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Selling an online course is far from easy. Even though so many gurus online say the opposite. Why is it hard, how can you improve sales and how to get that first course sale?

Well, this article is all about that. Getting that first course sale, and also discussing why it’s so hard to generate those sales and what needs to be in place to land those coveted sales.

Before we go into how to sell an online course, it’s worth establishing why it’s hard to sell online courses.

The first reason for failed course sales is that there are so many options, there’s so much supply, and course marketplaces like Udemy and Skillshare won’t make the journey any easier.

While Skillshare and Udemy do offer you an excellent platform to host and sell your course, this article is all about you owning an online business and wanting to host your course on platforms like Teachable or Kajabi.

Related: The 7 Best Online Course Hosting Platforms You Need To Know

The reason why I leave out Udemy and Skillshare platforms out of this article is that they don’t offer you the flexibility and options you need to build highly effective sales funnels and customer tracking.

But to get back into why it’s hard to sell an online course, one was the amount of supply, and another one is the authority. Or better said the lack of authority.

With online courses, it’s all about teaching, sharing knowledge, giving insights, revealing industry secrets. With this, the question arises, from whom should I learn from?

Authority comes into play, and if you don’t have that proven track record or results to show, the sale will be hard to make. However, in this article, I will be sharing a massive amount of strategies on how you can bypass some of the sale obstacles and how you can land those first sales.

Another thing that was mentioned was the supply. Skillshare, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, Pluralsight, Alison, Coursera has thousands upon thousands of courses on offer.

There are already so many courses available that it’s not easy to go against behemoths like Udemy and Skillshare, though this is yet again something that will be tackled in this article. 

The final thing that is making the course sales from happening is the lack of traffic and the audience. If you don’t have eyeballs, you don’t have customers, and you don’t get sales.

As you can see, making online course sales is not easy; it’s far from easy. The easy part is creating a course, making those slideshows, crafting the material, branding, creating a website, building a funnel, all of these things are easy. That is all about creating an online course, which differs greatly from the selling part, which is the hardest.

What’s not easy is getting the money and making that sale — establishing trust between you and the customer. Trust is needed, and without it, you don’t get a sale. It’s that simple.

While this might already seem like, there’s no way I can sell my online course. Worry not, this article has so many things that will open your eyes, and in the end, you are more than prepared to get that sale.

Now, if you haven’t yet created an online course, this article won’t do you any good. In this article, we don’t focus on creating an online course. We focus on selling your online course.

Related: How To Create An Online Course – Full Guide

Let’s begin!

Audience profiling

As with any product, no one product is for everyone. Even if you think about a mobile phone. Not every mobile phone is for everyone. We are individuals with our own preferences. We like different things, and so do your customers.

You might easily start to sell our online course to everybody. Everybody wants to look good, and everybody wants to make money, no one wants to be alone. Sure! However, the methods vary, and that is what needs to be remembered here.

You and I, we differ, and so does your customers. The key to marketing and selling your course is audience profiling — not everything to everyone, but one thing to a certain group of people.

The world is so vast that there are always people like you that like the things that you do in the way you do them. It’s like they feel you are just like they are. So they make a connection with you. The feeling of “I’m just like you,” it creates a connection.

And that connection can be created only by being yourself and searching people like yourself. Your online course is about one thing, and that one thing is something that your people are looking for.

Now, I assume you have done your market research and course validation before thinking about selling your course to the masses?

If not, read “How to create an online course.”

Now, when you know who is your target audience, and you know what kind of person is the very best customer you could have. You are ready to go to the next stage, which is finding them!

Facebook audience insights

We are not trying to target everyone, we are trying to target VERY specific people, and for you to be able to do that, we go to Facebook and start finding those people.

Best place to start is Facebook’s audience insights:

The usual route is to target by demographics, age, gender, etc. However, with Facebook, we don’t do that sort of elementary targeting. We go for psychographics, and for you to do that, you will target based on interests.

