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Whether you’re an entrepreneur, educator, or creative, learning how to sell an online course can help you build an audience and reach a wide community of learners. Selling courses online can be a main job, a secondary revenue stream, or a strategic promotional tool for your brand.
What does it take to become a successful online instructor, and how can you translate your skills and expertise into a curriculum that others find valuable? Read on to learn how to plan, create, price, and find an audience for your online courses, then market and sell your online classes or courses to grow your brand.
Grow your brand with online courses
Knowing how to sell online courses, classes, and workshops is a great way to build your brand. Whether you’re using the format to monetize your skills or to help customers better understand how to use your products, teaching can help increase awareness of your offerings, show people that you’re an expert in your field, and establish an additional revenue stream.
A course is a collection of lessons, where each builds on the previous one toward an end goal, like a series of classes on learning music reading basics.
Online courses can serve a few purposes:
Monetize: Your courses or your personal knowledge could become the main product you’re selling.
Sell: Convert curious customers into buyers with classes that demonstrate the value of your product and highlight its strengths in its niche.
Train: Help your customers get the most out of your product with how-to workshops and step-by-step tutorials.
Build: Increase customer loyalty with classes that showcase your personality and develop your brand.
If you’re already working as an educator or instructor, launching an online course can help you fully digitize your business. For any educator or instructor, online courses are a path to lowering overhead and creating passive income. For example, if a yoga instructor offers live in-person classes, they can also monetize recordings and create an online class library as a new revenue stream.
By the same token, online courses can help offset overhead, and increase profits, by turning your professional know-how into an additional source of revenue on top of an existing business. A professional photographer, for example, could earn passive income from teaching a course in photography for beginners.
Online classes and courses also give your customers a virtual option that may be more suited to their current learning and logistical needs.
Learn how to build your brand with an online course
Understand the target audience for your online courses
To raise awareness of your online learning offerings, make content that meets your audience’s needs. One of the best ways to do this is to understand which keywords will be searched by the people most likely to sign up for your new course idea.
Let’s imagine you want to sell courses on carpentry. Knowing that lots of people are searching for a specific term (e.g., “how to cut a dovetail joint without power tools”) would give you an idea for a course topic to cover. It also gives you an exact search term (keyword) to use in your content marketing for the course. You might even use that exact phrase as the title for a course module and list it on the sales page for your course. This would help to drive your visibility on search engines because your course would rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) for searches containing that phrase.
One way to find out what your audience is interested in learning is to run a survey with your existing customers or social media followers. With Squarespace, you can choose from a range of polling templates to embed on your own website using form blocks. Alternatively, some social media channels enable polling in their posts.
In fact, you can use social media for a lot of your audience development. If you’re an expert in your field, you can post about opportunities to learn from a renowned practitioner. If you’re planning to teach something you’re less well-known for, you might want to publish bite-sized examples (e.g., videos) of your course content to show people the skills they can learn from you and build trust with them.
Learn more about developing an audience for your courses
Develop a curriculum for online courses
When you teach what you know, online course creation is relatively straightforward. It’s just a matter of organizing your expertise into relatable, engaging topics, then structuring your new course around those topics.
Your course outline should have a beginning and an end goal. What level of knowledge will your customer have when they sign up, and what level will they reach once they have completed the course?
Think about the steps your learner will need to take to reach the desired goal. Those steps will form the chapters of your course. Keep your course accessible by limiting it to five or six classes at most. If you have more expertise to share, make a follow-up course. For example, if you’re a graphic designer, make your first course an introduction to typography, then develop a secondary course on hand lettering for people who want to deepen their skills.
If you’re already running a business, you can repurpose existing assets for your courses. Explore brand video stories, whitepapers, podcasts, and webinars you’ve previously made to see if they’d be of value to your learners. Then, fill in the content gaps by developing new teaching materials based around those assets.
Teaching your course using different types of media will keep learners engaged. With Squarespace, you can create multimedia courses with videos, written materials, photos, and more.
Learn how to create a curriculum for an online course or workshop
Explore online course-building tools
When you’re ready to start creating your course, start by designing the virtual space where you’ll host your online courses or classes. Your specific subject expertise will set you apart, but in order to sell courses or classes online, it’s just as important that your online course platform stands out, too.
