How to Sell an Online Course + Free Checklist to Revitalize Course Revenue

It’s time to discover a new method to sell online courses from your own website.

Many of us who have started our own online training or coaching business remember how motivated we were when we first started.

Yet, as time goes on and the business begins to grow, there will come a moment when that motivation dwindles and you start doubting yourself, asking things like:

These are questions our clients come to us with all the time, and today, I want to address these doubts by teaching you how we…

…using the tips and tricks we’ve learned being in the business of course and membership website creation.

This article could be just the thing you need to relight the fire for your business!

It’s time to get it (and you) to a place where you’re making the passive income you wanted, without losing traction on the successes you’ve created already.

So, if you’ve been wanting to get really clear about where to take your online course or coaching business next…

…then follow along through the sections below for a step-by-step guide to optimizing course revenue sustainably. No more burnout, and no more doubts!

But first things first: can you really make money selling courses online?

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

Check off each step on this list to successfully sell your next online course

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

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Can I make money selling coaching or training courses online?

Most likely, if you’re reading this article you know the answer to this question is YES!

Of course you can make money selling online courses–and we have nearly 100 clients who can back us up on that!

The secret to their success? They followed the initial steps we use to create incredible online coaching businesses, including:

1. Investing in a website that can grow. Even if you spend a few dollars per month compared to a cheaper platform, building a website that can easily be reworked (say, with Wordpress) will minimize the cost of any future reworks or relaunches. If you want your business to be a ‘real’ business, spending $5K per year on your ‘storefront’ should be a no brainer. You can learn more about the best platform to choose for your business plan in our article: WordPress.com vs WordPress.org: Which is the best fit for you?

   A Note from Our In-House Expert on How to Calculate Website Cost:

   Some of our prospective clients at The Digital Navigator were hesitant at first about WordPress for their business website, either because of cost, or because they don’t want to spend more time than necessary on website upkeep when they could be focusing on content. That’s a totally fair concern, however, investing that time or money into what is effectively your ‘storefront’ will – as you ramp up your business – end up freeing 10+ hours a month that you can spend on content marketing and customer conversations, as opposed to rigid and inflexible tech. Not to mention, getting good data about your audience early on will be crucial as you make your next moves; this doesn’t always happen with those other sites, where data is scattered around.

2. Working on your main offer, pricing, and ideal customer. The most important step of any business plan is to work out the main offer and place it into a workable sales funnel. We talk all about how to do that in our Step by Step Guide to Building a Sales Conversion Machine, so if that’s where you’re at, we recommend starting there. Just make sure you learn how to price online courses for maximum enrolment before you actually put your main offer up for sale online. You don’t want to sell yourself short!
3. Creating lead building freebies (lead magnets). Selling your main offer works best when you leverage content to get the sale. We do that for our clients using a proven marketing funnel strategy that reverse-engineers marketing content from the main content being sold–a strategy you can access through our free Marketing Funnel Template for Digital Products and Online Training Businesses.
4. Building lead generation into the business early. It’s important to start building your email and marketing list as soon as you get those freebies and lead magnets nailed down. The most successful businesses started a communication flow with that email list early, and ended up benefiting from a snowball effect that added thousands (and even tens of thousands) of extra leads to their network later down the line. To create incredible leads from the get-go, we always remind clients to maximize their welcome emails. You can learn how to do that yourself with our free masterclass: Sell Substantially More with Indoctrination Emails.

The issue is, even if you’ve been selling courses for a while – and especially if you’re making more than $100K a year doing so – it’s still possible to lose track of the focus of your business.

This type of unfocused approach almost always results in sales slumps and lead losses. It can also cause confusion and inconsistency on the buyer-side if you keep adding more content options without a target.

These losses can then cause you to feel unmotivated and drained, since you’re no longer able to spend as much time doing what you love–perhaps leading you to question why you started your business in the first place!

That’s why we want to talk today about how to sell an online course from your own website so your new direction fully aligns with what you’re passionate about.

First things first:

Just like a fast-growing plant, as you grow your business and offerings, you will have to prune some of what you’ve created to keep your business on track and profitable.

To quickly refocus (or reorient) yourself and your business, we therefore recommend you rethink your strategy for creating, marketing, and selling coaching and training courses online…

…and to do so using our 13-point checklist to make sure you’re positioning yourself and your business in a solid direction moving forward.

