A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses

hey friends welcome back to the channel so in this video I want to show you absolutely everything about how I've made over $10 million selling online courses over the past 10 years and really my goal for this video is for you to leave thinking wow I literally know everything I need to know to go and try and do this for myself or at least work towards this kind of thing over time and I'm going to recommend a bunch of extra resources as well alongside everything I say in this video and so hopefully this will feel

like your ultimate guide to how to make money with online courses on a high enough level that you can get a whole overview of the map and the terrain and you can dive in to actually execute on this for your yourself if you're new to the channel then hi my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and the author of The New York Times bestseller field of productivity and I specialize in making online courses so we're going to split this video up into a few different parts firstly I'm going to share a brief overview

of my 10-year history or rather 12E history selling courses online and all of the numbers on my own Journey secondly I'm going to give you some examples of other creators other online course creators who are making lots and lots of money selling online courses so you have a sense of who else is out there in the market thirdly we're going to walk through the specifics of selling courses as a business model and I'm going to show you kind of screen recordings of what our process looks like in all the different platforms we're going to talk

about creation of the course we're going to talk about sales and landing pages and checkout Pages we're going to talk about traffic we're going to talk about leads and funnels and then at the end of the video there's going to be a bit of a rapid fire Q&A for commonly asked questions around building an online courses business now this is going to be an insanely long video and there will be timestamps to literally everything descriptive timestamps as well in the video description so do feel free to skip around the video if you feel like it

so I hope you enjoy this video and let's get to it so I'm currently 29 years old and I sold my first course in 2012 I had just gotten into medical school at Cambridge University I was how old was I I was 18 years old and I'd just been scammed out of $1,000 £1,000 that I'd saved up like this was my life savings I'd saved it up through like private tutoring and stuff which I was doing for years and I wanted to buy my first Apple product cuz for the first time I could afford an

Apple product and I tried buying it off of this dude off Craigslist I got scammed the product didn't work it was an old product anyway and I and so I lost this ,000 that I'd worked so hard to save then then then I decided you know what I need to find a way to make money this is in fact the document on Evernote that I made in 2012 12 years ago when I first tried to brainstorm how to make money money-making schemes couple of questions first what am I good at academics teaching web design graphic

design High a levels High GCS high bmat score interview prep perhaps with other people build computers and stuff can I use any of that stuff to make money tutoring courses teaching people onet to one build computers for much cheaper than equivalent specs online stuff website on how to get into medicine website on bat prep charge for this question mark website on interview prep question mark and so this middle thing website on bmat Preparation charged for this this was my foray into the world of successful online business cuz I realized I had expertise in this thing

getting people into helping people do well in this exam called the bmat and so I decided I was going to run some classroom courses teach teaching the thing as one does so in 2012 I had about seven students who were all friends of mine in the year below at my school and I invited them over to my living room uh I created a PowerPoint present present ation beamed it to the TV using my HDMI cable and ran this course for seven people sitting around my like living room dining table that was where we started that

was 2012 I made basically zero money then I I think I probably made like I don't know £300 or something so you know recouped 300 of the ,000 that I'd lost then it was 2013 this was when I started medical school and I decided you know what let's go big with this so I made a proper website I I knew how to make websites and I started marketing it nationally I think we made around like £6,000 that year because I Tau like1 50 students across like five different courses and then this business six Med ended

up growing further and further and then in 2014 to 2019 is I was making around £150,000 a year from continuing to run these classroom courses where we would rock up to a classroom with like printed booklets me and a friend of mine or me and like mates from medical school and we would teach classrooms of 30 students one of the times we taught a electure theater of 150 students cuz there were you know it was the final date and loads of people wanted to join so we put electri theater and that was six we made

like 10 grand in day and it was like mind-blowing the fact that you could Rock up on a weekend and teach people something and they would pay me money for it and this was like where I got the bug of this this this realization that there is there is a way to make money by teaching stuff was kind of interesting cuz previously I thought being a teacher is like oh it's kind of being in school or something like that but I realized you can make money by teaching stuff and in 2018 I graduated and started

working as a doctor but in between graduation and working as a doctor I had like a month of summer holidays and in that summer holiday I filmed the bmat course as an online course so I created the bmat crash course online and I hosted that on a platform called podia which we're going to talk about more in a little bit and by that point I'd already been making YouTube videos for a year so I knew how to film videos I knew how to edit videos and so I basically spent that summer filming the course which

took a few days and editing the course which took absolutely freaking ages but I was doing all that stuff myself cuz I hadn't yet outsourced editing I didn't have a team and that was my first foray into the world of selling an online course that course made a few tens of thousands of pounds that year so the following year me and a friend of mine a we partnered to make the ukat what was called the UK cat back in the day another medical school entrance exam and the following year I filmed another course called the

interview crash course which was helping people prepare for Medical School interviews then in 2019 this was 2 years into my YouTube channel I decided to make my first online course on skillshare so on skillshare I made a course about how to edit videos in Final Cut and that year we made $847 on skillshare in 2020 I made a bunch more courses on skillshare made $515,000 from those it is worth zooming into this uh 2019 to 20 jump so 2019 $88,500 on skill share 2020 $515,000 freaking on skill share this is not normal this is atypical

all of the timing every everything was in our favor I think pandemic had just yeah pandemic times were there skillshare had a weird weirdly lucrative way of paying teachers and I realized wait a minute if I just make loads and loads of courses and Chuck him on skillshare and then tell my YouTube audience that they can access them for free I would just make money and it seemed like an obvious math problem at the time where I was like huh if if one course makes 10K a month 10 courses will make 100K a month and

so that was just completely freaking mind-blowing uh it no longer Unfortunately works like this and you know it helped that I had an audience on YouTube and and stuff but I don't want me to be watching this section of the video and think that it's normal to jump from 10K a year to 500k a year that is a very very atypical jump but we're going to talk more about the specific details of how to get into all this stuff further along in the video and in 2021 this was you know Peak pandemic times skillshare was

paying out loads of money that was our Peak skillshare earning period where we made $859,000 is that year from selling courses on skillshare and if you're not familiar with skillshare it's basically like Netflix for online courses you sign up to a subscription and then you can watch any of the courses for free but the way we make money as it the way I make money as a teacher is that it's essentially based on how many minutes someone watches the course so uh we can see that we've had 37 million 37 million minutes total watch time

for my courses you can see this month total paid minutes watch was 236,000 and this month this month the estimated earnings are are 9,000 are about $10,000 this month then in 2022 we did $778,000 from skillshare 2023 was $351,000 from skillshare so we had a peak in skillshare in 2021 and now it's sort of like going up sort of essentially decaying to zero but it's still pretty reasonable like we did $350,000 last week last year not last week I meant last year from just continuing to have some courses available on skillshare then there is another

layer to all this which is that in 2020 I decided to make my first sort of official online course the parttime YouTuber Academy and that has been running for the last 4 years now in 2020 that course made around about $294,000 in 2021 we did about $2 million again insane jump it was the pandemic effect life cohort courses were all the craze at the time and I'm going to go into much more of these details further down the line in the video in 2022 we did 1.7 million from that course and in 2023 we did

