The archetype of an entrepreneur often conjures images of a scrappy store owner packing items from their kitchen table, an artisan meticulously making bespoke goods, or a merchant building an online store to ship products to customers worldwide.
But entrepreneurs come in all stripes, creating what’s innovative and selling the unexpected.
This description certainly applies to online course creators, a category of entrepreneurs selling their expertise. Online course creators package their insights—knowledge, know-how, and experience—into a digital bundle for customers without worrying about packing tape, shipping labels, and tracking numbers.
There’s a good chance you have specialized knowledge or expertise that others can learn from. You might know how to edit and produce videos, have unique insights on growing social media channels, or be uniquely skilled in digital design. Creating an online course is about taking your knowledge and skills—often honed over years or even decades—and developing a curriculum to compress and share your expertise with others so they can learn, too.
With just a laptop and access to the internet, your online course can enroll students worldwide, helping them master essential skills for much less money than traditional education.
There’s never been a better time to sell digital products like a course and be part of a movement and industry democratizing education. In 2020, the global e-learning market was estimated at $250 billion and is projected to reach $650 billion by 2026. With just a laptop and internet access, students worldwide can enroll in your online course, mastering essential skills for a lower cost than traditional education.
This article will take you through a 10-step process on creating an online course while making money and impacting your customers. You’ll walk away with a blueprint on creating an online system that positions you as an expert in your industry, generates a meaningful amount of money, and sets your students up for success.
With no inventory issues or supply chain problems to solve, creating a digital course is an online business idea with benefits worth considering:
If the benefits of creating an online course convince you, dive into the step-by-step process of taking your system from a little idea to launch day and beyond.
The rise of e-learning and the benefits of creating an online course should signal something important: you’ll have competition when bringing your online system to the market. There is no shortage of online courses on topics ranging from digital marketing and video editing to online writing and entrepreneurship.
When considering creating an online course, choose a topic you’re uniquely suited to teach. Select a course topic where you have industry insight, credibility, expertise, and passion. Plus, ensure the course topic has high market demand.
Novices want to learn from an expert who is ahead of them on the learning journey. Learners also need to know they’re hearing from someone with credibility who is highly regarded in their field. Here are a few signs that this is you:
Putting together a comprehensive and valuable course requires a meaningful amount of time and energy. Here are signs you have the passion for sustaining the endeavour:
While your expertise and passion are vital to consider when choosing your course topic, your course must have a high market demand to succeed. Here are a few signals your course has enough interest:
While your course topic doesn’t have to check every single item on this checklist, having some level of industry insight and expertise, credibility, and passion in your subject area will make all the difference in creating a course that stands out from the competition and has a unique value proposition for prospective students.
It’s also essential to research and test whether your course topic has market demand. Niche course topics like “making authentic maple syrup” or “producing ska music” might not have enough order to make creating a course profitable. (We’ll dedicate an entire section of this guide to how you should validate the market demand of your system.)
While choosing the topic of your course is critical, you’re still a few steps away from creating course content and diving into the sales cycle. First, it’s essential to understand your audience before planning content for them. Here are a few reasons for taking the time to conduct user research and define your ideal customer at the start of your course creation journey:
In defining your ideal customer, step beyond assumptions and casual conversations. Instead, approach defining your perfect customer like someone conducting methodological user research. Here are a few different ways to conduct user research:
Keep user research interviews short and use them as an opportunity to inquire about preferred course format and pricing, too. Consider incentivizing interviewees by offering them the course for free once it’s complete.
Use the following script to ask prospective customers if they would be willing to sit down with you for a user research interview:
“Hi. I’m creating a course on _____ and want to make sure it’s incredibly valuable for learners. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to give me 15 minutes of your time for a short video call, where I can find out how my course might be able to help people just like you reach their goals. If you’re interested, I’d love to give you the course for free once I’m done to show you my appreciation.”
Taking the time to conduct user research will make all the difference in crafting a high-quality course that can be promoted to an ideal buyer and that provides a transformation for students.
Courses can come in a range of different formats and mediums. How you structure and deliver your course will determine how you market your course to buyers, how much content to include in your curriculum, and how much money you can reasonably sell your course for.
There are three main types of courses: mini-courses, multi-day courses, and masterclasses.
A mini-course generally requires an hour or two to complete. It can take on different mediums—for instance, a series of emails or a playlist of 10 short videos. Mini-courses are generally offered at a low price point (e.g., under $100), or may even be free, to serve as a marketing tool or lead magnet for a more in-depth and pricer course offering. A mini-course is a great way to get started as a course creator to test the market and learn how to create a larger course.
