Many people today are interested in creating their own online course, and then perhaps selling it. Without question, there is a golden opportunity for those who are interested in doing this. Never before has elearning been so widely accepted and accessible.

While the idea is straight-forward, getting everything in motion may seem a little confusing. Ultimately what happen is that someone will create a course, and then go to a site like Udemy in hopes of making a few sales.

If your hope is to make a sale here or there, and to split your revenues, then this is certainly a viable way forward.

However, if you want to build a brand and generate thousands of dollars (without having to share your revenue), then there are other options!

Getting started with selling elearning can easily become confusing, but if we boil it down, you only need three essential pieces to get the infrastructure in place:

1. Course worth buying
2. Course delivery
3. Course visibility

Before you start to do anything else related to your course, you must create a course worth buying. It does no good to have the other two items in place if no one is interested in your course.

First, do some research on sites like Udemy and SkillShare to see what courses are selling in your field of expertise. Talk to people in your network to see what the general interest would be, and finally start to create a wire-frame for the course.

It should be noted that this part of the process will take you the longest, but it is imperative you do it correctly.

When the course is complete, you can move onto course delivery. By this I mean the “home”, and shopping cart system for your course. For this phase, you will need a website, and therefore hosting. This will only run you about $10/month to begin.

There are many shopping cart options out there for accepting payments, as well as ways to create your course. To streamline the process, it’s probably in your best interest to use something like the LearnDash plugin (we take care of both these items).

With your course officially on the site and ready to accept payments, you can finally get to increasing the course visibility.

There are no shortcuts with marketing – be it online or offline (hint: do both!) … Set up social profiles for your courses, write articles for industry publications and for your own site, get your company name out there!

There are proven ways to generate online traffic, and one of the most effective ones is to write – or find someone that can do it for you. Find potential professional partners on LinkedIn to start getting sales for your courses quickly. Over time you can refine this process, you are just looking for momentum (you’ll be surprised at what a little momentum can accomplish).

This entire process may seem too simple. People refuse to believe simplicity, but it has been proven time and time again. Put in a little effort and you’re bound to see results!