3.6 million from that course and because I'm a fan of providing receipts just in case anyone's comment being like this is BS like there's no way you can make that much money on the internet this is our our skill share in total as you can see we have earned 2,579 13819 off of skillshare on podia which is the platform that we were hosting our YouTuber Academy initially you can see over here the revenue is 2,676 43799 then we switched to a platform called kajabi which is the one that I would recommend mostly if you're trying

to build an online courses business and on kajabi as you can see all time from December 2022 through to April 24th 202 before we made $3.6 million on kajabi which is absolutely insane towards the end of last year we switched to Shopify for some of our online course payments and you can see on Shopify we made $838,000 uh made on this which rough roughly adds up to like $10.1 million I think something like that in case anyone was a little bit skeptical of the whole thing there are also loads and loads of other people on

the internet who are making insane amounts of money selling online courses so here are just a few of them just to give you a flavor of what sort of stuff is out there let's take Justin Welsh for example Justin Welsh is famously in the niche of online business and solo preneurship and two weeks ago he tweeted today my little oneperson business crossed 7.5 million in total revenue it took 1,712 Days 1id by 365 ah 4.6 years four and a half years to make 7.5 million I ran zero ads and operated a 91% margin that's insane

for context our margin in our business is like 60% and that is also considered very good but Justin's operating at 91% because he doesn't have all the overheads of stuff that I do Justin mostly writes stuff on Twitter and Linkedin and he has three courses he has his content OS which is $200 he has his LinkedIn OS which is $200 and he has his creator MBA which is $897 and I would estimate his Revenue was probably like 3 million last year or 3 to 4 million something like that next we have someone called Amy Porterfield

who apparently has sold over $100 million in total sales for her online courses absolutely freaking mind-blowing wow well done Amy uh she posts mostly on Instagram and Facebook she also has a really good podcast called the online marketing Made Easy podcast with Amy Amy Porterfield and she seems to have three main courses her digital course Academy for $2,000 her list Builder society which is about email building which is $500 and systems that scale which is $300 and almost certainly she does at least 10 million a year but $100 million in total sales absolutely Next Level

GG Amy next for example we have someone called Jenna Kutcher whose website is sick I love a website it's like super Vibe she doesn't reveal the exact numbers of Revenue but I would estimate it's probably in the several million a year maybe even 10 million plus cuz she seems to be pretty big and she sells courses on how to do Instagram Pinterest the list to launch lab the podcast lab and the content lab and these are sort of all in the sort of $200 to $1,000 range and what's interesting about Jenna is that she's absolutely

enormous on Pinterest I never would have thought that you could make money posting stuff on Pinterest but Jenna seems to be doing exactly that which is pretty cool next as a bit of a random example we have a friend of ours called George Blackman who actually used to work for me and then he struck off on his own to start his own business doing script writing for other YouTubers and making a course about it and earlier in January he launched his first online course of course and he wrote my first product launch just made $63,750

in 48 hours for context that is the salary of a whole year working as a doctor in the UK if not more and he's made that in 2 days and he only had 7,000 Twitter followers and 2600 newsletter sub subcribers there's also a tweet of his from March where he's made $8,250 from core sales in the last 30 days $8,000 a month in core sales it's pretty good business there is Kieran Drew who has a course on called high impact writing which is about how to write and he is very open with his Revenue numbers

his March net income was $132,000 that's pretty freaking sick you can see that his Revenue based on this graph is quite spiky because he has a bit of a launch based model for core sales we'll talk more about that later in the video and Kieran apparently fairly confidently consistently makes at least $500,000 a year from selling his online course about writing and then we have another friend of mine who is called Thiago Forte he was a big inspiration I took his course in like 2019 and he was kind of my productivity Guru back in the

day so he tweeted at the end of last year uh 40 Labs has been in business for 10 years as of 2023 we've made 8.9 million in Revenue spent 5.4 million and profited 3.3 million in the last decade that's on average that's 334,000 years I only made $49,000 on average barely enough for me to afford the rent in the San Francisco Bay Area I guess this just shows the importance of sticking with it for the long term and you can see his Revenue expenses and profit graphs over here and again you can kind of see

we can highlight the 2021 pandemic effect where everyone selling courses blew up and then kind of over hired and then the expenses went through the roof and then the next year they were like oh and they kind of CLW it back down a bit and then they're sort of becoming more profitable over time and thiago's course is called building a second brain it's basically a productivity course he has a book called building a second brain as well and it's a course on how to organiz your notes and thoughts and stuff okay so I just wanted

to share those examples to give you a sense of whoo this is this is what's possible when it comes to selling online courses one important caveat is that it's easy to think that the only way to make money selling online courses is by teaching other people how to make money selling online courses and you get into this sort of like uh VI this sort of like Loop where it's like oh I a guru teaches you how to make money but the way they teach you how to make money is by teaching other people how to

make money and you get them into this weird weird sort of thing it's worth keeping in mind that that is less than 1% of the total number of people that actually sell online courses there are people who sell online courses on all sorts of things yoga with Adrien for example makes at least 10 million a year selling yoga courses and posting yoga content on YouTube um Justin Guitar who is the guy whose course I followed to learn the guitar probably makes several million a year teaching people how to play the guitar Mary spender probably makes

at least a million a year teaching people how to play the guit guar and how to record music in like Ableton or whatever Pro Tools whatever software people use to record music there's loads of people doing online courses on how to code like essentially any skill you can imagine that someone might want to learn there are people making stupid amounts of money selling online courses teaching that thing and the reason why you might only hear from the people who selling online courses about business is because it is in their interests to talk about how they're

doing it and to share their revenue numbers for example Justin Welsh his whole business model is aimed on teaching people how to be solo preneurs so it's very much in his interests to share how many millions he's making being a solopreneur and so it really becomes too easy to have this impression that the only people who are making money through online courses are people who are teaching other people how to make money through online courses that as I said that's like 1% of the market and there's like huge huge huge range of people who are

doing this sort of thing as a career but who are not teaching others how to make money okay so next I want to kind of talk through the philosophy and like the general business model of how people are making this money through online courses and to understand that it's really helpful to think of an online C course Creator as simply a teacher I'm going to get the iPad out but I need to need to I'm going to draw some stuff can we snake the cable there nice thank you is it going to reach oh no

the C cable's not long enough no no there's USB in the front in the front here as well okay M making millions through online courses can't even afford a long USB cable and I'm going to prop up the iPad on my book so that I can do a bit of product placement for my book in the background by the way if you haven't checked it out feel good productivity it's about how to be more productive in a way that actually feels good okay so let's imagine you are a a teacher and I want you to

think what does a teacher do well a teacher basically is someone who teaches things to people who want to learn the thing now broadly there's like kind of the school stuff that most of our experience of teachers is in but then there's everything else so school stuff would be things like English and maths and history and geography and Science and all that kind of stuff like when we think teacher we generally imagine like a science teacher or a history teacher something like that but there are also teachers for other things so you know for example

we've talked about how you can teach the guitar you could teach gardening you could potentially teach accounting you could teach coding you could teach painting you could teach even soft skills like public speaking sort of you know there you can imagine someone being a teacher of public speaking you can imagine someone being a teacher of goal setting like how to set goals and achieve your dreams and stuff like motivational type people you can imagine someone who is a teacher of parenting essentially there are all sorts of people out there who want to learn stuff and