If someone is interested in email marketing, and you are selling an online course on how to get more subscribers or something email related. You could type in the person name who is currently “dominating” that industry and tap into that audience instantly.

Understanding your audience and knowing what they like is essential. You need this information when you are building your sales funnel.

Page likes, top categories, demographics are all the information you need, for you to build a high performing sales funnel.

The very reason online business owners are going for Facebook ads is entirely because you can target potential customers so specifically and easily.

When you know the age, gender, and interests, you know what kind of ad you need to create. You need to create an ad that is precisely tapping into their interests. 

Showing an ad of a muscular man to a female who is interested in fitness is a wrong message. Why not show a muscular female? Precise ads for a precise audience!

With audience insights, you get to see if the target market is more about females, males, and what age group is more dominant than others. You will also see what devices they tend to use. Remember, preferences and one’s image, culture, and thoughts.

Apple and Android people think slightly differently about technology!

All this data will help you create a customer profile like never before. So many are saying to create your customer avatar, imagining all these features, hair color, eye color, clothes, etc. I mean, seriously? It’s nice and all, but we should focus on data and see what it shows to us. Not create our own imaginary friends.

With hard data, you can quickly see what works for what group of people.

Remember that course validation is one part of creating an online course, and Facebook groups are a wonderful place to do exactly that.

Related: How To Create An Online Course

At this point, you should already know who is your audience, what they like, where they hang out, what pages they follow, what is the typical age, and are they either female or male or both.

You will need this information when you are creating your sales page, ad copy, ad creatives, funnels, etc.

It’s about speaking with the right tone, with the right imagery, connecting on a more personal level, making sure that what they like is presented in the ad.

Organic audience profiling

Let’s assume you have a blog that is well established and drives a ton of traffic every month. Then I hope you have installed Facebook pixel to your website’s header code.

And if this seems too complicated, then I think you are not ready for some of the more advanced techniques presented in this article. Worry not, though. There’s a bunch of guides online that help you with the Facebook pixel installation.

But getting back to the subject. With Facebook pixel installed, you can create a ‘custom audience’ from the website traffic you are getting. The best part about this is that the traffic is more than likely the people you want to target.

If your blog is about finance and saving money, and your online course is about saving money. Then you are already having the right audience in place, and you can target them through Facebook ads very effectively.

By having a custom audience, you are already excluding a lot of people from your ad campaigns, which is a good thing because the targeting is more refined.

So in a sense, by having a Facebook pixel installed on your website, you are creating an audience in automation. But yeah, you need the traffic to do that.

The Facebook custom audience gives you the ability to slightly skip the audience insights part, as your pixel and Google Analytics already have this data available.

Audience summary

• Do not think your online course is for everyone. It’s only for some.
• Do not target everyone with your ad campaigns.
• Study your ideal customers by using Facebook audience insights.
• If you don’t have traffic to your site, paid traffic is the way to go if all other things are in place (authority and trust).

It feels like I’m still scratching the surface only, but the most important thing to know about your audience is that you are serving the few, and when they are happy, you can serve the many.

The insights to online course marketing

We started the article with audience profiling. And that is the very first thing you need to nail down. You need to be very knowledgeable about who you are talking to because, in marketing, you are always talking personally.

I assume that you are not a huge brand or a huge company with millions in your jacket pocket. So we do things on a smaller scale and focus on individuals and not to the masses.

One of the biggest mistakes online course creators do is that they start to market to everyone. That is not what we do here. We do things little by little and build the foundation for more prominent marketing.

You have to leverage small wins to bigger wins. You use strategies that work for a small online business owner. Trying to be bigger than you are, is not going to work.

We need to establish you first, and then you start to scale. You need authority before you can start scaling.

Value proposition and USP

Your online course in mind, what is the one thing that you excel at and what others can’t touch? What is your Unique Selling Proposition?

What is the thing your online course provides that others don’t? What do you offer that others can’t or won’t offer?

The thing about marketing is that every business does it, and when that is the case, you need to be different. You need to differentiate yourself from the market. You need to be better than the rest.

