How to sell downloadable pdf course on the internet

Microphones are crucial. Bad audio is much easier to detect than shaky video, and you need a quality microphone for your course to sound excellent. Use the best microphone you can afford.

You can use a standard receiver, lavaliere mics, or even a headset, but I recommend a USB microphone. One of my favorites is the Blue Yeti. Having a good set of noise-canceling headphones will help tremendously during the editing process. They also come in handy when conducting interviews and recording someone. There are lots of options when it comes to screen recording software , but one of my favorites is Screencast-o-matic.

Mostly all online courses will require live webinars or videos of an instructor for a personal classroom feel. Recording equipment can include something as simple as your iPhone or a webcam, or run up to professional DSLR camcorders. The most significant factor is your budget. Quality three-point lighting is crucial to ensure your instructor shines pun intended. You can purchase a full studio light set or only some accessories for your iPhone.

This one is a no-brainer. You need a detailed vision of who your ideal students are and what they are interested in learning.

Do they want to develop a new skill and earn an online certificate? Do they want to help grow their own business? Create compelling video courses. Use video plus interactive worksheets, PDFs, quizzes, and other elements to engage with your students on a deeper level.

Also, make sure to condense learning into shorter sentences — no one wants to read long paragraphs. Focus on your niche and provide the absolute best content with a focus on your unique value proposition UVP. Unless you want to become the next EdX, you have to specialize and be the best at an exceptionally focused niche. Ask yourself: What makes my course different than the rest? Your online course should have one focal point and not stray away from it or go off-topic.

Only after you see some initial success with your teachings should you diversify into other topics. After pouring all of your hard work into creating your course, your job is just getting started. Now you need to market it. You need a dedicated website. To help people find you and view you as an expert in your field, you need a professional web presence.

Your website should have an active blog with content related to your niche, which is search engine optimization SEO optimized. Build a social media following. Create your own Facebook Business page so that you can engage with your community. Share your latest updates on Twitter and Instagram. Having a regular post schedule and providing engaging social media content will help build a community behind your brand.

You should have complete control over your brand. You should be able to set your pricing and policies, incorporate your logo, and make the experience consistent with your business. If you are developing your brand, you should be the face of the course and have the ability to showcase your personality in the class design.

The platform should deliver a great learning experience. You should include multiple content types like audio, text, documents, and more. Choose a platform that integrates well with other solutions.

For example, if you started a blog and are selling courses with a WordPress site, you need to choose a platform that can easily integrate into your current website. If you do want to create an online course business with WordPress, you can search their plugin directory for a list of the right plugins:.

The platform should fit your budget and offer flexible pricing options. To make money selling online courses, you need to spend money. But by looking into pricing information first, you get a better understanding of your potential return on investment. You should also be on the lookout to see if any platforms charge a hidden transaction fee on your course sales.

When creating your online course and choosing an online learning platform, most paid plans remove heavy transaction fees. The platform should offer excellent customer support and training. A lot of services offer free resources and training, a dedicated account manager, and a helpful instructor community that can help you succeed. The Online Course Report recently came out with their list of the 80 highest-rated on-demand courses. Their catalog includes some of the most popular and highly rated online courses:.

As you can see from this list, students are looking for highly informative, impactful education. But you need to create classes that are not only high quality but also train your students on topics they love. When choosing between the best online course platforms, remember to do your research: consider the student experience, marketing features, and pricing. The truth is, all of the best online course platforms let you easily upload your content, provide training for your students, and generate course sales.

The success of your course and ability to sell courses online is based on both the quality of your content and how well you can market yourself. With all of the high-end features you need at the most affordable price, Thinkific is the clear overall winner. Ultimately, with an endless amount of topics to teach, and millions of students ready to learn from you, why not get started today? With over , monthly readers , my mission is to teach the next generation of online entrepreneurs how to scale at startup speed.

Disclosure: I may receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. You can read our affiliate disclosure in our privacy policy. I would like to see which platforms have forums, and how you can edit your text in the forums. I teach writing so my students need to be able to hand in texts, and in giving feed back it is very pratical to be able to use color coding.

