How to sell online courses: a practical guide for independent teachers

Advice on how to sell online courses tends to start with the camera, the microphone and the editing software. That is the wrong end. A course that nobody asked for is still unsold after you have recorded it in perfect light, and the weeks spent recording are weeks you cannot get back.

This guide runs in the opposite direction. You find out whether people will pay first, you teach it to a handful of them second, and you build the polished version third, from what you learned in the room. It is written for an independent teacher or tutor who already knows a subject well and has little or no audience. Every number in it is either arithmetic shown in full or an illustration, and it is labelled as such.

Selling a course is not one skill. It is six small jobs, and a course that has stalled is often stuck on just one of them. Naming them makes it easier to see which one is yours.

A topic people find interesting and a topic people pay for are different things. People pay to reach a result by a date: pass an exam, get a job, hold a conversation on a trip, stop being embarrassed in meetings. The more specific the result and the nearer the date, the easier the sale.

Take Maya Bisht, who has tutored high-school math for years. "Learn calculus" is a subject. "Be ready for the AP Calculus AB exam in ten weeks, starting from a B in pre-calculus" is an offer. The second version tells a parent who it is for, what changes, and by when. It also tells Maya what to leave out, which is most of the work of designing a course.

Before you commit to a topic, run it through four tests. You do not need all four to be perfect. You do need to be honest about which ones are weak.

• The result test. Can you finish the sentence "after this course you will be able to..." with something a student could demonstrate? If the ending is "understand" or "appreciate", keep narrowing.
• The spending test. Are people already paying for this result in some other form: private tutoring, books, test prep, a local class? Existing spending is the strongest sign that a new option can sell.
• The reach test. Can you name where twenty of these people already gather, online or in person? A group, a forum, a school community, a workplace. If you cannot find twenty, you cannot find two hundred.
• The evidence test. Have you already taken someone from the starting point to the result? One student you can describe truthfully is worth more than any credential on the page.

Then talk to ten people who have the problem. Not to pitch, only to listen. Ask what they have already tried, what it cost, and what went wrong. Write down their exact words. Those words become your sales page later, and they are better than anything you would write yourself.

Interest is cheap. People will tell you a course sounds great, join a waitlist and then not buy. The only reliable test is asking for money, so the first thing you sell should be a small live pilot, offered before the course exists.

A pilot is a short run of live sessions with a fixed start date and a small number of seats. Lucas Martin, who teaches conversational French, might offer eight seats in a six-week evening class for people traveling next summer, at $150 a seat. If all eight sell, that is 8 x $150 = $1,200 before he has recorded a minute of video. More useful than the money is what it proves: eight strangers or near-strangers wanted the result enough to pay.

1. Write a one-page description: who it is for, the result, the dates, the price, and the number of seats.
2. Set a real deadline and a real seat limit. Keep both. A limit you extend teaches buyers to wait.
3. Send it directly to the people you spoke to in step 1 and to the places they gather. Personal messages beat announcements at this size.
4. Take payment up front. A pilot that is free, or paid later, does not test what you need to know.
5. Decide in advance what counts as a pass. For example: five paid seats by the deadline.

Tell pilot students plainly that they are the first group, that the course is being shaped around them, and that the price reflects that. Most people like being first when they are told the truth about it. They also give far better feedback than a later student who thinks the course is finished.

By the end of the pilot you have three things no amount of planning could have produced: recordings of yourself teaching the material to real students, a list of every question they asked, and a clear view of where they got stuck. The course is built from those.

Start from the result and work backward. Write the final thing a student should be able to do, then the four to eight milestones on the way to it. Each milestone is a module. Inside a module, each lesson teaches one idea and ends with something the student does: a problem, a short recording, a piece of writing. Keep lessons short enough to finish in one sitting. A long lesson that is abandoned halfway teaches less than two short ones that are completed.

• Reuse the pilot recordings where they are clear, and re-record only the parts that wandered.
• Turn every question the pilot group asked more than once into a lesson, a worked example or a line in the FAQ.
• Add a short quiz at the end of each module so a student can tell whether they are ready to move on. There is more on this in quiz and assessment best practices.
• Decide what proof of completion a student gets. For exam prep it may be a score; for professional skills a certificate can matter to an employer.
• Leave out anything the pilot group did not need. A shorter course that gets people to the result is the better product.

On equipment: a recent phone or laptop camera, a quiet room and a microphone close to your mouth are enough for a first course. Students forgive plain video. They do not forgive audio they cannot follow, or a lesson that never gets to the point.

A sales page has one job: let a stranger decide in a few minutes whether this is for them. It does not need animation, countdown clocks or a long story. It needs to answer the questions a careful buyer would ask, in the order they ask them.

Two rules keep the page honest. Use only things real students said, with their permission, and never write a testimonial yourself. And promise the result you saw in the pilot, not the best case you can imagine. A course sold on an inflated promise produces refunds and a reputation, in that order.

Put the page on an address you control. A page on your own website or your own domain is something you keep if you ever change tools; our guide to a custom domain for your course website covers why and how.

Pricing deserves its own article, so this is only the outline. Price follows the value of the result and the amount of your time the student gets, not the number of video hours. Three questions give you a starting figure.

1. What is the result worth to the student? An exam pass, a certification or a job skill supports a higher price than general interest.
2. What are they paying for the alternative? If private tutoring toward the same result costs $60 an hour and takes twenty hours, the comparison in the buyer's head is 20 x $60 = $1,200.
3. How much of you is included? Recorded lessons alone sit at the low end. Live sessions, feedback on work and direct access to you sit higher, because your hours are the scarce part.

