Make A Passive Income Creating Online Courses

Today’s approach is to earn ways to make passive income and additional income in a great way by using the skills and experience you have developed through your years of training and employment.

We’re talking about creating and selling online courses. The big benefit here is that there are few additional skills or pieces of equipment you’ll need in order to get started and you can be earning money virtually immediately.

However, those few skills you’ll need are very important and can make the difference between getting paid and wasting your time. If you’ve still got any questions after reading our simple guide to getting started, just hit reply to this message (or any email from us) and let us know! 

TL;DR

• Free – potentially little to no initial cost to being selling courses
• iPhone – you can start creating courses with just a smartphone and some free software
• Passive Income – once a course is online and starts making sales, it can make long-term passive income
• Rewarding – it feels good to pass on knowledge
• Competitive – you may find a lot of other courses in your subject area, but high-quality courses can still compete
• Steep Learning Curve – you may need to learn some new skills yourself so you can make good, compelling courses

How Can You Make Money With Online Courses?

By creating an online course, you get the same warm feeling of fulfilment that a teacher gets from passing on wisdom and enriching the lives of others. Sadly, you can’t pay the bills with warm feelings, so where’s the money? Well, that’s probably obvious: you sell the course, of course!

You could try hosting and promoting your courses yourself, allowing you to choose your own price structure and receive all of the rewards for your efforts. However, this approach requires an extraordinary amount of effort and back-end work. Instead, platforms like Udemy and Teachable do most of the hard work for you in terms of hosting and presenting your course and receiving payment for it while still giving you a good cut of the profits.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Long before you start thinking about where to upload your course, you need to have created it. And before you do that, you need to have a plan. The key to making money out of online courses is choosing the right subject and presenting it in an engaging, informative way.

As with virtually any business, you have a scale of potential when it comes to selecting a subject for your course. Those subjects that are the most popular generally have the most courses, which means you will have to really stand out to get ahead of the huge amount of competitors you will be up against. On the other hand, you won’t have to fight so hard in niche subjects, but there are fewer customers to fight for. You ideally want to go for something in between, which has both a lot of interest and not a lot of courses.

An important point to include here is that your subject needs to be quite specific. Saying that you will teach, for example, ‘digital marketing’ will not only require a huge amount of work to comprehensively cover the subject, but will also multiply your competitors since you’ll be up against every course that touches on elements of that subject, be it SEO, SEM, content marketing, social media marketing or any of a dozen other topics.

Besides, you can multiply your income by selling separate courses on each subject within the theme of digital marketing. Udemy provides an extremely helpful tool for showing you exactly how sought-after a particular subject is.

If you go to the Marketplace Insights tool, which you can access from your Udemy Instructors Dashboard, you can enter your area of expertise and discover just how many people are searching for this subject and how many others are covering it. Again, the sweet spot is something that has high demand but low supply, giving you a greater average monthly income.

Since these niches are rarer than rocking horse droppings, a solid strategy is to teach what you know, but teach it well. Even if you throw your hat into a particularly busy ring, you can still make money if your course really stands out from its competitors, giving better insights and information in a more engaging way. Plus, if you give it an extra marketing boost, that certainly won’t hurt.  

How To Get Started With Your First Online Course

Once you have decided what you want to teach, you need to start thinking about how you’re going to teach it. You need to select what information you are going to pass on to your audience and in what order, and the best way to figure that out is to study your audience.

This can actually be quite tricky because, being an expert in your chosen subject, the information that you would prioritise might be completely different to that which a complete novice would want. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to get a clear idea of the needs of your target market.

There are plenty of message boards, Facebook groups and other forums where people will ask questions about specific subjects. Take a look through those forums that are specific to your industry and look for which questions get asked the most and which subjects create the most discussion.

Do this across several sources to make sure you’re not getting biased results.

At the end of your research you want to know:

– What are the challenges people are facing?

– What are their biggest worries and concerns?

– What is the area they most want to improve?

– What problem do they most want solved?

If your course provides the solutions to their challenges, answers their questions, relieves their worries and solves their problems, you are more likely to get very positive reviews.

Now that you’ve got an overall objective, you need to decide on the steps you want to take to get there. Your course should be a journey, from the general to the specific, the simple to the complex, the problem to the solution. However, you don’t want to make the journey too long, either. Break it down into sections so that those with more advanced knowledge can avoid getting bored by jumping ahead a few chapters while absolute beginners still get the essential grounding in the basics. If you’re unsure of exactly how to do this, check out some successful courses and make notes.