If you think that you have a better looking online course, higher production value, better branding, etc., while those could work, they won’t. You can’t fake results, and if a course that looks downright carbage next to you can show results that you can’t. It’s a win for the ugly one.

When you are creating your USP, evaluate what you can offer that is critical for the customer to have. They need to see the value in your offer, not the features. They want to see how the course can benefit them. 

And while the value is always about perceived value, it’s your job to show it to them.

For example, having a fitness course, you should show how you got results with your unique method and how no one else is talking about this miracle technique that worked wonders for you.

If you are selling the same thing in another form, how can you leverage your results and show that your course is better, even if teaching the same thing as your competitors?

Results, authority, trust. Critical components on building your USP. 

Manipulation

In marketing, it’s either about manipulation or inspiration. Either you manipulate a sale for yourself, or you inspire the person to buy from you.

If you are able to pull off both techniques at the same time, good for you!

Manipulation is about “tricking” people to buy your online course, creating a false feeling of urgency, scarcity, reciprocity, even fear of missing out.

Next, I’m going to list manipulation techniques that you can use or not use. I do want to say that use at your own discretion and use them to do good as they are very powerful techniques. 

Scarcity

Scarcity is about limitation, limited availability, or limited quantity. When we talk about courses, scarcity can be created by having an open and closed cart time period.

Scarcity creates the feeling of something being scarce and hard to acquire or get. This creates a feeling of value because your course is hard to get, so it must be valuable.

You can create this with limited time availability and, as mentioned before, having a period when your course is open for the public, after which you will close it for a few months, for example.

When something is seen as a limited edition, there’s a feeling of missing out, not experiencing something, not being part of something great.

Innovation

You are presenting something new and innovative. Something that is never seen before, and you bring this message forward on your sales page. Innovation creates perceived value and is about giving the customer the feeling of new and being at the forefront of knowledge.

Fear

Fear of missing out or fear of losing. Very much related to scarcity where you are making something hard to get. Fear is something that is ignited by these kinds of events, and when it hits, a sale is made.

Price

Price is one of the oldest methods of manipulating a purchase. Being the cheapest, having the biggest discount, being the most expensive. It’s not always about being the cheapest. You can also be a luxury option. Even with online courses, there are those who pay the big bucks, and there are those who don’t see knowledge as an investment.

Without going too in-depth with pricing (there’s more later in the article), let’s just say that if you are the cheapest, you are also the least valued. 

Because your course is the one that anyone can purchase, but having more premium pricing, you are one that only a few can afford, and thus, your knowledge is more valuable.

Remember, it’s all about perceived value!

Aspiration

Motivation, encouragement, short-term gratification. Aspiration is about creating these good feelings, future visions, and establishing courage to make the leap of faith. Making the customer trust you and see the vision you have for her. 

It’s nothing but words, images, visions, but they all paint a picture in the minds of the customer, and that picture can be made into reality with your course. 

Aspiration is about visions, letting the customer see herself in your position, or having something that is just one course away.

Urgency

Only one spot left! Only 3 days left! You are creating a sense of urgency when something is available only for a short period of time. Kind of the same as scarcity, but the urgency is more about timing. 

You’ve probably seen these countdown timers or these clocks that display how many days, hours, or minutes an offer is available. Every offer that shows you something like 30 minutes and so on is more than likely a fake offer and a way to manipulate you to buy the product.

Sometimes an offer is actually for real, and the offer actually expires after a certain amount of time. However, I’ve seen it being misused too many times that I don’t really see them effective anymore. Annoying more than anything and slightly cheap method of creating urgency, in my opinion.

Reciprocal

I’m not even going to try and pronounce that word, but it means giving something valuable in exchange for trust. Funnels are all about this. At the start of a funnel, you see this nurturing sequence where you are bombarded with free valuable information.

You might even get free resources and whatnot. It’s all about creating trust between you and the seller. When you’ve given a lot of free and super valuable information and insights, you start to feel indebted to the person, and this way, you are “tricked” into buying a product from them.

