How to Sell Online Tools

Why Sell Online Courses?

The online learning industry is already huge, and it’s only going to get bigger as more and more students turn to online courses to further their education.

In fact, the size of the global eLearning industry was estimated to be around $250 billion in 2020 and is expected to cross $1 trillion by 2027.

So selling online courses is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to share their knowledge with others and make money in the process.

I personally know and have consulted many entrepreneurs who regularly make a six-figure or even a seven-figure income by teaching online courses.

More importantly, such success stories aren’t limited to just a few make money online niches. There are thousands of creators who make money teaching yoga, photography, web design, cooking, and a host of other things.

Take my friend and client David Young, for example. He is a drone enthusiast and the founder of Drone Launch Academy.

His course FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Exam Prep Course has earned him over $800k over the past 2 years. He quit his corporate job in early 2018 and now works full-time as a knowledge entrepreneur.

Apart from the money, what makes the online course business model so attractive is that you’re basically selling digital products that you create once, but you can reuse them and sell them for years.

So you’re not trading your time for money which makes selling online courses ideal from a scalability point of view.

Moreover, the kind of impact that you can create on other people’s lives through online courses won’t be possible with any other online business model.

Finally, you don’t have to spend a fortune to create online courses; you can do it with a small budget, as small as a couple of hundred dollars.

Suggested Reading: How Much Does It Cost to Create an Online Course?

When you consider all these benefits, selling courses online has to be the single most powerful and impactful way to build a profitable knowledge business and find the freedom you want.

It is a perfect business model for you if:

• you’re a blogger or a Youtuber or an Instagrammer who has an existing audience.
• you’re a freelancer or a coach who wants to move away from 1:1 work.
• you have an established business and want to add another income stream to it.
• you’ve been teaching in-person classes and want to take them online.

I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t create online courses if you’re new to the world of online business. In fact, this is exactly what I did when I was getting started.

However, to successfully create and sell online courses from your own website, you’ll need to invest time, money, and energy into the whole process.

So if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to make money online, it’s definitely not the best option. 

But if you are interested in teaching online and are willing to put in the hard work, the online course business model will work great for you.

I know you’re already thinking about things like “what I’ll teach in my courses,” “how I’ll create videos,” or “how I’ll market the courses.” Don’t worry about these things, as we’ll cover them in detail in the subsequent chapters.

The only thing that I want you to do before we move to the next chapter and start working on your courses is to believe that you, too, can teach online and build a business out of it.

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CHAPTER 2

Find a Profitable Course Topic

Now that you’re committed to selling courses online, it’s time to decide what you will teach your students. So you need to come up with a profitable online course idea.

A profitable course topic should be:

• something that you’re knowledgeable about or have expertise in,
• something that you’re interested in teaching,
• something that potential students are willing to pay for.

Basically, you need to find the sweet spot of your know-how, interests, and market demand.

Come Up With Ideas for Your Online Course

When I was planning to create my first course, I had close to 4 years of professional experience in the supply chain industry.

I knew it was something I was good at and loved doing on a day-to-day basis. As a result, finding my course niche was really straightforward for me.

So the first thing that you should think about is your skills and professional expertise. 

If you do a full-time job in an organization, think about the things that you do daily. For example, you may know about certain processes or software which can be helpful to others.

Or, you may be working as a freelancer or a consultant. In this case, take stock of the things that you help your clients with.

Similarly, you may be a blogger or a Youtuber, so you should look at the topics you create content around.

Before founding MyExcelOnline, John Michaloudis had worked as an accountant and financial controller for 15 years. During his corporate career, he would use Microsoft Excel extensively and even trained other employees in using the software.

So when he decided to start an online business and ultimately create online courses, it made sense to choose Excel training as his niche.

But what if you don’t have such a skill or professional experience? 

Don’t worry! Bcoz you might have a passion or a hobby that others are interested in learning about.

Or, you might have overcome a personal challenge in the past that many others struggle with as well.

In fact, hobby/passion niches have picked up big time in the past few years, and there are thousands of successful course creators teaching courses in these niches.

I love the story of one of my clients, Zaheen Nanji, who developed a stutter when she was seven. Unfortunately, she also got diagnosed with breast cancer.

She overcame these personal challenges, and now she teaches online courses to help others build resilience. And the courses have done pretty well.

Now that you have an idea about what you’re good at, it’s time to think about potential topics for your online course.

Suggested Reading: 150+ Profitable Online Course Ideas (With Success Stories)

At this point, just think about the things that you can teach and don’t worry about things like market demand, competition, etc. And you can use this ideation worksheet to list all your ideas.

A very effective way to come up with course topics is to identify what your potential students are struggling with and think of the topics as solutions to these problems.

