Looking for a way to monetize your skills while increasing awareness about your business? Create and market online courses. It doesn’t matter what industry you work in; whether you’re a business owner, instructor, or creator, online courses can help build your brand. They have the potential to be a secondary income source and also be a key strategy in getting the word out about your business.
Having online courses lets your customers know that you have the skills to run your business. You can use online courses to educate customers about your products and services, show them you’re a front-runner in the industry and increase awareness about what you offer.
But the question is, how do you actually build an online course? In this blog post, I will tell you all about creating and monetizing an online course that would help build your brand.
What are Online Courses?
Online courses are a series of ready-made content based on a curriculum and are offered on your website or through a link that you can email. They can also be web-centric courses that require online scheduled meetings. You can teach anything with online courses. You can choose to offer continuous online courses or seasonal online workshops. Online courses can help increase brand awareness, draw in new customers, and be a new income source for your business.
Types of Online Courses
There are three different types of online courses. These courses are designed based on audience needs and preferences, so each type has its own target market. You have to learn about your audience’s habits and lifestyles in order to create the right online course for them. Let’s look at the types of online courses:
- Audio: Audio online courses like podcasts and audiobooks are great material for busy learners.
- Video: Video materials are the most common types of online courses. You can share video content on your website or social media platforms like YouTube.
- Text: Whitepapers, essays, and e-books are reading material perfect for bookworm learners.
Build Your Brand with Online Courses
As I mentioned before, online courses can help amplify your brand. But how exactly does it happen? A good online course helps build a brand in two ways:
- Increases customer knowledge of your skills and gives awareness about using your products and services to the fullest.
- Helps gain customer loyalty and the opportunity to turn prospects into future customers.
By creating relevant and focused content for your online courses, you can hit these two goals to elevate your business and increase brand awareness.
Benefits of Having Online Courses
There are several factors why you should include online courses in your branding. The purposes of having online courses are:
- Sell: Turn prospects into customers by offering them online courses about the value of your products and the benefits of doing business with you. This will increase your sales.
- Train: Offer how-to online courses and workshops to educate your customers and have them make the most of your products and services.
- Build: Build a community of loyal customers by creating online courses that show off your personal branding and values.
- Productize: Your skills and knowledge can be the product you can sell to customers through online courses. Let’s take a look at the five key factors:
Knowing these reasons, you can guess what advantages online courses can have for your business and brand. Let me break it down for you. Below are five main advantages of creating online courses and how they help build your brand.
1. Increase Brand Visibility
I cannot stress enough just how important online courses are for brand awareness and visibility. Online courses are an ideal strategy to increase awareness, whether you are just starting your business or looking for ways to elevate your current brand. Creating the right type of content with the relevant material can introduce your business to your audience. They will learn who you are, what you do, where they can find you online, and how your brand message targets them.
Let’s say you run a coffee brewery. You can create an online course about how to differentiate the coffee types that you offer in your brewery. If you market it on social media, you will educate people, come off as an expert, and increase awareness about your business.
2. Grow Your Personal Brand
Online courses allow you to introduce yourself as an expert in what you do and a tough leader in your industry. It’s a great chance to build your reputation as a business owner and impress your potential customers. There are three main categories you can create online courses in:
- Sharing your expertise: The online course is the focus here. You can share educational content like industry analysis or product reviews.
- Product support: The online course will act as a guideline for your products. You can share educational content like demos, instructions, tutorials, etc.
- Marketing material: The online course is purely focused on marketing your products or services and your business. They can also be a part of a marketing campaign.
3. Build a Loyal Community
Your customers are your most valuable asset. With online workshops, you can build an interactive community of customers who can connect with you and each other to gain more experience with your brand. They will feel supported and valued. These people are the advocates that will draw more customers in, so make sure your online courses are as business-driven as possible. Since they will learn about you from you, they can spread the exact words you want them to. Online workshops are a great way of turning customers into loyal advocates.
4. Sell Your Knowledge
With online courses, you can monetize your skills. You know the industry, you have the expertise, so why not make extra money out of it? In order to build trust with your prospects, offer online classes and share your knowledge with them. You can earn extra money to put back into your business by productizing these classes. With tools like Appointments from Runsensible, you can add a scheduling appointment calendar to your website so your audience can book face-to-face online classes with you. You can turn prospects into leads and increase customers while making extra money on the side.
