Earlier we talked about how you can make money selling your own courses online, while this gives many people an opportunity to make a full-time income online, but it may not be so straightforward for people who do not want to teach online at the moment. Thus, I would like to share another business model that you can consider.
Instead of selling your own courses online, you can sell other people’s courses online for profits!
Yes, this means you do not need to create your own courses, you just need to know where to find white-label courses and sell them online.
I will cover the essentials in this blog post so you can get started after reading this.
Before we start, let’s go over what are the pros and cons when we sell other people’s courses online.
Advantage of selling other people’s courses
- Faster implementation speed – You can start making money faster when you sell other people’s courses because you do not need to take additional time to plan, record then post-edit your videos and package them into an online course. Also, when you sell your own courses on popular platforms like Udemy, it also takes time for the platform to review and approve your courses before the course is available to the public.
- A great way to test out the market – Selling other people’s courses is a fantastic way to test the market as well. Some people test the market by selling a basic course and when there’s demand after that, they follow up with their own courses for higher profits! On the other hand, if the response for the first course is not good, then it had actually helped to save you time to create your own courses in the first place!
- Learn how other people are creating courses – If you start by selling other people’s courses, you can also gain experience by looking at and learning how others structure the course and learn how you can package your own courses in the future!
The disadvantages of selling other people’s courses online
- No support for learners – Unless you are also well-versed in the course topic, else, it will be very difficult for you to support the learners in terms of the domain knowledge. To minimize this impact, I would suggest you can sell courses that you have some knowledge in so that you can still support the learners if they have questions along the way. It would be very expensive if you get the original course creator to help answer your learners’ questions, hence, I suggest either you answer the learners’ questions or you do not provide support at all. Just a note, if you decide not to answer any course-related questions, make sure you indicate this on the course sales page to manage the learners’ expectations.
- You will not be the only one selling the course – Very high chance that you are not the only person selling the course if it is not created by you. Thus, this is also one of the disadvantages because what sets you apart from others who are also selling the same course? This point is worth thinking about. Some people differentiate by course price (which I don’t suggest), some differentiate by support, others may offer you more bonuses.
- Not knowing where to start – Selling other people’s courses can seem to be daunting if you do not have any experience on how to do it. It can be confusing and overwhelming if you do not know what’s the process and how to approach course creators. But worry not, I have come up with a simple guide you can follow, and continue to read on.
Step by step guide to selling other people’s courses online
- Find a white-label course to sell
- Research and make sure there’s demand!
- Setup the online course platform and payment gateway!
- Market it!
1. Finding online courses to sell
Most people find it very difficult to find online courses to sell because they do not know of any existing course Instructors to approach. My suggestion is to go to IDPLR.com to find online courses that you can sell. Some course owners put up their courses there for you to resell. So you will have an easier time finding a suitable online course to sell over at IDPLR.com.
For example, once you sign up for membership over at IDPLR.com, you can sell the following online course ‘How To Start a Freelance Business Video‘ for any price you want!
A snapshot of the first 5 videos in the course.
The following are some of the online courses available for you to sell too:
- The Winning Mindset Formula.
- Free Facebook Traffic Strategies.
- Social Media Marketing Made Easy.
- Healthy Habits.
- The Morning Ritual.
- Here’s the link to all online courses that you can sell.
You can price the online course anywhere from US$29 to US$99 depending on your marketing strategy.
The lifetime membership for IDPLR.com is only US$79 one-time. This means you only need to pay this fee one time and you can get to download all the future and existing online courses and eBooks to sell on your own platform or website! To me, this is a very worthwhile investment!
You can click here to check out their 12,000+ digital products to sell!
2. Research and make sure there’s demand!
One of the best places to conduct research is Udemy.com, the reason because most people go to Udemy to sign up for online courses. At the time of writing this post, Udemy has a community of 40 Million online learners!
Let’s take an example that you are keen to sell the course ‘Speak with confidence‘, you can do a search on Udemy and see if people are signing up for such courses.
The following are the results on Udemy when I search for speak confidence:
A list of courses when you search ‘speak confidence’ on Udemy
Clicking on the bestselling course, I can see that it has more than 90,000 online learners enrolled! Talking about a strong demand!
In this example, you can see clearly that there are a lot of people online looking to learn how to speak confidently.
Some people asked me why don’t I use Youtube for research. My answer is because youtube tends to have pretty good demand in all kinds of niches but it does not mean people are willing to pay. People who go to Youtube and watch videos do not have the intent to pay for what they are going to learn. But Udemy is entirely different, most courses on Udemy are paid courses so it is much more accurate if you based your research using Udemy instead of YouTube.
Once you find out that the course you are going to sell is in demand, the next thing you need to do is to set up a sales page and collect registrations!
3. Setup online payment gateway and sales page
I am going to share with you an easy way to set up a payment gateway and sales page. That is, using PayHip!
Payhip (payhip.com) is an online service that anyone can join and create a sales page to sell digital products. Many people have been using payhip to sell ebooks, membership and recently payhip just announced that now you can sell online courses via their platform too!
The reason why I suggest using payhip is that if you were to create your own website, it takes some level of skills in the web design, video hosting, payment gateway, and course learning system design. By the time you learn all these, it could be some months or even years down the road…
So in short, just use payhip!
To start, you can just sign up for a free account over at Payhip.
Enter your email over at payhip.com to get started!
You may wonder how much it costs to use payhip. If you are a free user, payhip only charges a 5% transaction fee! So which means without the costs of creating a website, you just need to pay $5 out of every $100 of sales to payhip – this is truly time and cost-saving! If in the future, your total transactions fee exceeds $100 per month, then you may consider payhip’s PRO plan which cost $99 per month without any transaction fee. This is what I like about payhip as it helps you to scale your online business too!
Payhip charges only 5% transaction fee if you are a free user!
You can continue to refer to payhip’s documentation here for a step-by-step on how to list an online course using their dashboard!
Just to add, in payhip, you can also enable the drip content feature too! This feature is useful when you want the learners to only access certain future lessons after some period. You can use this feature even if you are under their free plan!
4. Get sales for the online course!
Once you have set up the sales page to sell the online course, the next important task is to start marketing the online course for sales!
One of the best (and free) ways is to upload a few sample lessons to Youtube to attract some eyeballs to your online course sales page. Youtube has tons of searches and you will definitely get some views directing from youtube to your sales page using this method.
Leveraging youtube is a good way to start but often not enough to get a good amount of sales to your sales page.
In order to get consistent sales to the online course, you will need to invest in some advertising channels like Microsoft Ads or Facebook advertising. The reason I suggest Microsoft ads is because it is more affordable than Google ads and also facebook advertising in most niches. You can learn how to start using Microsoft ads on this tutorial page.
As for Facebook ads, you can join the official facebook ads training here.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Advertising will take some time and budget to see results. Thus, you need to be patient to learn and gain experience. Do not expect to see sales once you start advertising, there’s more to learn after that!
I hope you find this blog post useful and if you have any questions, just post your questions in the comment box below and I will help to answer. Good luck and all the best!