Multi-day courses are intermediate digital educational products that generally take students several days to complete. They might include pre-recorded videos that break down the course into different levels or modules and include supplementary materials like worksheets and checklists. These courses often fall into the price range of $250 to $2,000. A multi-day course is ideal if you’ve already validated your idea through a mini-course.
Cathryn Lavery, the Founder and CEO of Best Self, sells several online courses around productivity and self improvement. The most expensive offering, the 20/20 Vision Digital Course, takes around 8-hours to complete, includes bite-sized video lessons, and includes an 87-page downloadable workbook.
Masterclasses can be anywhere from weeks to months long and aim to provide buyers with a complete system for success. These types of courses are generally sold to professionals and have a price point ranging from $300 to $5,000. If it’s your first time creating a course, you generally shouldn’t start with a masterclass. Instead, build up your experience creating mini-courses and multi-day courses first.
Jean-Martin Former and Suleyka Montpetit, the founders behind The Market Gardener Institute, offer a range of courses, including The Market Gardener Masterclass. The course takes 40-60 hours to complete and includes 40+ modules, 50+ videos, 45+ technical sheets, and more. A community component is part of the offering. The course is priced at $1,997 and includes a downloadable syllabus you can review before buying, which provides information on everything the course covers.
Select the type of course you create based on your experience with creating courses, the breadth and depth of the content you’ll create, and your target buyer’s willingness to pay.
In business, it’s helpful to validate your idea before you launch your product to the world. Before spending money and time building a digital product that people may not buy, test whether there’s truly a market demand before going full steam ahead with your idea.
One way to do this is building a minimum viable product (MVP), a concept coined in Eric Reis’ The Lean Startup.An MVP is a product you release to the public with just enough features to validate your assumptions. When considering how to create an online course, create a minimum viable product version of your course, such as a mini-course or a free webinar to validate your idea.
Mini-courses generally take less than two hours to complete and narrow in on a specific topic rather than attempting to cover a broad range of ideas. A mini-course could eventually be a module or lesson in a multi-day course. Here are examples of taking a broad course topic and narrowing it into a mini-course MVP:
| Multi-day course Topic | Mini-course idea |
| Marketing for startups | Organic social media strategies with $0 |
| Email marketing 101 | Email segmentation in Mailchimp |
| How to write a nonfiction essay | Crafting the perfect opening hook |
| Photography basics | Photography lighting and shadows |
| Leadership and people management | How to run an effective 1:1 meeting |
A mini-course allows you to choose a topic you know well and package your expertise or repackage your existing material (e.g., blog posts, tweet threads, email newsletter) into a format like an email course. An email course also lets you capture the emails of people who you’ll eventually market your bigger course to. Someone signing up and taking your mini-course is validation of market demand for a larger course on a broader topic.
Another MVP strategy for validating the market demand of your course is creating a webinar with an upsell. This will help you test your topic, gain feedback to perfect your value proposition, prototype your course in a condensed format, and learn about your audience. You can also make early sales from upselling, promising a special promotional price for your course for a limited time to participants. The average conversion rate of a webinar can be around 20%. Seeing a conversion rate like this is validation that there’s market demand for your bigger course. Spend the majority of the webinar providing valuable information on your course topic, but make sure to gather feedback from participants on what they found valuable and what else they want to learn. Of the people who convert, note their characteristics and consider framing future marketing toward people who are similar.
These methods of validating your course idea will save you the experience of creating a course that nobody actually buys.
Pre-selling a course means selling your course before you’ve actually created it. While you’ll need to actually finish creating the course, this is another mitigation strategy to avoid creating a course that nobody wants. Other advantages include stress-testing your concept, tailoring your content to early feedback from buyers, and raising money through pre-sales to actually fund the creation of your course. Plus, having a few early student sign-ups will likely serve as a motivator for finishing and launching your course to the world.
Getting your very first cohort of customers to sign up for a pre-sale (or “pre-order”) can be done by creating a pre-sale landing page and incentivizing buyers with a discount. For example, use Shopify to create a pre-sale page and collect payments for your course. To add pre-order functionality to your store, download an app from the Shopify App Store like Pre-order Now, PreProduct, Pre-order Manager, and Crowdfunder. Shopify also integrates with a number of course platforms, like Thinkific and Teachable.