One simple strategy for how to sell an online course from your own website

Our pipeline for creating, marketing, and selling coaching and training course content online is simple, and involves three main components: creating a technical foundation, a main product offering, and a superb content marketing strategy.

In casual terms, this means:

1. Getting your website good
2. Getting your main offer nailed
3. Getting your product marketing on track

This ‘makeover’ method works great no matter what stage of business you’re in. It will prioritize your capacity to transform as a business, while ensuring you don’t lose out on all the hard work (and great content) you’ve invested in already.

That’s because it takes a ‘from the ground up’ approach to successfully sell online courses–much like the way you would build a pyramid!

First you create the building blocks for the pyramid, developing an even better website hub to host your product offerings. This could mean choosing from popular online payment methods, or increasing website conversion and profitability potential at the technical level.

Next, you start creating the pyramid itself, elevating your website higher and higher with exciting product offerings for clients in your niche.

This is when you’ll get super clear on how to make more money with online content and courses, implementing membership or subscription opportunities to increase prospective revenue.

Finally, you’re going to coat the pyramid in gold paint to reflect its brilliance, giving your digital products an attention-boost with a curated marketing plan.

Think of it like a marketing makeover, or what we call a marketing intensive, where you build out your authority, your expertise, and your student network all at the same time!

Here you will take time to reverse engineer a marketing plan from the main products you create, offering up free masterclass series to draw in leads and convert them–which you can learn about more with our free marketing funnel webinar: Lucrative Marketing Funnel.

Free On-Demand Masterclass

4 Steps to Build a Lucrative Marketing Funnel for Course Creators, Coaches and Spiritual Teachers

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How much time does it take to create and sell online courses from your own website?

We recommend planning a minimum of ten hours a week in the beginning; any less than that and it’s likely you won’t get the traction or momentum you need to jumpstart your business growth.

As you begin to find your ground and actually make money, then you can begin the transition to making this endeavor your full-time job, at which point you’ll be investing anywhere from 30 to 50+ hours per week as you go all in.

“At first, my previous ventures – The Spiritual Voice, Sound of Prana – and my current one, The Digital Navigator, required me to work from 6 am to 11 pm, 5 days a week and sometimes weekends. Although this type of commitment is what ends up breeding the most success, know that you don’t have to go to such extremes. Just that you should be ready to work at this more than you would at a regular 9 to 5 job.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Keep in mind that this work will pay off in the end!

You’re putting in the hard hours now to create passive income later down the road, when the courses you recorded sell again and again.

After all, that’s why we follow this simple three-step process to curate a course-oriented digital business that will really shine.

Because it’s the process we’ve used time and again to deliver our own digital product packages, as well as those of our clients.

It’s all about mapping out a plan alongside our team, then using our proven 13-step process to effectively selling an online course to get a very clear plan about what’s going to happen next.

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

Check off each step on this list to successfully sell your next online course

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

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When do I need to start thinking about search engine traffic when selling online courses?

When it comes to selling online courses from your own website, it seems natural to worry early on about whether you’re doing all the right things to set yourself up for search engine success.

However, when you’re still unsure about your main offer, or haven’t updated your website in a while to improve the user experience, then it may be too early to focus on search engine traffic.

Of course it never hurts to check into a few keywords (search terms) in your niche to help better establish your primary offering, but spending too much time at this stage could result in a loss of all your hard work!

Let’s say, for instance, you work really hard to publish a ton of search engine-friendly content, only to discover that you want to pivot your main digital product offering.

As you pivot your offer, the content you already created will need to be updated, creating more work for you in the long run.

It’s also way too early to be considering paid ad campaigns, since you want to make sure you have a good enough offer that you get a good ROI. Only if your offer proves successful do you want to start budgeting for paid ads, starting at around $3000 per campaign.

Learn to budget for ongoing website costs

“I recommend validating your offer with at least six organic sales before moving onto paid ads. You can do this by selling it directly to your email list, or through conversations on platforms like LinkedIn or Pinterest before considering paid ads. This can end up saving you thousands of dollars over the course of your business!”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Instead, keep yourself in check by staying focused on your goal: to set your business up to successfully sell online coaching and training courses.

We think the best way to do that is to make sure the business you’re running is the one you want to be running in the first place.