Now, I do have to say this is probably one of the best ways to sell, as it’s not so much about manipulation. There are honest people who want to help, and if you do this right in your funnel, selling your product is a good thing.

After all, your online course is about helping people, and if you need to educate your customers first, that’s only a good thing and actually even a preferred thing to do.

Promotions

-30% OFF! Discounts, Black Friday sales, flash sales, etc. are all promotions in which you are offering your course at a discount for a certain period of time. Inside a funnel, this is a very effective way to get those course sales. 

Peer pressure

Have you seen a famous person or a celebrity promoting a product? Who wouldn’t have seen it! Right!

It’s about peer pressure, giving the customer the feeling of if that person uses this product, then it must be good. A celebrity can, in some ways, lift the value of a product just by being next to it. The celebrity is seen as someone who is admired, other words valued. 

So having value next to a product attaches value to the product. Weird but effective. It’s like you are using the same product as someone with a “higher status” than you.

With online courses, if you can get a quote about the course from an online influencer, it might just improve your sales.

Inspiration

Above was all the ways you can use manipulation to “trick” those sales to you. Next, I’ll show you what inspiration in marketing means and how to do it.

Inspiration is a very different story and something that isn’t easy to pull off. That might also be the reason why you don’t see this technique used too often.

It even feels like it’s only for the big players — those with big and established brands like Nike and Apple. However, we can apply these principles to online course sales too.

As you can see from the pictures above, they are not selling you a product. They are selling you a way of life. 

While you might be thinking about how do you apply this to online courses. Easy. You talk from the perspective of change. You don’t talk about how this or that is only available until this week’s Sunday.

You start the conversation by showing them the improved lives they will have after taking your course. You will inspire them to take action, without some manipulation tactics thrown in there.

People don’t buy online courses for information. They don’t buy the knowledge. They buy transformation, a new beginning, a change to their current situation.

They want to achieve the next level in life, and your course can enable them to do that. Now, if you are thinking, how can your course create such a situation? 

Think about a Microsoft Excel course, for example. A person is not buying a course on excel. The person is buying the course so she can achieve maybe a better position inside her company. 

It’s never about the course, never about the features, but always about the endgame. 

It’s about the change you can create, and the results you promise with your course.

Inspire!

Sales Funnels

The audience selected, marketing tactics in place, it’s time to get familiar with funnels. 

At the beginning of a funnel, you have the market, your audience, in other words. Your audience is, however, cold, meaning that they don’t know you, like you, and they certainly don’t trust you.

So we need a funnel to create that trust, connection, and likeability towards your online course.

We are, in other words, warming the audience for purchase. One of the biggest companies offering funnels, funnel training, tools, and resources is ClickFunnels.

I’ve taken courses such as One Funnel Away Challenge and can recommend that course for anyone interested in building funnels.

Related: One Funnel Away Review

But to get your funnel truly working, you need a few services in place or one service. ClickFunnels, as mentioned before, offers you a wide variety of tools and resources to get your funnel on gears.

What I like to use is WordPress, Elementor Pro, and ConvertKit. And you can check my resources page for the latest recommendations for online course business and passive income tools.

Related: ConvertKit Review

Without going too in-depth into how to use those services together, or how ClickFunnels work, I’ll continue on the part of how you need to build your funnel.

Lead magnets

Every funnel starts with the audience. Your audience has desires, dreams, hopes, and fears. So your job is to tap into those emotions and bring a solution to their struggle with your online course.

Lead magnets are a quick solution to a struggle your audience is having. It’s a freebie that you give in exchange for an email address.

Email address is then used inside the funnel to nurture, educate, and promote your course.

If you’ve seen these “freebies” that pop-up when you visit a website, that is the front end of the funnel. It always starts with the same “get this; give that.” That being your email address. Online businesses love to build that email list. It’s an asset, in the end, so yeah, it makes sense.

