You’ve put hard work into those training programs, and they’re gaining popularity around the office. Customers and franchise members ask for them by name. Employees nod their heads in agreement around the water cooler – these courses are actually useful, helpful, and interesting. For a learning professional, it’s a training grand slam.
Now that you’ve hit your training content stride, it might be time to sell your online courses to the general public. Course monetization is a clever way to build a new revenue stream for your company, and if you use the right learning management system (LMS), it’s easier than you might think. But first, let’s decide whether your content’s ready to hit the market.
5 signs it’s time to sell courses online
Monetizing your courses is an excellent idea – if your content’s up to scratch. The last thing you want to do is go to market with interactive courses that aren’t quite right for their intended audience, so make sure you’re hitting a few of these target goals before you consider monetization.
1. You’ve proven your corporate training’s worth
Sales numbers are picking up and employee retention’s at an all-time high. Attrition rates are falling, and your employees report feeling empowered and confident in their roles. Sounds like your corporate training content’s making a difference in your organization!
When you can tout measurable results tied to your learning and development (L&D) efforts, you’re onto a money-making winner for your company. Other organizations will happily pay for the secrets to your sales, employee, and franchise training success. If you can show you’re achieving fantastic results, you’ve got a built-in USP you can use to market your courses.
2. You have evergreen training content that’s always relevant
Evergreen courses are always in-date and valuable to your audience, so they’re ideal for the passive income business model of selling online courses. They don’t require frequent updates to the text or changes to the format, and the topic’s of ongoing importance in your industry (like sales or compliance training).
Once it’s created, evergreen content will happily work away in the background as a little passive income machine that requires little to no intervention.
3. Your competitors are charging for similar content
Why should your competitors have all the fun? If you’ve noticed that your competitors are selling courses, and you know yours are better (or just as good), it’s time to sell your course content outside your organization.
Before you take action, buy one of their courses. Check out the topics they cover, the tactics they use to keep learners engaged, and the type of numbers their course sales are generating. You’ll have to create a business case internally for selling courses, and an analysis of the competitive landscape will help your cause.
4. You want to build training into your brand
Engaging courses aren’t just a passive revenue stream – they’re an opportunity to position your company as an industry leader.
You’ll show clients and competitors that you understand the industry so well, you’re educating others on its finer points. It’s a stroke of branding genius, especially in industries where knowledge leadership is a sought-after USP.
5. You’re ready to offer certificates or accreditation
Depending on your industry and audience, you might want to offer your learners certifications and accreditation for completing your courses.
Of course, that will probably require working with a third-party accreditation board to ensure you’re meeting their standards and following their course development process (especially for heavily-regulated industries like healthcare). But the benefits can easily outweigh the slightly-less-agile approach to course creation.
Certifications and accreditation validate your courses in the eyes of learners. They lend legitimacy to your entire company, and parlay you from “just another vendor” to “vendor that’s recognized as an educator and thought-leader” in the space.
Plus, learners are more likely to pay (and pay higher prices) for course content that’s received a stamp of approval from industry accreditation boards.
Why working with an eCommerce LMS is essential
If you’re not using an LMS to create courses, you’re working waaayyy too hard. And if you’re using an eLearning platform, but it’s not an eCommerce LMS, you’ll have trouble pivoting from “training” to “selling”.
Using the right LMS, eCommerce integration is truly effortless. Plus, it ensures that monetizing your courses remains within the original scope – a way to add a passive revenue stream to existing content without wasting too much time or resources in the process.
Offer more dynamic, engaging courses
Learner engagement’s vital to any training content – even more so if you want to sell your courses.
A learning management system lets you change and refresh learning content formats, gives access to discussion forums and instructor messaging, and allows you to measure your learners’ engagement. You’ll know exactly how engaging your learners find your content, so you can tweak the courses anytime they seem to be losing steam.
Scale beyond 1:1 or in-person training
With an LMS, your courses can reach audiences anywhere. The confines of the office can’t hold you back – your content can reach far-flung locales and industries you hadn’t even considered before.
