Diversifying Your Income Through Online Courses

This is part one of our series on Building Online Courses for Your Business from Luisa Zhou’s webinar hosted by the Tory Burch Foundation

As entrepreneurs, we’re always looking for new ways to keep our business afloat, especially with so much uncertainty in today’s economy. I recently had the opportunity to watch a webinar hosted by the Tory Burch Foundation with speaker Luisa Zhou, who discussed ways to develop an online course business model to attract new customers and generate new revenue streams. Zhou is founder of LuisaZhou.com, which teaches people how to build their own profitable, impactful, and fulfilling six- to seven-figure online business working for themselves. She’s helped thousands of students from every industry imaginable to launch businesses that generate anywhere from 30K to 100K in a matter of months.

The webinar was incredibly interesting and informative so thought I would share some key takeaways for our readers here.

Why Online Courses?
Developing an online course model for your business is an innovative way to bring in additional revenue for your company and attract new customers no matter the industry you’re working in. Say you own a business consulting company for example. You can take some of the introductory information you think would be helpful for potential customers and sell the course, allowing them to experience a “test run” and see if they are a good fit to move forward with you on future projects. Your course doesn’t need to be intensive; in fact Zhou recommends starting small with 3-4 modules that last no more than 5-10 minutes each. Most people don’t have an hour a day to spend on professional development and if you’re able to distill the information you’re sharing into short clips, your customers will appreciate you that much more.

Another way to introduce the online course model to your customers is by building free modules that give them a sample of what they will receive when they sign up for your service. If they decide not to make a purchase, you still have a new lead in your pocket. For product-based businesses, you could create something simple such as a how-to video for customers interested in your product but uncertain as to how it may be used. The opportunites in this space are really endless. Online courses are a great way to differentiate yourself from the pack in addition to being valuable marketing resources that can be repurposed through multiple channels. Being able to offer courses also opens your business up to partnerships with an opportunity to scale in terms of audience and sales.

WHAT YOU NEED

Zhou also covered the main things you will need as you start to develop online courses for your business. You of course need the product itself – whether they are modules, lessons, recordings, or worksheets. You’ll need a platform to host your courses on. She recommends Teachable, which is a common online course platform, or building something within your own website. You could create a Facebook group for customers to access your courses. You’ll then need landing pages for the courses, order forms, and a payment processor, like PayPal or Square.

Finally, Zhou says when it comes to courses, engagement and follow through are key. “Customers lose motivation because they aren’t seeing results quickly enough,” she says. “You need to ensure they are getting value from the course and it’s answering all of their concerns, fears, and doubts, otherwise you lose people.” The best way to keep people engaged in your course is to “reverse engineer” them to ensure milestones are met at the end of each module. As an example, say you’ve created a course with three modeules. You will want to give your customers a milestone for the first one - perhaps you challenge your client to identify their business gaps during the first module and after implementing improvements, they will see a 20% increase in revenue. After the second module, you may want to look at traffic or existing customers to scale, and the end of the third module look at existing products and ways to boost profitability.

At the end of the day, Zhou says, online courses are all about the results, not the actual information being presented. If someone is paying for your “trade secrets", they want to see that investment spill over into their own business. What’s been your experience with online courses? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Next week, we’ll take a look at a few other things you’ll need to launch a course, how to market it, and a few things you should avoid doing along the way.