Get five key trends to grow your business with online courses. The five key trends I cover are related to your niche, community, tiers of offers, pricing strategy, and some encouragement for you.
1. Examine your niche
Are you in a growing or declining niche?
Sharing your passion when you grow your business online is always great. People get smitten by your enthusiasm, and you can keep going when the going gets tough because you love what you do.
Maybe you love horses and wooden shoes! And perhaps your great passion is to teach people how to shoe their horses or make a pair of wooden shoes.
However, there might not be a vast market for shooing horses and wooden shoes these days.
In market research, you may find that many people are searching for the topic you are offering. That’s good news because it means you have a demand and a market for your offer.
On the other hand, you also need to consider if the market is saturated with supply with what you do. Suppose this is the case. You want to think about what makes you different compared to your competitors and how you can easily tap into the superpower you know will positively make a difference and help your audience get the desired outcome.
If you do what you love and your audience loves what you do. Your people will want to follow your lead, learn your solution, and satisfy their basic learning and growing needs.
2. Create a community to promote learning and build a sense of safety and belonging
As human beings, we like to feel like we belong. It makes us feel safe. The issue of safety and belonging also applies to any learning situation. No man is an island. We learn from each other.
Learning research shows that it helps us understand better when we apply our new knowledge rather than just listening. We learn by doing. One way to help your audience learn better along with your courses is to create a community as part of your online business. In the community, your audience can ask questions and discuss how to apply what they are learning from you.
3. Offer different ties and levels of support
An evergreen online course is similar to a book. It is a way to share your unique knowledge with your audience to help them get the desired solution and outcome.
Once you have written your book or created your evergreen course, your audience is working with the content on their own to learn from it while you are making passive income for your business.
However, most people will want and need more support from you to help them get the desired outcome better and faster than they can if they are working on the content alone.
To give you an example. Right now, I’m learning how to play golf. I started not knowing how to hold the golf club or hit the ball. Then I did some research and found some instructional videos on YouTube. That helped me get started. But I realized I needed more personalized instruction to make sure I was not developing bad habits by guessing how to apply the instructions from the videos. So, I hired a professional golf trainer to help me evolve my approach. And I am sure glad I did. Not only did he help me realize that I had made some misinterpretations about where the best place to hit the ball was because I was afraid to hit the ground. He also gave me some great exercises I would never have thought of to improve my putting.
When you grow your business online, this example can help you think about expanding your offers with group coaching and individual coaching, where people pay more for more interaction with you.
4. Set an informed pricing strategy
One of the mistakes I see around me related to the success or failure of online courses is pricing. When you think of an evergreen course in similar terms to a book, you wouldn’t charge $1000 for a book and expect to sell it, would you? The average price range for a paperback is between $13-$18.
The new learning trends report from Thinkific shows average prices for online courses in different niches. Whit prices average from $129-$234.
On a side note. If you offer more personalized coaching in either group or individual settings, you can charge more, but I encourage you to consider this an upsell offer.
Another thing to help you with the pricing strategy is to think of a subscription-based model, where your students pay a lower monthly fee while they use and value your content.
5. Remember growing a business online takes time!
Growing a business online takes time. At the same time, I have met a lot of course creators and marketing people that promise a quick, easy fix. I have to be honest with you. In my experience, growing your business online takes time and effort.
Just like I know, learning to play golf takes time, effort, and consistency.
I know this from my learning experience in martial arts as well. It has taken me 17 years and 10.000’s hours of practice to get to where I am today as a black belt.
The same thing is true for growing a business. Even though I admit, I sometimes hope for a quick fix myself. Knowing this helps me be patient with myself and my progress in all areas of life.
So don’t be discouraged! You can do it!
And if you need help growing your business with meaningful online programs as part of your services, I’m here to help. I LOVE learning and assisting knowledgeable people in developing their curriculums to help their students achieve the desired outcome.
You can get my new book here for only $4.99: https://sophiehigginsbook.com
And et my FREE course creation blueprint here: https://courses.sophiehhiggins.com/courses/the-ultimate-course-creation-blueprint