Here’s the thing: an online course is easy to monetize, especially when you compare it to blogs, ebooks, YouTube followings and Podcasts. We ran the numbers, and here at Teachable it takes 47 days on average for someone creating their course to go from first step to first sale.
There are two reasons for this. Firstly, courses are gated content. You simply can’t access someone’s course unless you enroll and an instructor can set the price tag.
Secondly, people are willing to pay for a course more naturally than other online products. Because our society values education and is trained to think of courses, classes and education as valuable, it’s easier to convince someone to pay for an online “course” than say, a blog, where a writer is expected to give away their content for free.
Let’s compare:
BLOG: When people think of blogs, they think of something free AND they think of new content. What that means for a blogger is that they must constantly create content and promote it, and they’re getting very little direct income from the process.
We’ve actually seen many bloggers move from this medium to courses to make money off of their investments.
“ Advertising rates have plummeted and bloggers can no longer make a living with ad revenue alone (unless you get 10 million uniques a month). The over-saturation of blogs and websites means that competition is fierce. Simple supply and demand - there are more blogs and they all want a piece, which means advertisers will pay less and less.
You’ll work your buns off for pennies. This is also the slowest and worst way to make money as a beginner. Making a living online with ad revenue means you have to waste years building up traffic. Even tiny bloggers with small audiences can make a living with their own products.”
PODCAST: A podcast is similar to a blog in that people expect to download your content for free. Podcasts lend themselves to marketing efforts since it’s easy to have guest speakers, but that still won’t make you money unless you bring in advertisers. You also have to continually put out new pieces of content to grow.
ONLINE STORE: An Etsy store takes an initial investment, you have to create the goods with physical materials, you’ve also got to keep creating to make money.
Another big point, you have to be creative and skilled. Considering my crafts are generally worthy of pinterest fails. this is not a medium that works well for me.
Compare this to an online course. Everything is digital so there’s very little cost investment AND everyone has their own unique knowledge and skills that can be taught.
EBOOK: Ebooks take a substantial time investment. It’s the equivalent of 10-50 blog posts in one place, and then, you try to market and sell them, but no one wants to buy an ebook. They’re just not that engaging.
If you compare to an online course where you move through progress section by section, actionably learning through video, sound, blog posts and worksheets, well, in my opinion, there’s no comparison.
