If you're thinking of starting an online course business, now might be the best time to take action!

Not only are people shopping without leaving home and companies are hosting online meetings, but the education and personal development industry has also changed dramatically.

Not only formal education but also personal development training has begun to be online.

The latest data shows that the online education market will more than double over the next few years, almost $350 billion by 2025 . Increasing demand comes from both individuals and companies looking for online courses.

Why Should You Enter the Online Course Business?

Since people now travel and move less, they inevitably have to meet their learning needs digitally. In addition, online courses do not overload the person with information; on the contrary, absorbing the information as you have time and learning by watching it over and over again becomes a very effective way of learning.

For this reason, we can say that online courses will always continue to develop today and in the future.

If you have expertise in a certain field, it must be time to turn this talent into value and, most importantly, into money. While you earn income by selling your skills you have acquired in any field to people through an online course, having people benefit from your skills is actually a good example of a win-win scenario.

Planning Your Online Course Business

Every business starts with a plan. As you get started, you can make plans to develop this business by creating other courses in the future, or you can consider it as a one-time project.

We recommend that you open and read the following headings in a separate tab to create your business plan.

Creating a Perfect Business Plan in 10 Steps

Managing a Million Dollar Business with Excel

On which platform will you sell your course?

When you reach this stage, you have two options:

1. Using packaged platforms such as Udemy or Teachable
2. Sell ​​your online courses from your own site

You may initially consider platforms such as Udemy or Teachable, but these platforms do not provide you with the flexibility and convenience of your own system. An unexpected discount made by your competitors may cause you to fall behind. Or different commission rates or monthly expenses applied by ready-made platforms may cause you additional costs in the future.

What if you choose to build your own platform?

If you want to sell your courses on your own platform (your own website), you will have no restrictions and you can act more easily. You can take your business to a different dimension by setting your own prices, customizing your landing pages for marketing purposes, and forming your own sales funnel.

Another advantage of creating your own platform is that you can build your own brand and take the business to the next level, generating more revenue through cross-selling.

How will you receive payment by credit card? Will it be necessary to form an llc?

It may be very logical to incorporate the online course business for tax purposes, to reassure people, and to be able to receive payments from credit cards more easily. You can form a tax-exempt company in the United States in order to create an infrastructure where you can receive payments when selling your online courses, as well as to create a corporate structure.

Which State is More Sensible and Affordable?

To form an LLC in the state of New Mexico, you only need to pay a $50 filing fee. Apart from this, there is no annual payment or any payment cycle requiring reporting.

Due to these advantages, the most advantageous state where you can form your online course or training company is New Mexico.

With the Usan company you will form, you do not have to only sell courses. If you wish, you can also use your company to do e-commerce, sell e-books, sell software or do any other online business.

To create an online company in Usa, you need to take the following steps;

1.  Start an LLC in New Mexico, USA
2. Get Your Free EIN Number
3. Open a Bank Account in Usa
4. Open a Verified Stripe Account

Compared to local companies, the cost of establishing an LLC company in the USA (when a suitable state is selected) is truly ridiculous. In the state of New Mexico, Northwest for a total of $89 (including company address).

When you complete these steps, you will be able to have an LLC company in Usa and, thanks to your LLC company, you will be able to run any online business you want in any category online from Turkey or any other geography.

You can sell your online courses not only to Turkey but to every region of the world. Regardless of whether it is an online course or a different online business, it will be in your interest to create your plan and form an Usan company as soon as possible to benefit from tax advantages. After forming your company and obtaining your tax number (EIN), you can do business online in any field you want.

Steps to Creating a Successful Online Course

Creating an online course from scratch can be a lot of fun, but we should not ignore that it also has some difficulties. Now that you understand the importance of creating and selling an online course, let's start covering the processes of how to do this.

Determine the Topic of the Online Course

First, you must decide what kind of business model you will form. Take a look at the following items and decide on the online course model;

• Selling courses by focusing on a single subject in which you have your own expertise
• Find instructors and form a mixed system with the experiences of others
• Creating a platform where anyone who wants can become an instructor and upload their courses

Here, the first option is both less risky and less costly for the beginning. Because when you consider the other two options, you should take into consideration the strength of your current competitors. (For example Udemy.com)

Once you have made your choice, the most important part is deciding what the course will be about. How will you choose your course category or topic?

1. Choose a subject that you love and are interested in: You need to choose an area that you are interested in and passionate about. Everyone definitely has an area of ​​interest and a field in which they specialize compared to others. A subject you love and are passionate about will give you an advantage when preparing and marketing your course. You cannot benefit people in a field that you know less about or are interested in, and as a result, you cannot earn income from this work. You should be in the field you know best.
2. Knowledge and skills: Although a field in which you are interested and passionate is of great importance, your skills in this field are more important so that you can turn it into a course and educate people. You do not need to be well-known and have a certain degree in this field, or have an academic background. You will just benefit from your experience and pave the way for someone who knows less about the subject than you. That's all.
3. Target Audience: If you have a target audience that you have already created in the field you are good at, you can turn this audience into a portfolio that you can quickly start selling after creating your course. For example, it may be an e-mail list or a Facebook group. If you have such an audience, you can get ideas from them and check their pulse before starting work.
4. Competition and profitability: There will definitely be a course that has already been created in the field you choose. If you are not alone in the world in your chosen field, competition is inevitable. When you consider the competitive side of the business, you should not be afraid to do some research. Knowing the skills of your competitors in the same field as yours, you should create your content accordingly and determine the pricing policy accordingly.

