How Much Money Can You Make Selling Online Courses? (Realistically!) (2024)

How much can you make selling online courses?

In today’s guide, you’ll learn how much you can charge for your course, how to create a course that sells – and increase your earnings.

Want to learn more? Read on!

How much can you make by selling an online course?

You can make anywhere from $100 to multiple six-figures (or even seven figures) per year from your online courses. Most people who create courses as their full-time job make five to six figures per year. Your course sales will depend on your course topic, marketing strategies, conversion rate, and course price.

For example, if your course is priced at $299 and you get 5,000 people to your course page with a 5% email opt-in rate and a 1% sales conversion rate, you make $748 in revenue.

Or, if you charge $1,000 for that same course, you make $2,500.

Ultimately, there’s a lot of potential in the e-learning market, which is estimated to reach $325 billion by 2025.

The average part-time Kajabi course creator earns over $30,000, while one in three full-time creator makes over six figures.

Teachable creators earned close to $400 million in 2020.

And many of my own students earn five to six figures and beyond with their online course businesses.

We’ll talk more about the strategies successful course creators use below.

But first, let’s take a look at how you can calculate your course revenue.

How do you calculate the revenue of your online course?

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To calculate the revenue of your online course, here’s a simple formula:

Revenue = the size of your audience x conversion rate x price of your course

Let’s break it down.

Audience size: This is the number of website visitors who convert into email subscribers. On average, 3% of your “cold traffic” (like traffic from paid ads and SEO) will sign up to your email list. But “warm traffic” (like clicks from guest posts, social media, and podcasts) has a higher subscription rate – typically 5-7%. If you don’t have an audience yet, make a conservative estimate of how many people you think you can reach.
Conversion rate: This is the number of email subscribers that buy your course. The average conversion rate across the online course industry is 1%.
Price of your course: Your revenue is going to be very different if you price your course at $50 instead of $500. (We’ll talk more about pricing your course in a later section.)

So here’s an example:

Say 1,000 people become subscribers to your email list after finding you via blogs, social media, or other marketing channels.

That’s your audience size.

Now let’s take the average conversion rate of 1%.

That’s 10 people.

If the price of your course is $500, you can expect to make $5,000 in revenue.

So that’s revenue. What about profit?

Profit = revenue – expenses

Is selling online courses profitable?

Yes, selling online courses can be very profitable.

You’re selling a digital product that you don’t have to produce over and over.

Instead, you put in the work once and can continue to sell the course without having to re-create it.

But that doesn’t mean that making money with online courses is easy.

It takes work. And you won’t see overnight sales.

When students ask me “How much can you make selling online courses?”, I’m honest with them.

I now make multiple seven figures across my many courses (I have around 16 courses and trainings on offer).

But it took me years to perfect them.

For example, my flagship course – Employee to Entrepreneur took a few years to develop.

At the same time, there are a lot of people who find success with online courses.

Take Alex Cattoni, an expert copywriter and YouTuber. She built a seven-figure business selling her flagship course, The Copy Posse Launch Files, teaching people to become great copywriters.

Or Teresa Greenway of Northwest Sourdough. She makes over $200,000 a year selling courses on Udemy about how to make sourdough bread.

So as you can see, online courses can be hugely profitable. Even for niche course topics.

Another factor that impacts the profitability of your course is how effective your marketing is.

The better your marketing, the better your conversion rate.For example, paid ads are fast and effective, but drain your profits over time because you need to keep paying for them to drive traffic.

But organic traffic from search engines (SEO) is free (in the sense that you don’t pay for your visitors) and can scale. Over time, your sales become more profitable.

Next, let’s talk about how you can increase your revenue as a course creator.

How to make more money from your online course

Now you know how much you can make from selling online courses. But there are ways to improve your course sales.

And here’s how you can maximize your results:

Choose the right audience and topic

Here’s the thing about courses: a lot of topics can make money.

Sure, some popular topics always do well like marketing and tech topics. Some topics have more demand depending on existing trends, such as AI and coding. But your course doesn’t need to be about these topics to make money.

For example, some successful course topics include courses on how to:

Write a book
Build tiny homes
Breastfeed
Raise a puppy

And so on. Often, these types of niche courses can sell for more than more general courses because the audience is smaller. What matters is that you have an audience that is willing and able to pay for your course.

Tip: Try coaching or consulting a few clients to learn what your audience needs.

I talk more about this strategy in this video:

Help students get great results

When I launched my first course, I went above and beyond to help my students get results.

