There has never been a better time to build a business selling online courses. By 2026, the global market for online education will reach an enormous $457.8 billion (Global Industry Analysts), and it shows no signs of slowing down. Millions of people are purchasing online courses, inside and outside of the traditional education system, in order to upgrade their knowledge and skills.
It comes as no surprise that in response to this demand, entrepreneurs and subject matter experts from all over the world have started creating and selling online courses to share their knowledge with others.
At Thinkific, we’ve felt the effects of this demand first hand as thousands of individuals and organizations have started using our platform to create online courses.
Many of our customers are established organizations and entrepreneurs. For them, creating and selling online courses is a viable way to create an additional source of revenue for their business. We also have several organizations (like Hootsuite, for example) creating free courses to provide training to their customers. But for many of our customers, selling online courses is their primary business model and source of revenue.
And while we are proud to say that many of these people have been able to build a successful online course business (meaning they are enrolling students and generating revenue on a regular basis), there are some course creators that are struggling to turn their expertise into a full-time business.
This isn’t unique to Thinkific, and it certainly isn’t unique to online course creators. This is the Pareto Principle (aka the 80/20 Rule) in action:
In every industry – from real estate sales to financial services, to professional sports – the majority of the income (roughly 80%) is earned by the minority of the people in those industries (roughly 20%).
After looking at the data from thousands of customers, it is clear that for every person that has published an online course in the past year and is successfully getting new students, there is at least one other person that is struggling to get consistent sales and enrollments. More often than not, it’s not because they didn’t create a great course. It’s because creating an online course is just one part of building an online course business. Building a business is the other part.
But let’s be real here. If you ask ANY type of business owner if it was easy for them to build their business, they will tell you that it wasn’t.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is an online course business
At the beginning of 2017, I watched a close friend of mine open his own barbershop. It took him 3 months of renovations and tens of thousands of dollars just to get his barbershop ready for him to welcome his first customer through the front door. (I was his second customer, by the way. Someone else beat me to the grand opening by about 5 minutes!)
For my friend, those 3 months of preparation work was just the beginning. During the next 6 months after his grand opening, he worked 7 days per week to build up his clientele and recoup his startup costs before he started hiring more barbers. Why did he do this? Because that’s what it took to start his own barbershop.
Today, I am proud to say that my friend runs the busiest barbershop in the area. And with 3 other barbers on his team, and he no longer has to work 7 days per week.
What does this have to do with building an online course business?
The point of this story is that it takes a lot of work upfront to build a business. It doesn’t happen overnight, and building an online course business is no exception. There is a lot of work you will have to do, both before and after you create your course, in order to be successful.
Unfortunately, most course creators give up on their business before putting in the work required to ensure they will be successful. They stop digging for gold before they experience the big payoff that makes all the hard work worth it.
Even though it takes a lot of work to build a successful online course business, there are plenty of other people that have done it before (check out our customer case studies to see some examples). And because other people have done it before, there is a proven path for you to follow. You don’t have to learn from trial and error. As life and business strategist Tony Robbins (also an online course creator!) once said: success leaves clues.
With that in mind, we reached out to more than 40 successful entrepreneurs and online course creators (many of whom were featured in our own online course called Profitable Course Creator) and asked them what it takes to build a profitable and sustainable online course business. These people have literally built their careers by sharing their knowledge with others, many of them selling millions of dollars worth of training programs and online courses throughout their careers.
After reviewing all of the valuable insights these online course creation experts and entrepreneurs shared with us, we managed to distill the process of building a successful online course business into 7 specific steps (well, more like phases, since each one of these phases has several steps involved).
EXCERPT FROM THINKIFIC