You might even need to take a course yourself for the next bit as this is the first part where you might need some new skills. If you’re not already a teacher or have extensive experience with presenting, you might find the next bit challenging. You will need to record your course in a way that best suits the subject matter – either speaking to a camera, using a slideshow with a voice-over, or a combination of both.

If you have a lot of experience with giving Powerpoint presentations or the course you are giving requires very clear step-by-step instructions, the slideshow option might be best. Putting a face to the voice can help your audience connect to you better and might be a preferable option if the subject you are teaching doesn’t require much visual support. This approach has some technical requirements, though, such as a good camera, tripod and lights. In theory, the least you’ll need is a smartphone, a tripod and a well-lit space.

In both cases, you need to be sure that your voice is clear (so, add a microphone to that shopping list) and that you speak at a steady pace. You need to keep ‘umm’s and ‘ahh’s to a minimum and make sure that your points are properly covered. Having a well-written script will certainly help and using a teleprompter makes for better on-camera presentation, though that may add to your initial set-up costs.

Suffice it to say that, even if you’re an experienced presenter, your first few videos will almost certainly be embarrassingly bad. However, like with everything, you get better with practise, so just keep recording it again and again until the delivery sounds smooth and natural and you look calm and comfortable on camera.

With recording done, you’ll need to edit the videos – another new skill you may need, though the alternative is to outsource this step to a freelancer. You don’t need any fancy effects, so you might find that Windows Movie Maker, iMovie or some free/cheap online editing software are enough for your needs.

Finally, you’re ready to upload your course, but there’s still another important step – arguably the most important. Again, you might need another new skill here because you need to sell your course. You need to write a description for the sales page that will convince people that they need your course to move forward in this area. Again, if sales isn’t your strong suit, consider hiring a freelance copywriter.

The aim is to convince your target audience that you understand their pain points and that they are all addressed in your course. Make your pitch benefits driven – show the reader what they will get out of this small investment and how much better their life will be after they have watched your videos. Take a look at some of the best-selling courses for more inspiration on how to structure the text.

Unfortunately, you can have the best course in the world with a perfect sales page, but it won’t sell without some social proof. You need to get some reviews. This will mean asking friends and family to take the course and rate it, which will at least get the ball rolling. You will also need to do your own marketing. Platforms like Udemy and Teachable only host courses – they won’t do your promotion for you. Post all about your course on social media, in industry-appropriate groups and on any other appropriate medium you can find. Maybe do a course in marketing to help you with ideas for this step.

Once you get your first few sales and organic reviews, the momentum should gradually increase until you’re earning on this course without trying. The more courses you have, the more you’ll be earning.  

Things to Consider When Creating Your First Course

While you might be a subject matter expert in the topic you want to teach, the new skills you require to be a good teacher and to create successful online courses can create a steep learning curve. The need to be a good presenter and a good marketer will likely be especially big obstacles for any but those with extensive experience in these areas (such as salespeople).

Without experience in creating online courses, the chances of creating a stand-out product on your first try are pretty slim, so initial successes will be slow in coming. However, as you refine the process and learn to make better videos and courses, you should find that selling them gets easier, even in highly competitive markets.

To give you an idea on the size of the market – and it’s potential – this is directly from Teachable’s website.

How Much Does It Cost To Get Started Creating Your First Online Course?

In theory, you could start making courses without spending anything. Smartphone like recent-model iPhones or Samsungs have adequately good cameras and microphones and you can find software for recording slideshows or on-screen demonstrations for free and most computers now come with basic video editing software as standard.

However, higher-quality products will get more organic reviews and more sales. This might require investing in better camera equipment and software, as well as courses or freelancers to fill your skill gaps in some of the steps outlined above.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that expensive gear will automatically make you an expert teacher, though. The real value in your online course is the knowledge you are sharing and way it is presented.  

Learn more about creating online courses

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Podia – provides everything you need to sell online courses, digital downloads, eBooks, webinars and memberships – all in one place, rather than five platforms or tools that you might otherwise need.

Udemy – is the leading marketplace for online courses and they do most of the selling for you

Teachable – is more an online platform for teaching and courses, with many users having their own audience to sell too

Best Tools For Online Creators – an excellent resource for all the tools that you made need to build your own course (many of which are free!)

Camera Shy? – then this may be the solution for you