059: How to Price and Sell Your Online Course

Thank you very much for joining me today. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about how to price and sell your online course. So if you followed last week's episode, you've probably started outlining your online course. And one of the things we discussed towards the end of the episode is the pricing. Pricing can be a sticking point for a lot of people because it's difficult unless you have purchased and done a lot of courses, to quite understand what might infer value and what costs $47, what costs 300, and what's the difference between a $500 program and a $900 program. So let's dive right into the difference now. Okay, so just so that you understand where I'm coming from. So the pricing that I'm going to talk about comes from my experience buying courses online.

I'm talking about when you're doing your first steps when you're beginning to move into selling your first mini-course. And I'm talking about people who want to keep their prices average and are not targeting a high-ticket elite clientele. Okay, so let's start off. You've probably all seen the $47 challenge out there at the moment. There's a new launching trend where people are creating free challenges and then asking you to upgrade to VIP for $47. It's kind of the same business model that Summits used to use in the past online Summits. You could register for free, and then for $97, you could get lifetime access to all the recordings. It's kind of the same principle.

This, however, cannot really be called a mini-course. So when I speak about mini-course, I'm not talking about something that is delivered live. I'm talking about something that is a digital program that can be downloaded, that can be accessed anytime and has evergreen value. You can, of course, use the previous episode and this one to price your challenge or a mini course that you're doing. However, sort of my assumptions based on price here are coming from courses that are being sold where you just register and you get no direct contact with the person giving it. It's just recorded videos. You access them and it's DIY. So the $47 program is usually very small.

It includes probably six to ten, five to ten-minute videos. On average, they're usually about six to eight minutes. And the price can range between 47. Sometimes it's 100, sometimes it's 97, sometimes it's 67. It could go up maybe to 120, even $150, depending on what you're selling and to whom you're selling it and the value it delivers. Very often this kind of mini-course is going to deliver a very specific outcome. So let's say keeping the same example of the previous episode, if we're dealing with a stress coach and you're probably going to do something extremely specific with your $47 program, like giving them the tools to deal with a panic attack, for instance. So it is a very targeted, very targeted title, very targeted tool.

It can be learned in literally a few minutes, and then it's a matter of how the person uses it in the long term. Similarly, when we start moving up, when it comes to price, if we start moving to 300, $500, then we're looking at something that's a little bit more substantial. I have in the past purchased programs that teach you how to create a sales page, how to write your about me sales copy, programs that help you do maybe write a small email sequence, the ones that perhaps teach you how to design your own book cover or maybe outline your book. Programs that give you something very specific that usually requires a level of skill. So when you're dealing with for maybe life coaching and things like that, you're going to have something that is a little bit more substantial. So you're going to give them a little bit more than just resolving one part of the program. It's got to be a little bit more in-depth. So potentially if you were a stress coach, you would talk about recognizing triggers.

You would go into the detail of what tools you can use for the different triggers to help you heal the different things and how to create a structure. So you would give them something that is way more substantial than a $47 program and more to work with. It doesn't mean you're going to resolve all their problems. It just means you're going to resolve one problem really well in depth. For instance, you could pick stress at home and stress at work and focus on one and go really deep on that. Another example might be 29 days to lose 50 pounds. So this could be a good $500 program or $350 program. The exact price would depend on how much value you can put in your videos and how much you can support them to actually reach their goal.

The next tier is the $900 tier. And generally e-courses, digital courses that you do by yourself, they're going to stick to under $1,000. It's not always the case, but it's mostly the case for this kind of price. People would expect you to provide quite a few hours of video training. So let's say potentially, let's say 20 hours of training where you're going really deep on a particular topic. Maybe you can add also a one-to-one call or a couple of one-to-one calls to go with this. It's probably going to be the kind of format where you have maybe a program that could be done over a month or more. You've got the kind of program where maybe you're dripping it and it's got 1 hour of training every week, and then there's stuff to do in order to make things happen.

You may have a nice workbook. Maybe you have an ebook that you wrote that comes as a companion to the course. So this kind of program is going to be more of a long-term program that supports them to achieve something in the long term. I think on average I would say six weeks to maybe three months, something of the sort, as long as it's something they highly value. So once you've decided what the pricing is going to be for your online course, the next thing you need to think about is how are you going to sell it? There are a number of ways in which you can sell it. We're not going to go a lot in depth because I think these actually deserve an episode each, and I will definitely make sure that I create those. However, let's just have a quick overview. So generally people would sell them either by having a free or a paid challenge just through email, by using Facebook ads or by having webinars.

And of course, as you can see, a couple of these things, especially webinars and Facebook ads, they can actually become quite passive. The ones with the least effort is probably the email launch. But definitely there is a lot of opportunity to go evergreen and create a passive income program. That's all we have time to cover today. But listen up for the next episode next week and the week after, we'll be talking more about going in depth on how to actually sell your online course. And also we'll be talking about passive income and going directly into the details of challenges, webinars, emails and all that lovely stuff that helps make your coaching business scalable and truly profitable. If you're looking for support in any of these areas, feel free to go to Stephaniefiteni.com

Call and book a free 30-minute consult with me. You can also find the link at stephaniefiteni.com/podcast in the show notes of this episode at episode 59.

Thank you so much for joining me and I'll see you again in next week's episode. Take care.