How to Sell Online Courses From Your Own Website: The Complete Guide

Selling online courses is a great way to share your knowledge and earn passive income. Whether you are a corporate leader, tutor, musician, entrepreneur, or spiritual leader, the joy of sharing your knowledge is unparalleled! And what better way than to sell online courses from your own website?

Courses aren’t just a practical way to make money but also an instrument that helps others to grow and evolve! It can help an individual learn a skill, master an evolving business trend, or just add a new language to their portfolio. However, selling a course is not just about creating amazing course content; it also involves identifying your target audience, finding the right platform to sell the course and marketing your courses!

So, whether you have launched your course or are just struck by a fantastic idea to launch your first course, this blog can help you in your new journey! Right from choosing your course topic to understanding how to sell a course online, we have got you covered. So, let’s dive in!

Why to Sell Online Courses from Your Website?

Now, given their reach, you might wonder why not sell courses on marketplaces like Udemy. But, it is not a good idea to leverage such marketplaces which are already saturated.

Listed below are the red flags to selling your courses at popular marketplaces:

• You don’t have complete ownership over the platform
• You don’t get 100% revenue earned
• You cannot interact with your audience
• You have to endure stiff competition to maximize sales

So, whether you plan to sell online courses for your mainstream income or just as a side hustle, selling online courses from your website is a worthy bet!

And if you still aren’t convinced, here are some plausible reasons to embark on this lucrative revenue stream:

• Share Your Expertise

The first and foremost reason you are creating an online course is to share your knowledge with the world. Although it might be challenging to transfer all the hard-earned knowledge over the years, you can at least share a part of your knowledge. Sharing your tips, tricks, and techniques gained through expertise can help others follow a similar path!

• Complete Control Over Revenue

Unlike selling your courses on marketplaces, hosting them on your website offers complete control over your business. Most importantly, you possess complete control over the revenue; also, there are no listing or commission fees involved. This obviously increases your ROI!

• Increase Brand Awareness

Brand awareness helps to stay ahead of the competition. People would prefer to buy from a recognizable brand that addresses their problems as they traverse through the sales conversion cycle. Selling content through courses is an ideal way to establish domain authority and a loyal customer base for your business.

• Freedom to Use Marketing Techniques

When you create and sell online courses on learning marketplaces, the platform spearheads the marketing. Although this might reduce the burden of promoting your courses to some extent, it doesn’t create brand awareness. So, if you are looking beyond the monetary element and aiming to establish your brand, an e-learning marketplace is not the best place to sell online courses!

Now that you have enough reasons to sell online courses from your website, let’s move to the most crucial section of this blog!

Steps to Sell Online Courses From Your Own Website

Selling courses is a surefire way to build authority, create brand awareness, and, of course, drive some money. With the freedom and flexibility to create and market your course, it is an excellent way to grow your business.

Listed below is a step-by-step guide to sell online courses from your own website:

Step 1: Choose a Profitable Course Topic

The first and often the most challenging step while selling courses online is determining your course topic. If you have already decided on the topic, you need to validate your course idea. But, if you are struggling to find your topic, consider these factors to brainstorm the relevant topics and make the final decision.

• Domain Expertise and Passion: You are creating the courses in the first place to share your domain knowledge. So, if you have already identified your niche, pick a topic you are confident in and equally passionate about. For example, if you are an experienced SEO marketer, you can create a course about how the Google search engine ranks your content.
• Marketable Niche: Before selling your course, ensuring it is in demand is essential. So, is there a way to identify your course’s marketability? Research your competitors, understand what your competitors are offering on the same topic and the number of course enrollments. This helps to identify what your unique business proposition should be!

Some valuable resources for determining relevant topics are keyword search tools, YouTube and online communities like Quora and Reddit. They are great tools to assess the search volume of your course topic!

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

Compelling content is one of the key factors influencing the success of your course. So, if you want to be the best course creator in your niche, you must first understand your target audience well. Know their pain points, learning styles, interests and available solutions in the market.

