How Much Money Can You Make Selling Online Courses 2024

Creating and selling online courses is a booming market internationally. The online course market is growing rapidly with an expectation to reach $319 Billion by 2029 (Source: Elearning Statistics)!

Demand in online courses has been steadily growing, and after the 2020 Covid boom, people keep looking to purchase education and training online. Search trends are almost double than they were 5 years ago, and the trend seems to be growing (Source: Google Trends).

Investing in education and lifelong learning is an emerging trend among both old and young learners. Online courses have come to fill in knowledge gaps. A lot of people seem to prefer the comfort and flexibility of their own homes and to avoid the complexities of commuting to physical classes.

And this is perfect for the growing elearning industry.

If you are not already selling an online course, you are missing out on a big opportunity!

How much money can you make out selling online courses?

You can take the following quiz and see how much money you can potentially make with an online course!

Take the Quiz and find out!

HOW MUCH MONEY CAN YOU MAKE SELLING ONLINE COURSES?

• Make Money With Online Courses
   
• How Much Revenue to Expect from an Online Course?
   
• Increasing the Value of an Online Course
• Are Online Courses Profitable?
   
• Why Sell Online Courses: The Benefits
   
• Are You Ready to Become a Course Creator?
  
   

Can You Make Money Selling Online Courses?

Yes, you can make money selling online courses, although it’s hard to say exactly how much. There are a lot of factors at work when creating your own online course and the profits you get from the course sales can vary wildly.

For example, as an online instructor you could be earning from a few hundred dollars per year to a six- or seven-figure income. In fact, you could reach up to a six-figure number while treating your course business as a part-time project.

Course creation is only part of the process. The work on marketing and sales, including your personal brand can give you an edge.

How Much Revenue to Expect from an Online Course?

This varies a lot from one online course creator to another. You will have to consider a lot of factors that affect your potential revenue when you sell eLearning courses.

• The price of your course: Are you selling a 5$ or a $500 course? This makes a huge difference in how many people you need to sell your course to make your revenue goals.
• Your audience: Do you have an email list? Any social media followers? Do you have a YouTube channel with subscribers? Do you have access to partners and their networks? The bigger, more engaged network, the more customers you can expect to get while doing social media marketing. If you are starting out right now, generating an email list should be the first item on your checklist of your new online course business.
• Marketing and sales experience: Have you done this before? If you already have an online business and have sold products before you are at an advantage and should expect a higher conversion rate from your audience.
• Current customer loyalty: How loyal are your customers? Are they coming back for your new products or disappear? Do you have an engaged customer base?

Even if you’re just starting out, all of the above can be learned, and you could still get paid for online courses. However, you should expect a slower start than an experienced entrepreneur.

How can you calculate your potential revenue?

To determine your potential revenue you will need to calculate following:

Revenue = Number of your Audience x Conversion Rate x Price of the Course

If you don’t have an audience yet, you can make some hypotheses based on how many people you expect to sell eLearning courses to. Do you anticipate 100 subscribers, 200 subscribers, or 1,000 subscribers?

Conversion rates for online courses depend on the subject, the price, and your capability to attract and sell to the right people. You can think of conversions as:

• Low conversions: 0.1% to 1%
• Medium conversions: 2-5%
• High conversions: 6-10%

To see different scenarios and set goals based on them, you can run the calculation on all three conversion rates, 1%, 5%, and 10%.

How can you calculate your potential profit?

In order to determine if your online business is making a profit from selling courses, you must subtract the expenses. Luckily, online courses do not cost anything per additional customer but might have production or marketing expenses. This is how to think about it:

Profit = Revenue – Production costs (fixed) – Marketing expenses – Other related costs

Now you can calculate if your course can be profitable, how much work you need to do, and how much money you can make selling online courses!

Increasing the Value of an Online Course

Sure, you create online courses for money, but bringing your learners value should also be a determining factor in your decision. You can improve the value of your courses in several ways. Before moving on to set your course price on your first course, check out the following factors that can affect your course’s value:

• Your personal brand recognition: how approachable, memorable and visible you are as a person on social media and the web. A brand’s reputation online can be directly affected by mentions of the brand. We suggest that you google your name to find out where you are at and what the internet says about you. For more in-depth results, we suggest that you use a brand mention tool or a social media listening tool.
• Your level of expertise: the more knowledgeable you are in your subject, the more high-quality and unique content you are producing. It will also be easier for you to establish a reputation as an expert.
• The training content at hand: depends on the amount and variety of course content you have created and whether it is ready to be shared with your learners (e.g. blog posts, email marketing sequences, books, videos/vlogs, audio/podcasts).
• The course topic: a successful online course starts with a profitable topic. Your course idea determines whether lots of people will love your course or not and if it’s going to sell.
• The size of your audience: having big followership on social media (LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik, Tok or Facebook Group), an email list, or a number of business contacts interested in your expertise is important. Course creators with a ready-made audience such as established professionals, bloggers/vloggers, people with authority, and celebrities have an advantage over others when starting their own online courses. Their brand recognition helps to boost sales.
• Your audience’s income: consider how much your target audience earns and whether they are willing to spend on digital products, such as online courses. To get a sense of your target audience’s income here’s a simple calculation. Would someone be willing to pay to learn more about what you teach? Do they have a price range? If so, how much are they willing to spend? This will also affect your course pricing – when determining the best course price point, as well as the quality of the course topic.
• The market size & competition: identify how many people are in need of your courses (a solution to a problem) in your niche, and analyze how your competitors are using this information. Conducting market research helps figure out whether there is a real market for what you are proposing to sell or upsell.
• The effectiveness of your site: track your target audience’s customer journey, how they arrive at your online school’s website, how they interact with your pages (landing pages, sales page, etc).