Obviously, you’ll know about some of the pain points based on your experience. However, you can also find other things by following conversations in Facebook Groups, niche forums, or other online communities (e.g., Quora).

Another important thing to keep in mind while brainstorming course topics is to be as specific as possible. For example, if you’re going to teach a course in the baking niche, here is how you can get more specific about it:

• How to Bake (very broad)
• How to Bake Bread (still broad)
• How to Bake Sourdough Bread (specific)
• How to Bake San Francisco Style Sourdough Bread (more specific)

Specific courses are easier to sell than broader courses, and I recommend that you start with a specific course that promises specific results to a specific audience.

As you move along in your journey as a course creator, you can consider creating online courses on broader topics.

Validate Your Course Idea

Most new course creators completely skip this part. Instead, they will come up with some ideas for their online course, but then they pick one randomly without validating whether there is enough demand for a course on that topic or not.

This ultimately turns out to be a big mistake, as they end up spending a lot of time and money to create an online course that just doesn’t sell. 

So you need to validate your course idea and make sure that there is a demand for it before you start work on content creation or marketing.

Get Google Search Volume

The easiest way to validate interest in your course topic is by checking the search volumes for related keywords on Google.

The tool that I recommend you use for this purpose is Ubersuggest. It is free to use and doesn’t require you to create an account.

=> Go to the Ubersuggest website and search with your keyword. Now analyze the results.

You should then check the search volume for your main keyword as well as the related keywords. A high search volume for your keywords would mean that people are interested in your niche.

This keyword research should also give you insight into what related topics people are interested in, and so you can use this information to fine-tune your ideas.

Search on Youtube

Youtube is the largest video platform as well as the second-largest search engine in the world. On Youtube, you can find videos on almost any topic and in any possible niche. 

Plus, Youtube has a huge audience for tutorial-type and how-to videos that give you a strong indication of interest in your course topic.

=> Go to Youtube and search for your course topic. Then, analyze the search results and video views.

You can also read comments on these videos to get a sense of your students’ pain points and what they want to learn.

Search on Udemy

Udemy is the largest online course marketplace, and it has millions of students who take courses in virtually any niche.

While I don’t recommend you use Udemy as the main platform for teaching online, it can provide you a lot of information that will help you validate the demand for your course. 

=> Go to the Udemy website and search for your course topic and related keywords. Now check the courses that come up in search results.

=> Select a particular course and check the number of students enrolled in the course.

=> Go back to the search results and repeat the previous step by selecting a different course.

If you find a few courses related to your topic and a few thousand students enrolled in these courses, that’s great news. This shows that a significant number of students in your niche are willing to pay for a course on your topic.

Search in Facebook Groups and Niche Forums

This is one of my favorite ways to validate a course idea because, with this method, you don’t just look at numbers, but you actually listen to your potential customers.

With this approach, you first need to identify Facebook groups, niche forums, or other online communities (e.g., Quora) where your potential students hang out.

Once you’re part of the community, search for your course topics and follow the conversations. See what people are asking about and whether it’s generating enough interest or not. 

And you can always start a new conversation yourself and collect direct feedback from your potential customers.

Apart from validating your idea, this will help you develop a better understanding of your niche. As a result, you can further refine your idea and improve your messaging.

Survey Your Audience

One of the most effective ways of testing your product idea is collecting direct feedback from students, and a survey is a great tool for doing that.

When planning to create my Supply Chain Network Design course, I first tried validating my idea using the above approaches. 

But the numbers didn’t look great, and it seemed that there wasn’t enough interest in the topic. 

However, based on my experience, I knew that Network Design was a premium supply chain skill and had seen how my colleagues and friends were interested in learning it.

So I sent out a brief survey to my small audience, asking them what they thought about the course idea and whether they would be interested in enrolling in the course when it launches.

Overall, the response was positive, so I went ahead with the idea, which ultimately was the right decision.

If you have an audience of your own, this method is really straightforward to execute. You can create a short survey using Google Forms and send the survey via email.

If you don’t have an existing audience, you can still send the survey to your friends and colleagues and share the survey in various online communities and groups you’re part of.

Presell Your Course

If you need a stronger validation for your topic, you can presell before creating an online course.

To presell an online course, you can create a sales page that explains what the course will be about and when it will release.

If you can successfully pre-sell your course, there is no better way to validate your course idea, and you can be 100% confident about investing time and money into turning this idea into reality.

Another advantage of pre-selling a course is that you get access to a group of people who you can reach out to for feedback on your course content and other stuff.

However, keep in mind that pre-selling works only if you already have an engaged audience. Selling your course idea to a cold audience is more difficult.

If you followed all the steps in this chapter, you should have an idea for your online course by now. It’s time for you to start creating your course content now, which we’ll discuss next.