Digital & audience · Less obvious
Online courses
A workshop that sleeps. Record it once, sell it while you write the next book.
An online course is a workshop with the lights left on: video, exercises, perhaps a forum, a price that does not require you to get on a train. The work is in the design and the recording. After that it is a product, and products scale in a way that Tuesdays in a hired room do not. The market is noisy. The courses that sell are the ones that promise a specific transformation to a specific person.
- Typical pay
- From a trickle of sales at £50–£300 a seat, to a serious income if you have a list and a subject people will pay to get good at. Bundles and cohorts raise the price; evergreen pages raise the volume.
- Ceiling
- Uncapped
- Speed
- First money in months
- Effort
- A job in itself
- Needs
- Needs an audience
How it works
- 01
You design a curriculum, record it, host it on a platform (your own, or Teachable, Kajabi, Podia, and so on), and sell it through your list and search.
- 02
A live cohort version can run alongside the recorded one, at a higher price, with your time included.
- 03
Refunds, logins, and the student who emails two years later are now your customer service.
How to start
- 01
Teach it live first. A course that has never met a student is a guess with production values.
- 02
Sell it before you film the whole thing if you can. A dozen pre-orders will tell you whether to spend the month in front of a microphone.
- 03
One tightly scoped course beats a 'university of me'.
Watch out
- 01
Platforms and payment processors take their cut and their rules. Read both.
- 02
A course is not a book with slides. If they could have read the book, they would have.
- 03
Do not promise a publishing deal at the end. You cannot make that promise, and the people who do should be avoided in every other context too.
I have written How to be a Writer and How to Get Published — books that try to do, in chapters, what a course does in modules. A course is the same impulse with a camera and a price that reflects the hand-holding. If you can teach it in a room, you can probably teach it on a laptop. The laptop does not need a sandwich lunch.