
How One Can Sell Online Courses from Their Own Platform?
Online courses are witnessing a boom in popularity recently. The eLearning industry is set to reach $325 billion by 2025, with more and more people signing up for online courses. If you are reading this blog, then you are most likely embarking on your journey to create and sell eLearning courses online.
Once you have taken up the decision of delivering online courses, the next thing you need to decide on is which eLearning platform you want to use. Online course creation is a challenging task and you want an online learning platform that will best serve your requirements and goals and enable your online business to maximize revenue.
Why should you create online courses?
Freelance educators and online tutoring business can benefit massively from creating online courses. Creating online courses is not a new source of income, it is also an incredibly useful tool for lead generation for businesses.
Businesses can use online courses to attract new customers and make more sales. Besides making new customers, it also helps to keep current customers happy by offering what they are looking for.
How to sell online courses from your own eLearning platform?
If you are looking for how to sell online courses, you must consider the different aspects of a profitable business and create your own eLearning platform.
Follow the best practices and tips to achieve great success in creating your eLearning website.
Identify your audience
Get a detailed vision of who your target audience is. What are the subjects they are interested in? Would they like to get certificates to advance their careers or just want to improve their skills in accordance with the industry they are interested in? To get to know the interests of your target learners, browse the forums where your audience is. By leveraging social platforms, find out the challenges your audience face. Understanding the essential needs of your audience will help you create courses to address the requirements and thus create real value.
Find your user base
Now that you have an idea about who your target audience is, you need to start finding your students online and attract them to your eLearning platform. How to find the audience finally comes down to your niche and your target learners.
Begin your search on social media by creating marketing style, content like teasers of your online classes and special videos to attract potential users. You can also start building a mailing list and encourage people to join your newsletters. In this way, you can reach out to new users and notify them when your new courses go live.
Further, you can leverage video sharing platforms like YouTube, which helps to bring in a great amount of traffic to your website. Start promoting your highlight videos and teasers to increase the visibility of your online courses and bring quality traffic to your platform.
Research the market
Once you are familiar with your target audience and their needs, you need to conduct market research to analyze which websites are already targeting those audiences and explore the features offered by them. Conduct a competition analysis and see which online classrooms are successful and which are not and why. This will give you a clear idea about the features you need to add to your website to gain a competitive advantage in the industry.
Differentiate your courses
Focus on a specific niche and build your educational brand around it. Unless you have a flexible budget that allows you to run a wide variety of course categories you must build your courses around a specialty. Before doing all of that, it is important to build a consistent learner base first. Later you can diversify your user base one you have a good number of students on your platform.
When you do the market research, have an in-depth look into the type of courses your competitors offer. Analyze what makes their courses different from the rest. Plan a series of online courses that have a progression so that it can take them on a successful learning journey. However, when you sell a series of online courses to your customers, you can keep them coming back to your platform for more.
Formatting eLearning courses
When you present eLearning courses in an attractive format, it helps to draw in more students and create great eLearning experiences for them. Design your eLearning courses by integrating relevant images and attractive graphics along with an appropriate format to convey the information to your learners. If you are starting out, you can achieve good formatting by using PowerPoint or PDF. However, if you are using an eLearning platform of your own, you can leverage the editor that comes built-in to create well-formatted courses.
Plan your lessons
When you know your target audience, start planning your eLearning courses you are going to deliver to your learners. Before you launch, plan your lessons in advance. Prepare at least a few completed lessons for each course with interactive assignments, podcasts, PDF’s, infographics, etc. to make your lessons engaging.
If you are planning on how to sell online courses, it is best to run your courses on your own eLearning platform so that you can easily add and alter your content according to the feedback of your students.
Promote your online courses
A dedicated eLearning website is very important when it comes to promoting your online courses. Even if you have your online courses on multiple platforms, having it on your own eLearning website will allow you to implement SEO strategies to drive learners to buy your courses.
You can also start a brand page on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for your online educational brand. In social media, encourage your users to interact with your posts and build engaging conversions. Do your best to keep your target audience engaged.
Conclusion
Virtual classrooms are complex in operations and need a lot of attention if you are planning to create one to sell your online courses. Understanding your niche is important so that you can make sure you are offering the right courses to your target market. Improve the online appeal of your eLearning courses to keep track of the evolving interests of the eLearning industry. Consider your online courses as a creative chance to build a positive impression among your learners.
Author Bio
Kathy Alameda
I’m working as leading experts on building and implementing the learning strategies. I have led learning & performance improvement projects form last few years. Currently marketing consultant at https://www.pinlearn.com/