some of that stuff is knowledge and some of that stuff is skills history is broadly knowledge you want to learn about the history about the history of the world all that kind of stuff then there's skills like gardening guitar coding parenting accounting painting so it's worth like keeping in mind what this expanded definition of a teacher is I.E someone who just teaches other people who want to learn the thing that they know how to do now let's imagine back in the day how would a teacher have made money because like you can teach people for

free you can like go to your mate in the local coffee shop and be like I want to teach you about I don't know the Industrial Revolution or I want to teach you how to play the guit but you're not making money from that so how did teachers make money well essentially the way teachers made money is by finding people to pay for their expertise so how can you do that well you could work for a school or a university or some other sort of like educational institution and in that sense you know the school

or university is your employer they are paying you a salary and then they are charging the students of that University insanely High fees to learn from you or they're charging the government because that's how public schools for example make money or or they're a private school and they're charging the rich parents of the kids going to the school basically you're being hired by the employer I.E the school or university institution and they are paying you the salary in return for your expertise in return for your teaching how else might you have made money as a

teacher back in the day well as a teacher you could always do one-on-one tutoring right like you can go to your local super supermarket you can advertise that hey I do tutoring in maths I do tutoring for the 11 plus entrance exam I do tutoring for guitar I do tutoring for public speaking and you hope that someone calls you up or sends you a letter or knocks on your door and signs up to your services one-onone how else can you make money as a teacher well you could run weekend workshops right workshops this is how

I used to make money selling these like medical school admissions courses I would rock up to a conference room I would teach a workshop and people would pay me50 to1 per person classroom of 30 people so I make what is that like 1,500 to three grand in a day and I'm like whoa that's quite fun I enjoy teaching I get to spend a whole day with these kids teaching them stuff time flies it's good vibes I get a nice little like noodle takeaway for lunch you take the train home pocket my 1,00 to £3,000 and

I'm like wo I've just made money this is sick so you can make money by selling these sorts of workshops you could make money training businesses so for example let's say you're a teacher of public speaking you might go to a local business who employs I don't know a few hundred people and say hey I will run a training workshop for your team on public speaking or something like that even back in the day you might have the whole sort of patronage model so for example I might be getting my facts wrong here but for

example like Plato and Aristotle and Socrates they were teachers they were philosophers but back in the day philosophy wasn't about like this kind of University Ivory Tower type nonsense back in the day philosophy was teaching people how to live a good life and these people Plato Socrates Aristotle they would have followers or disciples uh I think the word from for disciple is like dis discar discar means to learn discar which means to learn so like the Disciples of Plato Socrates and Aristotle are learning from them and the way these guys made their money was I

think they were independently wealthy which is why they could afford to spend all their time in contemplation and they were being patronized by like the Emperor or something I think I could be getting my facts entirely wrong as as you might gather I'm not I'm not a student of History I would like to learn more history so if someone has an online course on history I would I would love to sign up to it but basically you can be a teacher in all of these different sorts of ways and you can make money by Distributing

your services to people who are willing to pay for them and this has been a thing that's happening that's been happening throughout time how then do we understand this world of the online course creator the world of the online course creator is basically when you are a teacher but you utilize the power of the internet to make money selling your teaching services so teach teacher X internet teacher X internet equals online course creator basically so how does this actually work well if you were a teacher like you know let's say you like me and you

teach people how to do YouTube or you teach or you teach people how to be more productive you can then create an online course and you can sell that to people who will buy the thing now this could be a self-paced online course which is you could teach the thing and then it could be online this is how I learn the guitar by taking Justin uh Justin guitar's course on how to play the guitar this is a course he recorded it's a series of videos you buy them for like I don't know $50 and then

you go through the videos this is great for Justin because he has to do the work once and obviously build the audience and stuff and then people can just buy his course and pay him $50 every time and can learn the guitar by just following along this is a self-paced online course alternatively you could do what's called a cohort based course this is what we are currently doing with my productivity lab this is what we were doing for like 3 years for our YouTuber Academy where this is a course that happens live but happens over

the internet where like let's say 300 people join and they're part of this cohort and then they're all taking the course together and the course is delivered through a series of like Zoom calls essentially where I might hop on the zoom call for 2 hours and do a big presentation and I have my presentation and share my screen and do engagement from the chat and this is sort of the equivalent of taking a course at a college where you rock up you've got the whole elect theater people and the professor or the teacher is giving

the course talking through their slides this is just happening using the power of the internet and therefore you know these sorts of people can make money through online courses as well how else could you make money using the teacher internet analogy well you could do one-on-one coaching over Zoom for example at one point during lockdown I had Zoom singing lessons cuz I wanted to improve my singing and I found this guy off of YouTube who had one-onone Zoom singing lessons and I paid him for like I paid him for like eight lessons and I think

I only took advantage of two of them so I should probably reach out to him and be like hey man can I have these other six lessons but he's making money doing one-on-one coaching over Zoom this is also part of this sort of teacher using the power of the internet for distribution as a teacher using the power of the internet you could write a book so back in the day people were obviously making money writing books but you had to have a publisher I have a publisher for my book it's penguin in the UK and

McMillan in the US and a bunch of different Publishers worldwide and stuff and so you know having a proper proper publish and so having a proper publisher kind of makes sense for various people for various various different reasons but now you can self-publish a book and so for example one of my friends Paul Millard self-published a book called The Path of path and in the last few years it's a very good book he's made over quarter of a million dollars from this self-published book and anyone anyone in the world can just write a book on

Google Docs export it as a EOB Chu it on Amazon using Kindle Direct publish in and now you have a book that you can sell on Amazon and it costs nothing to do this because Amazon just takes a cut of your sales but again this is similar to this thing it's a teacher you're teaching something you have something to teach writing a book about it and you are selling it online on Amazon using like the self-publishing platform it doesn't have to be teachers you know there's people I there's a guy I met a few years

ago who uh would was writing like um romance like the steamy romance novels aimed at women he was he he was like a 17-year-old dude and he was writing these like uh risque romance novels aimed at women and self-publishing them on Amazon and was making like a few thousand a month doing this but that's less the teacher thing this is more like a yeah that's like a writer how you make money online as a writer so the way that we can really think about these online course creators is they're basically teachers using the power of

the internet and I think that is a useful framing if you are thinking of getting into this business can you see yourself being a teacher in real life if you could see yourself being a teacher in real life you could probably potentially try making money trying to sell online courses um it's not for everyone if you are the sort of person who enjoys explaining stuff to people if when you were at school or at University you know people would ask for your help and you were sort of helping them along and you got a sense

of glow and fulfillment and pride out of helping someone else with their homework like me you might enjoy being a teacher if you for example think you know if I had if I had loads of loads of money what might I want to do and one of your answers is you know what I might like to teach I might like to teach some of the stuff that I've learned whether it's gardening or public speaking or youtubing or building a business or playing the ukul whatever the thing might be if if part of your life vision

is like oh you know being a teacher would be kind of cool then potentially you might decide to go into this online course creator game because essentially it's all about just being a teacher and using the power of the internet so now let's go into the world of how to actually make money through selling online courses and we are going to imagine that I am I want to sell an online course teaching people how to play the the ukulele I have been playing ukulele for a few years I know how to play some chords my

