Online learning and training have become an essential part of every online business. Creating and selling online courses can be quite profitable, with many professionals achieving 6- and 7-figure incomes. There has never been a better time to join the growing industry of eLearning.
Recommended for: anyone with a teachable skill
How much can you earn: a LOT. Depending on how good your course is, there’s a lot of potential. Some people make millions from selling online courses
Start-up costs: a few hundred dollars, depending on what equipment you already have (but you can always reuse webcam/microphone/etc. for future courses) plus you’ll also need an online course platform to set up a teaching “room” and host your course
The e-learning industry is absolutely huge; if you’ve never really tried it before (i.e. taking courses online), you’ll be probably be surprises, to say the least, by the huge number of online courses available, as well as the absolutely impressive number of people who take them.
And the thing is, it keeps growing; in fact, the e-learning industry is estimated to be worth around $325 billion by 2025.
Companies use them to further improve their employees’ skills; individuals use them to learn new skills and improve existing ones, as well as expand their knowledge; and of course, schools use them to make it easier for their students to learn.
And a plethora of people online are making a lot of money from creating and selling online courses. In fact, for a lot of top-earning bloggers, online courses are some of their biggest sources of revenue.
So if you have any skills or knowledge that others would want to learn as well – and it can be anything, from cooking to SEO to web design and pretty much anything you can think of.
And once you have an idea of what you could teach, you can easily research the market by searching the online courses available on platforms like Udemy:
You’ll be able to see how many courses there are available on that topic, as well as see how many students have enrolled for each course (just click on a course to get this extra information):
This simple research will give you a pretty good idea of what the demand is like for that particular market as well as show you what kinds of courses get the most students enrolled and the best ratings. This way, you’ll be able to pick a topic that people want to learn more about.
Plus, it will also give you a better idea of how to price your online courses.
Once you’ve picked a topic and you’ve got your materials ready – i.e. prepping the lessons and videos, as well as any other additional materials and resources, such as checklists and useful articles – you’ll need an online course software to help you; Thinkific is a great option for this.