Three years ago the thought of selling my own online course would have never even crossed my mind.. Who? Me? A course online? No way! What in the world can I teach people? Who am I to do this? I am not an expert at anything!
Well, I am happy to say that since then things have changed a bit. I fired my limiting beliefs and let the imposter syndrome go (never liked those two anyway).
I now know for a fact that each and every one of us has at least something that they could teach others. We all possess some knowledge that others would be willing to pay for. I also now know that you can sell online courses from your own website or blog, regardless of what niche you are in.
I am not going to go technical here and talk about how you can embed a course into your website – information on that can easily be found online and can be accomplished by installing an additional plugin to your WordPress site. Instead, I want to answer a couple of the most frequently asked questions by people that are still on the fence, wondering whether they could create their own online course or not.
Also, much of what I am going to lay out here comes from my own experience of overcoming limiting beliefs, but also from what Amy Porterfield explains in Digital Course Academy, a program that teaches how to create digital courses and how to sell them. If interested, you can read the full review of it here. Enjoy!
Why sell online courses from your own website or blog in the first place?
If you have your own website or blog, chances are that you want to stay doing business online. What can be better than working from home, spending more time with your loved ones, while receiving an income that is enough for you and your family to feel more than comfortable? That’s right! Hard to find a 9-5 job that can compete with that…
As someone that has been blogging for almost 4 years now, I can with full confidence say that this hobby can replace your day job and make you a lot of money. The only challenge is that you have to constantly be strategic and find ways to use your blog to make money. Simply writing content does not create wealth, unless, of course, you have a large following and you are using something like Google AdSense to display ads on your blog.
As an internet entrepreneur, you have the options to sell physical products, do one on one coaching, affiliate marketing or you can sell online courses from your own website or blog.
So if you are a blogger, and you do some affiliate marketing, but you don’t want to sell physical products or do one on one coaching, then why wouldn’t you go for digital courses?! I asked myself this question.
Besides, inside of the Digital Course Academy Facebook group, there are people that make 6 and even 7-figure incomes from selling their courses. If that’s not an indicator that it’s worth giving a shot, then I don’t know what is. 🙂
Do I need to be an expert to create and sell online courses?
The main reason why I didn’t dare to create my own course for such a long time was because I thought that I needed to be an expert. For me being an expert meant having a degree in that field and at least ten years of work experience.
I kept pushing the idea of making a digital course aside until one day, I heard Amy Porterfield say on one of her podcast episodes that you DON’T need to be an expert to make a course. It’s actually a limiting belief that most people have, she added.
Her approach clearly states that as long as you have done something in life that has gotten you great results, or you have helped someone else do something that has gotten them great results, you can make an online course about that.
Honestly, Amy’s words were a breath of fresh air for me. It made so much sense. I had no idea why I was so strict with myself, constantly trying to be a perfectionist, using the all or nothing mentality.
Not everything can be studied at a university, and not everything needs to be practiced for ten years in order for you to be good at it. The bottom line is that as long as you have solid results in something, you can create a course around it.
Sure, you probably will need to create some kind of structure so that other people can follow your approach, step by step, but that is something you do once you actually start working on the course.
Do I need a large following to be an online course creator?
While this post is about how to sell online courses from your own website or blog, the great part about creating online courses is that you don’t even need an audience to begin with.
Having an audience always helps, of course, but if you don’t yet have any, no problem.
Amy teaches how to attract an audience as you create your course. And if you can’t build a large enough audience by the time you finish making your course, you can use Facebook ads to attract people. Amy has Facebook ad and social media strategies included in her DCA program as well.
The funny thing is that I always thought that buying Facebook ads is expensive, but in reality, not at all, if you know what you are doing. Since having signed up for her course, I’ve been using ads in other areas of my online business, and with positive results.
Finally, while it is good to have a website or a blog ready before you make your first online course, you actually don’t need that either. You can use any of the existing online education platforms to host your course. For some people that don’t want to run their own website or blog, this is a perfect solution.
Amy Porterfield’s Digital Course Academy (DCA)
As I mentioned in the beginning, I purchased Amy Porterfield’s Digital Course Academy. I decided that I wouldn’t even bother trying to learn how to create online courses on my own.
I have heard many times from different people how the process can get quite complex. The last thing you want is to spend six months creating your own digital course, just to find out that nobody wants to buy it. So I was 100% sure that I needed to get a program that would teach me everything I needed to know about creating and selling digital courses.
I am not going to describe the program in depth here since I already did it in another blog post. However, I am going to briefly share with you the benefits of Digital Course Academy.
First of all, I would have never imagined that creating courses can get so tricky. The only things I had in mind regarding course creation were: writing and filming content, finding a platform to host your digital course and a system that will accept payments from students. For some reason, I did not think much beyond that.
As it turns out, there is a lot more to it.
Now I clearly understand that the biggest danger of creating online courses is the fact that you can create one, and then not be able to sell it because nobody wants it. Fortunately, Amy in her program teaches us to validate the course idea before we go on creating it.
Click To TweetYou can’t convince anyone of anything. You can only give them the right information, so that they convince themselves. – Eben Pagan
The second danger lies in not being able to market your course the right way. People may actually want your course, but if you don’t know how to get your message across to them, they won’t buy. Luckily, apart from course creation, Amy also added to her program a whole section on how to sell your course.
No other similar program that I researched at the time taught how to promote and market your digital course. They focused only on course creation. This is why I eventually chose DCA – it has everything.
So can you sell online courses from your own website or blog? As you have probably understood by now – yes, without doubt… even if you don’t have a following, a website or a blog. 🙂
At the end of the day, I am convinced that we all have something that we can make an online course about. It’s just a matter of how badly we want it and how creative we can get.
And if you do decide to do it, then you can expect some really positive changes to happen in your life. I say this because I am now myself in the process of making my own online course, but also because I see so many people in Amy’s Facebook group that only do digital courses for a living. It’s definitely possible.
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