I would also love to hear more about forums. Hey Alicia! I have been researching this topic a lot recently myself :. It seems that typical online course platforms may not have the best forum functionality and a lot of teachers use tools like Slack or a Facebook Group to create a community. Google docs has a great way of adding comments, notes and revisions. Do you know anything about how they tackle security? I have worked with platforms that have been hacked and that unknown people subscribed for private courses.

Hey Laura! Most hacks occur because of an easy way to get into the course without validating their credentials similar to bots filling out forms or blog comments. Educating your team on these things is important too if multiple users are managing the course. Thanks so much for this article, this is all i have been looking for to start teaching online.

Solid article, thanks. More of a continual coaching platform I think, seems robust though. You did a lot of work here. Thanks for doing that for us. Great article, very helpful. Can you give me a little direction on something? I work for a real estate firm, and we currently use Litmos. I am not sold on Litmos as the best option maybe they are, not sure. We have in-house online learning courses. There seems to be a difference in LMSs.

Systems like Kajabi seem to be geared more toward the person who has created a course he wants to sell. But systems like Litmos or Docebo seem geared more toward what we have. Am I correct in this? Thinkific, Teachable, and Learndash all look great, but are they geared more toward selling a course, or would they be totally sufficient for in-house training?

Hello Adam, great review. Do you know which ones support Single-sign-on from another LMS? My company already has its own LMS so we would ideally like to make it an extension of our own system but for training courses. So any authorized user can be pushed over and an account automatically set up. It can help you build a more trusted brand by outlining marketing actions to take across the role of responsibility, values, and inclusion in your advertising.

The Marketing with Purpose Course is designed to empower all types of marketers with strategies, research, insights and actionable tactics to drive growth through more trusted customer experiences.

Start the course. Watch our webcast and get data and insights from consumer research studies on trust and inclusion, plus brand success story highlights. Register to watch. Catch the newest episode of The Download, a series of marketing videos focused on thought leadership and insights. Your extended social circle can be interested in your new offering or introduce you to potential customers. Let them know what you are doing, how someone can buy from you and who is your target market and they will become your best promoters!

Whether you are the speaker or not, print a few business cards with an interesting call to action and join events of your industry. Get connected, get to know new people and connect with old acquaintances, introduce yourself and see which new opportunities will present themselves. At industry related events you can find the most interested and engaged people of your industry, and collect business cards for calling out potential customers.

Events are the perfect opportunity to meet with company representatives and arrange a meeting to present your services. Selling course access licenses bulk coupons for free access to corporations is the most profitable way to grow your business!

Ideally, you should already have some industry contacts you can reach out, if not, then consider going to a relevant event see the previous point. When you are out of warm contacts, you can go into cold outreach. Find a business listing of companies that could be your customers, find the right person and take note of their contact information at a Spreadsheet. Then, send them an email first introducing yourself, your company and what you can do for them.

Be professional and get to the point as soon as possible. Then, follow up the next day with a phone call letting them know you have emailed them first. You will be amazed by the results, but be prepared for both negative and positive reactions!

The next step in offline sales is scheduling a meeting or a presentation. Scheduling a presentation is about selling multiple licenses or offering expensive training. Most high-paying customers will expect a more personal approach, and if you are reaching out to local customers, you can afford to meet some of the most prominent and present your services. Some of your customers might be more comfortable buying offline. This is, of course, an exception to the rule. Cash Payments work if your work is focused on the local community and you have a physical presence, for example an office.

It will be easy for you to collect payments offline and register students manually to your school. While Bank Transfers are a usual way for big companies buying in bulk. So, if you are having a meeting with an executive to offer a company-wide training, expect to be asked if they can pay with a card or a bank transfer.

Think about your audience and how you can better reach out to them and choose the right one for your business. As an online educator, you are not only offering a service but a promise as well.