finger is a bit screwed right now cuz I cut it [Music] um let's imagine we're going to teach people how to play the ukulele so I want to make an online course teaching people how to play the ukulele and obviously apply whatever example you want here and we're going to talk through what would this sort of business model look like so my ukele course needs a name give me 20 naming ideas for a course teaching beginners how to play the ukulele make the name fun and alliterative great let's see what does chat GT come up

with ukulele Unleashed UK ukulele Utopia strumming serenade Plucky playtime Tiny Tunes travel you clearly uplift you know what I am going to choose to make an online course about how to play the ukulele called ukulele Unleashed this is the new business that you and I are starting together the business of building an online course called ukele Unleashed and really the point of a course is that it is a transformation from A to B so someone is like at a certain point in their life and then they take the course and it gets them to a

certain outcome and so I'm really trying to figure out okay who is the person that this course is going to be good for and what is the transformation that they're going to experience as a result of taking my course UK clearly Unleashed so it's probably going to be a complete beginner and probably someone who wants wants to play the ukulele and this is maybe their first musical instrument and they like the idea of the ukulele cuz it's super cheap so you can get them for like I don't know 15 quid 20 quid and then if

they take my course ukle Unleashed by the end of the course they will be able to play basic chords and sing along uh pop songs and in my course you know what while I'm there I'm going to teach them hey there Delila because it's good that they have some songs and I don't know like over the rainbow cuz that's a classic ukulele song fantastic we have a rough idea of what what's going to go into our course in reality it's more complicated than this but this is meant to be a broad overview where you can

always like dive in but it's it's it is it is actually very useful to be thinking in terms of what is the transformation that the learner is going to experience as a result of taking my course and who is the person now UK clearly Unleashed it's it's also it's also generally useful to understand who would be the absolute dream target audience for this course is it ukle Unleashed a course for kids am I teaching seven-year-olds how to play the ukulele probably not I probably want if it were me I probably want ukulele for adults you

know what adults these are adults who have jobs and maybe don't have too much time on their hands and they want to learn the ukulele because it just seems kind of cool it's like a fun little instrument you can strum on the ukulele and it's like Good Vibes so we have an idea of what this course is going to be about now if you are a beginner to the world of online business you would think okay well I've got my name I've got my uh transformation I know what the course is going to be about

why don't I just make the course uh so for example let's use Chad GPT I wouldn't actually use Chad GPT because I would have actual expertise and but we're going to use Chad GPT just to mock up an outline of what this course would be let's create a uh for module 20 lesson uh four module Time 5 lessons each course on ulele Unleashed for beginners please give me a rough course outline boom let's say we spend a weekend deciding you know what I'm going to put this course together and we decide it's going to be

a video course and we just sort of make the course like I'm going to skip over the process of actually making the course because you can kind of imagine what a course would look like if you're teaching something UK cly Basics module one module two chord progressions struming module three diving deeper into music module four ukulele for performance Dynamics and expression chords and Melody songwriting oh wow this is too advanced of course I think I kind of really want to make it way way way simpler than this but whatever let's just go with the structure

and let's say I've spent a weekend or a week just filming the course editing the course and I now have a course okay cool what I now have is a series of MP4 videos what do I do with that well this is where you probably want to upload your course to an online course platform this is where things start to get a little bit complicated cuz you could just put it on YouTube right but you're not going to make any money if you put it on YouTube other than AdSense maybe if you have a monetized

YouTube channel so you really want to sell this course now there's kind of two ways of doing this online course thing the first one is you could put your course on your own website and the second one is that you can put your course on some sort of platform Now by platform I mean things like skillshare or udemy those are the famous ones where like you just upload your course and the platform does the work of distribution and handling payments and all that sort of stuff that's how I made like $2.5 Million by putting stuff

on skillshare but that is generally not what I would recommend what I would generally recommend and the way that all these people are making millions rather than just small amounts of money um making courses is by doing it on their own platform there are pros and cons like there are some people making loads of money making selling courses on you to me it's generally a lot easier to do it on an another platform but it is generally I think better to do it on your own website so you need to find something that allows you

to make a website build a sort of sales page for your course collect payments and then actually deliver the course to people conveniently there are specific platforms that allow you to do just that so you've probably heard of Squarespace for example Squarespace it makes it super easy to make a website um but there are also platforms that make it super easy to make and sell online courses so the first one I got started with when it came to creating my bat UK cat interview courses was podia it's probably not what I would recommend today but

it's pretty good your website email marketing and products all Under One Roof thousands of people like you use podo to bring their entire business into a single platform podo is free interesting and as you grow it has all the tools you'll need to keep growing oh actually pod is pretty good it's they're they're really going down the cheap route so so if you want to go down the cheap route I actually would recommend podio podio is very good kajabi is much more expensive it's much more premium has much better features but podia is pretty solid

and I got started on podia so you can start for free you get a website you get a Blog you can build a CO a coaching product you can have a draft course and then when you're ready to publish your course you pay $33 a month okay yeah fine $33 a month so essentially when I have an account on podia I can upload all of my MP4s I can turn them into an online course and then I can create a website directly on the platform and I can get my URL like ukulele unleashed.com or whatever

and now people go on uk.com and they buy my stuff they hit buy and then they're able to watch my online course so for example in our case I'm going to use uh kajabi as an example cuz kajabi is also a very good platform let's look at their pricing so kajabi pricing starts at $119 a month and then goes up to $319 a month so more expensive than podia but I personally think it is a better platform so this is what kajabi looks like on the back end let's say you know what I'm just going

to make a new product I'm going to hit new product create a course get started they also have a bit of an AI course Builder which is kind of fun ukulele Unleashed uh fine use this course to learn how to play a few songs on ukele for complete beginners and it's going to use its AI features to like put together the thing let's give it a nice blue color let's give it a green accent color for whatever that's worth that doesn't quite work let's give it a light blue accent color there we go I don't

need a thumbnail let's make it a paid course and let's sell the course for what's a reasonable amount to sell a ukul lady course for I don't know let's say $29 that seems reasonable and I can skip payment method for now great so it's basically doing all the work for me well it's not doing all the work for me but it's helping me it's helping create the outline of my course oh perfect it's AI course creator is already giving me the course outline this is very nice it's already created a landing page as well oh

this AI Builder is very good fantastic we now have a course so we can see we've got module one introduction module two basic ukulele chords go away we can see ukulele strumming patterns and we can see playing your first songs and you can see the air course Builder has already done this but obviously you have expertise you're going to want to teach something you have expertise in so you can adjust this to your heart's heart's content heart's content L um now let's say I wanted to add a video to this holding your you I could

oh wow it's already it's already created this the the actual body of the course but let's say this is a video course I'm doing I can just hit upload a recent file upload a video from my computer and now people are able to take this course good now if I hit preview this is what the course currently looks like ukulele Unleashed use this course to learn how to play a few songs on the ukulele for complete beginners start course come on oh everything's draft so it's not really going to look good let's just hit publish

