Are you an entrepreneur wondering how to scale your business?
You’re in the right place. Perhaps you’ve maxed out your available time to work with clients, or want to attract new customers to buy your product. Whatever your business model, if you’ve hit a plateau, you need a strategy to scale your business.
Today, we want to show you how online courses can help you do this by reaching more customers, saving you time, and expanding your sphere of influence – no matter what type of entrepreneur you are.
Watch our free video below with course creation expert Paddy McGill, to learn how you can scale your business with online courses and see examples of other entrepreneurs have done it.
Grow Your Client Business Using Online Courses
Running a client business can be incredibly fulfilling. Whether you’re a freelancer, consultant, influencer or service provider, there is often no greater feeling than working with your clients and helping them achieve a result that they could not on their own.
But there’s one big problem with running a client business.
When you work with clients on a one-on-one basis, you’re trading your time for money. With only 24 hours in a day, there is a limit to the number of clients you can serve.
The good news is that by using online courses, you can multiply your time to help more clients, without having to clone yourself.
Lewis Howes is a great example of someone who has exponentially grown his business through online courses. After finding initial success with his first course, he launched others to similar success. Today, he’s built a multi-million dollar business selling online courses, books, and other digital assets.
Many types of entrepreneurs are transitioning into online courses in a similar fashion. Let’s look at how different types of client-based businesses do this.
YouTubers
YouTubers have historically depended on ad revenue. With all the content they already create, packaging it into an online course is easy, and enables them to generate a much higher rate of return than what they get with ads.
Sunny Lenarduzzi is a great example of this.
Sunny is an expert in YouTube marketing and works as a consultant to help others grow their YouTube channel. She teaches others to do the same in her YouTube for bosses online course.
Bloggers
Typically, bloggers would work to publish posts that are free to read on their sites and would try to monetize their content using banner ads and affiliate links. These days, many bloggers have discovered they can generate more revenue with the same effort by converting their content into online courses.
Danny Iny has put this into practice. He started the popular Firepole Marketing blog to share his knowledge about online marketing. After rebranding it to Mirasee, he started creating online courses to sell the content to his audience.
Speakers
For those who have hit a ceiling with the number of speaking gigs they can take on, online courses help scale past that barrier. Many experts who do this choose to speak for free, as they make their revenue selling related online courses.
Michael Port has been giving keynotes on public speaking and professional development for over 15 years. He’s an example of someone with a successful speaking career who decided to transition out of delivering keynotes, to focus on making a bigger impact through online courses.
Podcasters
Podcasters are also eschewing the traditional sponsorship model, in favor of selling their own courses. This enables them to monetize their audience without interrupting their shows with ads from other companies.
John Lee Dumas is a podcaster who’s used online courses to grow his following and business. He built the popular podcast Entrepreneurs on Fire, which grew to yield six figures through sponsorships. He went on to create an online course on podcasting that now brings in even more revenue.
Coaches & Consultants
Professionals who have reached capacity in their calendars and can’t trade any more time for money are scaling up by creating more online courses, by creating a digital part of their business.
Mari Smith is a leading expert on Facebook marketing and consulting for countless companies. To scale up, she decided to share her knowledge by creating online courses.
Authors
Authors can augment diminishing book revenues by creating online courses as a natural extension of the concepts covered in their books. One example of this is Dorie Clark, a best-selling author and branding expert. After the success of her books, she took her business to the next level by launching an online course titled, Recognized Expert.
If you have a skill, audience, or passion that people want, selling it as an online course is a great way to extend your business and generate additional revenue.
Online courses can also be used as a customer acquisition strategy, bringing in more customers for another part of your business. Let’s dive into this in the next section.
Online Courses for Customer Acquisition
Some businesses flip the online course model on its head by using online courses to build an audience, with the intention of having them purchase other products.
A great example of this is Hootsuite, a world-leading provider of social media management software. They offer free social media marketing online courses in their Hootsuite Academy. More than 250,000 people have taken these courses, and many of them have become paying customers of Hootsuite’s software.
If you already have a product, creating an online course can help you attract customers for that product. In this case, you want to give your course away for free or sell it at a nominal price, since the revenue you’re after will come from your existing products.
Online Courses for Customer Success
You can also use online courses to train customers on how to use your products, making sure they don’t leave for a competitor. This is a good strategy to use if your product requires a learning curve to use.
If you can help your customers achieve success with your products, they will have a higher lifetime value, a lower churn rate, and will be more likely to refer more customers to your business.
A good example of this is Later, a company providing software to manage and schedule social media posts. While their software is easy to use, many people don’t know how to be successful on social media. Later found that people would sign up, use the software without much success on social media, and then leave the platform.
Myths About Creating Online Courses
At this point you might be thinking: if online courses are so great, why doesn’t everybody have one? After all, as you’ve seen from the examples above, online courses are beneficial to many types of entrepreneurs, at various stages of their business.
After polling our community, It turns out that there are some commonly held myths and misconceptions about creating online courses that stop people from taking action.
Let’s break them down.
Myth #1: I’m not the expert, so I can’t create an online course
The reality is, if you can help someone get the result they are looking for, to that person you are an expert. While there may be things you still feel you could learn, if you can take your audience through their desired learning journey, this is enough.
Myth #2: People can learn what I teach for free
Even though this may be true, what people value most and are willing to pay for is convenience. With an online course, students get proven advice, accountability, and community. In fact, getting access to a community is a big selling point in someone’s decision to invest in an online course.
Myth #3: I don’t know what to teach
Take stock of the intersection between your skills, passions, and market demand. What are you uniquely qualified to teach? Are there questions you are repeatedly asked by your clients? If so, this is usually is a strong indication that you could create an online course to answer those questions.
Myth #4: If I teach them, they won’t hire me
Not everyone wants to or can afford to hire your services. Create your online course for the market of do-it-yourselfers – it’s likely that they are not looking to pay for your services anyway.
Myth #5: I don’t have enough time
Creating an online course enables you to help more people, in less time. By investing time up front, you will be freeing up your time later on.
Myth #6: I want my course to be perfect
Ah, perfectionism. The reality is, there is no such thing as perfect. That’s because your customers are the ultimate judge. Even if you think your course is perfect, your students will point out opportunities for improvement. Done is better than perfect.
Myth #7: There is too much competition
Competition is a sign of market demand. This is not a bad thing. What you need to focus on is out how to stand out. Look at how you can align your topic to a specific target market, and infuse your message with your unique voice.
Don’t let these myths get in the way you of you taking action!
If you’re looking for more tips on how to get started creating your own online course, download this free guide to creating and selling online courses.