Leverage tools for building online courses to give you a competitive advantage. For example, choose an all-in-one website builder that simplifies the process of designing your website with easy-to-use, customizable course templates and video players. Then think about all the elements you need to be able to deliver an effective study program.
With Squarespace Courses, you can monetize your courses by putting them behind a paywall. You can allow students to sign up for your course anytime or enroll cohorts with set start dates and set up email marketing automations to automatically remind them about follow-up classes and assignment deadlines.
The best virtual learning environments will also incorporate methods like:
Video: The vast majority of online learning is done by video, so the ability to upload, host, organize, and present your video content in an appealing way is essential.
Audio: Podcasts or audio lessons are great for busy learners on the go.
Reading materials: Embedding third-party code allows you to display files on your site so that learners can download whitepapers, essays, and e-books.
Group sessions: Create community among your students by hosting live group meetings to discuss course content or network, either among themselves or with you present.
When monetizing your course content with Squarespace Courses, you can also explore website extensions that will help you scale your business and streamline accounting and finances for your growing online business.
Consider your pricing strategy
Audiences will respond to your pricing based on a number of important factors. Turning an engaged audience member into an active customer is often a combination of how you price your courses and your actual course content. High pricing doesn’t automatically mean “too high” and low pricing doesn’t automatically mean “too low.”
When pricing your online courses, focus on the quality of your material instead of the amount of time spent in a course and think about your value as an educator. If you know your topic and are respected in your field, you can price your courses higher than course creators with a lower profile in your subject area.
For example:
What are your competitors asking people to pay for comparable study content?
How does their subject expertise compare to yours?
Are they better known in their field than you, or vice versa?
Do you have experience leading courses or educating others?
Also, think about the outcomes your students will take from each of your courses. Expertise may come at a higher price than entry-level, beginner content. Consider the wider course marketplace and how many similar courses are available. If there are too many, find a more specific niche for your course or identify how your take on the topic will stand out. This will add value based on its uniqueness.
The general rule for how to sell courses is that, unless your content is without peer, you should price it similarly to courses offered by your competitors: not too much higher, not too much lower.
Also, make sure that your website makes it easy for people to pay for a course. Pain points during checkout can be the difference between converting a customer and having them abandon their shopping cart. A Squarespace website allows you to connect a payment processor, which makes it simple to buy your course.
Learn more about pricing strategy for online courses
Develop a pricing structure
If strategizing your price point means understanding the value of your educational content, structuring your prices means organizing them into a system—how much you’ll charge for what type of class or course, in other words.
You have options for the types of pricing options you want to offer to your students. You can create multiple pricing fee options, like a one-time cost or recurring monthly or annual fees, for access to your content.
A one-time fee likely makes more sense for someone teaching a limited course of study, like a beginner music course. Someone who is regularly uploading new classes, like a fitness instructor, might want to try recurring monthly or annual fees, so that customers are paying for continued access to a library of content.
To begin attracting customers, offer free sample content. Free course content—whether it’s a beginner class, blog post, downloadable guide, or whitepaper—is a way to show potential customers that your expertise has value and entice them to make a full purchase. Your free content should be every bit as good as the follow-up material, so that it gives customers a reason to buy. Don’t, however, give everything away in your free content, so your paying customers get the full value of their purchase.
Then, leverage gated content and put the next stages of your course behind a paywall. Consider adding an online course to your website to allow for easy sales. This is also where you can provide tailored content for specific audiences.
When you start selling your courses, try testing a few different price points, too. Run one for a few weeks, then drop the cost slightly to see if it has an impact on the sign-up rate. A few weeks later, raise the price to see if that makes a difference. You might be surprised by how it impacts course sales. People may value higher priced content more than lower-priced content.
Essential equipment for online learning
The three main types of equipment required for putting together an online course are hardware, software, and course materials.
Today, most laptop and desktop computers, as well as mobile devices, come with high quality video cameras. However, you’ll probably want to invest in a high-quality condenser mic and table-clamp microphone stand to ensure your audio is broadcast quality. Also, consider buying a ring light to ensure your face is visible when filming yourself.
When it comes to learning materials, give your learners credible content pulled from reliable sources, such as academic journals or respected news outlets. Alternatively, if you’re truly an expert in your field, develop your own course content, such as e-books that can be downloaded by learners and even sold separately from your main course content in an online store.