on a bunch of these so it looks like cool now if I preview the course you can see introduction understanding the ukulele it basically is like a video player and you can hit next module and then you'll get more stuff I'm going to show you what this actually looks like for our YouTuber Academy course because that's actually got stuff on it um so we have gone really elaborate with like the template and stuff but you can see introduction module one how to find your perfect Niche an introduction to finding your Niche and you can see

that there's a video here and there's video lessons and there's comments and finding your Niche so the question we're trying to answer is what is my Niche so you can see on the side I've got all the content of the course and then I have got you know people can sign up to the course and they can take the course this is what happens in a platform like kajabi but it also happens in platforms like podia and teachable and all of those sort of stuff so at this point we now have our course created we

have made a fantastic course and it's beautiful and we're can show people that look check out this little course of mine but you might publish the course you you he'll publish you'll get a URL like ukulele unleashed. kajabi.com you can buy your own domain ukulele unleashed.com and then you could sit back and absolutely nothing will happen because in order to sell your course you need traffic to your course website and this is where the next part of the puzzle comes in and I'm not going to put the ukar off to the side because now ukele

is kind of irrelevant in this in fact it's kind of irrelevant in this whole process great easy okay so how do we get people to actually buy our course well they're never going to see the course directly but what where they potentially might hit is the website ukulele unleashed.com now what should a course website have so this for example is what the current website looks like for my bmat crash course online this is a thing I filmed like 7 years ago in no 6 years ago in 2018 you can see BAC crash course online £99

three payments of £39 by now um there's a little trailer for it hello uh how's it going welcome to the and then there's a bit of an overview for the course in the course I teach you everything you need to know about the bat blah blah blah and then there's what's in the course and you can preview some of the lessons this is all hosted on podia um and this is what a landing page looks like where you tell people what the courses is about so when they land on the landing page they then have

the option to click buy and then a checkout page opens an annoying checkout you put in your email address you put your name let's give it a fake password I agree to receive marketing emails create account and then you can accept credit or debit card or PayPal or Apple pay or whatever based on the platform that you have this is great this works nicely this for example is what the landing page looks like for our part-time YouTuber Academy this is a really really long landing page as probably a bit too long welcome to the PM

YouTube Academy will help you grow a YouTube channel while saving your hours every week there is a video over here and then it's just a really really really really really really really really really long landing page and at the end of it you can hit the buy button somewhere enroll now and then it takes you to a checkout page where you can enter your card details and do the checkout you might be wondering what is the difference between a landing page and a website ah people often use the two inter interchangeably a website is more

like a website is sort of like the broad thing and the website contains landing pages so for example Ali ABD dal.com is the website and ali.com ukulele Unleashed is the landing page for the course if you're just getting started out you probably don't need a website as such all you need is a landing page a landing page is just like a one one a onepage thing that has a button on it that allows people to buy your course it's also often known as a sales page it is the page that sells your course and then

if you want over time you can build your own website and your own funky stuff uh but I'm sort of using the word website and landing page interchangeably but it's worth keeping in mind that website generally broader landing pages a page within a website so this is for example what our YouTuber Academy checkout page looks like this is hosted on kajabi and then finally we have productivity lab this is what our productivity Lab Landing Page looks like and at the moment it's sold out but if it wasn't sold out you would hit the buy button

and it would take you to a checkout page where you can then pay and then all the good things happen now a lot of these landing pages look pretty fancy but these platforms like podia and kajabi and teachable like they all have landing page stuff built into it so it's sort of like Squarespace drag and drop you can just sort of make a website even without how to code or rather you can make a landing page without knowing how to code and so it's it's like easy enough to make that happen now at this point

it's also worth introducing the terminology of offer so an offer is basically what is the thing that you are offering the offer is basically if you imagine asking the question what are you selling and you had to respond in bullet points that's the offer so if we look at the offer for example for productivity lab this is the offer productivity lab sold out productivity lab Community 12 months access you'll get access to the life productivity system the daily Focus lab the reflection rituals the expert workshops build the community with us and much much much more

that is the offer if we look at our YouTuber Academy what is the offer you get the core YouTuber Academy curriculum bonus modules lifetime access to the course material the Creator booster pack our PTY workbook our YouTuber productivity system blah blah blah blah blah blah exclusive interviews from Mr who's the boss M exclusive bonuses free bonuses access to the community YouTuber foundations Final Cut Pro this is all part of the offer bonuses are part of the offer where like it's like what's the offer that that we're making when you go to a lemonade stand the

offer is would you like some lemonade they're offering you the lemonade if you say yes you get out your card you give them cash you pay for the lemonade and then they fulfill on the offer they give you the lemonade you drink the lemonade you're happy the offer is the Le the the the the offer is the promise of lemonade and the Fulfillment is actually getting the lemonade in your hand similarly the offer is the promise of what I'm going to get in ukulele Unleashed or what I'm going to get in the parttime YouTuber Academy

or what I'm going to get in productivity lab and the Fulfillment of the offer is actually getting the course actually getting access to the course or getting access to the community or getting access to whatever the thing is that you're trying to sell now at this point it's worth recommending a book If you're trying to craft an offer the best book I've ever read about this is $100 million offers by Alex hosi it takes you through a step-by-step guide on how to actually make an offer and Alex homo's whole thing is make an offer so

good that they they can't send you to it often the single one one of the biggest levers you can pull for making more money through your online course is making a better offer if you present the offer to the target market and they say wo that sounds amazing sign me up right now then you know you have a good offer if you present the offer to your target market and they're like uh then you don't really know you have a good offer so if for example I was speaking to let's say Tintin Tintin you want

to learn the ukulele right I'm going to teach you you know the ultimate course on how to create the ukulele is going to be absolutely sick by the end of the course it's only going to take you 3 hours to go through and by the end of it you'll be able to play a song and sing and serenate your girlfriend and it only costs $3 You' probably be like oh that's yeah that's pretty good I would you know if Tinton was interested in playing the ukulele be like yeah sure $3 for a really good course

and how to serenade my girlfriend playing the ukulele as a complete beginner that's a pretty reasonable offer if I said the course costs $3,000 he'd probably be a bit like H not sure about that this relationship between like the value that's on offer and the price of the thing another example Alex hosi often uses is that imagine if someone said hey here's a brand new Ferrari and I'm only selling it to you for like $1,000 that's a pretty good offer if you belied to them that it was actually a Ferrari because you know that the

value of the Ferrari is way more than $1,000 and the price they're charging is $1,000 so that is a very good offer you want there to be an enormous discrepancy between the perceived value of the offer and the price of the offer this is all getting into the weeds absolutely if you're in this mode read the book $100 million offers by Alex MOSI and that will help you create a good offer and then if you want to learn how to create a good landing page read the book copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards that's a great

book that teaches you how to create a solid landing page and copyri is basically writing with that writing that's written with the intent to persuade someone or writing written with the intent to get someone to take action so through your landing page you're kind of saying have you ever wanted to play the ukulele well introducing ukulele Unleashed it's the ultimate course that will teach you how to go as from complete beginner to like the heart and soul of the party and be able to serenade your loved ones by playing basic songs on the ukulele and

it's actually really easy and blah blah blah blah blah blah all that is copywriting I.E the writing that is on your landing page so copywriting Secret by Jim Edwards for the landing page and $100 million offers by Alex hosi for the offer now earlier in this video we talked about this whole philosophical idea of being a teacher now the thing with being a teacher is that doing the teaching is like just a tiny part of building a business around doing the thing if for example you're a teacher and you're being employed by like a university