To pre-sell your course, you should at the very least have a title, topic, and course outline that gives early buyers an idea of the curriculum they’ll learn down the line. Additionally, you should have a goal in mind of what a successful pre-sale might look like. For instance, your aim might be to make 25 pre-sales of your course. If you make less than this in a given time frame, it’s worth carefully thinking about whether you want to continue with creating the course or opt to refund customers what they’ve paid and go back to the drawing board.
Read more: How to Create a Coming Soon Page and Start Marketing Before You Launch
As discussed earlier, the primary reason someone purchases a course is for an expected transformation. A buyer expects to be more knowledgeable, more skilled, or more prepared to take on a given challenge after they’ve gone through the lessons you’ve laid out or completed the modules you’ve made. Outlining your course content, coming up with the contents of your course and logically dividing it into lessons requires you to put yourself in the shoes of a student. Start from the desired end state of a student and work backward from there.
The amount of content in your course and how many lessons you include will be determined in part by the type of course you create (e.g., mini-course, multi-day course, masterclass) as well as the associated completion time and cost. Once you’ve sorted that out, break down the course into distinct modules and lessons or sections and subsections.
For instance, if you created a course on content marketing, here’s what breaking down that course into six modules might look like:
MODULE 1: Setting a Content Strategy
MODULE 2: Writing Content that Converts
MODULE 3: Search Engine Optimization
MODULE 3: Search Engine Optimization
MODULE 4: Managing a Content Calendar
MODULE 5: Content Distribution
From there, you can break down your modules into a series of specific lessons that go into detail about a given subject matter and set up your students for success. Here’s how you might break down the modules above for the same course:
MODULE 1: Setting a Content Strategy
MODULE 2: Writing Content that Converts
MODULE 3: Search Engine Optimization
MODULE 3: Search Engine Optimization
MODULE 4: Managing a Content Calendar
MODULE 5: Content Distribution
Once you have a clear outline that details the topics for each module and lesson, you should have a clear direction to start building your course content, one lesson at a time. Each lesson should have detailed steps, information, and exercises for students to work through. Within each lesson, aim to have clear learning objectives that students who buy the course will walk away with.
Depending on the type of course you decide to create, the medium of your course could take many different forms. For a mini-course that’s free or low-priced, you might opt for an email format where you limit the formats you use to text and some illustrative images or screenshots.
However, for more intensive and higher-priced courses, it’s best to use multiple formats to keep your students engaged throughout the course. For example, rather than using only text or exclusively video, use a mix of formats to keep your students engaged. Here are a few popular course formats and their benefits:
As a best practice, keep videos under 10 minutes long and aim to create content that’s focused and actionable. During your research phase, look at what formats your competitors are using and consider asking prospective students about what course medium they find most engaging.
The price of your course will vary based on the type of course you create: a mini-course is free or low-cost, a multi-day course is mid-cost, while a masterclass is usually high cost. However, the pricing of your course will depend on a variety of factors you should consider:
To get an even better idea of how you should price your course, conduct competitor pricing research to see how other digital course creators in your niche are pricing their own digital offerings. Ensure you’re not selling yourself short by pricing too low. On the other hand, remain realistic and avoid pricing too high. Don’t be afraid to study what competitors are offering, add more value to your own course offering, and price your course accordingly.
Alongside doing dedicated pricing research around your course, set a sales goal that will also inform how you price and market your course.
For example, if your sales goal is $50,000, there are several ways to price your course:
Scenario one:
Scenario two:
In scenario one, you price your course lower and need a higher volume of customers. In scenario two, you price your course higher and need a lower volume of customers. So, which scenario is better?
Generally, pricing your course too low is not a good strategy. For one, you’ll need to spend time and money marketing your course to drive traffic to your course page. Assuming 1% of the customers who land on your page buy the course, you’ll need to drive 250,000 visitors to your page in scenario one and 20,000 visitors to your page in scenario two. Secondly, it’s often favorable to have customers who are less price sensitive.
Consider these factors when pricing your course, and avoid pricing that’s too low and forces you to market more aggressively. Put the time and energy into creating a course that you’re proud to value at what it’s worth.
Next, decide on exactly where you want to host your course content online. There are a range of different course platforms with unique features, but there are three basic types of online course platforms: standalone, all-in-one, and online course marketplaces.
Standalone platforms give you a lot of control over your content and data. Examples of standalone platforms include Thinkific and Teachable, both of which integrate easily with Shopify.
