How to Sell Online Courses From Your Own Website

Online courses are one of the best models you can adopt if you starting an online business. How much money you can make selling your courses? Rob Percival, a maths teacher was able to generate $3Million in revenue 9 months after launching his first course.

Let us have a quick look at the market growth of the online course industry. It is expected to touch 243B in 2022. One of the areas that benefited by the Covid-19 is the e-Learning industry. Many schools and institutions switched into online education model.

Online Course Market Growth

So what are the 3 biggest advantages of selling courses online?

  • Easy to launch – Normally you can launch your first course within a month.
  • More profit and recurring revenue – Being a digital product, the effort and investment is one time, you can easily break even and after all its 100% profit margin.
  • The industry is getting bigger – Online course industry is growing day by day. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for online courses did shoot up exponentially.

How can You Sell Online Courses From Your Own Website ?

You can sell your courses on platforms like Udemy. But its always good to start course selling on your own website. These are the biggest advantages of selling courses on your own standalone website.

You are independent – Your success doesn’t depend on any other service or a company like Udemy. What happens if udemy deletes your account one morning? By starting your own website , you literally have zero dependencies on a third-party platform

More profits – You can keep 100% of the profit of a course sale.

You can build your own brand – You can never build a brand selling course through udemy, but you can build a great brand through your own website.

So, what are the best ways to sell courses online in your own website?

1.LearnDash

Learndash is a super popular WordPress plugin through which you can turn your WordPress portal into a beautiful looking course selling website. Learndash is the easiest and trusted platform out there used by fortune 500 companies, major universities, and other popular organizations to create sell courses online.

Now, lets have a look at some of the main features of LearnDash

1. Learndash Focus mode – Focus mode is the distraction-free course creation section through which you focus maximum on your course content. Very much like the WordPress Gutenberg the learndash focus mode helps you to be productive and focused on your course.

2. Powerful Course Builder – The simple drag and drop course builder makes learndash course building very powerful. You can break the courses into categories, lessons, etc.

3. Quizing – You can start an advanced quizing session along with your course. This enables your students to take part in quiz related to each lessons and thereby assessing the learning progress.

4. Forum -With LearnDash, you can launch a public or private forum for your students through which they can start discussions with other students and clarify their queries.

5. Gradebook – Gradebook shows the grades of students. Learndash does have an advanced quiz system through which students can answer different questions set up by the course creator. Learndash automatically creates a grade and ranking system for the students enrolled.

1. How to create your WordPress website ?

So the biggest question is why WordPress?

Let’s have a quick looks at some of the WordPress facts that make it the best platform.

  • Super popular – 37.1% of the world’s all websites are in WordPress. In other sense, 1 out of 3 websites is in WordPress.
  • Ease of use – WordPress is simple and powerful. You don’t need any technical knowledge to install and create a course in WordPress.
  • Best design options – Did you know that the world’s most good looking and efficient themes are in WordPress.
  • Google loves WordPress – WordPress is highly optimized for SEO, it has free plugins like Yoast which makes your website optimized for google search.

You can skip this step if you already have a WordPress website. If you don’t know in detail about creating your WordPress website for free, you can follow these steps. Most of the hosting providers, like Bluehost, Dreamhost, Siteground, etc do have one-click WordPress installation to install WordPress on your website. Other managed WordPress hosting companies like WPXhosting will do it for you (they have a dedicated support team for you).

You have to purchase a domain and install WordPress into it. The one-click install process is so simple, you need to

1) You need to enter the site title and description

2) Enter the WordPress username and password

3) Install WordPress

You have to wait for 5 minutes or you might get an email notification once the installation process is completed. Now you can enter your WordPress website entering yourwebsite.com/wp-admin entering the username and password which you gave before.

2. How to setup learndash in your WordPress website ?

Once you purchase learndash, you can download it from your account. Upload the zip file into your WordPress website.

Step 1 : Download and install learndash , after you install learndash you have to activate the plugin.

Log into to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin> Choose File > Install Now > Activate Plugin

Step 2: Activate plugin License

After you install LearnDash LMS, navigate to overview enter your email and license key and save the license.

3. Create a new course

Here is a video tutorial from learndash in creating a new course.

  1. Adding a new course

After installing the learndash plugin, select the Courses menu under LearnDash LMS menu. After that, you have to click the Add New Course button

After that you need to enter course title, description, course details(like course materials, course price type(free, buy now …), Course price, etc).

2. Creating Lessons

After you enter your course details like title, description, and other details, you have to create lessons of your course. The course enroller will be going through these each lesson one by one when starts learning the course.

3. Publishing Your Course

After you create the course along with its lessons, you have to publish the course and it will be available in the frontend, you can see the course link(as seen in the below image). That will be the link to your course and it will be through this link your students will be getting into your course.

4. Viewing your course in frontend

You can view your published course in the frontend of your website through the link shown above(permalink).

2. Teachable

You can use teachable for your own domain. If you have a domain, you just need to connect that domain in your teachable account. If you don’t have a domain, you have to purchase a domain from domain registrars like Godaddy.

Teachable has a detailed guide in integrating teachable with your own domain.

There are many other platforms like thinkific, Learnworlds, Podia, etc to create courses online. But the biggest drawback with these platforms is that you can only create courses in their platform only not a standalone course platform on your website.

If you already have a website, then integrating WordPress and installing learndash plugin is the best method to set up an online course selling platform. You can market your courses on your own website, enroll students or in short be an online institution.

Note: Thinking about a custom online course platform is that last thing you need to think about. Platforms like learndash, teachable etc does have plenty of features(far more than enough) for a highly interactive course platform. Building a custom course platform can be really expensive(ranging from $10,000 – $50,000) with no guarantee offering all the features provided by the above mentioned platforms.

About the author

Linjo Joson

Linjo is a PHP developer who loves to write about online businesses and marketing ideas

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