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Ever thought about making money online selling online courses, 1-on-1 coaching, or an online program? Or maybe a digital product like an ebook?

If you have, then this blog post is for you.

Getting started in the knowledge industry selling online courses, online coaching, or other digital products and services is a powerful way to create passive income with knowledge and skills you already have.

In our extensive blog post ways to monetize your knowledge, skills, and experiences online, we help you break down your marketable skills and find ideas for how to turn them into profit online. Make sure to check it out if you wonder which digital products or services you should create that match your interests and background to make money online.

In this post, you get the exact blueprint for what’s important to successfully launch your online course (and other digital products & services) that people will happily buy.

Selling online courses: Free training to start a profitable online coaching and course business

Good news is that there has never been a better time to get started selling online courses. Even in times of economical turmoil, the knowledge industry has always remained strong. Did you know that the e-learning market is expected to hit USD $200 bn by 2024?

That’s not surprising because people will always want to learn. They especially want to learn from people who they can relate to (= you!). You don’t need to be an expert to create a successful online course! Being one step ahead will position you to create massive value. Read on to find out how!

Today we share with you what we have learned to be the key ingredients for successfully selling online courses. Our first online course was about how to leave your 9-5 career to travel full-time. Since then, we have helped hundreds of freedom seekers start their online businesses and create a lifestyle of freedom. Check out our Free Training HERE if you want to turn your superpower into an online offer that sells.

This blueprint is not only relevant for selling online courses, but for launching profitable digital products and services in the online coaching industry in general. Think of 1:1 or group coaching programs, e-books, webinars, and mastermind groups.

Want to know how you can launch a successful digital products business and sell online courses with ease?

Read on.

Since you’re here, you might also like to read:

 

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Ever thought about making money online selling online courses? Or maybe a webinar or ebook? If yes, then these 5 tips are for you. Getting started in the knowledge industry selling online courses, ebooks, & other digital products is a powerful way to create passive income with knowledge and skills you already have. Here's an exact blueprint for a successful paid course launch or create a paid digital product that people will happily buy. #makemoeyonline #digitalproducts #makemoney #productlaunch

Why is selling online courses a great way to make money online that anybody can do?

Before we quit our 9-to-5 jobs and left to travel full-time as digital nomad entrepreneurs, our biggest concern was money. Saying goodbye to our comfortable corporate salaries meant that we had to create other ways to stay financially safe while living our dream freedom lifestyle. (If you’re interested, check out our Instagram Highlights to read more about our story!) We considered several options for making money online from anywhere in the world.

There was the obvious Option #1 of saving up and using our savings as long as they lasted. That would mean though that at some point money would run out and we would be forced to return home broke. Finding another job back at home was NOT how we saw our future, so we quickly scraped that option.

Another Option #2 was to find a remote job while traveling. In this case we would have to sacrifice travel time and sit in front of our laptops daily. We wanted control of our schedule, be our own bosses, and do work that was exciting and meaningful to us. So this was also not the right option for us.

Our requirements for making money online were:

  • We wanted to be our own bosses.
  • The work should be done remotely, so we could travel whenever & wherever we want.
  • It had to be something we could do with our existing skills, without the need for retraining.
  • It should have the possibility to make substantial money relatively fast, so we could sustain ourselves from the business as soon as possible.

The business model that would tick off all these requirements was selling online courses & coaching.

TIP!  If you want to learn more why launching an online course is the fastest way to replace your 9-5 salary and how to create a premium program that people will want to buy, check out our Free Training here.

Selling online courses: Free training to start a profitable online coaching and course business

Disclaimer: Making money online by selling online courses or coaching is not a get-rich-quick thing. You do need to put work, time, and dedication into making your online program work. However, when done right, online coaching has a fast idea-to-profit time.

In the next 1-5 Steps, we walk you through the first essential steps for getting started with selling your first online course.

1. Pick your niche: which skills, knowledge, or experience are you going to sell?

I said it before. People want to learn from people they can relate to.

In other words, they trust people who have faced a similar challenge as them in the past and have achieved an outcome they desire. They see themselves in you and want to learn how also they can achieve what you have achieved.