You have a responsibility for the success of your students, and they will return your love and dedication by speaking out for you. It is the strongest form of marketing, and you cannot force it. Word of mouth is when your customers speak nicely for you, suggest your services to their friends, family, and colleagues. A happy customer will always suggest you as the go-to expert. Keep your students happy, go the extra step where it is needed, and you will be rewarded with engaged students who will spread the word for you!

Delivering education can take many forms, but it is a form of human communication. Be open to communication with your students, welcome their questions and encourage social interactions between your students. In LearnWorlds, you can encourage your students to use the discussion board on the left of the course to share their thoughts, questions or opinions and answer them publicly:. Or you can open up a private channel of communication with them with personal messages through the inbox:.

Learning does not happen passively, it is an active process, and engagement in class plays a huge role in it. Give your students different activities to learn, some prefer watching a video, others prefer reading. An online course is more than that, you can create quizzes to reinforce knowledge, exams to test your students and help them see their progress towards learning and you can also encourage them to do other activities. You can also give them assignments like reading, writing or executing on your teaching — it could be a painting, an excel file or a physical exercise, anything that makes sense for your specific course.

Encourage them to highlight important parts in the ebooks you provide and come back to your teaching whenever needed.

Or let them know they can take notes. Active learning happens when the student engages with your teachings, and is not passively passing by the text.

This is why we have created a unique Interactive Video for LearnWorlds , where you can take your teaching to the next level by adding quizzes, notes, pop-ups and more on top of your videos. Success in online courses is measured in learning, and learning is achieved with highly engaged learners. Teach them to succeed, and they will be your evangelists! It is a promise of the results your course will provide.

Your job is to push the students towards the path to achieve those goals. Unit by unit, activity by activity, every step should be getting them closer to it. Whether it is learning a new language, improving their writing or becoming better managers. Break down those activities into sections acting as short-term goals or checkpoints.

Then, you can offer a higher level of achievement, using a course completion certificate. A certificate can push a student toward a goal that looks achievable, with visible steps towards it. Certificates offer this sense of achievement and sharing them will boost morale and earn them some boasting rights , which in turn will become a free promotion for your course!

Your students are here for a reason, and their success is your main mission. After creating your online courses, it can get old and common pretty easily, especially if you hold on to the same content and learning material for too long. To get past this, there are many ways to add that little something that gives more credibility and value to your courses.

As an online instructor, you need to keep asking yourself what you can do to make your courses better, improve the quality of your teaching and increase the chances of standing out from the competition. An obvious way to do this is increasing the price of your courses. However, if you do so, this means that you will also need to justify your decision to put up your prices.

Offer one-to-one coaching: consulting your students and providing personalized feedback adds another valuable service to your online school. Not only that, but it shows your students that you are genuinely interested in their learning progress. Treat this as a VIP offering of your very valuable time and expertise! Offer downloadable resources: anything that includes learning material such as ebooks, checklists, templates, worksheets, and resource can help to supplement your method of teaching and give that extra guidelines their students were missing and had to go out of their way to find.

In this perspective, it offers the chance to your customers to spread the cost of a course over an extended period of time rather pay it up-front.

Offer a completion certificate: getting rewards is always fun and gives an incentive to students to continue learning and completing your course. If it is also something they can use for their professional life like getting CPE credits , or a promotion, it can be a good reason to raise your price for this opportunity. Form partnerships to offer resources: apart from creating your own material, offer to your students more resources designed by other sellers who are relevant to your niche and can help to implement your teaching.

Create pricing tiers: a pricing tier can offer more options to potential students instead of wholly relying on just one fixed price. Along with what they choose, you can decide what features and help they get from their courses package. Providing More Value to Current Students:. Whenever you get the chance, give a thumbs up and show public recognition to those students for the great work they have been doing. This could be a small change in your teaching or delivering a lesson in more detail — depth in a chosen area of the subject.

Offer help on assignments: you can provide your students with written transcripts to accompany your instructional videos or alternatively, hire someone to help students with their learning e.

Bringing them in for a talk, to conduct a webinar or share their advice directly to your students can count as an advantage. A community-based learning environment though, is always welcomed by students.