[Free Checklist] 13 Steps to Sell an Online Course

No one wants to keep up a business that doesn’t intuitively feel like the business they want to be running.

That means it’s time to get super specific about what you want and what your audience wants, so you can respond with products they’re ready to buy.

To make sure your business is in alignment with not only your sales goals, but the future you have in mind for yourself and your business, we’ve created a 13-point checklist to ensure your business is working for you, and not the other way around.

Feel free to write down each step and how you’ll tackle it in another document as you read. By the time you’re finished, I can guarantee you’ll have a ton more clarity about how to sell your next online course.

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

Check off each step on this list to successfully sell your next online course

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

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Discover your niche

As an online course provider or life coach, you owe it to yourself and to your prospective students to be as authentic as possible at every stage of your development.

That means staying confident and grounded within the industry you want to serve.

The best way to do that is to ask yourself, “what topics am I most passionate about?”, the idea being that you will have more success working in a niche you already love.

Then, ask yourself where your personal expertise intersects with the topic you’ve chosen. What sorts of unique things can you bring to the industry based on your specializations and strengths?

This process might just involve typing out different terms into google and seeing what comes up in relation to your skills and passions.

It could also look like making a mind map of topics and titles to use to build further products and content–which will also be helpful when you determine your target audience during the next step.

For instance, if you are a practitioner of Qigong, then you might want to reposition yourself in the meditation and mindfulness industry at large, noting a focus on bodily health and wellness.

Now, this can be a little difficult if you already have a well-established business that is close to the new niche you want to serve, or which is in an entirely different niche.

This is the challenge that our client Jen Gilchrist of Soul Success Unleashed faced when she wanted to pivot her business in early 2020. What we discovered though, is that all the work she had already done gave her more options for how to move forward, not less.

Overall, it gave her more clarity about where she needed to go next, and what exactly it was that needed to change.

That’s what this process is about after all–checking in with yourself to refocus your passion, motivation, and attention to get you the biggest gains possible from your business. Jen ended up creating a six figure training business in 20 months, and I’m confident your commitment will lead you there, too.

“Choosing your ideal audience and allowing that to start feeding into your solution is important. You might find yourself with several good ideas, or several target customers, so the time you spend defining who you plan to help and their needs, the more successful your programming will be.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Just remember, when you tap into your passion AND expertise as you define new product offerings in that niche, you’ll also inherently be providing value and making a positive impact on your audience by choosing topics with integrity as opposed to pure profitability.

Believe us, your clients and future students will notice your authenticity, and you’ll benefit from being able to create courses you actually love!

Define your target audience

How can you know what your client needs unless you step into their shoes?

With your expertise, you know best what kinds of problems or challenges you’ve faced in getting to your skill level, and can use those challenges to start thinking about your target audience.

Most likely, they’re out there facing the same issues you did, and they’re looking for someone with experience to guide them further in their own knowledge journey.

These problems are also going to tell you a lot about who is most likely to become part of your ‘inner circle’ of knowledge seekers, i.e., who is going to follow-through to your final product offer.

Discovering your target audience is, incidentally, how to get incredible search engine rankings, so as you continue to hone and refine your business, know that the customer avatars you create now will come in handy again and again, and will keep you on track as you implement changes moving forward.

It’ll be especially helpful when you figure out different ways to provide follow-up support and added resources for students and customers.

Of course, if you need a little help with your customer avatar, you can always schedule a call with one of our experts to get you on the right track. As our founder, Pol Cousineau, points out:

“Our marketing intensive service starts with mapping out your offer, avatar, and email campaign so you have a concrete plan moving forward into the next 12 to 18 months”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Let’s talk about your customers

Understand your target audience

At this point of your journey, it’s important to ask how students will move through your course or course series.

In other words, you are going to want to think about an optimal learning plan that your students will follow as they delve into your course content.

This is effectively what teachers do when they begin course planning for students at the elementary, high school, and university level.

You can also think of it kind of like a customer roadmap for how they’ll move from point A to point B of your course material.

What’s exciting about this step is that you get to establish the main tenets of your course or series, and then determine what will be needed for each of those ‘chapters’ or ‘sections’.

Remember, this step is more geared towards the knowledge you’ll be sharing during your courses, as opposed to thinking about what materials you’ll use to share that knowledge (though you can do that too).

It’s also largely about how you will structure that content to optimize student motivation to keep going.

