How to Make Money Selling Courses Online

Selling courses online is a great way to use your professional expertise to make additional, passive income. If you’re successful, you might even find that online learning eventually becomes your primary source of income, giving you more free time to devote to other aspects of your life. 

If you’re interested in how to make money with online courses, there are a few techniques you should follow to maximize your earning potential. Consider attracting your audience with free teaser content, then putting complete access behind a paywall and encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews or testimonials.

Offer some free sample content

One of the best ways for course creators to raise awareness of and encourage engagement with their course is to give some of it away for free. If you’ve ever clicked on a video for a language lesson, for example, that then directed you to a course site where you could access the next lesson by signing up for a whole course, you’ve experienced this digital marketing technique.

By posting your first lesson on the free part of your website and sharing a link to it with your social media followers and email list, you can show people the value of the e-learning content you offer. 

Alternatively, you could summarize key points from a lesson in a short video or text-based post, then link to the full version on your course platform. People will get a taste of your particular teaching style and the course topic, and understand what they’ll get out of your course. That teaser, plus any additional information you share on your course landing page, will help them decide whether it suits their learning style.

When you hook an audience with high-quality, free course content, they are more likely to want to invest their money in your paid content. Your free content effectively removes the perceived risk of whether your course is a fit for them.

Put your content behind a paywall

Once your audience is engaged and hungry to learn more, you can drive them to a course sign up page on your own website. Visitors will see a paywall and sales page that encourages them to sign up. Behind the paywall, you can upload exclusive, in-depth learning content that’s available only to those who’ve chosen to pay for it.

Customers often value paid content more than they do free content. Some argue that this is partly due to feeling like part of an exclusive club, while others believe people will assign more value to something they’ve invested more money into. Either way, when you lock the majority of your online education content behind a paywall, you are telling your target audience that your learning program is worth their time and effort.

Squarespace Courses, for example, allow you to sell your own online course content and connect paid customers with one another so they can form learning communities. You can host a variety of course content with Courses, from videos and photos to written materials and more. You’ll also be able to share course calendars with a select group of students and create a newsletter that only goes out to course attendees. All of this adds to the sense of value that a subscription to your online course delivers.

Encourage users to review your course content

While your free course content can be judged by potential customers as a benchmark of your teaching quality, there’s nothing like a vote of confidence from their peers to drive the decision to buy a course or class. Make sure you give your students the chance to give feedback on your courses and encourage them to do so.

Before you give people the opportunity to share feedback on your course content, make sure your content is professional, runs smoothly, and delivers results for attendees, especially if it’s your first course. As soon as you’re confident that you have a course that people will say great things about, it’s time to ask for student testimonials.

Make it a part of your regular email communication with customers to ask them for testimonials. Link any search platforms or marketplaces where your course appears, or simply ask for direct feedback via a form. You can then share testimonials yourself with permission from the reviewer.

Share any positive feedback you receive on your social media and on your course website. As part of your marketing strategy you can offer your course for free to people with large followings in your field in exchange for an honest review of their experience on their social channels. If you wish to display reviews on a Squarespace membership site, you can build in third party plugins to gather and display your reviews or add a quote block for testimonials.

If you want to display reviews on a Squarespace online course site, you can build in third-party plugins to gather and display your reviews or add a quote block for testimonials.

You can even use new reviews and testimonials to connect with lapsed users via email marketing. Seeing those happy students might convince them to sign up for any new courses you’ve released.

When you develop a reputation for excellence in your course content, you are effectively building your brand as an online educator. This puts you in a much stronger position to make money with your online courses.

Read the complete guide on how to develop and market online courses

This post was updated on August 21, 2023.