Lead magnets you can create:

• Tools & resources guide
• Checklists
• Small workbooks
• Templates
• Tips & tricks PDF
• Insights PDF
• Case study
• Report
• Secrets PDF
• Compilation of articles
• Coupon
• Free mini-course
• Course module from your online course
• Webinar
• Audio clip
• Cheatsheets
• Quick-start guides
• Email mini-course
• Quiz or a survey

As you can see, the list is pretty long, and these are only some that I’ve encountered so far. The general idea is that the lead magnet should be something that can be consumed in around 5 minutes or less. 

However, webinars and free mini-courses can and should be a bit lengthier. 

The whole goal of lead magnets is to capture the audience and nurture them for sale. Remember, you need to know your audience pretty well, to be able to create the desired lead magnet.

The best lead magnets evoke curiosity, are simple and easy to catch. Meaning that they are easy to get and understand. Your leads are always looking for something, and if you know their biggest desire, create a lead magnet that solves their struggle and present it to them.

For a few reasons, I think lead magnets are getting saturated and feel like the effect they are creating is less and less. For a few years, lead magnets provided insane value, and nowadays, people are more aware of the agenda behind them. So giving that coveted email address isn’t so preferred anymore, so there’s a resistance coming up.

Facebook ads are more than anything, lead capturing, getting leads that turn into customers for your business (inside a funnel). But when everyone is doing the same thing, it comes saturated and less effective. But then again, this is the beauty of marketing. It’s ever-evolving. Funny enough, the principles are not.

When you are creating lead magnets, remember that the magnet should not be a total cure for desires. It should not be like “offer the option A and then sell option A+.” You need to sell option B. If that makes sense?

When a person has received, let’s say a mini-course on how to use Photoshop, and then you go and sell advanced Photoshop training. The person might feel like they already know enough of Photoshop. However, when you teach how to make money with Photoshop skills, the game changes.

A lead magnet is all about pre-framing a lead to understand the importance of your online course. The better the framing, the easier the sale.

When you end your lead magnet with a CTA (call-to-action), you are guiding your new lead to the next thing. And the next thing can be more training, giving more value, or presenting your online course for purchase.

Email marketing funnel

After a lead magnet is done and active, you need to guide your leads inside your funnel to an online course.

And it all starts with the email address you got earlier, by giving them your valuable freebie, you got an email address in exchange. Now, you will start your email nurturing sequence. 

This isn’t something new and flashy, this is being done, by almost every digital marketer and online business out there, and if you are not already doing, it’s about time you do.

As I mentioned previously, you need different services to build this and one good option is to use ClickFunnels, to build all of this. I use WordPress, Elementor Pro, and ConvertKit together to accomplish what you can accomplish by just using ClickFunnels. But it’s up to you what you use.

The “usual” email marketing funnel

What is being taught and what is being used is a 7-8 step email funnel.

The sequence is as follow:

• Day 1. Introduction/ sending the freebie via email
• Day 2. Your backstory, why you matter, why should they listen
• Day 3. Value email, giving something valuable
• Day 4. Value email can be a video series, freebies, insights
• Break
• Day 6. Course pitch, building anticipation for tomorrow
• Day 7. Objection handling email
• Day 8. (morning) Online course offer
• Day 8. (afternoon) Frequently asked questions email
• Day 8. (evening) Online course offer, last call

The list you see above is an email funnel. That funnel is nothing special and is pretty much a basic form of an email funnel. The main goal of an email funnel is to build likeability and trust. 

You need to build that trust to sell your online course, and email is a fantastic way to do it. Effective?! Debatable.

The thing with emails is that they might not get opened, which creates the need for volume. With enough traffic, you can slowly see how your funnel works and what parts in it do not.

With modern email service providers like ConvertKit, you can A/B test different headlines and see what emails get opened and what goes past unnoticed.

Related: ConvertKit Review

With email marketing, it’s all about testing. Testing headlines, copy, images, offers, sequence, breaks, etc. Slowly but steadily, you will see your conversion percentages, and with math in your mind, you can start to pour in ad money and scale your business to new heights.