This is where you’ll consider your main topic, or main point of expertise, and the main things you want to teach or translate to future students.

Say you have a meditation business that focuses on improving the symptoms of insomnia. You might then ask, what three or four things do people need to know to help improve their symptoms?

Depending on your answers, you can then create a course structure that addresses each of these symptoms to provide an overview of how to improve sleeplessness.

As you break down your main topic into its primary parts, you can just as easily use these parts as a natural indicator for the different courses students will need to get a handle on their main topic.

Only when you have given some thought to what will be included in each of your courses can you start thinking about including course add-ons and extras, companion programming, or certificates of completion at certain stages of the course to maximize the motivation to learn.

Organize your course structure

In the spirit of course delivery, now it’s time to get real with understanding how you will deliver your courses–whether that be live online sessions, to self study or on-demand formats.

What this means is defining how you will deliver each tier of content you structured above, and what kind of course formats will best resonate with your target audience.

You’ll also be thinking about more than just audience preferences–you’ll want to look toward ease of registration/access, and scalability as you choose your way forward.

For example, say you’ve come up with an idea for a course which has six modules, and each module includes a video, and a couple handout materials.

The question of how and when you want to deliver that content thus becomes one of: do I want students to have access to all course materials all at once? Or do I want to deliver course material over a period of time?

Do I want to create live opportunities for students to engage with me, or do I want to keep most courses pre-recorded, accessible on-demand?

“Initially, live online delivery tends to be easier to sell, however, the trajectory should eventually move towards on-demand delivery systems. For our clients at The Digital Navigator, 90% of their income comes from a strong on-demand delivery component. Some provide Q&A calls in addition to self-study programs, while others avoid live delivery altogether.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

This step can get a bit complex if you aren’t familiar with all the course delivery options you have, so our recommendation would be to do some cursory research for how others are delivering courses in your industry.

To help, here are just a few options we recommend at any stage of your business:

• Hybrid courses that mix pre-recorded and live content
• Workshops (or courses that are fully live)
• Flagship offers that combine different courses and course series you already have on offer
• Evergreen courses that students can purchase anytime, on-demand

As you get creative with course delivery, make sure that you’re also looking into the course delivery options available through your chosen Learning Management System for more ideas on how to share courses with students.

For example, you can increase course sales with membership and subscription options for your content, which we talk about in detail in our article: How to Make More Money with Online Content.

You can even launch your first main product offerings through Google Drive and Zoom, just like we talk about in our article: Becoming a Content Creator!

“Multi-day video series are more forgiving and much easier to execute compared to solo webinars. Three day video series’ aligned with your course direction will also be a great option when it comes to marketing course content later, when you start sending daily reminders through email, with a distinct topic for each day.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Then, when you’re clear on what you’ll deliver (the content) and how you’ll deliver it (the courses), you can set up those courses for sale…

…but how much should your courses cost?

Price your courses

Setting a price point for your course should be based on the value that course provides–yet determining that value isn’t always the most clear-cut process.

Learn how to price online content for maximum enrolment

To help you complete this step, let’s look at a few different ways to think about digital product pricing, including profit margins, audience feedback, perceived value, and course delivery and marketing.

Profit Margin

As you think about pricing your product, consider your sales goals. How much money do you want to make from every sale?

Say you’re selling a course that’s about $97, and you make about $30 from every sale since the rest goes to leads and overhead.

For instance, to meet a sales goal of about $20K, you would need to make about 200 course sales in order to make that work. Is that amount feasible for your sales goals?

If not, you may want to consider creating a more comprehensive program that you can sell at a higher price point.

As you develop your products, we recommend offering smaller course options at the $297 price point, in addition to your core offering, and then you can see if you gain any traction on that.

Audience feedback and ‘perceived value’

As you build your business to the point of getting those first six organic offers, we suggest opening up your time to book 15-minute calls with prospects to make sure they’re really interested in your program.

During those calls, what you might find is that prospects and leads provide you with more language and insight into what audience you’re drawing in already, and what they are specifically looking for.

Not only will this insider information boost your marketing efforts later, but you will also have a better understanding of what’s valuable to your target audience.

If your course or training series does in fact offer that kind of value, then you can start thinking about selling a $1,000 program, and you can do it right then and there on the call.

