Are You Selling Courses, or Community?

By: Justin Ferriman • May 23, 2016
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team-workEverywhere you look online today there are people selling courses.

Bloggers offer courses on their subject of expertise.

Training organizations are selling courses for continuing education credits.

Universities are selling online courses for degree requirements.

The list goes on and on.

Course marketplaces like Udemy attract thousands of course creators in hopes that they too can cash in on selling their knowledge.

Make no mistake, there are people out there making a killing from selling courses. The reason is simple: information will always be in-demand.

People love to learn and are willing to pay someone for information if it provides them some sort of benefit.

But courses are only part of the equation. In some circumstances it makes sense to build a community around your courses.

The Difference Between Courses and Community

Courses are finite in nature. There is nothing wrong with this as it is often a perfectly acceptable method for selling information.

However, communities are valuable to both you and the learner. They help to bring life to your course material.

By way of example, WPElevation (a LearnDash customer) has created a highly-interactive community around their courses.

To emphasize the community value they have their customers providing video-testimonials where they discuss the advantages of forums, networking, and interacting with others.

Yes, the content of the course is the foundation for everything, but the community brings it to life.

If you have an online course then you may do well to start a community around the content as well.

The Social Learner theme makes it easy to bring communities to your LearnDash courses (this is the same theme used by WPElevation).

Deliver value to your community and you will find that in return they will sell your program for you through word of mouth and you will have a tribe of loyal fans.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter