You’ve decided to start selling courses online, but you are unsure where to start. Learning how to sell educational courses online is not as hard as many people think. We’ll outline a step by step guide below. Follow these steps, and you will find it much easier to get your courses up and make them available to students who are ready to start learning.

Step 1: Subjects and Niche

Before you dive into the process of content creation, take a deep breath, and start by considering what skills you have to share. There are thousands of different niches, sub-niches, and subjects that people focus on when they create courses.

It is generally a good idea to have a focus on specific niches or subjects. This will help you build credibility within the niche – ultimately helping students recognize you for an expert on that particular topic.

With that in mind, consider the skills you possess that you are able to share with other people.

Here are a few ideas:

• Maybe you have completed multiple studies in the area of personal nutrition and fitness. This gives you the ability to develop content around health-related topics, such as eating a healthy diet, what types of exercises to do, and more.
• If you are really good at graphic design, you may consider setting up courses for working with Photoshop, Illustrator, and other software.
• Programmers and web developers can create beginners and advance coding tutorials and course material. This is currently a hot topic that many people are looking at.
• People who are skilled in psychology may provide helpful courses on how to cope with anxiety and depression, or how to help a loved one going through a difficult time.

Of course, these are only a few ideas. You need to know your own skills, then consider what types of topics can be targeted when you set up courses around those niches and experiences you have gathered.

Step 2: Course Structuring

Once you know the type of content you want to deliver and the niche you wish to target, the next step is to structure out the course content you will be compiling. This is essentially a planning step – do it now to ensure the process of creating the actual course will be easier and more organized.

Set up a complete outline for the course – from introduction to the closing. Make notes of specific aspects that should be focused on, in each of the topics or modules.

You should also decide the type of content you will be delivered to the student at this point. Some people prefer written content, which means typing out documents – but it has been found that people are increasingly looking at more engaging courses. This could mean including some additional media formats in your course, such as video and audio content.

The more detailed your initial planning is, the easier it will be to fill in actual content during the production process of the course. Thus, it is wise to spend some time during this stage to set up an in-depth plan and structure for the course.

Step 3: Choose A Platform

Once you know the type, of course, you want to deliver to the students; you need to select an appropriate platform to take advantage of. Several platforms can be used, as previously stated – you can decide to set up your own landing page, turn to a membership site, or use an LMS to make things easier.

Registering with a site like GuruCan makes the process significantly easier when setting up your own course content on the internet.

The platform gives you the ability to customize the learning environment of your students while also delivering a white-label experience; this means you can easily use your own branding when delivering the courses to your students. It creates credibility for yourself and helps you set up a highly brandable online business.

With this suite of software solutions, you get a single platform and dashboard that gives you access to the following features:

• LMS that lets you create courses and upload different types of content into every course.
• Courses can be broken down into multiple modules to make the learning experience easier and more convenient for the student.
• You can set up daily challenges for your students, which motivates them to continue with the course and reach its completion.
• Homework and tests can be assigned to the student, allowing them to be more interactive during the course.
• You can also set up quizzes that instantly tests the students' learning and comprehension after they finish a module.
• A landing page builder is added, making it easier to create funnel pages that convert better. This means no more need for an external website builder to get people to sign up for your course.
• A whitelabel app can be ordered, which is published on Google Play and the Apple App Store. This makes it easier for people who frequently travel to gain access to your courses on-the-go. It also ensures everyone can take advantage of your courses, even those who do not have a computer or laptop at home.
• The ability to easily set up automated emails and broadcast messages to your students help you provide all clients with news, opportunities, and other notifications.

Choose a platform that will work for you. Make sure it comes with all the features you need, while also helping with the automation of communication and content delivery. Ensure appropriate security measures are also in place to give your students peace of mind that their personal data is secure.

Step 4: Creating and Publishing Your Course Content

You should now have a system ready to host the course you wish to sell online. With this done, it’s now time to go back to the structure you set up in step two. Use this structure and start expanding on each section.

Add the content that needs to accompany the course that you are going to sell on the chosen platform. Adding a variety of content types tend to provide a better and more engaging experience among students.

With this in mind, consider using text, images, audio, and video content. A balanced combination of these content types will provide the best experience.

Video content may include your own face and voice, or you can set up slideshows in an application like PowerPoint and use these as a video.

After creating the content for your course, go through everything at least once. Make sure the structure is appropriate and well organized. Your topics and modules should all follow up on each other. This ensures no confusion among the students, which could lead to low engagement and completion rates among people who sign up for your course.

Once you are happy, start uploading the content piece by piece into a platform, such as GuruCan, that you chose to host your course. Make sure you create the appropriate modules and that everything is formatted correctly once uploaded.

The final step is to publish the course. And that’s it, you’ve passed the initial phase of selling your content online. Make sure you have a payment gateway up on the website or platform you are using, which ensures you are able to accept payments from your students. If you have not configured a payment gateway, then you won’t be able to process payments.

Take a quick look around the platform you are using to see if there are any additional customizations that you can use to personalize the experience of your students. The more convenient the platform is, the better the completion rate, and the more engaged students will be.