“One example is to think about how you might be able to provide a claimable service, say, for an employee’s professional development. Businesses are more likely to pay for that kind of training, and ultimately they expect a higher price point for that.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Ideally, this sort of practice will give you a sense of the perceived value of certain skills. While yoga may have an okay perceived value proposition, mindfulness to reduce stress and anxiety has a much greater one, that is more applicable in different environments with a clear tangible outcome.

You want to be cautious here about what has a perceived lower value in your industry. If you instead provide what is perceived as high value and tie your offerings to tangible, actionable goals and solutions, then you will find students who are willing to pay a lot for that knowledge.

Marketing your courses

Keep in mind as you price out your courses that you’ll want to keep your books balanced in terms of marketing investments later down the line.

Wait until you have your six organic leads of course, but when you do start to invest in marketing, you don’t want to end up spending too much money without recouping your costs later on.

The beauty of marketing is, each sale progressively decreases the percentage of your profits that goes to ad spend, search engine optimization, and other content marketing activities.

For example, say you want to run paid ads through LinkedIn, which for us converts about 2% of leads, or two leads per 100 sales. If you’re paying around $4 per lead, then you’ve invested $400 in marketing costs for two sales.

Here the question becomes: what’s the minimum amount of money I need to recoup my costs, and what’s a realistic price point to ensure there is a margin on top of that?

Get specific about course delivery

Your pricing can vary based on the way you’re delivering your courses, whether online or on-demand.

For example, a client of ours named Lori Williams – also the founder of Intuitive Specialists – sells an entirely on-demand stream of courses for between $600 and $1,000, with no opportunities for live delivery.

Click here to view her masterclass series and see exactly what we mean.

Lori Made $155,355 in Revenue through Successful Facebook Launch

Success Story

Read Case Study

As you may have guessed, the perceived value of live sessions and Q&A opportunities is somewhat greater than on-demand courses–so creating a multi-day course in your niche with those value add-ons will boost the price from there.

When Lori does something like a three-day intensive on Zoom, she charges $1,500+ for that, and provides a self-study option for at a regular price of $997. For her then, the perceived value of those live sessions is double that of the on-demand options.

In line with Lori’s pricing, we recommend main product offerings with live sessions at a price point of anywhere between $1,000 to $5,000.

Anything below that, and your overhead might start to narrow your profit margins as you onboard virtual assistants, and invest more into content and course marketing. You’ll need these higher ticket items to achieve the profitability you need to be successful and profitable year over year.

Brainstorm lead generation tactics

Generating leads to sell online courses from your website is part of what we do best at The Digital Navigator, so we feel especially well-equipped to help you with this step.

Our golden rule of generating leads is to graduate beyond the point of asking “what kind of modality do I offer” to ask: “what type of person, and how can I bring them in?”

That is, you want to ask (and then answer) the question of what unique solution you bring to the table to solve some of the life challenges they may be facing.

What can you bring them that is going to help them achieve their goals?

Then, how can you adjust the marketing language you use during future marketing phases to promote that course offering?

What you’re doing by asking these questions is developing the foundation of your marketing strategy to generate leads and promote your online course.

This marketing strategy will include actions that involve collecting and sharing testimonials and social proof, running ads, and sending emails to potential prospects in your network…

…but at its core it will be about tying your course to a specific outcome in someone’s life.

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

Check off each step on this list to successfully sell your next online course

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

Name

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Email

Consent(Required)

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“Providing tons of tangible, actionable resources on your blog and sending follow-up emails, especially if you’re not the one who has reached out first, can be a great way to plant seeds about other services and products you offer. These seeds will bloom later during a prospect’s conversion journey, providing you with exponential sales boosts the more leads you get.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Thinking back to the insomnia example, imagine the mindset of someone who sees the value in your ability to help people find the sleep relief that they need.

To them, you’re providing a life-changing solution for a very real problem they are facing in their life.

Yet if you didn’t tie your course to the specific outcome of providing relief from insomnia, then it will be a little harder for your students to justify the expense. Some examples of specific outcomes are:

The power of email marketing to increase course sales

We’ve written before on Why Email Marketing is Still Important for Your Business, but it’s worth repeating here how email marketing will fit into the revitalization stage of your online course business.

For example, online course providers these days are exploring WordPress alternatives like Medium or Substack to simplify their blogging and email marketing monetization options.

