7. Build A Community Around Yourself

A course has the amazing benefit of quickly helping you create a community around yourself. Unlike an ebook that’s completed and shipped into the world, an online store where your customers are one time purchasers probably all over the nation, or a blog where you’re lucky to get a few comments on your posts, courses have a high community factor.

It’s common for instructors to ask for students to comment in the course through Disqus, or to ask students to engage with each other through various steps of the course. You can do this within your course, or, as many instructors choose, through a Facebook group or Slack group.

You become the moderator of these communities and it can be fun and incentivizing to see an active community around your product. In this position, you also become an influencer in your niche and an authority on your topic that you can leverage to grow your business.

Take for instance Kim Coles. actress, comedian and game show host best known for her role as a cast member on the sketch comedy, In Living Color.

In the course bio for a lifestyle course on Gratitude, Passion and Success, she says, “The journey is going to be fun (that is the ONLY way that I know to do things) and filled with real life solutions and tools. And even better, we will be accountable to each other! We are going to look in the rear view mirror and be amazed at how far we have come!”

If you’re at all interested in creating an online course (and hopefully you are!) check out our e-book to learn everything you need to create a course and start making money online.

Like I said, creating an online course might be one of the best ways to make money online, but it's certainly not the only way. If you're interested in checking out the other methods, click to jump or read the full post.

6. Help A Lot of People At Once

O ne of my favorite things about courses is their ability to quickly spread ideas, words and skills rapidly. They are one of the quickest ways to share your knowledge with people who need it.

That is a beautiful and powerful thing.

For example, course creators Bharat Patodi Swati Choudhary founded Pyoopel. a course that prepares students in India for standardized testing.

“Both of us felt that students paid exorbitant amounts of money on coaching. This was a gap we wanted to bridge,” says Bharat, who, along with Swati, has published a couple of books as well.

A good course idea, is a good business idea, and that’s one that people want and need, no scams involved. For more on that, check out our other post here: Find Business Ideas That Make Money and Do Good.

“I dreamed of creating a community that empowered people and gave them the tools to achieve their dreams. At the time, I felt unfulfilled and unhappy with my job and life, so TNC rapidly became my after-work obsession. I am crazy about helping others find that same “something” in their lives. Whether it be sharing all of my lessons learned so you can grow the biz of your dreams or reminding you why you’re ready, even when you think you’re not, I hope TNC unlocks something BIG deep inside you.”

5. Anyone Can Teach Everything's Teachable

Here at Teachable, we believe that everyone is an expert and can teach. Why? Here’s the definition of an expert:

Webster defines expert as “having or showing special skill or knowledge because of what you have been taught or what you have experienced.” Just by nature of living life as an individual you’ve experienced something unique that you can create a course out of, helping you share your knowledge.

Many people don’t believe this but many of those who do, succeed.

We've found that those who have just learned a topic are often much better at teaching it than an “expert.” Take for example John and Eliot of Bitfountain. After just completing a programming bootcamp and with no experience teaching, they launched a course that made over 2 million dollars.

One of the major reasons for this is because they had just learned, they were better in touch with the issues beginners' face.

Also, from our experience getting over 15,000 teachers up and running since Teachable’s initial launch, we’ve found that you can teach almost any subject area.

You don’t have to teach programing, you don’t have to teach business. We have courses on hundreds of topics, some creative, some technical, some entrepreneurial focused.

"Rarely just shoot one video at a time. Instead, we batch filming multiple videos into a single day. This leads to releasing videos on a consistent basis, which is how you actually build a thriving audience online.

This means you're saving time and money, so you can focus your energy on the rest of your business instead fiddling with cameras, lights, microphones, and editing videos multiple days a month."

4. Courses are a Reusable Asset

Unlike a blog or podcast which require fresh content to keep readers engaged, a course can easily be repurposed and resold. If you weren't happy with your first stab at a course, you can update it and relaunch.

If you feel you've exhausted the content in your course and create a new one, you can also use your first course as a lead magnet. bonus, or part of the offer in selling your second, third, or fourth course.

3. Monetize Other Online Products Audiences

Courses are a high ROI way to help monetize already existing content and audiences.

We’ve seen thousands of instructors with followings on YouTube, Facebook, Podcasts and published authors convert to online courses so they can make a more substantial income from home.

Take Nick Stephenson. he created an online course, Get Your First 10,000 Readers. for writers and authors to help them build their email list and make money off of, what I feel, is a very undervalued talent.

"Get the EXACT System I use to Generate a Six-Figure Income Selling my Books Online - and find out how to attract Your First 10,000 Readers."

A course works for this because they utilize already existing content, keeping initial time investment small.

Simply take your chapters to an ebook and put them into course sections. Take your watercoloring tutorials from YouYube and create a course (like Angela Fehr ). Courses allow you to gate and charge for your content, which works extremely well.

2. Scale from Part-Time Income to Working from Home Full-Time

The beautiful thing about a course is that you get about as much out of them as you put into them. If you want to do one course launch, make a few thousand bucks and walk away, you can do that. If you want to create multiple courses around a general topic and run an academy that you advertise through webinars, podcasts, blogs, and joint-ventures and build a lifestyle business from your home, you can do that too!

A course scales to the amount of work you want to put into it, which means you can generate passive, part time or full-time income.

Launch before you backpack Europe, and you’ll have money in the bank. Continually promote a course with webinars, deals and through other online platforms, and that’s part time income. If you continually make new courses and expand your school, you can make enough money from home for this to be your full-time business.

For example, Brennan Dunn who hosts a course on freelancing called, Double Your Freelancing. has become one of the most successful online entrepreneurs today by creating a course to give advice on freelancing and setting up your own business.

"Does the idea of selling or marketing yourself make you cringe? Do you know you’re undercharging, but aren’t sure what to do to fix that? If so, I’ve created a handful of premium courses that have helped thousands of freelancers build a more stable and more profitable business."

1. Make a Living from Home. Fast

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.

The Proven Way to Work from Home and Make Money Online in 2017

When I tell people I earn money online they tend to assume that I'm running some sort of Ponzi scheme. But I've never been a good enough liar to pull that off, so instead I blog. While I make pocket change, there are plenty of other people who have completely replaced their full-time jobs in favor of making six figures working online.

There are countless ways to make money from home, but not all monetization tactics are created equally. In this post, I’ll walk you through some of the most common ways online entrepreneurs make money and provide you guidance on getting started with each.

Spoiler alert: Creating and selling online courses is number one. I’m not going to make you sit and read through all 16 other methods before jumping into that.

It’s no surprise online courses are the next big thing when it comes to working from home by making money online. Here’s the deal. The EdTech industry is booming. Valued as a 107 billion dollar industry (according to Forbes ), the early-adopters are looking at courses and thinking: I. want. that.

It’s why our customers, who are just normal people, have made upwards of six figures in just a month while launching their courses. It’s why the best content marketers (like Seth Godin, Marie Forleo, Noah Kagan) are selling courses. It’s why there was $2.51 billion invested in educational-technology companies during the first half of 2016 (according to InsideHigherEd ).

Check out our most popular guides:

There are 7 key reasons that make online courses an optimal online product.

In this post, I'll be quoting some of the most successful online teachers talking about why courses are awesome then going into the next 16 top ways you can make money online. This one's going to be a doozy, y'all.

Annndd if you're inspired by any of these entrepreneurs, you can download our comprehensive course creation book that will guide you through each step of the process (it's free!)