Ensure that your content addresses their interests and needs in the first place. Moreover, offering your audience personalized experiences helps foster long-term customer relationships. Besides, knowing your audience enhances engagement rates and helps create better learning outcomes.

For example, Khan Academy started as a small YouTube channel where Salman Khan, the platform’s founder, uploaded pre-recorded videos for his students. He constantly improved his courses by working on feedback from his learners. Today, Khan Academy is a well-known learning platform that hosts instructional videos, practice exercises and an engaging community section.

Step 3: Outline Your Course Goals and Objectives

Once you know the course topic and target audience, the next step is to research and craft a detailed outline for your course. Creating a course outline involves categorizing your course into relevant sub-topics and individual lessons. This makes the learning process more engaging and helps students to have a better grasp of the subject.

Create a content outline that fulfills your course objectives and learning outcomes.

Here are the key elements to create an effective content plan:

Course Objectives

It briefly explains why the course is needed and what it intends to achieve. Simply put, a course objective is the purpose of your course. When learners know the course objectives, it enhances the teaching and learning experience!

Hook

Write an attention-grabbing hook that either captures the problems learners face or explains your course’s benefits. E.g., “Access 20 live sessions, 10 self-paced courses and 30 instructional videos.”

Course Schedule

Divide the entire course into small lessons and organize the sub-topics from the basic concepts to the advanced ones. Research shows that shorter videos with a duration of 2–5 minutes perform better. The average attention span for online courses is 20 minutes. So, allocate realistic durations for individual lessons!

Learning activities

An engaging course with different learning activities sounds far more interesting than a theoretical course. So, try including different learning materials like audio recordings, videos, assessments, ebooks, presentations, infographics etc.

Course Outline for Web Development Certification

Step 4: Create Your Course Content

Next comes the most crucial step — creating course content. The key to creating excellent content is to provide relevant and engaging information that keeps the learners hooked till the end. Most importantly, it doesn’t involve overloading your learners with everything you know!

Initially, you might find it challenging to establish a unique proposition, given the big players in the market. A good idea is to understand what your competitors are offering and how you can stay ahead. You can also consider their content as the foundation that steers your course creation process in the right direction!

If you have existing materials like blogs, videos, presentations, and PDFs for the same topic, try strategically reusing them in your course content. Another essential factor is quality — create high-quality videos and audio.

Here are a few tips to enhance the engagement of your courses:

• Include activities or exercises involving the practical application of concepts
• Integrate quizzes after each lesson for learners to assess their knowledge
• Deliver the lectures in a conversational tone rather than a monotonous one
• Mix different formats of course content for a better learning experience
• Create screencast or head cast videos depending on your topic

Step 5: Build Your Course-Selling Website

Now that your course is ready to be launched, you need a launchpad for your course to take flight! Right? This raises an important question: where to sell my online course? It is best to sell online courses from your own website.

Your course-selling website should be user-friendly and professional. Moreover, it should have all the essential features to create and sell online courses. Another critical factor is complete ownership over the course creation and management process.

Here are two approaches to creating your course-selling website; let’s understand the pros and cons of each of them.

• Building a Website from scratch

A full-fledged course-selling website must integrate different features for creating, uploading, managing, and accessing the courses. And to create a website like Udemy from scratch, you must hire a dedicated development team. So, you need to invest a substantial amount of money and time, which is not feasible!

• Use ready-made script

Now, let’s look at the most effective approach that doesn’t require coding skills or any technical expertise! Leveraging a ready-made script like Pinlearn helps you create not only a course management platform but also a full-fledged marketplace like Udemy.

Most importantly, you save your time and money and enjoy 100% ownership over your course-selling business. At the end of this blog, we will delve deeper into the core features of Pinlearn.

Step 6: Set a Price for Your Course

Your course prices are one of the essential factors determining your course’s sales. If you underprice your content, you won’t have a significant standing among competitors. Moreover, selling a course at a low price initially can reduce your perceived value and attract low-quality customers.

On the other hand, if you overprice, you won’t be able to sell your course! So, the key is to find an optimum balance considering different factors affecting the course.

So, how to choose the right price for your online course?