A common shape is two or three versions of the same course at different levels of access: the recorded course alone, the course with a live cohort, and the course with one-to-one sessions. The figures in the table below are an illustration of the shape, not market data. Yours will depend on the subject and the result.

For anything above a couple of hundred dollars, offer a payment plan. A $600 course split into three payments is 3 x $200. The price is unchanged, but the first step is a third of the size, and more people can take it. Resist discounting early. A discount is easy to give and very hard to take back, and your pilot students already told you what the full price is worth.

There are three ways money can travel from a student to you, and the difference matters more than it looks on a pricing page.

• A marketplace collects it. The marketplace is the seller, sets many of the rules, keeps a share and pays you later. The student is its customer first.
• A platform collects it and pays you out. The platform takes the payment, holds a balance and sends it to you on its own schedule, usually after its cut.
• Your own payment account collects it. You open an account with a payment processor in your own name. The student pays you, the processor deducts its fee, and the rest goes to your bank on the processor's normal schedule.

The third route takes a little more setup, because the processor has to verify who you are before it will move money for you. Start that early; it can take a few days, and it is the one step you cannot rush on launch day. In return you get the things that are hard to recover later: the money is never held by a middleman, the payment records are yours, and so is the list of people who bought.

The arithmetic is worth doing once. Twenty sales of a $200 course is 20 x $200 = $4,000. On a platform that takes 5% of each sale (an illustrative rate, not any named company's), that is $200 gone before the processor's own fee. At 10% it is $400. Our companion piece, course platform fees explained, walks through all three layers of cost at different sales volumes.

This is how Prolaud is set up. You connect your own Stripe account, which charges in US dollars by card, or your own Razorpay account. Students pay you directly, Prolaud takes 0% of the sale, and you pay only your payment processor's standard fee. Connecting Stripe means pasting your account's keys into your dashboard, so allow a few minutes for it. Payment plans are supported too, with later installments collected automatically; see payment plans.

How you deliver the course decides how much of your time each sale costs, and so how many students you can take. There are three formats, and most teaching businesses end up using more than one.

Self-paced is the format that scales, and also the one with the weakest pull on a student's attention. If you sell it, build the pull in: short lessons, a quiz per module, a visible progress bar and a reason to come back each week. Our guide to self-paced course best practices goes into this.

A cohort is the opposite trade. Sarah Mitchell, who teaches academic writing, can take twenty students through an eight-week cohort with one live class a week. The dates and the group do the work that willpower does in a self-paced course. She cannot run it for two thousand people, but she can charge more for it, and each cohort produces recordings that improve the self-paced version. There is a fuller comparison in cohort-based learning, explained.

Whatever the format, check the practical details before the first paying student arrives: the purchase gives access without you doing anything by hand, the student knows where to go and when, live sessions are recorded for anyone who misses one, and there is one obvious place to ask a question.

Ninety days is enough to go from an idea to a course that a stranger can buy, if you keep the order. It is not enough to build a large audience or a full catalog, and trying to do those at the same time is the usual reason the plan slips.

1. Days 1 to 14: pick the topic. Run the four tests, hold ten conversations, and write the result in one sentence. Open your payment processor account now so verification is finished before you need it.
2. Days 15 to 30: sell the pilot. Publish the one-page offer with a date, a seat limit and a price. Contact people one at a time. Stop when you reach your pass mark or the deadline, whichever comes first.
3. Days 31 to 60: teach it live. Run the sessions, record all of them, and keep a running list of questions and sticking points. Ask each student what nearly stopped them from buying.
4. Days 61 to 75: package it. Edit the recordings into modules, add quizzes, write the sales page from your notes, and ask pilot students whether you may quote them.
5. Days 76 to 90: reopen. Make a test purchase yourself, from payment to first lesson. Then open a second enrollment to people beyond your first circle and watch where they hesitate.

At day 90 you should have one taught pilot, one packaged course, a sales page with real words from real students, and a short list of things to fix. That is a small business that works, which is a better place to grow from than a large plan that has not sold anything. When you are ready to widen the circle, how to get your first 100 students picks up from here.

Four numbers tell you where the next hour of work should go. None of them needs special software; a notebook is fine at this size.

• Visitors to buyers. Divide purchases by visits to the sales page. If 400 people visit and 8 buy, that is 8 / 400 = 2%. The figure is an example of the sum, not a target. What matters is whether your own number moves when you change the page.
• Started to finished. Of the students who began, how many reached the last module? A low figure usually points at one lesson where people stop.
• Refunds and the reasons. Every refund request is a sentence of free advice about the gap between your promise and the course.
• Where buyers came from. Ask each one. The answer tells you which of your efforts to repeat and which to drop.

• Recording before selling. The most expensive mistake, because it spends the most time before the first piece of evidence.
• A topic instead of a result. "Photography" is a shelf in a library. "Shoot your first paid portrait session" is something a person buys.
• Waiting for an audience. You need ten conversations to start, not ten thousand followers.
• Too many tools. A video tool, a payment link, a spreadsheet and an email list each work alone. Keeping them in agreement becomes a job of its own; classroom and checkout in one system measures that cost.
• Setting the price by guessing low. A low price does not remove the buyer's real question, which is whether the course will work for them.
• Leaving payment setup to launch week. Account verification runs on the processor's schedule, not yours.

• Course platform fees explained: subscriptions, transaction fees and payment processing
• How to get your first 100 students without a big audience
• Self-paced online courses: best practices that actually work
• Cohort-based learning, explained, and when it beats self-paced
• What it costs to run your classroom and your checkout as two systems