5. Digitalize Your Services
Client-based businesses can benefit from online courses in the way of expanding sales. When you create personalized online courses based on your audience, you can reach out to clients interested in what you have to offer but do not have the recourses to visit you in person or simply choose to stay home. They will benefit from having the same face-to-face experience with you but digitally.
Let’s say you are a music instructor. By creating a series of online classes with different proficiency levels, you can attract music lovers who live miles away from you.
How to Create an Online Course?
Okay, let’s get to the fun part. We learned all about how online courses help with building a brand. Now, we will learn how to actually create an online course. There are five easy steps in creating an online course, so buckle up!
Teach What You Know
First things first, let’s talk about content material. No matter your industry, always stick to the knowledge you are confident about. Customers dig expertise. Educate your audience about your industry and products. When you are confident about the material you share, you will stand out.
Research
Find out what areas your audience lacks knowledge of and work on educating them. Find the keywords that people find your website with. Understand your audience’s questions and try to turn the answers into educational content. You should also research the online courses your competitors create. Find out what topics they teach and what methods they use for teaching. Compare those to yours and see how you can improve yours to stand out.
Write a Course Outline
Before writing your course outline, you need to figure out two things: what level of knowledge do your customers have on the topics you wish to teach and the skills and proficiency they wish to learn. Doing so, you will know where to start. Determine what you want your audience to learn by the end of the course. Based on the amount of content, determine how many lessons should be included in the course. Do not overwhelm your audience with too many lessons. A number between 2 to 6 lessons is ideal. After planning the number of lessons, write lesson objectives. Basically, in one sentence, write what each lesson will teach. Then, write a list of topics you will cover in each lesson. This way, you will write your whole course outline.
Develop Your Content
Start creating your audio, video, or text content based on your audience’s preference. If you have created any content previously, like webinars or blogs covering some parts of your course, reuse them. Repurposing those contents can buy you time in the process of creating your content. You can use these formats to create your content:
- Audio recordings: Audio recordings are great for assignments. Customers can download and listen to them while going through their everyday tasks.
- E-books: A digital textbook can be a form of an online course on its own or be included in a package.
- Quizzes: Design a quiz and include it at the end of your course so your customers can have a quick recap of all they learned throughout the lessons.
Design Assignments
You can create assignments for your customers to fill out between lessons. This way, you have a way to engage with your audience even when they are not on your website or other platforms. You can use a tool like Runsensible to set reminders and schedules on your customers’ calendars and email them when it’s time to turn in the assignment.
Pricing Online Courses and Collecting Payments
If you wish to monetize your online courses, you have to come up with a pricing strategy. You also have to make sure customers have comfortable ways to make their payments. Let me show you how to manage your pricing strategy and payment collecting.
Offer Free Content
You may ask, how is offering free content relevant to monetizing my online course? The answer is to build trust with your online course customers. Before asking for a payment, show your customers what they will learn with you and how worthy your course is. Give them a free sample like a short video or guide. Make sure this free sample is as good as the online course itself so customers can have a genuine concept of your online course.
Put Up a Paywall
The first thing you need to do is put a paywall on your website for the online courses you want to monetize. This can be in the form of a subscription or membership fee. Create a specific part on your website for your online course that would require payment to access.
Price Your Online Course
Now you have to write a pricing strategy for your content. The answer to the following questions can help you determine the price of your online courses:
- How much are your competitors charging?
- What’s your current reputation in your industry?
- What will your customers achieve at the end of the online course?
- Will your customers need to budget for your online course?
If you are unsure about the price you came up with, try increasing and discounting it after a few weeks and monitor how your customers react to the changes made. This will give you an accurate idea about how much your customers are willing and can pay.
To Wrap Up
Online courses can be a great addition to your brand awareness strategy. You can also financially benefit from sharing your knowledge. This blog post will help you understand the concept of online courses, learn about their purposes and benefits, and how to create and sell them. Have you ever created any online courses? What is your experience with them? Let us know in the comments below!