The community should be the place where they go to share their inquiries and exchange their ideas. In order to help you out in the process of creating and selling your online courses, we have three basic resources.

These include ready-made checklists, ebooks, online courses that are specially designed to supplement the training of online instructors, and a newsletter that informs LearnWorlds members about news and updates of the platform as well as educating them on e-learning matters and trends through a dedicated blog.

This checklist gives you a handful of ideas on how to position your business in the right way so that you interact with your students better. Also, you can get tips on how to leverage social media networks and other types of marketing to promote your courses. This e-book offers a complete outlook to what creating and selling coursers is all about. In a few steps, it describes the process every online instructor should follow to effectively create, publish and sell online courses, whilst looking at all the stages and factors that need the most attention.

This e-book focuses on the importance of paid marketing and how you can use Facebook Ads to meet the needs of your online marketing campaigns.

More specifically it explains how you can use Facebook Pixel connecting it to your LearnWorlds school and making the most of the features Facebook offers including Customer and LookAlike audiences. On our LearnWorlds Academy, we have a variety of online courses you can take to increase your e-learning knowledge and expertise. How to Market Your Online Courses. This course introduces you to all types of marketing, including email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, paid advertising and affiliate marketing.

Each section is specifically designed to give you all the guidelines and advice you need to effectively gain brand awareness, promote your online courses and ultimately increase your sales. In doing that, it lists a number of tips and suggestions on methods and advertising techniques that you can implement to your online marketing strategy.

The Ultimate Guide to Sales-Ready Online Courses This course helps to pinpoint down the steps you need to take to get your online courses ready for sale.

Starting from the very basics, it explains how you can set up your target audience, identify your unique selling point and come up with good content. Also, in terms of publishing your own course, you will learn how you can pre-launch and then launch your online course, taking into account important factors such as pricing, student analytics, and online business performance.

Creating and selling courses could be more than just an online business you started one or two years ago. In fact, years from now, if you are committed to it and truly believe that you can make a strong impact through teaching your favorite subject, you could be the next Chris Anderson — the curator of TED Technology, Education, Design conferences, in the eyes of future generations! All of this you do online, whilst meeting and connecting with people who live at the other end of the world every day!

He is a results based and well-rounded Digital Marketer with years of experience in the education industry, writer and digital literacy trainer.

Kyriaki is a Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team writing about marketing and e-learning, helping course creators on their journey to create, market, and sell their online courses. Equipped with a degree in Career Guidance, she has a strong background in education management and career success. In her free time, she gets crafty and musical. Act fast before our best price goes away in: 7. I want this! Back to blog. Share Get your fully social, engaging and interactive online school.

Launch your school! Course Earnings Calculator How much money can you make with online courses? An online training course is the amalgam of your work and life experiences, years of learning and education.

Visit Sell by Owner to view the full landing page. Landing page testimonials from Sell By Owner. I Draw Fashion courses promote the learning outcomes in an exciting visual way. Visit the ADK Program for the full landing page. You can see the full site of European Tourism Careers here. Visit Start Social to see the full landing page. Learn how to sell courses in the LearnWorlds academy. Create an Online Course with Learnworlds Free. From blogging to subscription Image Source: HubSpot.

Free ebook. Discover how to make your online courses ready for sales and, most importantly, profitable. Free checklist. A comprehensive guide to selling more online courses and suceeding with your online business. An error occured. Please try again. Nick Malekos. Kyriaki Raouna. Content Creator at LearnWorlds. In April , Chris published a short video on his YouTube channel to announce that he was going to create a course about drone flying.

Chris already had a large library of videos from his drone. With the addition of some how-to content, he had a great starting point for his online course. He needed to create a site with a sales page, the ability to upload and host his videos, collect payments through an online credit card form, and instantly let his customers stream said videos. As the name suggests, you host the videos on your own with this option.

