Have you thought about adding a digital course to your business?
As a service provider, chances are you'd like to add some steady, recurring revenue to your bottom line so you're not always chasing that next sale, that next client. Taking your unique expertise and wrapping it up in an online course is a great way to add a different kind of service to your business.
Before you say you can't do that or there are too many digital courses out there, the online education industry is expected to boom to $198.9 BILLION by 2030. Now is the perfect time to get started.
In today's episode, I walk you through a few options you have to add one to your existing website.
Mentioned Resources
Have you thought about adding a digital course to your business?
As a service provider, chances are you'd like to add some steady, recurring revenue to your bottom line so you're not always chasing that next sale, that next client. Taking your unique expertise and wrapping it up in an online course is a great way to add a different kind of service to your business.
Before you say you can't do that or there are too many digital courses out there, the online education industry is expected to boom to $198.9 BILLION by 2030. Now is the perfect time to get started.
In today's episode, I walk you through a few options you have to add one to your existing website.
Mentioned Resources
Have you ever thought about adding a digital course to your business? Now as a service provider, chances are you'd like to add some study recurring revenue to your bottom line so you're not always chasing that next sale. That next client taking your unique experience and wrapping it up in an online course is a great way to add a different kind of service to your business. Now, before you say that you can't do that, or there are too many digital courses out there already, look, the online education industry is expected to boom to 198.9 billion by 2030, and that's just one of the more conservative estimates. Now is the perfect time to get started. You're listening to the Captain Coder Podcast. Each week I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your online business. I'm your host, Maurice ans Skyr, AKA Captain Coder. If you would all help your clients with any kind of repeatable system, courses are totally possible for you. Now, I personally don't have a course right now, although this actually is the first week of the semester for me, cuz I do adjunct as an instructor at which to state. But you can bet that because of my teaching experience, I fully know how I'm going to add a digital course to my business within the next couple of years. Digital courses don't have to be overly complex. There are a lot of ways that you can go about adding a course to your business, but also you don't have to overthink what you're including. You just have to plan out what kind of transformation you wanna take your students through. What can you teach them that they can apply in their own business or their life? If you're service is not a b2b, if you're more of a B2C consumer, what do you, what kinda transformation can you take someone through and what can you do to get them to some kind of success to help them solve a pain point that they have? This doesn't have to be a massive transformation either. Think of your course as kind of the step one to potentially working with you. What do you wish people already had done before they started working with you? What kind of prep work would you like them to do? Take them through that as your digital course. There are so many different ways that you can look at adding a course into your business that I want you to with open ears. Think about this episode and how it can help your business. Now here's the thing that we're gonna, we're gonna dive into the dreaded tech stuff now, unless you're like me and you geek out about all of the text, all of of the tech, excuse me. Adding a digital course to your business can feel, um, a little overwhelming. And I think this is what stops a lot of people before they even get started. They don't understand what they need to do. All they know is they have to think about, okay, well how am I gonna deliver a course? Am I gonna do it through video? Am I gonna do it through a slideshow? Am I gonna do downloads of some kind? And then, you know, how do I give people only the people who paid for the course access to the course? There's a lot of creative things that are going on in this industry right now. I've seen people run courses through private Facebook groups. I've seen people run courses through just email. I've seen people run courses through overly complex systems. There's not really a right or wrong way to do that. And honestly, there's a lot of online course platforms on the market. If you're just getting started, you can use, think they have a free tier or you can dive into something a bit more professional, but it's higher priced like Kajabi. Now both of these provide an out of the box solution, but the problem, well, let's not even say it's a problem. The difference with using something like Think Ethic or Kajabi is they don't actually live on your own website. And typically you're required to pay a monthly fee to host your course, whether you're even ready to launch it and start earning revenue from it or not. You can be continuously spending money before you are even bringing any money in. So I have a lot of people that come to me and the whole point of today is short episode is they ask me, they ask me, Okay, if I wanna add a course to my business, can I do so on my current WordPress website? Because they don't want one more tech component in their library. They don't wanna have to think about Zapier, they don't wanna have to deal with another login. Can I add it to my current website? And the short answer is, yes, of course you can. There are actually more and more options every day that allow you to create an online course website with WordPress. Now, if you're like me and you like having not only full control of your website, but you just don't wanna have to think about, you know, all the different places you have to log in and all the different places that you have to think about logging into <laugh>, which is me, I lose passwords even though I use a password keeper somehow I still manage to lose passwords and you just wanna control your revenue a little bit more because honestly, digital courses can be a huge piece of your income. And if you just like controlling that revenue and controlling that part of your business, you maybe don't want your digital course to live elsewhere. Now another thing to keep in mind and what I see happen a lot when people don't run digital courses correctly. When your course lives somewhere besides your website, it can end up being hard for customers to find it. Yes, you can include a landing page or just a login button in your menu on your website, but the entire user experience of purchase and logging in to work through the course is a whole lot easier if they can go to the same domain to find everything. Instead, when you have things in different places