all you have to do is Rock up teach and grade papers that's like the easy part the University their problem is trying to get people in through the front door whereas if you actually want to make money selling online courses now we're in the game of building a business around your teaching so like the teaching really is the easy bit like creating the course is not the hard part the hard part is all of the other stuff around building a business and how to actually sell the course this is why to be honest platforms like

skillshare and udemy exist because they recognize that there are a lots of people out there who enjoy teaching and who enjoy the idea of making an online course but do not enjoy the idea of building a landing page and getting traffic to it trying to build an offer and trying to make it good and trying to do leaden and trying to do an email list and all the stuff that we're also going to talk about in this video and that I've talked about in a bunch of other videos if you don't want to do all

that stuff you're leaving millions of dollars on the table but it's also easier because you can just do the work by chucking a course on udemy and hoping that the udemy algorithm will like attract people to actually pay for the course so at this point let's summarize where we are at we have talked about the actual creation of the course which in many ways is the easy part and we've talked about the landing page page and the checkout which we're going to call our website so you can see how this works people get onto the

landing page then if they like what they see on the landing page they hit the buy button then they go to a checkout page they enter their card details and then they get access to the course and this really is where you make the money by people going through your checkout page but you could publish a course you could publish a checkout page and you can publish a landing page using kajabi or Podi or any of these platforms and then you could wait a week and still nothing would happen you're not going to make any

money and the reason you're not going to make any money is because no one knows that your we s it even exists and so then we come to the biggest problem of them all and if you can crack this problem then you can make literally millions if not tens of millions selling online courses and if you cannot crack this problem then you won't make a penny selling online courses and this is the problem of leads how do you actually get traffic to your landing page how do you get people to actually know that ukul unleashed.com

is even a thing now if you're a beginner to this world of online business and course creation I would recommend pausing the video and having think about it let's say you were creating an online course called ukar Unleashed how would you how would you tell people about it how would people even know that it exists well you could say well they could just Google it but they could Google something like how to play ukulele and then it'll show up good luck with that this is this is a world of search engine optimization if you Google

how to play ukulele we've got 82 million search results that come up you've got sponsored ukulele lessons USI your first ukulele lesson YouTube video ukulele magazine.com learn ukulele in 15 minutes a YouTube video another YouTube video music Prof how to play ukulele for kids another YouTube video how to play ukulele musician how to play fender.com how to play ukulele there's no way in hell your little course ukulele Unleashed my little course you clearly Unleashed is going to rank anywhere near the top for sear enging results it takes years and years and years of like high

quality content and debain authority and all this funky stuff to get people to be able to land on your think on Google so Google is not an option you are not allowed you're going to get zero traffic to your website if you just rely on Google how else might you get leads or traffic rather leads and traffic I'm kind of using interchangeably how El might you get traffic to your uh ukulele on le.com landing page now this is getting into more complicated territory around how do you get leads and again alexo's book $100 million leads

is very good for this um I'm going to try and kind of simplify it and and tell you what most people in this online online courses world are doing really it comes down to two things either they are making free content or they are running paid ads uh and some are doing kind of like a mixture of the two free content and paid ads how does this work well paid ads are let's say I were to pay Google to run ads to my course website for ukulele for beginners right so for example ukulele for beginners

these are paid ads USIC has paid for an ad to show up over here preply online UK legs has paid for an ad here artist Works has paid for an ad over here so these three people are paying for an ad on Google you can pay for ads on Facebook and on Instagram and on Tik Tok and on YouTube and stuff I could again pay Google and I could say hey any video any video on YouTube that's about playing playing the ukulele I want I want you to run my video ad in front of that

video this is fine a lot of the kind of info product online course people from back in the day made their Millions by running paid ads the problem is that it's really really expensive and it is only getting more expensive every year uh because often you have to pay like several dollars for every click to your website and if let's say only 1% of people are actually buying your thing it costs you let's say $300 to get a sale for $30 so you're just losing money like this is by far the quick you know one

of the quickest ways to bankrupt Yourself by trying to run paid ads when you don't yet know how there are still people that are doing it successfully it is still possible it's just getting very very expensive and so generally paid ads are not what most people would recommend for beginners it's it sort of depends who you talk to if you speak to the paid ads gurus they will say paid ads are still a great way as a complete beginner to blah blah blah blah blah but the way that I'm familiar with and the way that

most people I know are making millions if not tens of millions through online courses is essentially through free content now what does this mean well if I search Google for ukulele for beginners three of these videos are sponsored but actually this guy Andy guitar his is the first real search result absolute beginner start here how's it going guys welcome to this free 10day starter course it's a free 10day starter course interesting this video has 11 million views and he posted it 5 years ago it's a pretty basic video looks like he was just filmed on

a phone production value is a bit Jank but like you clearly listen one Absolut begin start here free 10day course he's giving away free content and now look what's happening in the video description Andy guitar. co.uk slashonline course let's click on that learn ukulele with Andy it's not as nice a name as ukulele Unleashed but hey you can learn ukulele with Andy let's hit get started and hello and welcome to that's his course and now he's going to sell me a me membership which is £ per month or1 per year that's pretty good I suspect

he probably started selling individual courses and then when once you make enough courses you're like ah it's kind of annoying selling all of these and so you just drive people towards some sort of membership where they get all the courses for free but the reason I know that Andy guitar exists is because he made a YouTube video about it and this is where the power of free content is where people are getting value from the free content from Andy's Andy's YouTube video and then if they like it they're thinking huh this guy seems kind of

legit let me sign up to his online course this is why hey friends welcome back I started making YouTube videos so if we look at my channel from 7 years ago and look at my oldest YouTube videos I've got some music videos I've got some trailers for my courses and then I have bat section one everything you need to know hello everyone my name is Ali and I'm a fifth year medical student at Cambridge University I'm also the co-founder of 6med uh a small company that runs courses for medical school applicants and I've been teaching

the Bap crash course for the last 5 years it's a video which currently has 225,000 views as absurd uh where throughout this video I'm just teaching people I'm giving away free content I'm teaching people how to do well in bmat section one and in the video description I will have linked my online bmat course 75 plus videos courses. al.com the free content is the thing that people get value from and then some of them will click to through to your website this is one way one very good way of solving the traffic problem because if

you can make really good free content about playing the ukulele you could then potentially get traffic to want to actually want to buy your online course the benefit of videos on YouTube for example as well is that you know if I see Andy guitar and I'm like you know what like with Justin guitar for example I started watching his YouTube videos I decided I liked the way that Justin teaches the guitar and I thought you know what I want his proper step-by-step course so I bought his course for like $30 and then I got better

at the guitar so then I was like you know what I trust Justin he helped me get to an intermediate stage so now of course I'm going to buy his intermediate guitar course if that was paid ads if that was anything else it would have been a lot harder for me to build that kind of trust and relationship with Justin's content and so that's the value of free content leading to traffic most people who make loads and loads of money selling online courses they have an absolute ton of free content Amy pfield has a podcast