This means renting a server, setting up a website on it, setting up a payment processing system, and so on. There are software like WordPress for creating the site, and plugins for the rest, but at the end of the day it still requires a lot of technical knowledge and is very time-consuming to set up. When Chris created his online course, he used his WordPress website with an e-learning theme to host it.

With his course up and running, he started running ads and hosting webinars to promote his course. When the same thing happened a second time, he knew he needed to find a better system to host his course. Chris had heard of marketplaces like Udemy , where you simply upload your videos and let them do the rest.

They promote it to their database of students, they collect the payments, they ensure that students can access the videos. It sounds great but, at the end of the day, they control everything. They also take a massive cut of your sales. It was important for Chris to have complete control and flexibility when it came to pricing his course.

He wanted to be able to create discount codes for his online course so that he could offer a special price for certain people such as people who attend his webinars, for example. He also wanted to give his students the option to pay for his course in a series of monthly payments rather than pay the full price upfront.

Thinkific is one example. To sell your online courses on Thinkific, all you have to do is sign up for an account and upload your course content. Thinkific has all the features you need to then sell and deliver that course. Payment systems are already built in so all you have to do is set your price. With a few clicks you can change the branding and design of your entire site.

You can create powerful sales pages for your courses with our drag-and-drop builder. The learning experience for your students will also be a lot better. Your course content is delivered to them in an intuitive interface, and they can even access it on their phones. You can also add interactive elements like quizzes and surveys.

Having tried other options, Chris decided that Thinkific met all his criteria. He opted for our Business Plan , where in exchange for a fixed monthly fee, he keeps all the revenue from his course sales. And thanks to our Bulk Upload feature , Chris was able to upload all of his course content in just a few minutes. Learn how to create and publish your first course with Thinkific, for free! Get the free training. How much are we going to charge?

This bears more than a few minutes of thought because incorrectly pricing your online course might lead to lost revenue. Price it too high and people may not buy. Additionally, the price of your course has a direct impact on virtually every aspect of your online course business — from the marketing to the type of students you attract, to how much support and attention you can provide to your students.

The question of online course pricing also comes up a lot in our Facebook Group , and among online instructors in general. We need to start by picking a business model.

There are two broad categories — one-time or recurring also known as a membership model. With a one-time model, students pay you upfront or in installments to access your online course. Typically, once payment is complete they have unlimited access to your course.

This is the model that Chris Newman uses. With the membership model, students pay you on a regular basis, usually monthly. This works if you always have something new for them every month. If they cancel their subscription, they lose access to your program. The average membership site has regular ongoing content.

Mimi G uses the membership model for her Sew It Academy where she teaches people how to sew their own clothes. She also wanted people to be able to join whenever they want, do as much or as little as they want, and move at their own pace. You can also combine the two models to form a hybrid where people pay a lump-sum for the core online course and then join a membership for ongoing coaching or mentoring. The following guidelines are based on the one-time model, but they apply to memberships too.

The first guideline is to avoid selling your online course for a low price point, no matter how tempting it may be. There are a few reasons for this. I may get into trouble for saying this but a purse is a purse, whether you buy it from Burberry or a street vendor.

However, Burberry gets away with astronomical prices because of the perceived value that a higher price point lends to its products. Your margins on marketing will be too low. Competing on price is a race to the bottom. No matter what price you set for your online course, someone out there will always be able to beat it. Customers that are loyal to the seller with the lowest price are not the kind of customers you would want anyway.

It makes it difficult to attract affiliates and partners. A really effective way to market your course is via Joint Venture Partnerships , where you get someone with a large audience to promote your course for an affiliate commission. But, if your course has a low price, the commissions will be too small for anyone to be interested.

It takes just as much effort to sell a low priced course as it does to sell a high priced one. However, if your main aim is to generate revenue and your online course provides a lot of value, then price it higher.

So higher is generally better when it comes to pricing. As we know from our Economics classes, demand falls as we raise our prices. The rate at which demand falls helps us determine a sweet spot where we can maximize revenue. Ideally, we want to test out different price points so that we can figure out where that sweet spot is. To determine what that starting price is, follow these guidelines:. Price based on value, not length.