and you're servicing clients all over the map, you they have to bookmark or they have to remember one and even has, sometimes it has another company's domain in your course url. So if you have a Kajabi, um, course it's your domain.kajabi.com or my kajabi.com, um, or potentially your domain.think.com. Maybe you don't want people to see what you're using. And so that's another viable reason to use WordPress instead. Now, there are really incredible plugins out there for WordPress and WordPress course management now WordPress, and one of the reasons that I love it and I will continue to die on this hill as it grows by the way, in the amount of the internet that it powers is, it's incredibly flexible. There is nothing yet nothing yet this may, there may come a day when I switch, but there is nothing yet on the market that is as flexible and allows for growth and allows for you to change your business and grow your website with your business like WordPress does. That also means there's a lot of options to add online courses to your website. One of the number one learning management systems that are available out there is Learn Dash. I've actually installed and configured custom learn dash setups for a couple of different clients. Now, this is a premium plugin, but it requires a really small, like $200 a year instead of $200 a month that you can pay at places like Kajabi, um, and can be really easy to set up on your own. The only time that I have clients that come to me is they want to do things more custom. They wanna have a little bit more control over the look or over how something works, but a lot of these learning management tools come fairly decent out of the box. It allows you learn, Dash allows you to create walkthrough modules, lessons and even allows you to create quizzes and things like that depending on how you wanna set all of this up. And it gives you, it manages all of the access for you. So somebody could purchase through your WooCommerce store or through Learn Dash directly, and then they get access immediately. They go straight from purchase to starting the course. There's no waiting for an email, there's no waiting for a sign up. It's super simple. Now, another premium plugin, WooCommerce memberships can be used to create online courses as well. If you wanna have specific pages of your website only visible to those who have purchased memberships or you wanna create more manual courses and have somebody like myself help you set those up, kind of depending on how you want those to roll, you can use WooCommerce memberships. It also allows you to provide product discounts to people in your membership tiers and lets you have multiple levels within that. So if you wanted to sell a bronze, silver, and gold course where you know, maybe in your main course people buy, they get the lessons, but if they pay a little bit more money, they get access to maybe live replays. And if they pay a little bit more money, they get access to special products and downloads. There's a lot of things that you can do with WordPress and a couple of plugins to make your site a hub for your digital course as well as being your website. Now, another newer plugin that's available, I've played with the free version, but they've rolled out an updated plugin straight from WordPress itself is since a pro. Now these are paid courses. It's $149 for this plugin. You drop it into your website and it's a whole learning management system. So it's a step above in kind of how you might wanna run your courses. It's a step above eCommerce memberships if you wanna have more quizzes, certificates, content dripping, and a full learning management like Learn dash. So depending on what you wanna do, you have three different options that you can spend$150,$200 annually instead of a month and get something up on your website. Now, one thing to keep in mind with all of this, the great thing about being able to add plugins to your website and not going with an external source is one, you're not giving control to anyone else. But two, this makes it possible for you to spin up what I like to call and what the industry calls an mvp, a minimum viable product. So maybe you download since a pro from straight, from WordPress, from W Commerce, you install it yourself. You maybe don't love the look, but it'll lets you drop in your videos, set up your course, play around with it, see how it looks, have some friends test it out, and then maybe you hire somebody, somebody like me to come in and make it do exactly what you want and look exactly like what you want. Or you could take people through a beta run and you've only spent $150 and a little bit of your time to drop things in, get things set up and test it out. Now, don't get me wrong, platforms like think if Kajabi and other things like that are a great way to prove your pro, your digital course is viable upfront as well, but you may have to spend some money to get it going. And if you ever wanna bring it back into your website, it can cause confusion down the road, especially if you wanna provide lifetime access. Now, if you wanna have a long term digital course in your business, much like what your website is for you, it's best for you to have control of it. After all, we never really know how long those platforms might exist, But if you build your digital course into your own website, it'll live as long as your website does, even using third party plugins. And that's why I recommend going with WooCommerce memberships or automatics since a pro because they are from WordPress themselves. But even when you're using external plug-ins like that, the plug-in will continue to work even if the developer abandons it at some point in time and gives you time to move it to some other plugin and readjust how it works. But if think if it decides it's gonna go out of business tomorrow, you're kind of outta luck. Now granted, is that really ever gonna happen? Maybe not, but I personally like having the control. Now, WordPress makes adding a digital course to your website pretty easy and straightforward. And of course, if you want help with making your online coursework within your website, reach out to me at capped coder.com/start. I'd love to help you get your online course up and running. And if you wanna see what I've done with one of the courses I've built, go to my website and check out the hatchery Chicago and their project. They were able to turn C and virtual events into something they could profit from without being able to have the in-person events like they wanted. And it's continued to be a money maker for those who maybe can't get there in person now. So think about how you might add a digital course to your business and keep your mind open to having that within your website. Thank you all for tuning in to our show this week to catch more Captain Coder. You can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now. If you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online. Business. Follow us on Instagram@CaptainCoder or visit us online captcoder.com. Can't wait to talk to you all again next week.