Here are the primary factors to determine the right price for your course:

• Competitor Prices: Research what your competitors are offering at the same price. Are they offering any complementary modules or membership plans? However, ensure that your price justifies your course content!
• Production cost: Decide a price based on the time and effort required to create the course. For example, the cost for using equipment, surveys and interviews, creating course materials etc.
• Your course authority: If you have attained a reputation as a domain expert, then it is fair to price your courses higher. But, if you are just stepping into the industry, it is recommended to start low and gradually increase your prices.

Furthermore, the standard course business models are free courses, pay-per-course and subscriptions.

Step 7: Build a Course Sales Funnel

You have created your course and fixed an appropriate pricing, but you still don’t know how to sell your online course. If this explains your situation, you must create a sales funnel for your course-selling business.

A sales funnel is a marketing tool that shows the various phases of a customer’s journey. This involves all the activities customers do, from prospecting to the actual decision.

Here are the five stages of the sales funnel:

• Awareness: This stage involves capturing the audience’s attention with your unique business proposition. Paid Google and Facebook ads and blog posts are a great way to capture user attention initially.
• Interest: After creating awareness, you have to hold the customer’s interest in your course with intriguing material. Lead Magnet is a valuable tool to withhold the customer’s attention. You can offer guides, PDFs, and free video courses as lead magnets.
• Desire: The middle stage involves transferring the interest to trust and establishing a solid relationship with the customer. Testimonials, newsletters, surveys, and polls are valuable tools to promote your course at this stage.
• Action: This is the place where you introduce your product! Here , you should demonstrate how your product solves the customer’s problem and explain the steps to purchase the course. The sequence and launch page are valuable tools in this stage.
• Loyalty: Now that your prospect has become loyal, you need to employ post-sale strategies to retain the customer. Use cross-sell and up-sell strategies to lead the customers to another purchase.

Finally, we have reached the end of the step-by-step guide!

After launching your first course, don’t stop there! Go ahead and launch more courses that are related to your base course!

How Does Pinlearn Help You Sell Courses Online?

Now, you know that a ready-made script is the most effective approach to sell an online course. But how does Pinlearn stand out from other scripts? It is a self-hosted and white-labeled solution with all the crucial elements to create, upload, sell courses and even deliver live sessions.

On that note, let’s take a look at Pinlearn’s core features which makes it an ideal course-selling platform:

Content Management Features

Pinlearn’s interactive UI helps to create both free and paid courses seamlessly. From the basic information and course objectives to precise lecture details and attractive coupons, creating your first course is like a breeze!

Multimedia File Support

Tutors can upload course content in multiple formats like PDF, audio, images, etc. Integrating different course materials enhances the overall learning experience for the students!

Tutor Analytics & Dashboard

The advanced dashboard offers detailed course analytics like earnings, students enrolled, uploaded courses, etc. This helps to track and manage the course overall performance.

Integrated Payment Gateway

The integrated Stripe payment gateway facilitates safe and convenient transactions on the platform.

Advanced Search Filters

The software’s extensive search filter helps to search a course based on grades, subjects, categories, keywords, topics, etc. So, learner’s can find the right course from the huge repository of courses on the platform!

Final Few Words

Selling courses online is not just about creating the best course content; it is much more than that! Right from choosing your niche to marketing your course, you need a clear roadmap to launch your course! Considering the freedom and revenue aspect, selling online courses from your own website is always the best approach!

That was a pretty long read! But, after reading the blog you are well-equipped to launch your course from the best place — your own website! And if you need help with creating your course-selling website, our experts are here to guide you in this empowering journey! So, feel free to contact us!

FAQs related to Sell Online Courses From Your Own Website

1. Can you sell a course from your website?

Yes, you can sell an online course from your website. Unlike eLearning marketplaces, selling a course on your website offers more control over your revenue and profits.

2. Is it profitable to sell online courses from your own website?

It is a good idea to sell courses from your website because you enjoy complete ownership of your business, create brand awareness, and you need not share your revenue with others.

3. What is the best place to sell online courses?

Although there are many ways to sell your courses online, the best way to sell online courses is through your own customized website.