What is the Earning Potential from Online Courses?

There are no industry average earnings for online course instructors. And that's because a lot of factors are responsible for how much you can earn.

There are 4 clearly-identified factors that affect how much you can generate from selling online courses.

I - The Cost of Your Course

Courses do not only come in various shapes and sizes, but they also carry different price tags. You can find a $5 course and another priced at $500, though both cover the same topic.

Let's say we have 2 instructors with one charging $5 and the other charging $500. And they both have the same number of students for their courses; one instructor will earn 100x more than the other, but the latter may not sell as fast as the former can do.

II - Your Audience Size

You will need to promote your online courses to your target audience. This target audience may be readers of your blog, subscribers to your mailing list, or your social media followers.

The size of the audience will determine how many people you can reach and convert to customers. An instructor with an audience of 5,000,000 has a higher earning potential than one with an audience of 100,000.

III - Experience in Marketing

Marketers are people with marketing and sales experience – meaning that they are more likely to get more students enrolled for their courses.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a metric used to measure how many people clicked on the links of an advert. The higher the CTR of an ad campaign, the more successful that campaign is.

Marketers are trained to achieve higher CTRs than the average professional.

IV - Customer Loyalty

Incidentally, customer loyalty is the major factor that determines if you will get repeat business, or if your customers will refer other people to your online courses.

Is the quality of your courses such that they meet your customers' expectations? Do you keep in touch with your customers even after they have used your service?

Have you succeeded in building the kind of trust that engenders loyalty? The more loyal customers you have, the more likely you will get repeat businesses and referrals from them.

Beginners will find it difficult to achieve the kind of success that the experienced instructors have. And that's because of the factors outlined in this section.

However, this doesn't mean that you cannot grow your earnings from selling online courses.