Learn what equipment you’ll need to deliver an online course
How to deliver an online learning program
It’s important to understand how you’re going to deliver a course online before launching your course selling business. Do plenty of planning and testing before you start filming.
Learn about the kinds of educational content that interest your audiences by looking at your website analytics to see which search terms led people to your website. This will help you to shape your content around those themes. Then, when you build your course content, make sure it’s well laid-out on your site and easy to navigate.
Before running your online courses for the first time, get to know the technology you’ll use to deliver them. Practice recording your voice, presenting to camera, filming yourself, and uploading and downloading learning materials to make sure everything works the way you want it to.
When delivering your course, do everything you can to stimulate interaction with your students. Interactive learning can yield better results than passive learning for many learners, and this can be achieved by including simple elements on your website, such as a scheduling tool that allows you to set up problem-solving groups.
Finding the right templates for your course website
The right visual identity can make all the difference to the success of your online course. After all, there are lots of different online course creators, so it’s important to stand out.
A great website template for online courses will help you to organize your content into lessons and chapters easily. The template you choose should also be built specifically with learning content in mind.
Courses can be added to any Squarespace template, but Squarespace also offers templates designed specifically for online courses. Your template should let you easily organize content into chapters, customize each chapter design, and separate courses into learning levels (e.g., beginner and expert).
It’s also important that your social media content is consistent with the look and feel of your website. This can be achieved by using branded header images and posting content that features the same visual identification system (VIS) as your website. You can also use social media marketing tools like Unfold, which has templates, editing, and planning features to help you quickly create social posts that match your website brand.
Learn more about website templates for courses
How to earn money from your online learning platform
Online courses can be a lucrative income stream if developed and delivered strategically. As recommended above, start by giving some content away for free on your website and sharing the link to it on your social media, so people can have a first-hand experience with the value of your learning content.
Then put the majority of your course content behind a paywall so that anyone who wants to continue learning from you has to sign up for the full course. Customers may actually assign higher value to paid content, so a paywall will tell customers who enjoyed your free content that the best is yet to come, if they’re willing to pay for it.
To build the reputation of your course content with a wider audience and grow your paid website traffic, encourage current and former students to share testimonials on social media and review sites. A vote of confidence from peers gives potential customers extra confidence that your teaching is worth paying for, and gives greater visibility to your website in multiple online spaces.
Learn more about how to make money from online courses
How to sell your online study program
One of the most important parts of teaching an online course is knowing how to market it effectively. So, take some time to build and test a sales strategy for your target audience.
Understand your brand audience
Research your target audience to find out what people want to learn and at what level. Then, shape a course to their needs. Research will also help you learn which social media channels potential customers use, which keywords they’re searching for when looking for courses, and what types of content they prefer to see.
If your website is already up and running, you can glean all of this information by looking at your current web traffic analytics. You can also type some search terms into your browser and check out what others are asking about when looking for courses on the search results page.
Work on your sales message
Develop a brand message that upsells the unique benefit of your courses to the specific audience you’ve identified. This will drive engagement and help you to convert more customers. Think about who you’re targeting (e.g., beginner students or seasoned pros) and craft your message to speak to them.
Conduct A/B testing
Running two different promotions for the same course at the same time will help you work out which marketing technique works better. This is called A/B testing, and it’s a great way to measure how your email list responds to marketing for your courses. For example, one version of an email might get a higher open rate because of a different subject line. With a Squarespace email campaign, you can track performance to see how one performs over the other.
You can even A/B test the workshops themselves: Which version of your free sample course gets more people to sign up for the paid program?
Carry out a campaign analysis
While your campaign is running, use website analytics to see where your audience is located and which search terms or marketing messages bring people to your course page.
It’s important to make sure you know what you want to learn from the data. This might include:
Awareness of your courses
Engagement with your social posts and free content
Conversion rates (the number of people who actually buy a course)
Low conversion metrics can obscure high awareness numbers, and vice versa. The same piece of data can tell you many different things about your sales technique and how well it’s working. Low conversion and high awareness may say something about your pricing or how well you’re pitching the value of your course, for example.
Ultimately, the more informed you are, the more it will come across in your messaging and the more likely people will be to sign up for your classes. Stay focused on what your customers need, and you can set yourself up to create a profitable online course.
This post was updated on August 21, 2023.