If possible, try to actually quantify the value of the outcome your students can achieve. If taking your online course is going to help someone earn a promotion at work, for example, that is an outcome that can definitely be quantified. How else would someone learn to achieve the outcome your online course helps them achieve?

How many months or years of trial and error would it take? How much money would they have to spend to hire a coach or consultant to help them? Price your course as a more affordable option. You may find that when you first start out, your sweet spot price point is pretty low. As mentioned earlier, the beauty of an online course is that you can always improve it. Here are some methods to do that:. Offer one-on-one or group coaching. Both of these methods are great for holding your students accountable for completing your course and providing personalized feedback to them.

Host a monthly live call with students. You can use that time with them to answer specific questions, delve into a specific topic in greater detail, or even invite a guest speaker to share their insights with your students. Include downloadable resources such as worksheets, templates, checklists, and resource guides.

This gives your students more control and enhances their learning experience. Offer a payment plan. This is a proven way to increase sales of an online course with a higher price point. Many people prefer to spread the cost of a course over an extended period of time rather than pay for it in full up front. Form partnerships to offer software, resources, or other courses. If your course recommends specific resources, tools, or software to your students, then a great way to increase the value of your course is to partner up with the sellers of those resources to create a special offer for your students.

Offer a completion certificate. They can also be great for increasing student engagement because the reward of receiving a certificate helps give your students an additional incentive for completing your course.

Create pricing tiers. The point is to just start and then updated the prices later as you enhance the course. The final piece before you hit publish is to create the sales page of your online course also known as your course description, landing page, or sales letter. This is the page that describes your course, but more importantly, persuades someone to enrol in it.

Before we go into what makes a good sales page, you need to know the answers to these three questions:. Who is this course for? No one buys a course, they buy solutions to their problems. That means your online course solves a specific problem for a specific group of people.

What does it help them do? This is where you need to articulate what results your online course helps your target audience achieve. The more specific you are, the better. With the Excel course, you could be making them three times more productive. Why is that beneficial to them? Try to translate the results they get into real world benefits.

If your Excel course makes them more productive, then the benefit could be that they earn a better salary, or get a high-profile finance job. This is your Unique Value Proposition , and it forms the core of your sales page. If only it were that simple! However, you need to do a little bit more to convince people to shell out the fat stacks. Think of it as the ad for your sales page. If all your target audience sees is your headline, would it make them want to keep reading?

Next, present the problem that they are experiencing and remind them of the cost of not solving it. Show your reader that you understand their current pain or frustration by explaining how you too experienced it in the past. This serves as a build up to the solution your course which comes next. This is really the key to making sales, and it is probably the most neglected step in the process.

This is where you explain what exactly your course teaches and how it can save your students a lot of pain and frustration. Like we did with the value proposition exercise, we want to clearly state the benefits that our course brings to our students.

List out the bonus materials and resources that are included in your course. We covered some of these in the section on adding value to your course.

These are meant to supplement your course material and enhance the overall learning experience for your students. If readers are still not convinced that your course can do what you promise, you need to show them proof. Include testimonials from past students and describe how your course helped them. With Thinkific , you also have the option to collect reviews from your students, and display those reviews on your course sales page. This is where you tell readers who you are and why they should trust you to teach them.

Feel free to boast about your achievements and showcase your expertise here. The FAQ section should overcome any last minute objections and concerns that your reader may have. If you were giving a 1-on-1 sales presentation of your course to a potential student, what questions would they likely ask you before they decide to buy your course?

Technically this part is taken care of for you by the Purchase Buttons that are automatically added to the bottom of your Thinkific course page. That being said, it is still a good idea to actually tell your reader to sign up for your course. Never assume that you reader knows what to do next. The risk reversal is the answer to that.

This takes all of the risk of buying your course off their shoulders. If you need more help with this page, check out our detailed guide here. Creating a sales page like this for your online course is pretty simple in Thinkific. Our page builder allows you to create the sections mentioned above and add any content you want to it.