However, as cool and fantastic as it sounds, scaling, and building the funnel is not easy. While we can build funnels, creating a working funnel is another thing. It requires resources, and if you don’t have the money, you have to do it with time.

Organic traffic comes with time, but if you don’t have that. Then you probably have money, so you can go and try ads if they could bring you the results you are looking for.

Educating vs. selling inside a funnel

While we are still in the funnel side of things. It’s important to notice that there’s no one single way that is effective or that creates better results than another.

Your audience is always unique, and the way they speak and act online is unique. So when you are creating your funnel, you can either go directly to selling, or you can educate them before the sales pitch, or you can entertain. It’s up to you how you approach your future students.

When you are attracting people to join your world, you might go the education route. Educating them on why they need your services, why they need you, and your course.

99.9% of the people that meet YOU online do not know you, like you, or trust you. So educating them and giving them value inside your funnel is crucial.

Make them comfy and earn their trust. But don’t demolish that trust after the sale!

Online Course Sales

When you know who is your audience, you know how to create a lead magnet to attract them to you, and you have your email sequence ready. It’s time to make the final step ready and create a sales page and those sorts of things.

Making a sale is never about pricing. I’m not even going that route of pricing your course at $40,000 and saying it’s not about pricing. Price matters, but not that much. We keep it at $3,997 and below for now.

$3,997 is already a premium-priced course, but it doesn’t mean you can’t price your course that high. It’s all about who you are, what you can offer, what results can you promise, what value do you provide, etc.

Remember, it’s about perceived value. For some, learning a new skill, like being better at dates, is necessary, and thus they are willing to pay high dollars on learning such skill. For some, learning such a skill is not worth anything.

So making course sales is always about the selected audience and their needs, not everyone’s needs.

Next, we will go through what you need to have in place to make those course sales. And even though you have these in place, you still need to tweak the offer, copy, images, etc. to make everything work together seamlessly.

Online course hosting

For you to be able to sell your online course, you need to make sure you have a place where you host the course.

You can either host your course on your own website or on a stand-alone platform like Thinkific or Teachable.

Related: The Best Online Course Hosting Platforms

In the above article, I have laid out the best online course hosting platforms for different use scenarios.

What’s important to know is that different platforms offer different features, integrations, payment plans, etc. 

So make sure you read the article so you can decide which platform suits your needs the best.

You can read my current recommendation from my resources page.

Sales page structure

As you already know, there’s a sequence to things and why it’s important not to go after the sale right away. The same thing applies to your sales page. When a person lands to your sales page, it’s a good habit to establish a connection with the buyer.

Do you like to be sold at? Probably not. 

So you need to build a sequence to your sales page. First, presenting your students what your course is all about — a strong headline, accompanied by a strong sub-headline.

Make sure to be clear, consistent, and also tapping into the struggle they have.

You can check an example here.

That is my online course, and I’ve implemented a lot of strategies into it. There’s transformation phase, backstory, creating connection through similar emotions, showing features from the perspective of needs.

Establish a connection, tap into desires, be on their side, share the struggle, and show how you conquered the struggle.

It’s important to show that you’ve gone through what they are struggling with. People want to learn from someone who has experienced what they are currently experiencing.

It’s about giving them a vehicle to get from their current situation to their desired situation. They have desires, and your course is a way to give them what they want.

Now, here’s the hardest part. No one can teach you how to write good copy, and the reason is that you have your audience, and inside that audience is a certain language and culture. 

Great copywriting comes from within you and understanding your audience’s needs. You also need to know how humans behave and how people make buying decisions.

Related: Who buys online courses?

The signs on your sales page

When a potential customer comes to your sales page, the more you have going on in it, the more likely the prospect is going to bounce off and continue elsewhere.

So keep your sales page pretty, simple, to the point and avoid using red color in it as it can create a feeling of danger within the prospect.

When the sales page is inviting and not full of clutter, it’s easy to navigate, and the prospect knows exactly what he/she is getting, then you’ve done a great job with it.