With Substack, for example, coaches and trainers who are primarily writers will leverage paid subscriptions into direct income, as well as into capturing the ideal person, type of solution, and problem that is going to map out further product offerings.

Other course providers will even frame these blogging-type services as a ‘freebie’ to increase the perceived value of their products.

Whatever mode you choose, the freebie route is great in the beginning, since it takes about two to three years to get a following of 1,000+ subscribers who are willing to pay $15 to $20 a month (or more per course) for your expert content.

Until then, you can use this ‘freebie’ approach to open up a conversation or even book a follow-up conversation with prospects.

How much do I invest in paid ads?

We’ve been talking about making sure you have a few organic sales before going the paid ad route.

The reason for that is because, with paid ads, you should plan to spend between $3,000 and $5,000 in marketing expenditures for your first campaign when working with a consultant–knowing that with the right marketing strategy you can pull in five figures from that investment

Remember, you need enough ad spend to make it worthwhile after paying for all your business expenses and the services of the consultant.

On the other hand, you don’t want to spend too much the first time you are running your paid campaign to mitigate the business risk.

“To be clear, almost everyone that goes the paid ad route on their own (even if they’ve paid $20K to learn how it works) fails miserably. There are so many details to work out, the work and the cost ends up being stacked against you. Plus, something as simple as a slow-loading page can skew the results of your paid campaign. They might click on your ad…but did they bounce as soon as they arrived?”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Once you are successful, only then will you want to rinse and repeat while increasing your ad budget, at which point you can jump to the $8,000 to $15,000 range for your second campaign

However, with that sort of expense, you definitely want to make sure there’s an existing audience for your product or service out there. By then you know your offer is proven, which is actually the hardest thing to nail in the business of selling online courses!

If you are just experimenting with paid ads without a professional, then I urge you to limit your budget to $1,000.

We feel it’s worth repeating here to save you in the long-run: paid advertising is quite unforgiving and you’ll likely waste your ad budget.

When doing it yourself, even if you participate in a paid ad training program, you are unlikely to generate any sales from the cold traffic.

All in all, be careful with paid ads, and trust the experts where you can to pull in huge profits without overspending on your budget.

Simplify payments and purchases

If it’s been a while since you last updated your online payment platform, you might want to see if there are better options out there for your website.

As of July 2023, there are about 8 Online Payment Methods for Small Businesses that make the cut in terms of seamless delivery and payment flexibility.

You don’t want just any program acting as an intermediary between you and your students, and you definitely want one that doesn’t incur any technical hassles associated with:

So how do you know that you’re getting the best eCommerce platform?

We explore this topic a lot more in depth in our article How to Choose the Best eCommerce Platform for Your Business?, but here are the main questions you should be asking yourself as you adjust your payment options for more efficiency, and less technical headache:

Then, as you start to really shop around and do some product research (say, between WooCommerce and Shopify), look for the following features:

Follow-through on business growth

We’ve already covered a lot of good material to help you get clear on selling online courses to revitalize your course revenue (and business!)…

…and now it’s time to dig even deeper into the specifics of your plans to sell your latest course material!

That means following each of the steps we listed above, as well as the following for your own success:

Remember, these steps govern the overall process of exploring the niche you want to serve, creating relationships with your target audience, getting clear on your primary product offering, and marketing that offering with fun freebie content.

Even better, as you follow these 13 steps, you’ll find that other important questions you need to ask start to flow naturally from the process; likely, these are the specific questions that relate to your industry, and your industry alone.

Whatever results you come up with, keep this 13-point checklist around as you revamp what you’ve got going already.

This is how you’re going to translate the successes you’ve achieved into a dream business that you’re much more passionate about keeping.

Not to mention, these answers practically write their own business strategy, and will end up revealing the step-by-step instructions you need to take next to create, package, sell, and market your online courses in the years to come.

What is the fastest way to sell courses online?

It’s one thing to tell you how to refocus your business, and another thing entirely to show you how it will look when you’re doing it live.

And although we’ve brought up several examples of how to sell an online course from the ground up, i.e., your main product offering, we thought it might be helpful to provide a quick-version of these steps to get you used to the process, using content you already have in your arsenal.

Let’s quickly take a micro approach to making money with online courses in real-time!

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

Check off each step on this list to successfully sell your next online course

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

Name

First Last

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How to Sell an Online Course Example: Meditation Guru

The owner of Yogi-Maru (we’ll call her Harmony) decides she wants to focus her next product offering on clients who have difficulty sleeping.