This is good news because that means that you don’t need to be an absolute expert. You don’t even need special certifications or diplomas (unless it is required by law of course – not encouraging a movement of amateur doctors or lawyers here!) to create real value for people.

Your most valuable knowledge is taught to you by life.

Surely, there are skills and knowledge you have acquired by experiencing a problem in your life and having successfully fixed it. Like in our example of quitting our 9-5 jobs to travel full-time through passive income streams.

To start helping people in a meaningful way, you only need to be one step ahead of your target customer.

  • You are now where others want to be.
  • You’ve overcome situations that others are struggling with.
  • You know something that others don’t know yet.
  • You have skills that others want to learn.

There are people out there that are on Day 1 of the journey you have already gone through. Whatever that may be. Those people have questions.

Start thinking about how the skills, experiences, and knowledge you have can make a difference for others.

Download our Free Workbook for guided questions to brainstorm on your marketable skills.

2. Define your ideal client

Once you have picked your niche and have reflected on which knowledge, skills, and experiences can help others fix a problem, you need to define your ideal client.

Getting to know your ideal client is crucial to creating an offer that sticks. The most common reason why businesses fail is that they don’t understand what their customers really want and need.

So, before rushing into creating an amazing product or service that nobody will buy, do your homework: Clarify the key customer problem you want to address and validate how you can help them to solve their problem. The starting point should be fairly easy because you were in their shoes one day. Remember what questions you were struggling with back then?

Our Free Workbook helps you to nail down a concrete ideal client persona — download it here for free.

Next, get in touch with people who fit your ideal client profile. Yes, like in talking to them online or offline. We can’t stress enough how crucial this step is for successfully selling online courses! Your ideal clients’ problems and needs will be the foundation of your business. If you don’t get the basics right, you will spend a lot of time and effort only to find out that you’ll have to re-do it later.

You want to avoid that, right?

Make sure you feel confident about answering the following questions:

  1. Which problem(s) are you helping to solve for your ideal client?
  2. What transformation do they want to achieve?
  3. What will create value for them?
  4. Our Free Workbook walks you step-by-step through the process of creating an online offer that people will want. You can access the video training and workbook here for free.

Selling online courses: Free training to start a profitable online coaching and course business

3. Create an irresistible offer

The next step to selling online courses is to come up with an irresistible offer. In other words, create a service or product that your ideal client simply can’t refuse, and then overdeliver! 

You problem wonder, what makes an offer irresistible? 

  1. Your offer sounds very attractive to your ideal client.
  2. It is effective in solving the problem of your ideal client.
  3. It solves their problem in a way that satisfies them.
  4. It’s unique compared to competitors.
  5. You have a good price-to-value ratio.

Let me clarify something. It’s not enough if you think that your offer is right.

You need to be convinced that your future customers love your offer.

That’s why it’s so important that you understand who your ideal client is. Because they are the sole important target group whose opinions matter.

So how do you know if they find your offer irresistible? You guessed it. You talk to them. In our post 5 Tips for how to start an online business from scratch, we walk you through the steps of setting up your first market research effectively, without overwhelm.

Side note: How do you make your offer unique?

There’s one thing that is important to point out about selling online courses that are unique: Unique doesn’t mean that there is no other coach or online course available that is addressing the same problem as you. In fact, if your online course is the only one out there, it might be an indication that there is no demand in the market. Competition is a sign that you are entering a healthy market!

Often the information you will be talking about will not be unique as such because there will always be somebody who has been talking about a similar topic in a similar way before. BUT, the way you are delivering this information can bring lots of uniqueness to your offer. It’s sufficient to combine different pieces of information in a unique way, or add your own unique perspective or experience to make content unique. Remember, you are a unique person and so will be the way you package and teach a course!

Check out our Free Training & Workbook to work out how to create an irresistible offer, make it unique, and how to price it. 

4. Launch your course to Beta clients and optimize it with their feedback

The biggest risk of selling online courses is that you launch a course that you think is great, but your ideal clients are not interested it. The way to avoid launching an online course that won’t sell is to bring in the voice of your customers. Involve them into your course creation process!

How?

Recruit a small group of loyal fans that match your ideal client profile.

