The popularity of online courses will not stop growing for a very long time. Many people prefer to learn from their own home, instead of going to an actual school or classroom. Thanks to online courses, people of all ages can benefit from learning, no matter their work or school schedule, because courses are available at any time.
What are online courses?
Online courses are a great way of getting some new knowledge or skill, without needing to leave your home. The courses are usually asynchronous, which means they are conducted over the Internet and there is no live communication between a tutor and a student. There are different types of online learning which include an online classroom, live communication between the teacher and one or multiple students at the same time. However, when it comes to online courses, there is no scheduled time for a class and no personal interaction.
The courses work by tutors uploading the video course on their website and students watching it whenever they want. The course consists of a series of different video episodes with different topics and learning materials. The lessons are pre-recorded and there is often a certain order of episodes as students are supposed to watch them. The learning materials might include additional video or audio files, images, links to certain articles, etc.
Should you create online courses?
Every online course begins with a topic or a subject. In order to provide some good knowledge, the tutor needs to be very experienced and have mandatory expertise in the subject he chooses. The subject should be unique, but also attractive to a large number of people. The course needs to be outstanding in a way that the tutor offers something that others do not. If you truly believe that you have a significant amount of knowledge to provide, as well as being good at explaining things and solving problems, the online courses are the right choice for you. Also, if you happen to be a teacher who is overbooked with lessons, the online courses are an amazing way of having an unlimited number of students, while not being so time-consuming as live teaching.
Are online courses profitable?
To make something clear in the very beginning: if you are currently in a bad financial situation and you are desperate to easily earn some money as fast as possible, then do not consider creating an online course. Many creators have given up because they did not make any money in the beginning. It takes a lot of time and effort to make a qualitative online course and money does not suddenly appear after uploading your first video. However, that does not mean that online courses are not profitable. The profit you might make off of your online course depends mostly on two important factors: the number of clients and the pricing of your course.
Can online courses be your free money?
Most definitely, yes! If you create courses with high demand and quality, then you can expect to receive some money over time. There are of course other factors that can influence how much money you can expect from selling online courses. A plethora of online platforms providing courses hosting and advertising, but what will bring you the most value is your own website dedicated to the courses you provide. Initially, you will have to invest some money, time, and knowledge to create great content that can be sold as an online course, but that does not stop here. So think about hosting solutions, marketing, and more to gain more.
Benefits of having your own website for courses
No third party fees
When you use third-party platforms to host and advertise your online courses, you will have to follow a huge list of rules and pay a % or fixed fee per course sold.
Competition
Usually, on such platforms, competition is quite high. So you probably won’t be the only one fighting for the audience. Sometimes you will win but you will have to earn the audience’s trust over time to be profitable.
Branding
It’s quite tough to build your branding while your courses being sold on somebody else’s website. Having a dedicated website for online courses gives you the opportunity to develop brand awareness in the online education industry. Also, will provide needed scalability to grow your online courses business further.
Marketing
When it comes to the first factor, the number of clients, here comes marketing! If you have no visitors on your website and no recommendations, nobody will be able to find out about your course. Ask your friends to share your website on their social media, put your posters across the city, give out some flyers and finally, pay for some real advertisement over the Internet, radio, TV, or the newspaper. You need to invest some money into marketing in order to be a successful and well-paid online course tutor. If you work hard, have innovative ideas and qualitative content, it will pay off. Also, you might as well try some free ways to generate traffic, such as SEO, making Youtube videos, Instagram or Facebook accounts for presenting your work and attracting customers.
Online courses hosting
Let’s not forget about the storage capacity and video manipulation for your website. Platforms such as Publitio can provide quite much for starting a small business in the field of online courses.
You have to have in mind a few factors before you choose the best online course hosting solution:
Publitio got you covered with all of these factors, and so much more.
Online Course Pricing
Free Courses
If you are a very experienced teacher or coach and you already get paid by your frequent students, then free courses are not an option for you. There are some huge companies that give full courses for free, but that happens because they are not trying to make money off of it, they are trying to get people to like them even more.
Free courses have a great role in helping new tutors start the business. It would be a great idea to have a free course for beginners or a free trial. That way, more people will take a look at your work and there are bigger chances that some of them will continue with the paid version, rather than making them pay before even knowing what they are paying for and who is teaching them.
Paid Courses
When it comes to choosing a price, always ask yourself a question: How much money would you be willing to pay for the course you are offering? The point is to make the price realistic and affordable. The price also depends on the number of lessons and the length of them. It is recommended to start with a fairly low price. Starting low will give you the room to go for the higher price later while attracting customers both with low price and good lessons. Once you have got a certain number of customers, earned money, and have the will to continue taking courses, you can increase the price as you wish, but never forget two things: do not overprice your course and ask yourself whether you would want to pay that amount of money.
Ways to Engage Students
Students would not pay for your course just to listen to the same information they could find in a book or on the Internet. You need to make learning fun, successful and interesting, and you will achieve that by engaging students. Try some of the following methods:
give tests and quizzes
include learning games such as crosswords, or word search puzzles with subject related questions
give feedback and support
provide qualitative and up-to-date learning material
tell your personal experience in order to help them learn easier
tell interesting stories related to the topic
Common Mistakes when Creating an Online Course
Many creators have given up and had a bad experience with making online courses. Most of them have certainly made some of these mistakes, which you should avoid making:
choosing a rare topic that not many people will be interested in
making the lessons boring, talking without volume, and no student engagement
talking about unnecessary details and missing the point
failing to promote the course via marketing
overpricing the course
Why should online course creators use Publitio?
Publitio is a simple solution for secure video hosting. Apart from video and image hosting, Publitio provides many other solutions and features such as file storage, manipulations, URL-based transformations, domain-level protection, built-in player, and a lot more! With Publitio, you can easily upload, customize, protect and share your online course on your website in the form of a link, player, or video. Protection and quality are guaranteed! Many online course creators have already chosen Publitio as their hosting platform and so should you!
