Online courses are the biggest trends happening in the online business industry right now. The e-learning market is expected to be worth $243 Billion by 2022. It is also expected to grow by $335 Billion in the next 5 years. A large number of online course sellers have quit their full-time jobs to live with the revenue from their courses sold online. Can you even believe that some of these course sellers have made millions of dollars from their single course?
What are some of the biggest advantages in starting an online course?
100% profit – Unlike a physical product, the expense in creating an online course is onetime(only the initial investment). Even a software requires, more developer support, servers etc
It is easy to start a course – Compared to other online businesses, its easy to launch a course. If you work dedicatedly, you can even launch a new course in 2 or 3 days.
More reinvestment– Unlike other products, you can reinvest a lot into marketing(affiliates, offers, free courses etc)
Now, let us have a look at some real life statistics and figures of some successful online course sellers.
1. Rob Percival
Rob Percival, a former high school mathematics teacher earned 1 million USD the very first year he launched his course. He started his first course in June 2004 for a price of $199. Rob was able to generate 1 sale only within the first 24 hours after he launched the course.
When Rob came to know about udemy and its potential, he sat in front of his mac and started building a course on web development(being a math teacher, he had some good programming background as well). He posted a 30-hour course about web development in udemy. The course picked up really slow initially, and Rob made it free for 2 weeks. Around 4000 people enrolled for the free course and then he switched back to full price.
In the first month, he was able to generate $15000 in revenue(most of the revenue came as an aftereffect of his own marketing efforts). Things really picked up in the following months, the revenue shot up to $30000 and $50000 respectively. In September 2014, 3 months after launching his first course Rob launched his second-course teaching swift(apple programming language) and it earned a whopping $200,000. After September, it was steady $150,000 every month. Within 9 months after his launch, Rob was able to earn around 3 million in revenue. Its been 5-6 years after this, Rob has launched multiple courses after these 2 courses and you can imagine how much more money he should have made selling courses in this time period.
2. John Azzi and Eliot Arntz
John Azzi was running and app development agency and Eliot Arntz was a miserable accountant in Newyork. They both decided to work together and invested around $1000 in developing an online course on app development for ios7. They charged $99 for the course and in the first month of launch, they were able to generate a revenue of $40,000. 2 months before Apple launched ios8, they made their course free for a limited time period. Their signups started going crazy, they were listed on top in Reddit, ProductHunt, and all over the internet. 600,000 people enrolled for the course in the very next 2 days. They were able to collect millions of emails in a small time period. When the ios8 was lanched, they send out an email to all the people in their list offering a discounted rate of $89. The sales exploded and they were able to generate $700,000 in revenue!
After this huge success, they scaled their course selling business hiring experts in the industry and was able to generate millions in sales.
3. Joseph Michael
Joseph always had that drive to start a business in his life. He launched tons of business including real estate and even snow cone with his wife and failed frequently.
Joseph while working full time, was looking for a side hustle of making $500 and he even tried applying for pizza delivery jobs. Later on, he started a small blog and posted a video helping his daughter to tie her shoes in 5 minutes. This was the turning point in his life. This video went viral with 800K shares.
Excited by this response, Joseph started working every day to launch his first-course LearnScrivenerFast, a course through which helps to learn Scrivener fast(a word processing program for authors). He became active in Twitter in order to promote the new course. It is when Michael Hyatt tagged him on twitter with a scrivener question and Joseph sends him the link of the course which he made. Michael Hyatt loved the course and he tweeted Josephs’s course with positive comments. This single tweet generated 20 sales to his course in no time. After all, he started a webinar(even though he was totally uncertain about the outcome). Joseph also promoted his course at the end of the webinar. The result was mind-blowing. He was able to make $25,000 in sales with that single webinar! This was a big break and he started doing $40,000 a month in sales regularly through webinars.
After this traction, Joseph started to get traffic organically through google, referrals from different websites, etc. He was able to quit his full-time job and focus fully on the course. He has launched multiple courses after this big success and has generated a large scale of revenue.
4. Nick Walter
When Apple launched its new programming language Swift, Nick Walter launched a swift course in udemy aiming to make an extra $1000 but what happened was he ended up making $66K in 30 days! His videos series had 50 short videos and he is still making money from that course.
5. Brennan Dunn
Brennan Dunn created a course double your freelancing rates, through which he helps freelancers to increase their value and sell themselves to clients at much larger pricing point. He was able to generate a revenue of around $40,000 a month.
Some Popular Internet Entrepreneurs Who Make Money Selling Courses Online
Well, you’ve read the stories of common and not that popular people who made millions selling their courses online. Now, lets have a look at some popular internet figures who makes great deal of money selling their courses.
6. Brian Dean
Who doesn’t know Brian Dean from Backlinko? In my opinion, Brian Dean is a genius when it comes it link building. During 2011 -2013, Google released some major updates to their algorithms and all the conventional link building methods failed after these updates. This was when Brian Dean came up with his totally out of the box link building methods.
I was wondering how he made money through his blogs, neither he was using affiliate marketing nor ads. Recently Brian Dean himself revealed that his major income stream was through selling courses online.
Well, consultations was his major stream of income but he doesn’t like the idea of physically being present to make money online. He charged good fees for consultation, but the issue was with the business model. He totally loved the idea of selling online courses as he only had to put one time effort. A course will sell on its own after the initial effort.
Below given is the screenshot from Brian Deans recent newsletter regarding how much progress he made selling courses online year by year since he launched his first course.
These are some fine examples showing how much money you can make online selling courses. When it comes to 2020, online course selling is a much bigger market than the time in which these people started selling their first course. With lots of online course selling market places and platforms like udemy, teachable, thinkific out there, the support from these platforms for course sellers are like never before. If you have any plans to start an online course, no doubt, it is the best time to dive into,
