How do successful course creators make money?
So you’re dreaming about selling courses online, and wondering which platform is right for you. I get lots of calls from fantastic entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas for online courses, who have heaps of experience in their sector of activity and who have huge potential to share that expertise with a wider audience. Online courses truly are a wonderful resource for those who need them and a brilliant income stream for you. They share your expertise with your audience in a manner that is specific to you, while still allowing you freedom to actually have a life!
Course creators often reach out to me because they are considering using Kajabi to host their courses, which is a great idea. We talk about the platform, the pros and cons etc. I do notice, however, that people’s eyes start to glaze over a bit when I talk about the biggest advantage of Kajabi over other platforms, in my opinion, which is it’s in-built marketing functionalities including landing pages, pipelines, email sequences etc Why does their eyes glaze over? I believe it is because a lot of wannabe course-creators actually ignore the amount of marketing work that needs to be put in in order to sell their courses.
Soooo, I thought it would be helpful to share the experience of a Kajabi user who has made over $1.5M in sales. His name is Brendan Geoghegan and he runs a company called Black Box Media. He posted his experience in a Kajabi-related Facebook group and he’s happy for me to share it here. The reason I am sharing it is because he highlights certain aspects of online course sales that you may not have thought of:
“Here’s the 10 things I’ve learnt from building our course from nothing to over $1.5M
Leave no stone unturned within your business to increase the likelihood of success for your students
Continue to spend money to improve yourself & your business in the areas that have the most profound effect on your students lives. You’ll be recognised as one of the leading experts in your field if you do this.
If you want to scale, you’ll need to let go of doing everything yourself within your business, especially the low value tasks that take up your time.
As hard as it may be initially, I’ve found that there are things we had to let go of within our business to focus on higher value tasks. Although the results of other people's work wasn’t always up to our level, we were able to generate more profit through concentrating our time in the right areas.
Go deep into your prospects' pain points, it’s not enough to just speak to them about the surface level problems they’re currently experiencing.
You need to put yourself in your prospects' shoes and write down everything they’re currently experiencing, then dig deeper and write down how that experience would be making them feel so you can speak to them on their level.
Be laser focused on tracking your stats across all areas of your business, this will enable you to make changes in the areas that are under performing rather than guessing.
Track EVERYTHING, from your ad, landing pages, email opens to sales calls. Research industry standards in all areas of your business & try to be above them.
When you’re in the position financially, invest in paid ads.
Paid ads have been the catalyst for this particular course surpassing 7 figures, there was no organic following prior to starting this course a little over 24 months ago.
Adapt when the market changes, have solutions to new problems for your prospects when they arise.
We live in an ever changing society, be on the front foot and create solutions to the new problems your prospects may be experiencing because of this.
Offer great support to your students, it’s the one thing that can separate your course from the competition.
Provide a level of support that will drastically improve your prospects' chance of success.
Even a slight improvement in a heading, landing page or email nurture can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars more than if you leave them and don’t regularly test alternatives.
Near enough is almost never good enough, Split test multiple different versions of your headings, if your landing page falls below industry standards start implementing new versions to improve it. Track your Email open rates, make improvements where necessary.
Be careful of who you allow into your course.
If you allow people into your course that are not aligned with your values, this can potentially lead to conflict within your group and make it very hard for you to coach them.
Find good support.
The online course industry can be challenging at times, have a good support base to help you navigate these times.”
I hope this gives you food for thought. Online courses are a great way to share your knowledge with more people than you could ever dream of doing in one-to-one work. They take a lot of work to promote and sell but the results can be astonishing and financially very rewarding. If you’re reading this and thinking, yes that’s what I want, then you’re in the right place. Get in touch to discuss how we can design, build and sell your first online course and get you on your way to building your empire!