Jenna ker has an Instagram and a Pinterest I have my fre 800 YouTube videos I've been making over the last like 7 years for someone new to come into the market and to just make an online course making the online course is the easy part getting the traffic to your website for the online course is 99% of the work if you can get the traffic then converting it into a sale provided they have enough money and the offer is reasonable good that's all easy enough the hard part is getting the traffic in the first place

which is why all these people are trying to build organic organic audiences by making YouTube videos and writing tweet threads and posting on LinkedIn the game of building a business is mostly about winning the work and less about actually doing the work and so if there's one thing you take away from this video if you're still here in this really really really really long video it's that just Banning to be a teacher alone is not enough it's not enough to that that is not how you make a career selling online courses you also have to

be the one driving the driving the leads driving the traffic to your website so that some of them might potentially buy your course and that is a large amount of work this is why you know people are getting rich off of this but it's a hell of a lot of work I know so many people who have tried to create online courses and they just don't put in the work because it it's actually quite hard it takes a lot of work to create an online course um you know you can always kind of bash it

out in a weekend that sort of thing but if you really want to make a good online course and make a good website for it and feel proud of it because you don't want to scam your audience it's like it takes weeks if not months to put together a decent online course and then you have to make this free content to promote the online course but do it in a non- salesy way and do it where you're providing loads and loads of value where you always worried about like if I give away too much will

people even sign up to my course all this sort of stuff this is this is why this thing is hard this is why this is not a get-rich quick scheme it's not a get-rich easy scheme but it is absolutely a way to build a career on the internet and to be honest you know I make millions selling online courses for me to make millions as a neurosurgeon I would have to train for like 20 years and have to work like 80 hours a week so like it's just it's worth keeping in mind that this is

not this is not get rich easy there's no such thing as get rich easy in order to make lots of money you have to put in a lot of work this is just a form of work that if you enjoy teaching it's just fun creating content on the internet and it's fun turning in into online courses you might be interested in this particular business model if that's the case all righty uh turns out we've actually just had a lunch break because this is a super super super long video and we're in the process of building

a a desk in the background cuz I'm currently on the dining table which I'm going to swap out for a proper desk hence all the random crap in the background um so we have talked about an entire overview of how to make money through online courses on a very broad level and I'm now going to sort of Blitz through commonly asked questions about this sort of business okay so what if you feel like you have nothing to teach okay this is a common a really common question I often see this from people who are in

their teens or early 20s but actually often I hear it from people who are in their 30s and 40s and 50s as well because there's a strong sense of imposter syndrome around like I don't really have anything to teach so how can I make an online of course if I have nothing to teach there's two things I would say to this the first one is that you probably do have something to teach if you had a gun to your head and you had to make a list of like 5 to 10 things that you have

learned in the last like 10 years you'd probably be able to make bring put something of this list together if you have a job the and imagine you imagine yourself giving advice to yourself from 3 years ago or 5 years ago or 10 years ago there is stuff that you've learned if you're let's say I don't know random 25-year-old and maybe you're like 4 years into working a job job but you did a three-year University or a four-year college degree you've learned how to study for exams you've learned how to have work life balance during

college you might have done some sports you might have learned a few skills you might know some stuff on your job maybe your job is I don't know rev Ops working for a startup you can potentially teach revops on first startups maybe your job involved you having to learn how to use figma or Cana or photoshop or any number of 100 different tools you could potentially teach how to use those particular tools so a it's about like broadening our Horizons and just really recognizing that you know it's very easy to think that you have nothing

to teach but you know there's some questions I like to think about which is okay let's say you you know someone forces you to like you have to give a talk in front of 100 people and it just need needs to be a 20-minute talk but you can choose exactly who's going to be in the audience and you can choose what sort of audience you're speaking to if you had to give a talk for 20 minutes what would that talk be about if you had to give advice to yourself from 3 years ago or 5

years ago what advice would you give that person if you had to teach someone who's 5 years younger than you a skill that you have learned in The Last 5 Years what would that skill be that will give you a sense of like okay maybe I do have some stuff that I could potentially teach but the other thing to keep in mind is that like I'm not saying anyone in the world can make a living selling online courses you actually do have to have something to teach so if you haven't done anything interesting in your

life or you haven't learned any skills you can't make a living selling online courses but what you can do is you can start today you can teach yourself a skill learn it over 2 years and then you can make a course about it 2 years from now I knew nothing about video editing absolutely nothing I started completely from scratch watching YouTube tutorials and skill sh classes on how to edit videos in premere Pro then I switched to using Final Cut and 2 years from 2017 to 2019 I taught myself the skill of video editing and

then in 2019 I made a course about it and that course has been making me $5,000 a month every month for the last like 5 years it's absolutely insane if you feel like you don't have a skill that's fine perfect time to start learning something is right now all right next question in what order should you do this stuff so the way that I explained things in this video was deliberately in an inverted order I started with making the course and then we talked about the landing page on the website and only third we talked

about traffic in reality what I would recommend doing is to flip the order if you think you have something to teach do not try and create a course because you will run into the problem of not having enough traffic if you want to start any kind of business the place you should start is with the lead generation with actually seeing can you get people to sign up to get a free version of the thing so this is where I would recommend watching my interview with Daniel Priestley on my deep dive podcast that talks all about

leads let's say I I was actually trying to make ukulele unleash the course I mean I would buy the domain name ukulele unleash if it's available just so I have it but I'm not even going to vaguely try doing the course what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to see if I can get people to attend a completely free I'll probably do a webinar a completely free ukulele for complete beginners webinar and it's going to be a 45-minute webinar and I'm going to do it over zoom and I'm going to see what can

I do how many friends and family and people in my network and people at work can I get to attend this free webinar that will teach them the basics of playing of of playing the ukulele so a free webinar might be a way of generating leads let's say I wanted to teach a course on productivity let's say I I've become really productive and I want to teach an online course on productivity I would not try and first Teach an online course on productivity what I would do is I would try and create a free educational

email course like five emails that are just giving loads of value and teaching the the things around productivity that I want to teach and then I'd be trying to figure out how can I get 100 people to go through my 5-day completely free email course cuz if I can't get 100 people to give me their email address for a free piece of value every day for 5 days then there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to get 100 people to pay me for some sort of course you kind of start with the

problem of traffic that's the first thing you get them to opt in to kind of demonstrate their interest in something that's when they become a lead I.E they've given you permission to contact them you give them free value and this could be in the form of a webinar or it could be in the form of like a quiz or a scorecard and you can use the app score app for that it's very good I've invested in it it's sick or or you can do an educational email course e you give them free value and then

what you do is you send people a survey once they've gotten the free value which asks them hey what are their challenges what would they be interested in you get a sense of what's their willingness to pay and once you can do that if you can get 100 people to see your free value and to you know at least some of them to say that yeah I would pay $29 for a course if you made it I would pay $59 for a course I would pay for one-onone coaching at that point you think okay cool

let me make the course even then from that point onwards I would probably do a pre-sale you can whip up a landing page for the course you can collect pre-orders for the course you can build a waiting list for the course and all of this gives you a sense of before you spend all of the time and effort to actually create the course at least you are making sure you're going to have enough demand to be able to actually sell the course all right next question how do you choose a price for your course it's

it's it's complicated like pricing is really really complicated there are entire books written about this what I would say is price it low initially and you can always increase the price over time whereas if you start high initially it's harder to decrease the prices over time because then the people who bought from you initially then get pissed off that you decrease the price further down the line whereas if you start low and then based on if you can sell a product for 29 bump the price to 3949 59 that sort of thing people don't mind

so much if the price increases in fact that they feel good about it because they got it when it was cheaper that's one way of going about it there is a whole other school of thought which says that you should start by charging really high you know you should start by charging trying to charge $1,000 for your course and just give people people $10,000 worth of value there is also Merit to that I think the pricing question is like that could be a whole likeing 3-hour long Master Class just by itself so I'm going to

give you those bare Bare Bones for now and if you're seriously in the position where you're thinking about pricing your course you should Google it and search on YouTube and search on Amazon for some books that specifically talk about pricing for online courses because people have written about this and I'm sure you can find some really really good information about it next question what is a funnel so uh this is something that so Russell brunson's book uh com Secrets is all about funnels a funnel is basically I I'm not sure how you define a funnel

