing code is not mandatory? Some solutions can help you build a site without even knowing a line of code. 

You are welcome to the world of Scrile Connect! Create a fully-branded platform to sell your online courses and directly communicate with your customers. 

Scrile Connect is a modern software solution that helps solo creators and independent businesses create, launch, and manage their own platforms. It does not matter your niche; if you already have a loyal audience or are just about to meet your first students, Scrile Connect customers get the best support they have ever dreamed of.

Some facts to support Scrile Connect leading position 

White-label solution. Our customers are free to brand their platforms the way they want. We believe that it is important for course creators to be able to express their brand with the platform they create. When you start interacting with Scrile Connect website building space you see a predefined template that can be changed the way you prefer. 

Website customization. Depending on the plan a customer has chosen, there is a different levels of customization options. 

• Startup plan: at the very beginning you are free to pick the domain name, try all the built-in monetization tools, and learn how to use the admin dashboard for management. 
• Professional plan: option to change landing page theme colors, create a unique design, and extend functionality with the help of addons. 
• Enterprise plan: available all the design and feature adjustments.

Create the policy for your courses on your own. From time to time there are scandals in that platforms limit creators and tell them what they can or cannot share with their courses (including video, photo, and text content). When you launch a platform with Scrile Connect you are the only one who sets the rules for your online course content. 

Financial independence. Your revenue is only yours, and we have 0% of it. It means that we do not take any commission fees from your revenue and do not participate in the workflow, but create a comfortable environment for your site to exist. 

Create a website without knowing even a line of code. It might seem weird but to create a site with Scrile Connect you do not have to be an expert in programming. It is a turnkey solution that pleases all of our customers.

Protection of course data. Security of data shared through the course pages is one of the most important issues that our team deals with. Creating platforms we provide strong security.

Social media integration. Today many course providers have great audiences on their social media pages, and it might be complicated to transfer them from social media to the course platform. With Scrile Connect you can connect your page with the course platform and post course updates directly from the platform on your Instagram or Twitter page.

Administrator dashboard. Manage creators and users, check earning statistics, set up a commission for guest course creators, control transactions and payout requests. 

All the strong Scrile Connect features are really motivating for building a course, but to have an understanding of exact numbers you can make with a platform built with the software, visit the main landing page and check the revenue calculator. To get an average amount of income answer several questions:

• How many content creators will you have?
• The average number of followers (students)? 
• What is the average percentage of payouts to content creators (experts/teachers/tutors)?  

In the end, you get a full guide through all types of revenue and income per month. 

Scrile Connect pricing

There are three great pricing options, so our potential customers could study them to choose the one that meets their needs better than the rest.

Startup plan	Professional plan	Enterprise plan
It is a great way to start launching a platform for an online course with the Startup plan.  Customers can try all built-in features, get on well with the admin panel, and modify the very basics of the created platform. (logo, domain name, design layout, colors, texts)	If the Startup plan limits your ideas go ahead with the Professional plan.  It allows integrating a billing account and sharing the platform with other online course providers. It is a great solution for a more complex online course platform with multiple experts selling their courses.	Are you in search of the best of the best? Great! You have found the Enterprise plan.  Get a personal project manager and communicate directly with our developers to create any specific feature you come up with. Scale up your business with no limit.
$10 per month	$250 for the first month, then $500 per month	Flexible price Contact us to learn more

In the table above we tried to express a general idea of plans, to see the full plans comparison please visit the pricing section on the Scrile Connect landing page.

To get a better understanding of the Scrile Connect solution, you can start your own website with the startup plan and check whether the platform suits your needs. You can try all the features of the platform and check the admin dashboard.  

Challenges of Selling that Online Courses Business Meets

Unfortunately there is no business that exists without challenges. Here are some of them that test businesses connected with selling online courses. 

Marketing strategy built on link building and search engines manipulation

Once you step in the world of marketing and SEO opportunities you find out about link building and options to manipulate Google. Though we do ask you not to follow this path. Probably a couple of years ago link building was a useful trick to make Google believe that your site is worth being in the top positions. But today there are more and more websites banned for being caught on manipulation. 