Great ways to find them is via social media, for example Instagram hashtags, in Facebook groups, or via LinkedIn. It can even be people that you know personally and who fit your ideal client profile. Think about where your ideal clients hang out and look for them. Tell them what you are working on and ask them if they want to participate.

During the pre-pre-launch of our online course about passive income, we worked together with about 15 testers who shared their thoughts about our course video demo. This was precious feedback that helped us refine, add, and improve parts of the course and make it as powerful as possible for our target group.

Interacting with testers before your launch is also a powerful way to test pricingCollecting feedback with a demo before your launch, will also give you the chance to collect valuable customer testimonials.

The benefit for your demo testers is that they can co-create the course exactly to their liking, so that it can be most useful to them. What we like to do is to offer a discount rate on the launch price of the course. This creates a win-win for everybody.

 

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Ever thought about making money online selling online courses? Or maybe a webinar or ebook? If yes, then these 5 tips are for you. Getting started in the knowledge industry selling online courses, ebooks, & other digital products is a powerful way to create passive income with knowledge and skills you already have. Here's an exact blueprint for a successful paid course launch or create a paid digital product that people will happily buy. #makemoeyonline #digitalproducts #makemoney #productlaunch

5. Plan a powerful launch (follow a structured system!)

This is something that is super important and that we did absolutely wrong during our first launch.

We wanted to bring a travel coaching program to the market. So we spent a lot of time and energy defining what the program would look like. We created a flashy sales page and collected a little bit of feedback. Then, when we finished the website copy, we launched the program via a 1 minute story on Instagram. That’s it.

You can imagine how the launch went… Actually, I am surprised that despite the lousy launch, we still had 5 people signing up for a discovery call.

Don’t make the same mistake. Aim to launch your offer with a big bang! How do you do that?

  • You warm up an audience of fans well in advance
  • Create anticipation and excitement that your launch is coming
  • Use strategic social media and email content to prepare your audience for a purchase decision
  • Consistently promote your launch over a period of several days or weeks

Book recommendation! In his book Launch by Jeff Walker – the guru of online launches breaks down step-by-step how he has mentored thousands of online entrepreneurs (including us!) to launch digital products and make six figures. Latest customer of Jeff Walker’s launch recipe has been Tony Robbins who had the biggest online launch event in internet history.

Here are our key learnings from several launches:

  • Build up anticipation well in advance: Reserve at least 3-4 weeks to warm your audience up with strategic content before you open the doors for enrollment.
  • Plan your enrollment period for 5 to 14 days: Show up regularly during this period of time (=daily!)
  • People love stories! Tell stories of the problems you’re solving, the transformations you make possible, and how your solution will help your ideal client.
  • Build a responsive (!) email list: An email list of prospects is your most precious asset. This list is your most likely-to-buy customers. Focus on building an email list from Day 1.
  • Show personality: Share behind-the-scenes and create a relationship and trust with your audience before you sell online courses.
  • Involve others into your launch! Have friends, experts, and colleagues promote your launch. If necessary, create an affiliate program. Your goal should be to create the biggest reach possible.
  • Create a simple but clear sales funnel: What’s the journey of a prospect from the moment of finding you to buying your online course? It doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple but clear funnel goes a long way.
  • Come up with an outreach plan and be consistent: Decide which platform(s) you will focus on to create leads and be persistent in your promotional activities.

It’s your turn! Ready to launch your first paid digital product?

The fact that you made it to the end of this post shows that you have the dedication to create and sell your own successful online course!

Selling online courses: Free training to start a profitable online coaching and course business

I may never find out if you will go for your dream of building an online business that brings you fulfillment and freedom. But I want to leave you with something special.

Imagine the amazing ways to earn a full-time online income with your e-learning product. Imagine it will allow you to leave your 9-to-5 job and work from anywhere with a wifi connection!

Here’s the thing: You will never know if you’re going to be successful until you try

The main mission of our brand is to help people discover that starting a successful online business is a realistic scenario for them. That’s why we created a Free 5-Steps training that walks you step-by-step through discovering your unique superpower and turning it into a premium priced online service … without waiting for more confidence or followers. You already have everything you need to do it! Start your successful online service business here.