She already has a main product offering, a great WordPress website, and a Learning Management System that includes a whole host of meditation course options and packages, yet sales have tapered off.

How can Harmony revitalize course revenue for her main, meditation-themed product offering, while also pursuing a more focused direction for insomnia or sleeplessness?

First, she identifies that her niche involves topics and themes of deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, and sleep therapy.

She then identifies the problems that people who lack these skills may face, like creating a routine, finding time to meditate, or trouble sleeping. People with these hurdles are determined as within her target audience.

Next, Harmony asks: what tangible, practical things can I offer this audience?

As a result, she notices that her bigger program includes a night meditation series that includes a simple set of breathing exercises for people who have difficulty sleeping.

From that, she decides to create a freebie ‘quick-course’ that will lead more people to her main meditation series.

Harmony decides to go for something a little more complex than an audio guide, or solo video, knowing that multi-day video series are more likely to build client trust.

“Don’t take the mainstream advice that’s out there about telling them ‘why’ and ‘how’ you’ll train or coach your students; instead, give them a multi-stage webinar, video series, or expert guide that offers a practical, tangible answer to their questions. Then, as the course series progresses, you can present your offer as a natural continuation of what you’ve already been doing.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

So, she creates a multi-day video series that is on-demand, and which includes the breathing exercises available in her foundational programming.

Then, she inputs this freebie into her existing sales and marketing funnels that lead into the main product offering.

She notices right away that the freebie is engaging new customers in a more targeted way than ever before, and that her sales are already rising.

Knowing this, she begins the journey of breaking down her larger content into snackable freebies that leverage real value into more digital product sales–just as we instruct in our free Marketing Funnel Template for Digital Products.

Plus, as she begins to engage with her student community, she discovers more issues this audience faces, and is able to pivot more of her main product offerings (or expand her course offerings) to include newer, high-value content.

Finally, Harmony leverages 90% of her existing course content and adds a bonus video lesson related to sleep and insomnia in each of the modules.

This allows her to reframe the program in a dedicated sales page, while addressing the particular challenges faced by her new students.

By the end of Harmony’s story, she starts pulling in tons of extra profits and has shifted the scope of her business offerings by listening to her audience, and to her gut intuition.

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Quick Review: How to Sell an Online Course

Congratulations! By now you’ve expanded the way you think about the way you sell online courses from your own website. You’re already on your way to giving your coaching or online training business a much-needed boost.

Still, as you continue to rework certain aspects of the business, don’t forget to follow the three core steps we use to sell an online course for clients:

1. Create a detailed avatar profile for your target audience. This is where you will clearly spell out your ideal client(s) for inspiration on how to develop targeted product of ferings.
2. Developer a core product makeover and customer journey roadmap. Create a blazing hot sales offer that fosters incredible student experiences, and then map out a pathway to increase customer value and engagement.
3. Optimize your content marketing strategy and campaigns. Take a tactical approach to build out various campaigns, including webinars, sales funnels, forms and surveys, and more!

As we’ve mentioned, this process is part and parcel to the Marketing Makeover Work Sessions we offer at The Digital Navigator…

…that’s how we know it really works!

Just remember, as you’re building out your new course streams, stay true to your passions, and provide practical and tangible value to your students as opposed to selling a dream.

The best coaching and training businesses online are the ones that inspire the same excitement in their students as they have for what they teach.

Plus, enthusiasm in your trade can help go a long way to improve customer acquisitions, as well as their motivation to keep learning.

All that being said, if you’re feeling at this point that you have a ton of answers you still don’t know what to do with, then we’re here for you.

We’ve been applying this simple course sales strategy for clients across the globe, and we’re proud to say many of these clients are pulling in multiple six-figures…even from a single ad campaign!

So if you’re ready to get serious about your coaching or training business, and want to sell online courses from your own website with the full support of our digital marketing experts, then feel free to schedule a consultation with us to chat about how we can move forward.

Until then, we’re confident that these questions have prepared you to take the next big steps in your business, and can’t wait to watch your business grow.

And if you’re ever in doubt, just ask us for help. We’ll get you over the hurdles stopping you from achieving each business goal you’ve set out.

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

Check off each step on this list to successfully sell your next online course

How to Sell an Online Course Checklist

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