Why? I wanted to learn as much as I could from my students, so that I could develop my course. Those students then gave me glowing testimonials, which I could use to sell the course.

After all, testimonials help build trust and show new customers that they can get results from your course.

So a great way to develop your course as fast as possible and get testimonials is to work one-on-one or in a group setting with your first few students.

Discover the top 3 reasons most courses fail

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Improve your online course

If you want your course to sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars, you need to provide a great learning experience.

And you will need feedback to make the course into the best possible product it can be.

For example, it took me almost three years to tweak my flagship course, Employee to Entrepreneur. I listened to my customers and developed it based on their feedback.

So take feedback and use it to iterate your course.

To get that feedback, ask your course students.

Ask them questions like:

“Where were you at with your goals before taking the course?”

“Did the course help you get closer to your goals?”

“Were you happy with the experience?”

“What were your favorite parts of the course? What areas of the course could be improved?”

“If someone was thinking of taking a course on this topic, would you recommend that they take my course?”

By improving your product, people will continue to buy from you.

Use the right marketing strategies

There are several marketing strategies you can use to sell your online course.

Examples include:

Referrals
Social media marketing
Podcast interviews
Paid ads
SEO

The most profitable methods are the “free strategies.” By that I mean you get “free,” organic traffic to your course.

Compare that to paid ads. Paid ads are effective but eat up your profits fast. So I don’t recommend relying on them too much – especially when you want to scale your business.

My favorite marketing strategy is SEO. It’s great for scaling because you continue to get traffic from your old content. But I wouldn’t recommend this for beginners.

In the beginning, focus on strategies like podcast interviews and social media until you have your first students. At this stage, it’s more about building relationships than getting as much traffic as possible.

Increase your conversion rate

This step immediately helps you increase revenue.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who buy your online course after seeing your marketing or landing on your sales page.

How can you improve? Here are some things to think about:

Include testimonials
Focus on benefits, not features
Write descriptive calls-to-action (for example, “Get the…” or “Buy it now”)
Use your audience’s language in your sales copy

These tweaks can take time to perfect. But as you keep experimenting, you’ll slowly increase your conversion rate over time.

Upsell

One of the best ways to increase revenue is through upselling.

You can upsell to people who enroll in your course by giving them tools to get faster, better results.

Examples include:

A bundle with another course
Coaching or consulting time with you
Extra material like templates, masterclasses, or guides
Membership in an exclusive online community with other students

I upsold one of my first courses with coaching. That simple add-on led to 21k more in sales on a $8,000 course launch.

Next up: Pricing.

Choose the right price

How much you charge for your online course depends on the type of course you’re selling.

I recommend new course creators to make a “First Steps” course first. This is a course that will help your students with the first steps of their journey to their end goal. These courses can be short and self-study.

For example, my first course helped new entrepreneurs get their first clients.

Compare that to a flagship A-Z course. An A-Z course helps students achieve their goals from beginning to end. For example, my flagship course, Employee to Entrepreneur, helps corporate employees start a business and leave their 9 to 5 jobs.

As a general guide:

For a new 4-6 week self-study course, charge $500
For a flagship, A-Z course, charge $1,000-3,000

But don’t overthink your pricing. Just set the price and start selling. You can incrementally increase your price over time.

What online courses make the most money?

Some of the most popular course niches at the moment are:

AI
Data Science
Coding/web development
Entrepreneurship
Photography
Nutrition
Fitness
Writing
Content creation

But you can make a successful course about anything.

For example, on Teachable, the most successful online course categories are marketing and self-development.

Whereas on Skillshare, they are illustration, graphic design, fine art, and photography.

And Udemy’s best-selling courses include Python, Excel, AWS certification, and web development courses.

Bottom line: Any course idea can make money if there’s a market for it. Everything from baking to entrepreneurship can be successful.

Focus on the topics that you have experience in and build an audience around your knowledge. That’s how you create a sustainable course business, no matter what your niche is.

Discover the top 3 reasons most courses fail

(plus how to fix them so you succeed)

Next steps

There you have it! The answer to the question “How much can you make selling online courses?”

We’ve looked at some of the most important steps to create a course that makes money. But the devil is in the details and those are just the steps…At the same time, most course creators make the same mistakes over and over.

And those mistakes keep them from making more sales.

Want to know what they are?

Get the free blueprint for new online course creators with three deadly course mistakes to avoid.

Read more:

How to Launch Your Online Course

How Long Does It Take to Create an Online Course?

Steps to Sell High-Ticket Online Courses