Creating and selling your own online digital courses is an extremely fulfilling and profitable way to launch your own online business, have your own high-profit product and build a solid foundation upon which to grow a very large and thriving internet business.
So it’s not a surprise that I get asked several times each week what the best platform is to launch, host and manage your own online course.
What’s A Typical Course Look Like?
There are Billions of dollars each year generated from online learning, courses that share a combination of video, audio and written information to help teach on topics that range from self-improvement, academia through relationships, hobbies, lifestyle and business topics.
I find myself having accessed online courses around these 3 areas just in the last month:
– Photography
– Music
– Technology: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Having helped hundreds of people develop their own online digital products, many of which have involved multi-lesson programs or courses I can share a few things that categorize a successful online course:
- They are typically between 15-min and 1.5 hours of material – most I would say fall within the 30-60 minute range
- They break their lessons or modules into bite sized chunks of no more than 10-min each (some exceed this, but keeping the audience’s attention is a challenge)
- There is typically a mix of tutorial + supplementary material – these materials could be workbooks, summary sheets, checklists, exercise pages, manuals, ebooks, software or even audio or video supplementary content such as interviews or case studies related to that module or lesson
- They sell for anywhere from $7-$1000+ with most falling in the $17-$199 range
- Many if not MOST have additional products and services that they cross-sell or upsell such as other video courses, coaching or consulting, services or other products (physical or digital)
As I mentioned, creating and launching courses is becoming much more common for our customers – and one of the most common questions I get is where should I launch, host or put that course online?
Where To Host And Sell Your Online Course?
For nearly a decade, there have been dozens of options for hosting and selling your own online digital courses, the challenge being, that not one is perfect. The options range from using WordPress managing access to your course content via built-in subscriber access controls or building out scripts that help mange your students all the way to high-end learning management systems that cost 10’s of thousands.
Where you host and how you market your online course will depend on a few things
- Purpose of the online course – is this a higher-end course meant to be a CORE revenue generator or is this mainly a lower-end or free course to generate leads and upsell into something else (higher-end course, coaching, software, etc…?)
- How much of your strategy will depend on driving partnership sales versus self-marketing. Many of the online course platforms offer partner programs and come with a built-in partner network that can be quite powerful. For example, when I first launched my course on Udemy, sales went crazy and more than 75% of those sales came from existing Udemy affiliates and/or Udemy marketing. Granted, I was paid less on those courses (as the rest went to partners or on advertising), it still gave quite a boost I would not have gotten had i self-hosted. That said, not all products get this boost, some of the platforms are getting a little tired (affiliates have left, they are not spending what they once did on ads), which can limit the upside these days
- Your appetite for control – you obviously maintain a greater degree of control over your content, pricing, profit with self-hosted versus hosting on 3rd party platform, etc…For some of my customers (me included for most of my material), this one factor weighs heavier than the rest ending up in my decision to host my own courses.
Hosting Your Own Courses Online
If you want to get into the business of hosting and selling your online course from your own website, there are a number of WordPress products or plugins that allow membership models most of which support varying levels of selling online course content. What that really means is having a template model, subscription page, content pages and integration with payment processor or gateway that allows you to take an order, assign a customer a login and then present them the course content pages you want them to access.
In addition, you can find some online software and plugins support some advanced features that allow for social media integration (Facebook Groups for example so you can incorporate a private or public Facebook group to your course customers); drip content functionality so you have more control over when and in which order your customer sees the content as well as other add-ons allowing for integration with webinars (to market your course) and shopping carts (to offer a front-end catalog interface into your offerings)
WordPress theme packages such as Optimize Press and Woo Commerce have membership functionality that can easily be the platform for your course, I prefer these as they also serve as platforms for other online sites, do a good, cost-effective job of keeping their support for WordPress up to date (as well as their own platform) and are constantly coming out with new features and looks to stay up to date in the market.
Finally, most online entrepreneurs, coaches and course creators who grow a serious online digital course business online end up on more professional platforms that incorporate more active learning and course hosting, more integrated payment and course plan management, and even front-end marketing funnels to help your visitors and customers move from free or low-cost options toward higher-end courses and content.
Platforms here include Kajabi, Clickfunnels, and our new personal favorite New Zenler (currently in beta and available to early founders at a fraction of the price of Kajabi and Clickfunnels — contact us for a free trial invite if this is something you want to try and get in early with)
Have a question about creating, launching or growing traffic and sales for your online course? Join us over at 30DayProductProfit.com and learn how to take what you know or learn and turn it into your top selling online digital course in 30-days or less.