Determine the Name of Your Course

Once you have determined the course topic and category, you can now give your course a name. Do not waste too much time in this step and get bogged down in details. Of course, it would be logical to be careful to choose a name that is short, catchy and relevant to your course. At the same time, another important detail is to check that the domain name and social media accounts of the name you will give to your course are available and empty.

Clarify Your Target Audience

You focused on a topic, determined the category of your course and named it. The next thing to do is to determine who this course appeals to and to which target audience.

When determining the target audience, you need to understand well which problem you will solve. The bigger the problem you solve, the more profit your business will make. In fact, this principle applies to every business. You need to analyze well the people whose problems you will solve.

The better you know and analyze your target audience, this will save you extra time and money in the marketing phase. If you know well who you are addressing, it will be easier for you to market the product.

So how do you know if the target audience you plan to offer your course to is suitable for your product?

It's actually very simple, just ask them!

Don't try to make the process too complicated. You are creating a product, even if it is digital, and is this product really suitable for the target audience you think it is? Does it exactly match the persona you have in mind? The best way to verify this is to interact with them. It's important to do market validation before putting your course out there and starting advertising.

Take a Survey:

Make a short survey about your course and deliver this survey to your audience via e-mail if you have an existing e-mail list. Based on the survey results, you can analyze how inclined your audience is to this course.

Pre-advertise:

By publishing form ads on platforms such as Facebook or Google, you can give preliminary information to the target audience you have in mind about the product you will create. Based on the feedback you get here, you can understand whether the audience is suitable for this category and collect some feedback to improve the product.

Create Your Online Course

Once you've created a business plan, determined a category, and confirmed what your target audience wants, you can now start creating your course.

If you have chosen to sell your course on your own platform instead of Udemy, you should have already taken care of company setup and other details by this stage. You can now create an outline of how to compile the online course materials and the course structure.

You can plan a skeleton of titles, subheadings and course topics on paper and start shooting videos.

You should separate the course videos or screen sharing videos you shot into folders according to the skeleton you created. This way, you can avoid the confusion that may arise when uploading videos to your website or environments such as vimeo business.

Protect Your Content

If you host your course on your own website or platform, there is a high chance that your content will be stolen. You cannot prevent this for sure, but the content protection features in vimeo business accounts can protect your videos to some extent.

Platform Selection

After preparing your course content (video footage, assignments, additional resources, pdf documents and links, etc.), you must now choose which platform your course will be published on.

For this, you can use a platform such as Teachable (it is paid) or you can continue with WordPress. Since you know your capabilities yourself, it is up to you to choose whether to use paid or free platforms. However, if you want to form a system that is flexible and has full control, you can create a magnificent online course platform with WordPress + Woocommerce + Learndash trio.

Learndash plugin is an online course platform produced for WordPress. It can be used with Woocommerce and also integrates perfectly with payment gateways like Stripe and Paypal. It provides a lot of flexibility, such as one-time payments, different levels - packages or monthly subscriptions.

Since Learndash is a premium and paid plugin, its capabilities are quite high, but there are also free plugin options with simpler features.

After establishing a company in the USA and opening your Stripe account, you can easily take care of payment by credit card by creating a new sub-business within Stripe specifically for your online course. Also see: Stripe Multiple Accounts

Create your landing pages by setting up a WordPress-based landing page and a funnel system that includes marketing and product promotion pages. You can configure which pages you will direct your ads to with a simple funnel. I always recommend you to take advantage of the sales funnel when creating a successful online marketing strategy.

Marketing and Advertising

Now that all the preparations are complete, it's time to set a release date for your course to go live. Get people curious about your offer and set a release date for your course. This period is generally a 5-7 day process that will create a feeling of urgency.

You can prepare a landing page and create a serious marketing plan during this time to direct your target audience to the page. During this period, you can sell courses or prepare special coupon codes for the opening and have the chance to get more potential customers. Or you can only collect pre-registrations instead of making sales during this period.

Before starting advertising and promotions;

• You must have determined your target audience
• You must create a pixel using the Facebook advertising platform
• You should test your pixel and create custom audiences
• You must create custom conversions
• You must prepare advertising texts and graphics
• You must determine the coupon codes and campaigns to be run.
• You should prepare for ads on platforms such as Google and Youtube

In short, it is time to complete all the preparations and spend some money. You can start sending advertising traffic to the page where you promote your product with an effective video that introduces and summarizes your offer on your landing page, social proof if available, and high-level texts.

In support of PPC ads, you can make paid promotions to high-volume Facebook groups or forums in the category related to your course. These types of platforms give you really fast and effective returns compared to PPC ads.

If you do not have sufficient knowledge about advertising and marketing, you can work with a professional, especially for important tasks such as conversion tracking, target audiences, special conversions and tracking codes. When you try to undertake every task yourself (if you do not have the talent), you will not be able to focus on your main job and you will fail from the very beginning.

Unfortunately, no business can be formed at zero cost, so you should consider from the very beginning that you will need to spend some money until your online business reaches a point.