Here’s a list of standalone course platforms:
All-in-one solutions put your marketing tools, website builder, and content delivery platform in one single place. All-in-one course platforms like Kajabi are more expensive but offer everything you need to build and market your course in one place. Anyhow, take a look at this in-depth overview & comparison of Kajabi pricing which will help you to make a right decision.
Here’s a list of all-in-one course platforms:
Online course marketplaces offer a platform that comes with a built-in audience that can help surface your course more easily than you could on your own. However, you generally have less control over your pricing and data.
Here’s a list of online course marketplaces:
Don’t succumb to analysis paralysis when it comes to choosing your course platform. The actual content of your course is more important than where it’s hosted online. If the course platform you select lacks the features you need, you can always switch.
Creating your course is one part of the equation; launching it to the world and marketing it to buyers is the other. After putting in the work to make your course as good as possible for buyers, it’s important to get it into their hands through marketing. Here are a few marketing tactics worth exploring to sell your course and earn money:
Successfully selling your course through marketing takes some experimentation. Start with a few marketing channels to see what works. Double down on the strategies that are effective at bringing in customers and ditch the tactics that are more time, effort, or money than they’re worth.
While customers may take your word for it, having real customers singing the praises of your course is even better. Collect feedback and testimonials from happy customers who have seen results from your course. Having positive anecdotes about transformations on your landing page and throughout your marketing is a powerful way to convince prospective customers of the value of your course and the results it can help them achieve.
To collect customer reviews and testimonials, ask for feedback from buyers who have taken your course. Ask customers who provide glowing feedback whether they would be willing to provide a testimonial to feature in your marketing material.
Be specific in providing direction to customers about what you want in their testimonial. Rather than simply asking for a blurb about their positive experience with the course, ask more targeted questions like, “How much new revenue have you seen through taking my course?” or “How prepared did you feel for taking the real estate licensing course before my course versus afterward?” Specific details on how your course was helpful are more powerful than vague generalizations. If possible, ask for a video testimonial rather than a text one.
Of course, asking for feedback should not be about just testimonials. Use positive feedback to inform what parts of the course are resonating with students and use critical feedback to revise course material that is under performing. Taking feedback to heart with each cohort of students that buys your course will allow you to gradually improve it over time and give your students the best learning experience possible.
Reflect on the unique insights, valuable knowledge, and marketable skills that you can share with the world through a course. If you’ve taught yourself how to create inspiring illustrations on an iPad, there’s a chance you can teach others to do it too. If you’ve helped companies grow an engaged social media across brands, there are likely buyers interested in learning how you did it. If you’re a product management leader and mentor who has helped others enter the field, you should consider doing the same on a wider scale through a course.
Creating an online course means packaging your passion into a digital product. Starting on your journey as a course creator will set you up to earn money through your enthusiasm and expertise, while helping others learn what you know in the process.
How do I create my own online course?
Choose a specific topic that has market demand and where you have industry insight and expertise, credibility, and passion. Choose the type of course you would like to create, the medium you’ll use for content, how you’ll structure the course curriculum, the course platform you’ll deliver it on, and how you would like to price and advertise it.
How can I create online courses and make money?
Set a sales goal and price your course based on your niche and topic, course type, and expected marketing costs. Conduct competitor research to ensure your course offers something unique and different while remaining competitively priced. Ensure you’re not selling yourself short and pricing your course too low. Decide on the marketing strategies you’ll use—like social media marketing, paid advertising, content marketing, SEO, and more—to sell your course to customers.
What are the best course platforms to host my course?
The best course platform to host your course depends on your unique needs as a course creator. Standalone platforms like Teachable and Thinkifuc give you control over your content and data—plus they integrate with Shopify. All-in-one course platforms like Kajabi are more expensive but offer everything you need to build and market your course in one place. While online course marketplaces like Udemy and Skillshare give you less control over your pricing and data, they come with a built-in audience to surface your course too.
What equipment do I need to create an online course?
If you are filming video content for your course, you’ll need a camera, microphone, lighting, non-distracting backdrop, and video editing software. Additionally, all course creators will need a course platform to host their course. Depending on how you opt to advertise your course, you will likely also need software subscriptions for email marketing, digital marketing, website hosting, and social media scheduling.
Is it easy to create an online course?
Like any business venture, creating a course requires time, effort, and energy. However, creating an online course is an example of a low-cost business idea. Selling digital goods has a variety of advantages over selling physical goods, including scalability, higher profit margins, and not dealing with sourcing, inventory, and shipping logistics.
