To date I have made almost exactly $1,000,000 in income through selling an online course.

Here is a screenshot of a few of my payment processors that we use to sell our course.

What is crazy is that this business is very much a side hustle - don’t get me wrong - we spent an incredible amount of time and energy creating our course, and it is based off of 8 years of experience running our own business - but in any case, it’s still pretty wild.

At a high level, the business that I run that makes me most of my money is a social media marketing agency. That business does about $1 million a year, and I was actually admitted to the "2 comma club" for making over $1,000,000 with my agency last year (if starting an agency sounds interesting to you, here is where you can learn from me directly).

Over the years as we built our reputation and shared our learning online over on one of my youtube channels, we started getting an endless number of questions stirred up by other courses that didn’t answer them. We decided that rather than spending 8 hours a day answering youtube comments, we would package this up into a course that offered more value than we possibly could in youtube comments.

Here is what we are going to cover in this post:

1. What a winning online course needs to be successful

2. An overview of the process and technology that we use to sell our course

3. An in depth run down of our entire process from how we generate traffic and leads, move them through the funnel, and eventually turn them into sales

The Basics of Making Money Selling Online Courses

Most people that sell info products, courses, assets, challenges, coaching - whatever get a bad wrap online - but the days of people selling crappy online courses with no value are dead. A winning course needs a few things in order to do well

1. What a winning online course needs
   1. Value exchange - The single biggest thing that is going to make your course successful is the perceived value exchange. Our course costs $749, and when someone buys it, I want them to be completely blown away as soon as they purchase. If they are skeptical, if they have doubts, or if they are just overall excited about buying it, I want them to be stoked when they do and feel like they made a good investment right away.
   2. Expertise - There are a lot of topics that I could potentially sell a course on, but I only want to focus on something that I have incredible and deep expertise in.
   3. Quality and actionable content - The content that you create needs to be organized and actionable. When we created the 2.0 version of our course, this was actually the thing that we spent the most time on. We spent months working on the new curriculum, re outlining every lecture in the course, and making it as actionable as possible. We also spoke with over 200 students to understand things that were confusing to them or where they were having challenges. This is important, because what ended up happening was our refund request % went down to 0.

These 3 things are essential, and none of what we are going to talk about in the rest of this post matters unless you are aligned on them. Now let’s talk about the items that you need in order to create a course that crushes it.

There are four building blocks that you need in order to make money with a course.

1) Traffic - You need to have a way of getting in front of people so that they know about your product. There are two different types of traffic - cold traffic and warm traffic. What we have found to work best is to use organic channels like social media, blogs, and youtube to generate cold traffic and turn it into warm traffic. We have tried everything that you can imagine - paid ads, webinars, facebook groups, etc. - nothing works better than building an organic audience and offering them something.

2) Trust: If you want people on the internet to give you thousands of dollars, you have to have trust. This is why paid ads don’t typically work for cold traffic course sales - there is no trust. They don’t know who you are, that you know what you are talking about, or anything about you.

It is essential that the content that you are creating does something to build trust. This can be in your knowledge, in the lifestyle that you are living, or any other way that you want to build trust.

For us, we provide valuable videos that no one else in our niche can create. We are the difacto experts, and our audience sees that in every video that we post.

3) Offer Put simply, you need something that they can purchase. There are all sorts of digital offers that you can create, but I am a big fan of online courses. When done correctly, they can be sold for high prices and don’t require a lot of student engagement.

The platform that I recommend is a platform called Kajabi. This is one of my favorite tools to use, and I will link to it in the description down below. If you use that link you will not only get a free trial, but you will get a special discount that only I have access to for folks coming from my YouTube here.

If you guys want a follow up video where I unpack the whole process of how we outlined, scripted, and created our course, let me know in the comments below. If I get enough comments, I will do it.

4) Infrastructure: Managing a community of people online and moving them from social channels, staying in front of them, and moving them towards a purchase requires a lot of effort. Just a few years ago you needed a different platform for all of this. we had our email list on one site, our course hosted on another, funnels created on another site, our website on another site, and so on.

When we released the 2.0 version of our program we were able to move all of these pieces into the Kajabi platform. This means that all of our contacts, courses, funnels, freebies, and so on which we will talk about in just a moment are all hosted on the same site.

I am going to be honest with you, this takes a lot of time to create and is constantly growing. Myself and our team are always creating more freebies, more funnels, more content for our community and students. There is no getting around this, you are going to have to create a system around it, which I am going to jump into now.

The Online Course Sales System

There are 5 steps in a strong online course system: Traffic, value, freebie/capture, Nurture, and purchase.

Step one: Traffic

Now I already spoke about the first step a moment ago - Traffic. This is the lifeblood of your course. The more traffic that you have, the more sales you will make, period. You need to choose a traffic source whether it is paid, organic, video, written, whatever - and start generating traffic to your offer. We focus primarily on YouTube as we have been making videos on here for the last 8 years on my other channel 2GuysBuildABiz

Step Two: Value

The goal of providing value is to do one thing and one thing only: turn cold traffic into warm traffic.

People find your content, have no idea who you are, and as they watch read or engage with you, they go from a cold lead to someone that has gotten value or learned something from you - aka warm traffic.

There are two types of value that you are able to provide to your audience that is going to drive them towards a purchase: education and aspirational.

Educational is just that - you are educating them on a topic. You can teach them why your business model or offer is great. You can teach them how to do something. You can answer a question that they or others have. You name it. The idea here is to answer questions, provide value, and build trust through your knowledge. After they get answers from you, the next step is going to be for them to potentially buy whatever it is that you are selling.

The other type of value is aspirational. Put simply, you inspire people with a lifestyle that people want to live. You see a lot of travel YouTuber's with this type of value ladder. they are out living their life traveling, and maybe they sell a youtube course that teaches others how to make videos with a camera and to do the same. this doesn’t work for all niches obviously, but for some it can be a great way to drive traffic.

Step Three: Freebie / Opt-in

Now that we have people who have become familiar with our content, the goal is to convert them into what is called an “owned audience”

The thing about organic channels is that they can come and go. Someone might hit a youtube video, watch it once, and disappear forever.

Additionally, algorhythms change. Followers don’t see your stuff. all these and more are reasons why you want to convert people to email subscribers or what is called an owned audience.

What has worked for us has been to create valuable pieces of content that people can get for free in exchange for opting in for our email list.

Step Four: Nurture

Now that people are signed up for our email list, the goal is to stay in front of them and warm up that traffic. Maybe they have only seen one single video from us, but wanted whatever it is that we offered them for free.

Now, we want to stay in front of them, let them know more about us - who we are, what we do, building trust and moving them towards a sale.

This is something that I am always optimizing, but put simply once someone signs up for something free from our website, they get a long sequence of emails providing more value and building more trust with them.

Never email more than once per day in your sequence, and make sure that you are continuing to provide value or people are going to mark you as spam.

Again, all of this can be handled completely within the Kajabi platform.

Step Five: Purchase

Over time, when your nurture is done correctly, you are going to see sales start to come through, and believe me, nothing is cooler than this! 

Having someone that you have never spoken with directly on the internet come through your inbox and join your program is incredibly rewarding - but if it doesn't happen right away, don't be discouraged.

It took us years until we started seeing multiple courses come through in one day, so this doesn't happen all at once.

Starting a course on the internet is not easy, but when you start seeing success - it is incredibly rewarding!

If you haven't already, hit me with a follow over on YouTube, I am sharing video's every single week to help you making money with nothing other than your laptop!