Advice: Choose to create content that would make people want to link to your site organically. Better put your efforts into building authority on the platform. 

The wrong choice of video sales funnels

There are various popular strategies for building a sales funnel. One of them is a “Long video sales funnel”, you create three videos, each of which lasts longer than 20 minutes with a call for action at the end. Unfortunately, today the majority of people prefer to skip a long video fragment and find all the information in a more compressed format. 

Advice: consider placing a series of several short video clips on the landing page, or even replace videos with clear theses in PDF. It takes you less time to create but gives the same amount of visitor-customer conversion.

Overcomplicated marketing strategies

Our real life is full of complicated things, and online courses are one of the solutions that people look for to make it better and easier. Consequently, no one would like to face numerous questions and endless calls for actions on a sales landing page.

Advice: take care of your customers, do not make them struggle with your online course site. It is great when a business does not quibble and creates landing pages clearly keeping with great UX/UI standards.

F.A.Q. – Frequently Asked Questions

How to create an online course? 

To create an online course that later you could sell to your customers, you should define your niche, study your competitors to see their strong and weak sides, and create the pricing. 

How to sell an online course?
At first, you should choose the approach for the online course selling, it might be a marketplace, a social media network, or launch your own website. As soon as you decide on the approach, plan the marketing structure you would use for your online course promotion. It is important to define the marketing strategy, target the potential audience, use an email list to remind your graduated students about various online courses hosted by you. 

What theme of online courses to pick? 

The theme or a niche should not be selected randomly. When you create an online course consider your knowledge and experience. Ask yourself if you are ready to share your knowledge and skills with people. 

How to create a price list?

To create a fair price list you should study the market, check out sales landing pages of your competitors, analyze the amount of effort you put into the online course (creating video content, making unique quizzes and investing money into marketing strategy). The final price for your online courses is a compilation of your hard work and time investments. 

What software should be considered while creating an online course? 

The choice of software completely depends on the type of course you want to create. For live streaming courses with minimum integration of non video files consider webinar solutions, use it to make videos, have face-to-face video calls with your students and create online video webinars with live chats. For online courses with more complex structure consider learning management systems (LMS), create an online course with LMS and you could host video lessons, integrate various quizzes and polls, build forums within the platform, so your students could communicate with each other throughout the online course program. If you want to create a platform for your online course that could operate almost independently of your administration use training management solutions (TMS). Once you create an online course with TMS you provide your customers with simple registration, one click login, a selection of payment options, customizable schedule, etc. 

What are important components for starting a successful marketing strategy? 

No marketing strategy could be realized without defining the target audience, collection of emails of the existing and potential customers, building a sales funnel, and a welcome landing page that would catch customers attention. 

What is the best marketing strategy? 

It is important to understand that there is no marketing strategy that perfectly works for every online course. Some people are more responsive to email marketing, some people do not check their email boxes, but instantly go through their social media pages, some people become customers through sales funnels, etc. 

How can an online course creator spend less time on dealing with technical issues, and focus on mastering the online course program? 

There are two options. On the one hand you can hire a team of experts that would create the platform for you, and keep managing it as long as you want and pay for it. On the other hand you can use a turnkey solution like Scrile Connect and get a platform with technical parameters set under your requirements. The second option is multiple times cheaper, but takes a little more effort in comparison with the first option.

Conclusion

Once you are ready to start a business, create an online course program, deal with email and marketing strategies, communicate with students that face problems trying to master the online course material, then congratulations you have succeeded with the preparation step. Ahead of you there is a great journey that we hope will last forever.

From our position, we would support you on each moment of moving through it and come up with new great solutions that you could apply to your online course platform to make it better than it was before. 

Feel free to contact our managers to learn more about Scrile Connect platform. We will be happy to provide you with more information, share business insights with you and choose the most effective solution for your business.