Online learning will be a growing industry that is already worth over one hundred billion dollars. All over the world, bloggers and influencers are making a living by teaching people valuable skills online. If you’ve always wanted to help others through your blog and build a business around that, you might have considered teaching online course.
For the past few years, I have worked as part of the online teaching ecosystem as both a teacher and, currently, working for a software provider for online instructors. I have seen a whole lot of successful stories. Our teachers have even taught over 3 million students and have gotten over $50 million in sales.
If you want to know how online course businesses work, today is your lucky day. I’m going to show you a 7-step system that anyone, from age 18 to 100, can use to start a successful online business.
5 Reasons Bloggers Should Create an Online Course
We’ve seen that more and more bloggers have become drawn to creating online courses. And while the online course business is very lucrative, money isn’t the only one thing you can get from pursuing this space. Here are some reasons why bloggers should teach online:
- Creating and launching an online class lets you profit a lot faster than other channels: Online courses will often give you a great return on investment. They are also extremely easy to set up.
- Many of your readers want to know what you know: Everybody has talents and knowledge that they can share with other people. While many people wonder what skill they can teach online, bloggers possess skills and expertise that a lot of people already express that they want to have, represented by the act of reading their blogs.
- Online courses can grow your income exponentially: You don’t have to put in a whole lot of work or investment. Online courses don’t have a lot of overhead and don’t have a lot of costs after the course is completed.
- You can change the lives of your readers: And you can do this while you’re asleep! This income-on-autopilot model has convinced many bloggers to teach a class online.
- You can become an authority figure inside your niche: Some online business owners spend a whole lot of time trying to become an authority in their niche. When you launch a course, you automatically demonstrate mastery and understanding in your subject matter.
Now that I talked about all the reasons why creating an online course is a compelling business opportunity, the time has come to reveal the road map that will help you create one.
7 Steps To Create a Successful and Powerful Blogger Education Business
Step 1: In What Niche Can Your Talents Set You Apart?
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll know that you really can’t just teach any subject and expect to make money. The money is in the niches.
Once you’ve figure out a topic for your blog, you will probably know what type of skill you want to teach. Once you figure that out, you should try to go several levels deeper into a specific type of audience. Answering these questions can help:
- Which one of your skills do you want to create a course around?
- Do you want to create a class for beginners or experts?
- What will your students gain after finishing your course?
When you answer these questions, you’ll get some guidance toward creating a course that people would want to take.
You don’t have to teach people how to blog. Marketing, writing, and networking are all things that you can teach to other aspiring bloggers.
Step 2: What Are Your Financial Goals?
It takes patience, hard work, and perseverance to set up a passive income machine online. But this doesn’t you shouldn’t aim for that.
It’s not enough to say that you want to make boatloads of money selling an online class. How much money do you want to make? Do you want to quit your job and make a full-time income from this course? Or do you just want extra income?
Being very specific about your goals will help you figure out how much effort you will need to make to create and market your online class.
Step 3: Get An Audience
You can only get students by putting your online course in front of their eyes. There are a lot of ways to build an audience, but one of the best ways is to give away something great for free and use that free item to build an email list.
As a blogger, you have a lot of knowledge to give away.
You can write or re-purpose your content to market it as an eBook, an online community, a niche cheat sheet, or even a mini-version of your course. Marketing people call these free resources “lead magnets”.
These lead magnets should make your main points without giving everything away and give people an idea of what your main product will be about.
Step 4: How Much Will Your Course Cost?
You should charge your students a price that gives them a lot of value for what they’re paying. Many bloggers and online business beginners don’t feel confident in pricing their course according to its true value.
Let’s say that you want to teach your students about writing blog posts. By teaching them this skill, your customers could get a new job, ask for a raise, change careers or even start their own business. Price your course in a way that reflects the value they will get from it.
Plus, if your students were to learn this skill in person, they would probably end up paying way more for the privilege.
Step 5: Choose a Course Platform
If you want a successful online course, you need an intuitive and easy-to-use platform that has an authoritative air. As a blogger, your brand is your most valuable asset. You need a to build your course in a platform that’s able to represent the value of your expertise.
There are three main options people choose from when creating an online course:
- Putting together a membership site using WordPress and several plugins for membership management, payment processing, and content delivery. This comes with several challenges that come from getting several systems to work together, but might not be a problem for you if you’re comfortable solving technical issues.
- Uploading a course to an existing online education marketplace. This is a great way to leverage an existing audience of potential students. However, by relying on marketplaces to do the distribution, course creators give up a percentage of their sales, the ability to raise prices, and access to their students’ contact information.
- Hosting their own courses using a self-serve online course platform. This is the option that most experienced entrepreneurs and recognized influencers have chosen. It allows bloggers to have a consistent brand image across their blog and online course, get complete control over every aspect of their business, and full access to their audience’s information.
Step 6: Create Content for Your Course
Now you have to start creating your course. How does one make an online course from beginning to end?
First, create an outline including the steps that will take your students from their current level to the one you want them at when they get to the end.
Then, create content for each of the steps you described.
Video courses are the most popular format right now. Fortunately, creating videos is no longer an expensive endeavor. You can make great videos on your phone and can get high-quality microphones from Amazon if money is a bit tight.
Step 7: Launch Your Online Course
This is by far the most fun and exciting part of the whole process.
You have a lot of options you can use to launch your online class. While there are many strategies you can try, we find that the following a specific formula works well for most new course creators.
This framework is easy, intuitive, and many people have executed five, six, and seven figures using variations of this strategy. It consists of a series of emails sent over a period of 8 days:
Day 1
Engage your email list by teasing your course to your loyal readers.
Day 2
Answer the following question: What is this course and who is it for?
Day 3
Open the course to interested students.
Day 4
Answer the most common questions your potential students have about the course.
Day 5
Give your students a one-of-a-kind bonus until midnight
Day 6
Say thank you to your students and send it to your whole list to build social proof.
Day 7
Tell your email list why they should buy the course and remind them that you will close the course to new students on the eighth day.
Day 8
Send out a couple of emails letting your email list know that you’re closing off access to new students soon.
Some bloggers do some kind of special launch pricing instead of closing off enrollment after the initial launch. This allows people who come back later to enroll in the course.
How about you?
Online classes give bloggers a wonderful chance to make money from their passion. It might sound intimidating, but I’ve seen people go from zero to full-time passive income by following these 7 steps. You love to blog, so why not make money off of something you like to do?
Author Bio: Eduardo Yi is the lead content marketer at Teachable, a platform that allows everyone, from creative individuals to established organizations, to easily teach online and create profitable businesses.
