While the business model for selling elearning is simple (create a course, add a price), the successful execution of it is dependent on a variety of factors.

First, you need to fully understand your market, differentiate your offering, establish marketing channels, create a memorable brand, understand your customer needs, and keep up with evolving industry trends.

To be honest, it’s this latter part that ultimately burns people out. What at first appears to be “easy money” turns out to be much more complicated.

Just because the business model is simple, doesn’t mean it is easy.

If you did a quick analysis of the courses for sale in your industry, you will find that the most successful businesses are selling a solution, and not a course.

This isn’t a revolutionary concept by any means, but you’d be surprised at the number of courses for sale that focus on promoting the course content while they should instead emphasize the benefit (solution) that the course provides.

Making this simple mind-shift for your own course content will get you thinking about the course from the potential customer’s perspective. This approach has inherent benefits.

Your course will be better developed because you’ll be laser-focused on the key objectives for the content. Each lesson can be created to satisfy a specific objective, and each objective is geared toward an end goal (or, the ultimate solution you are providing).

Think about this from your own point of view. If you’re purchasing software, do you purchase it because of how it’s made and all of its features?

Sure, these are important, but I would venture to guess that the decision to put up the money for the software is because you feel that how it’s made and its features provide you a solution to your situation.

Craft your marketing message to be solution oriented and it will resonate with more potential customers.