I'm sure Russell has a good definition but imagine sort of like an actual funnel and you've got like different stages of your funnel you have your traffic which maybe I don't know watches your YouTube videos that's like a lot of people then some percentage of those people I don't know let's say 1% uh will click to your website and then some percentage of those people when they hit your website will hit the checkout button and you know check out on your thing and then some percentage of those people will potentially kind of buy your upsell

or whatever it's like this is the idea of a funnel and so when you have a sort of the bottom of the funnel is usually the thing that makes money and the goal is to get people into the top of your funnel so that they trickle through to the bottom and obviously you're always going to get way more people who are not going to buy from you than who will buy from you and so the funnel kind of goes down in these different stages again this could be a whole like 10-hour master class in itself

but Russell brunson's book.com secret talks all about this I've just got the definition a funnel describes your customers Journey from when they first hear about you all the way through to purchase so they first hear about you on your YouTube videos then maybe they go on your website then maybe they go on your checkout and then they buy your think that would be one example of a funnel all right next question what advice would you have for someone who wants to start but is scared because they don't feel like an expert yes you do need

to have something to teach but you don't need to be an expert in the thing I think the word expert like puts a lot of people off cuz all you need to do is be able to teach something to people who are one or two levels below you I I was not an expert video editor when I created an online course about how to edit videos but I didn't I didn't promise that I didn't say I'm an expert video editor and I'm going to teach you everything you need to know I said look I'm a

basic ass I learned editing myself this is the 8020 I'm going to teach you the simple way of learning editing to make simple YouTube videos and I promised that and I was able to deliver on that promise for people who were two steps behind me in the journey I have nothing to teach someone who's a professional video editor but also a professional video editor kind of has the Cur of knowledge and like a Prof someone who's an actual expert you know the guy who edited Oppenheimer is probably not going to have anything valuable to teach

like a complete beginner who's never touched a video editing software program before in their life because there's just too much of a gulf between them so you don't need to be an expert as such most people never feel like an expert on my book it says you know the world's most followed productivity expert I still don't feel like an expert feeling like an expert is like an internal social construct uh that doesn't really mean anything what matters is can you provide value to people who are a few steps behind you in the journey and are

they willing to pay for it and you just try it out and see what happens but crucially you try up for free because if people are not if people are not getting value from your free stuff there's no way in hell they're going to get value from your paid stuff all right next question what are the most common mistakes that people make when building a course's business I would say the single most common mistake is not validating the demand for the course before making the course so again like I said get people to sign up

for the wait list for the course it takes like 5 minutes to create a page that lets people enter their email address to join a wait list for a course if you cannot get people to join a weight list for a course you have no demand for that course and so like start by doing that and then once you have the demand at that point you can then decide to make the course all right next question won what about people pirating my content this is a question that I get a lot when people do stuff

around courses people will always pirate your content like my courses I charge $1,000 Plus for them but they are available for free on the internet people have made impersonations of Ali abdal Instagram accounts and have dm'd all of my followers all 800,000 of them on Instagram saying hey I will give you Ali abd's course for like $7 it's just going to happen you can't do anything about it and there's no point even trying and then there's a bit of a related question which is how much of my cont content should I give away for free

on my YouTube Channel versus what I charge for in my course and again there's different schools have thought about this but my general view is that the more the more stuff you give away for free the more money you're going to make with your course because generally when people buy a course yes all of the content could be on YouTube but what they're what they're doing when they buy a course is a they're making a commitment to themselves and B what they're really trying to do is get it all in one place in a nice

in a nice laid out road map where they can just sort of go through and see things in the right order like yeah if you're sharing bits and buls of the stuff that you teach in the course on the YouTube channel I don't think that's a problem uh for me what I found and for most of my friends in the space who have made Millions selling courses the more you give away for free the more money you make from online courses all right next question how do you handle refunds and dissatisfied students so I'm a

big believer in uh offering a basically very frictionless money back guarantee my whole thing is that if someone doesn't find the course valuable then I do not want that money I do not deserve that money I should not have their money so we have a very easy way for people to get get refunds you just email us and we can basically get you to fill out a form and and you get a refund it's it's not that hard I think refunds are like guarantees are an amazing way of getting started with a coures business or

any business because it takes a lot of the Imposter syndrome away I know so many people who are like oh but like is my course really worth $300 or really worth $59 it's it's like bro just offer a money back guarantee and if people don't like your course they will get their money back and that's fine you're never taking someone's money if they don't want to give you the money you're never keeping someone's money if they're not satisfied so yeah if you get you're going to get people who want a refund because they don't think

your course is good enough that's fine you will also get people who sign up to your course purely so that they can download it upload it to some sort of piracy website and then request refund that's also fine it's just a custom ding business it's just part of the Wheel of Life and we just have to we just have to deal with it all right final question so what are some recommended resources uh to learn more about this topic um there are loads $100 million offers by Alex hosi $100 million leads the book by Alex

hosi com Secrets by Russell Brunson which is all about funnels uh which is a sort of more advanced type thing expert Secrets by Russell Brunson traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson so Russell's kind of three book Trilogy is basically all about how to build these sorts of businesses and he's an info product kind of guy and so makes a load of money selling online courses so that that's a really good really good series as well there's a chap called Brendan bashard who is amazing he has a book called The Millionaire Messenger which I've not yet read

but he has an online course called experts Academy which is basically how to be an online thought leader that's amazing it's one of the best courses I've ever seen on the topic it is $1,000 so yeah yeah but it's a really really really freaking good course within that I think you got access to another product of his called total product blueprint which really goes in depth about like online courses and coaching and memberships and stuff like these are all things within this online expert space which is basically how to be a teacher on the internet

to make money through through the thing um I also have a bunch of interviews on my deep dive podcast where I've interviewed other people who are course creators so people like Thiago Forte and David Perell and Dicky Bush and Nicholas Co and we'll put links to all of those in the video description apologies to whoever's in my team having to put those links based on based on all the random crap I've just said all right if you've gone to the end of this video firstly thank you so much for being here um if you want

more resources on this I've created a little playlist for you here which is in order the videos and podcast that I would recommend that will really give you an underlying foundation of the knowledge and skills you need to build an effective online courses business so check out that playlist over here thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye-bye