Getting all relevant tips on how to start a profitable online course business is crucial before you launch your digital product.

The global market for online education continues to witness rapid development and is expected to be $325 billion in 2025 and $1 trillion in 2027, this means that there is no better time to start a profitable online course business than now because 4-5 years from now, online courses will be more profitable than it is now. 

Millions of people are buying online courses to improve their skills and gain more knowledge about certain topics of interest because they want to learn at their convenience which makes this business profitable. Online courses allow individuals to learn at their own pace, something that is not possible in the conventional education system. 

Anyone with reasonable experience to share can start a profitable online course business but you have to be ready to put in more time, develop making plans and strategies to make your knowledge business successful.

What is an online course business?

Just like every business where you give value for money, an online course business is a type of business that is based on selling online courses in video format and other attachments. It involves live demonstration of skills and analytics aimed at solving a particular problem. 

Online course is a very lucrative business because every day a lot of people buy online tend to learn something new or improve an already informed knowledge of a business, it is cheaper than traditional learning and is quite convenient for people. 

It is not enough to put in all the time, skills and effort to create a course, like every other business, it has to be profitable and serve as a good source of income. 

In this article, I have described in ten steps, all you need to start a profitable online course business.

How to Start a Profitable Online Course Business

There are several ways to start a profitable online course business, please read the steps demonstrated below for the complete guide:

Step one: Decide what you want to teach

What are you good at? How experienced are you in the field? What high-income product (the course is your product) can you create and sell? What niche can you comfortably create content on, teach and build an audience? These are questions to ask yourself the moment you decide to start an online course business, it might take a while but make sure you pick something that you can teach absolutely well and add value to people in various forms. 

Step two: Create your audience persona

Who do you want to serve? Who will benefit from your course? Who needs your course? Whose problem are you solving? These questions will help you create a persona for your course, here is an example: I am writing for a 33-year-old single mum who lives abroad and earns $200 per month, what this does is that it helps you position your course toward this client’s direction.

Step three: Choose your topic

Choosing your topic is different from deciding what you want to teach, what you want to teach could be SEO, Photography etc but your course topic will be narrowed down to fit your audience persona’s needs. Considering the above persona, we can choose a topic like “how to balance home and work efficiently as a housewife.” Make your topic catching and a little detailed so that your audience know what exactly they are paying for and how it can solve their problems.

Step four: Build your target audience

Now you know who you want to serve and how you want to serve them, take time to grow your audience, start by using social media, be active and share a lot of freebies, it doesn’t necessarily have to be money, most times useful tips that can impact their lives is perfectly fine. Create a target for getting an audience and work hard to achieve them 

Using Facebook ads is a quick way to grow your Facebook page following or Facebook group participation. Ensure that the audience you build are those who are relevant to your business. 

Step five: Research market trends for your course

Before you decide on what course to create, an essential marketing strategy is to determine the market trend and relevance of your course in the market. It will be a futile effort if you create a course that no one is searching for – a course that does not solve any problem. Courses with a huge volume of searches tend to be more profitable than those with very little or no searches.  How many people are ready to pay for your course? Is the demand for such topics high? Positive answers to these questions mean that your online course has a good market value and will be a hit in the market if you handle the marketing aspects appropriately.

Step six: Research topics and competitors

Like every other business, competition research is one of the first things to do before launch. SEO tools like SEMRUSH, MOZ, SCREAMING FROG and UBERSUGGEST are good competition research tools to help you get started. 

Competition research will help you to understand your competitors business and the strategies they employ, where they stay, customers they target and much more essential information for business decisions. 

How do they create their course? What can you learn from them? And what mistakes do they make that you can capitalize on to make you more sales? Research and studying your competitors is a great way to start a profitable online course business.

Step seven: Branding

This is where you stand out as a course creator, you don’t want to be like every other course creator in your niche, you want to create impact and be remembered for that. What value are you adding to your audience? How do you stand out from other course creators? What are you doing differently? And how does one identify your brand? All of these questions help you figure out how you want to pass your message to the world.

You may consider specific colors, logo, font size, header style and more and make them specific on all your website pages to create an easily memorable brand name. 

Step eight: Choose a good platform to host and manage your course

How do you create and sell your online course? Learn Afrique is the best platform for creating courses standard online courses that makes the best sales. The software has a professional course builder that helps you create valuable courses for your audience. It is quite affordable and you get the chance to automatically promote your online course in the online course marketplace. 

The affiliate system allows other promoters to earn a small commission from promoting your product to those who need them. The online course platform stands as the most affordable online course platform in the world and possesses many special features like the point system, gamification, course attachment and advanced quizzes. 

Step nine: Create your course

It’s about time you create your course. Now that you’ve grown your audience, identified your niche and chosen your topic, you can put in the energy to create a valuable course with knowledge and other ingredients that make it unique and different from other similar courses in the market. This is your product, take your time to package it, not just the cover but also the content. 

Step 10: Promote your course

When your course is finally ready, there are several ways to create a good marketing strategy that will make your course or product very profitable. Essential strategies used in promoting online courses include the following:

1. Facebook ad

Create Facebook campaigns that are properly targeted at the right audience in different locations and measure their performance and impact. The essential component of your campaign includes your copy, images or videos, heading and targeting. If you are not a Facebook ad expert, it is better to employ an expert who will use A/B testing to measure impact and get a winning ad that you will use for your campaign.

2. Create an Affiliate System

Affiliate products help others earn great commission from just reselling your courses on your LMS. Learn Afrique affiliate system allows students to promote your courses if they like them and earn some commission on every sale.

3. Host Live Webinars

Live webinars are a great way to handle the launch of your online course and other products to an unknown audience. Social media webinars have the capacity to reach more people than traditional posts. A good strategy is to invite a social media influencer and launch your product on the live show. 

4. Prepare for pre-launch offers

Before you finally release your online course, offer pre-launch sales with a huge discount to attract a huge following and great attention. 

There are several other ways to promote your online course as discussed in this article.

Conclusion

Starting a profitable online course business is one of the challenges many information marketers or knowledgepreneur encounter when they start an information marketing business. Being able to make an online profitable is particularly difficult for someone who is just starting out. This is because it requires a lot of funds to register for an LMS that will allow you to create professional online courses that can be promoted in any part of the world. 

The various ways to start a profitable online course business as described in this article include the following; create an engaging audience, create a product that solves a problem peculiar to a large number of people, carry out competition research to determine who is into your niche and what they are doing differently, sign up for a standard LMS to create professional courses, create a buyer persona for your online course, and develop an effective marketing strategy.