How Much Money Can You Make Selling Online Courses?

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!

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).

Working to improve these factors can help to promote your online course business and gain greater exposure to online communities or even industry influencers that can help you sell and upsell your courses. If you need help with marketing your school, check how to increase your course sales.

A side-project online course can be a good way to start making revenue until you can switch full-time.

Are Online Courses Profitable?

Yes, they are. You can make money selling online courses if you’re methodical and make a serious effort. Online courses offer one of the best business models to digital entrepreneurs. The demand is rising and people are more than willing to pay for them, and they are one of the top ways to make money online.

Especially if you are selling high-ticket courses, LearnWorlds’ data shows that higher price courses ($500 and above) generate more revenue with a smaller audience, over cheap courses marketed to a wider audience.

This is a great piece of information to start with!

However, you will need to research more into your chosen subject to make a new course launch. Creating your first course might seem overwhelming, but it can be surprisingly straightforward using LearnWorlds. We offer the best online course platform to create, market, and sell your online course.

On top of that, when it comes to creating content for your course, you have many options to choose from.

One of them is to reuse your old material, including your:

• Old blog posts (if blogging is part of your business activities)
• Video or audio recordings (webinars, tutorials, speeches, interviews, etc.)
• Books, eBooks, or other company-related information material

Lowering spending on new content and reusing your old material, can increase your online course’s return on investment (ROI) and your own income. Once you know what your minimum expenses are, all you have to do is put together a worksheet that can easily calculate the equation (Income – Expenses) / Expenses.

Why Sell Online Courses: The Benefits

Launching an online academy can bring you a passive income or a truly impressive new source of revenue, but it can also have multiple benefits for your online course business.

The primary goal is to get paid for online courses, but you can also use an online course to:

• Enhance your online brand and presence as a whole.
• Establish yourself as a thought leader and a credible source for new knowledge.
• Develop a loyal following of your current clients as the desire for easy and more consumable information continues to grow.
• Bring more opportunities for new, profitable ventures, providing free online courses to attract potential clients and online business leads.

As you would expect in a knowledge society where information is power, utilizing your expertise through online education is a revolutionary way to make money. Also, it can open up a wealth of opportunities for your organization, as well as benefit your community by educating its members.

Online courses can also be a great way to start building your membership site. Membership sites have the advantage of selling subscriptions for a learning community and get recurring income for it.

Are You Ready to Become a Course Creator?

Undoubtedly, online learning is the way forward. Course creators have the chance to make money selling courses to create additional sources of passive income or even make a living teaching online from your own website.

Monetize your existing content of training workshops, YouTube videos, podcasts, coaching sessions, and empower people to improve their skills.

The real question is, are you ready to become an entrepreneur, open your own online learning business, leveraging the resources you already possess?

You can start with a 30-day free trial on LearnWorlds and launch your course today!

In the meantime, make sure to check out our step-by-step guide to creating courses that turns online course creation to a walk in the park 🙂

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How to monetize online courses

There are several ways to monetize online courses, with the most popular being:

• Create your own website to promote and sell your courses either separately or in bundles.
• Create a membership site. This option is best if you regularly produce new content and you have a loyal following.
• Sell it in a marketplace.

Can you make money selling online courses?

There are are several monetization options for a course creator. Successful course creators make around $1k – $10k per month on average. The top course creators can make 6- to 7-figure incomes per year.

What are the most profitable online courses?

The most popular courses right now are in the following niches:

• Web development
• Data analysis
• Graphic design
• IT certifications
• Programming languages
• Personal development
• Artificial Intelligence
• Arts & Crafts
• Health & Wellness

How much does the average online course creator make?

An average course creator can make a few thousand dollars per month selling online courses full-time. If you are starting out part time, you can expect a few hundred dollars initially, but this depends on a lot of factors like the price of your course, your audience, and your marketing & selling skills.

There are also top creators who easily make 6-figures sales per month and a few that make 7-figures from their courses. Usually those are niche influencers or subject-matter-experts with years of experience and wider recognition.

What factors influence the income potential from selling online courses?

– Your audience size
– Your course price
– Your marketing & selling skills
– The topic
– Your expertise

Further reading you might find interesting:

• Top Tools & Resources for Course Creators
• How to Create a Tutorial Website to Sell Courses
• Best Online Learning Platforms
• Expert Opinion: 10 E-learning Trends that will Dominate in 2020
• How to Teach Online & Earn Money

Nick Malekos

Nick Malekos is a Senior Digital Marketer in LearnWorlds. He is a results based and well-rounded Digital Marketer with years of experience in the education industry, writer and digital literacy trainer.