That scalability’s brilliant when you’re training remote team members, but it’s downright invaluable when you’re starting to sell courses. Using an eCommerce LMS, your courses can generate sales from learners around the world, making an even bigger name for your company and bulking up that revenue stream at the same time.
Gate your content effortlessly
An LMS that’s also an eCommerce platform lets you keep your content behind a payment gateway. That way, learners have to pay before they can download.
An eCommerce LMS has that functionality built-in. That means, you won’t be installing an eCommerce module or third-party application, hacking together code that plonks a half-baked payment gateway on top of your courses.
Instead, you’re flipping an intentional, hard-coded switch that includes features like creating course bundles or steering learners through a thoughtful learning path.
Billing and payments are simple
And while we’re on the subject, using an eCommerce LMS also ensures your payments and billing are processed correctly. You can allow payment in multiple currencies, sell subscription plans, and automatically create confirmation emails and receipts.
Plus, you can collect data from your learners, store it securely within the LMS, and organize them by role or organization, so you can keep track of who’s buying your courses and which ones they’re taking. That’s great data to have when you want to expand your course offerings.
How to get started selling courses
If your learning content’s showing signs it’s ready for a bigger, paying audience, here’s how you can turn those employee training programs into a sustainable revenue stream:
- Define your target buyer: Your eLearning customers might be different from your employee or sales learners. Do you want to sell to individuals, small businesses, or large enterprise clients? The content you choose to sell should appeal to your target audience.
- Audit your content: Go through your training library and identify the materials that have broad appeal and proven results. You may have to adapt them slightly for an external audience, but try to find courses that will require little editing before they make their market debut.
- Choose an eCommerce-ready LMS: If you’re not using an LMS that can easily accommodate eCommerce, now’s the time to switch. Choose a platform that offers the key features we described above, plus best-in-class customer support from real agents who’ll help you monetize your courses.
- Package your training: Think about what your audience wants from your content, and then package it accordingly. You might want to bundle certain modules together, or create a learning journey that guides learners towards a certification. Pinpoint the skills gaps your learners are probably trying to plug, and then create learning paths that fill them.
- Set pricing and access options: Your corporate learners will appreciate flexible payment plans, so allow them to pay for training on a per-seat basis, via a monthly or yearly subscription, or with a bulk license.
How to choose the right e-Commerce LMS for your courses
The right learning management system is the linchpin in offering a stellar learning experience and seamless monetization in your online training. When you’re shopping for the best platform, look for these features and functionalities:
- Intuitive authoring tools and user management: A good LMS makes it incredibly simple to create, edit, and manage courses. Branded courses should be out-of-the-box functionality, and once your training’s up and running, it should take only a few clicks to add courses to a learning path, or assign learners to a course bundle.
- Simple, data-rich sign-ups: Sign up forms and event registrations should do 2 things well – capture loads of helpful data about your learners and feel fast and simple for registrants.
- Robust integrations: Solid LMS development should be able to handle any integration you require, so be sure to ask how your LMS of choice plays with the other software in your stack. If they can’t integrate, look for a better LMS option.
- Hassle-free transactions: We mentioned billing and payments above, but double-check that every possible payment and billing scenario you’ll need is covered. Maybe you want to offer bulk-buy discounts or pay-as-you-go pricing. Maybe you want to change the subscription plans depending on the size of the client. Demand serious flexibility and customization in your LMS’s billing and payments features.
- Enhanced security: With all of that payment and learner data floating around, you’ll want to be sure your LMS is secure. Ask for references from other clients and research the software’s history and reputation, especially regarding data security.
- Metrics, analytics, and reporting: You’ll want to be able to (proudly!) report on all of the amazing things your monetized training courses have achieved for your company, so look for metrics and analytics features that are completely customizable, including downloadable reports.
LearnRight’s your best-in-class eCommerce LMS
Why slog through demos of the competitors when the answer’s clear? LearnRight is powerful, versatile, and geared towards course monetization. Book a demo today – it’s the last one you’ll ever need, and we promise you’ll be thrilled by the end of it.
