5 Creative Ways for Course Creators to Boost Their Revenue (with Successful Examples)

Summary: Boosting course revenue is one of the challenging parts of creating online courses. Despite the hard work it entails, course creators are still taking risks. Today, we will talk about how you can boost course revenue creatively.

There are billions of content and courses available on the internet today. Everyone is learning in different formats like what you do now—reading an article and so much more.. watching a video, attending live courses, completing a self-paced course.

Almost everyone is competing for everybody’s attention. And so selling courses and other educational products get more complex every day. Adding the fact that the eLearning market is oversaturated. Research says it will reach $374B by 2026.

As a course creator, this might be good and bad for your business. Good as the market size is growing for this industry. Bad as you need to keep your value to the market as it grows. After all, being in the creator economy requires hard work, patience, and commitment.

It’s never an easy path. But the good thing is giving up isn’t an option. There are still ways to boost course revenue and get something from the effort you’ve put in.

5 Creative Ways to Boost Your Course Revenue

Whatever course format you have—MOOC, CBC, workshops, masterclasses, or even memberships, you can try these strategies that creative course creators and entrepreneurs have tried already.

Affiliate Marketing

If you have worked on different marketing techniques such as growing your social media followers, creating a high-converting sales page, building your brand, multiplying your email list, and more. Then you can connect your audience to other products and services they need.

This is through affiliate marketing.

One of the successful course creators that teaches and applies affiliate marketing in his business is Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income.

He earns a commission when you purchase a tool on his website. In 2017, it was reported that his affiliate earnings build up to $105,619 (crazy, I know) and it was 63% of his total earnings in December.

Okay, you might tell me you aren’t a huge course creator as Pat Flynn. The point is that you can start small and copy what he did to boost your course revenue.

How to get started?

• First, identify the products and tools you’re using as a course creator which are useful to your audience. Another way is to look for useful tools for your audience.
  
• Reach out to them and offer an affiliation program. Some tools already have their own internal process so you don’t need to deal with it. Some don’t. And for those who don’t, you might give them an idea to start one.
  
• Lastly, create a landing page for the tools and products. Decide if you want to offer it to a public audience or for a private learning community. Tip: You can also make these tools an additional perk if you’re running a membership. General Assembly has this strategy.

Sponsorships & Brand Deals

If you have grown your audience where you can advertise other brands to them, then you can start with sponsorship and brand deals to boost your course revenue.

Great examples are Justin Welsh and Ali Abdaal.

Justin Welsh is one of the notable creators today who earned $5M+ revenue as a solopreneur. Apparently, he gained 48k subscribers in his weekly newsletter and offered a sponsorship program for brands. He is transparent in his newsletter’s data and the sponsorship price. Right now, he earned around $3,400 per month only with his sponsorship package.

Ali Abdaal announced his earnings of $523,000 from brand deals alone in 2021. He’s a popular Youtuber and productivity instructor.

How to get started?

• First, create a sponsorship package you can offer to brands.
  
• Then create a landing page and or a video that you are offering sponsorship packages to brands—like what these two top creators did.
  
• For you to get deals, you need to build trust with these brands. So be transparent enough on your data and explain the process—if they’ll pay you first, or you will get a commission or both.

Create Course Packages to boost your course revenue

I don’t mean the normal course packages—2 intermediate courses + 1 advanced course = $150. Well, it can be like that but with a twist.

If you have different educational products such as email courses, cheat sheets, ebooks, free self-paced courses, cohort-based courses, workshops, consulting services, etc. Then you can mix everything and create the best packages out of it.

A good example is the Podcast Marketing Academy by Jeremy Enns to boost course revenue. There are three packages mixed up with workshops, self-paced video lessons, live Q&A calls, private community, mentoring, personal growth plan, etc.

How to get started?

• First, identify what educational products you have
  
• Then creatively designed your package according to your course brand
  
• Lastly, create a landing page for your course packages

Build your own MasterClass

A bit similar to mixing up your course packages, but the only difference is this is a subscription or membership-based model.

If you have created several courses and content materials on different topics, then you can create your own version of MasterClass like how Robert Petras created it in Credo Academy.

Credo Academy has 4 learning topics: App Dev, UI/UX design, AR, and Blended 3D. You can access all topics for $30 per year for student membership. He also offers free courses and uploads them on his Youtube channel to gain leads and earn from Youtube ads.

Other than that, what you can do differently from Credo is to add mentoring and coaching programs aside from the self-paced courses to measure the progress of your learners.

How to get started?

Look for a learning platform where you can upload your content, videos, and bonus products. Teachfloor.com lets you create several courses on one platform. Plus, it has several app integrations and other awesome features.

It’s the best platform for hybrid cohort-based courses so you can upload self-paced materials plus meet your students in a live session.

Sell Merchandise

If you’ve created a strong brand for your courses, then you can sell cool, swag, and branded merchandise to boost your course revenue!

The best example is Amexem, a course membership platform of self-paced videos on life’s greatest problems with ancient solutions. Aside from courses, they offer merchandise with the tagline “It’s not rocket science, it’s Moorish science”.

How to get started?

• First, identify what kind of merchandise is swag for your audience. Is it a hat, a shirt, a hoodie, a coffee mug, a tote bag, an apron (if you’re teaching how to cook vegan meals), etc?
  
• Then think of a design. A simple idea is to start with your brand statement or logo or a mascot if you have one. One very good example is Doobydobap. Although Dooby isn’t a course creator, she is a Youtube content creator. She nailed it on how to boost revenue out of the merchandise.
  
• Lastly, look for a Print-On-Demand (POD) service. POD will help you to print and ship your merchandise when someone orders it. And they can do it across the world. Check out Fourthwall to do the print-on-demand service for you. It’s so cool, isn’t it?

Conclusion to Boost Your Course Revenue

There are several creative ways how you can boost your course revenue and create another income stream from your products. The only secret is—you need to be creative as much as possible!

Test out several things, experiment, and see what works as these top course creators did. After all, innovation mostly happens when you least expect it.

Can’t wait to hear how it goes! Connect to us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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