You might feel at this point that it’s so hard to sell anything, and there are so many things that have to be considered. While that is true, I would say that take your time and build your sales funnels, pages, and sequences step-by-step, and little-by-little. 

There’s too much to get right at the first go, so it’s better to do it slowly and improve over time.

Offer creation

You are not selling an online course. You are selling an offer. That is one of those things I learned in One Funnel Away Challenge.

Related: One Funnel Away Challenge Review

While you might be thinking that you are selling an online course, you should think of it from another perspective. Essentially you are selling a course BUT also so much more, and that is shown as an offer.

Offer is your course, bonuses, features, benefits. It’s everything you can cram into the one price you are giving your students to.

It’s all about making your offer sexy, irresistible, must-have, no-brainer, something that is dumb to leave to the table.

While you can see from the picture above, there’s a bunch of things listed in there, and if the listed things are more valuable than the price I’m asking, then there’s a sale. 

Now, you might be thinking, what if you lower the price, wouldn’t people then buy more likely?

The answer is no. Sometimes the pricing can backfire you and cause more damage than success.

And next, we will discuss the pricing.

Pricing

Price is a signal. Signal of something being either cheap or expensive, but only in the mind of the individual. You see, a $297 course can be expensive, or it can be a bargain. It’s always about the person who you are attracting.

Buying a $297 course today would be a bargain for me, and it’s because I’ve paid more than $1,500 for a course already — the viewpoint changes by the experiences you’ve had in your life.

The same applies to your audience, how aware are they about online courses, online education, and the benefits it can give them?

I’ve seen multiple times in Facebook groups where people can’t decide what price to give their courses. Should it be priced at $497, or is $697 too much? 

It doesn’t matter!

If you can’t get your course sold at the price you’ve given to it, rather than thinking about the price, think what more can you offer. Pricing your course too low will give the idea of you not valuing your course and knowledge.

Here are an example and the pricing mechanism behind it:

Now I’m not telling you to price your course at $97 (which is the lowest price you can set to a course). And I’m not even saying that this is the price I will keep my course at. It can go up, and it can go down.

However, the reason I priced my course at $97 is that artists, in general, are not too wealthy and because YouTube is filled with videos showcasing line art techniques. So there’s a lot of free supply already.

However, I do know that the information is pretty fractured, and getting a full picture of how to do professional line art is a challenge. So I’ve priced it at $97, and it feels like the correct price for such a course. 

There are few cardinal rules in selling. Are your audience willing to buy, and are they able to buy?

If for both of these questions, the answer is yes, then the selling just got easier. In my case, are they able to buy, that is a bit 50/50 situation right there, as said before artists aren’t the wealthiest of people?

So price your course according to your audience and the value you provide with your course. It does not hurt to check your competition, too, though I see this as a novice advise.

Testimonials

Why do you buy online courses? Why people buy anything these days? Results!

People want results, and the more results you can show them, the better. When people see that there are other people who got results by using your course, they are more likely to buy the course.

Testimonials are social proof, and social proof shows that your material works. This is what most course creators fail to do. Show proof!

It’s tempting to go and create your course, but creating a course without first testing your material and seeing if people get results, will only lead to bad results (for you).

Related: How to create an online course

If you don’t have testimonials, show your own results, and when you get customers, ask for testimonials. Ask if you could show others how they got results with your course.

And whenever you get better and better testimonials, you can either replace the old testimonials with new ones or stack the testimonials together, creating a catalog of customer success results.

Selling an online course, or any other product is part art and part science. Science is all about knowing how and why people buy. Art is the copywriting part, how to start a conversation with your future student.

Selling online courses is always shown to be easy and something that anyone can do it. When the reality is that, you have to have a lot of knowledge and experience before you can do it effectively. 

Luckily if you read all that was discussed and showcased in this article, you know more than a lot of people. You are already ahead of the pack by a long shot.

Summary

• Know your audience
• Build a funnel
• Create a nurturing sequence with emails
• Craft a sales page with a sequence in mind
• Gather and add testimonials to finalize your sales message