10 Reasons Why It's Time to Finally Get in on the Online Courses Action

1. Online courses boost your authority

Why? Because they boost your reputation. They showcase your expertise and because you're using online courses to teach, they also build trust and credibility, and that position is a power position. Clients for your course are also prospects for your much higher-priced coaching and consulting services.

2. Online courses help you establish your platform

You can reach more people. You can go broader and deeper into your target market. The niche industries where you want to elevate your personal visibility and credibility as a business professional, as a coach, as a consultant, as an independent expert, online courses are one of the fastest, most effective ways to do that.

This also gives your clients more ways to buy you. It's another menu item in your funnel of investible opportunities that might go from low fee to medium fee to high fee to premium to super premium.

We’ll dive much further into this in tomorrow's “High Fee Courses” free masterclass.

3. Online courses can be a huge cash cow

Let's call a spade a spade. Online courses can be a huge source of new revenue that leverages your existing content that you're already sharing with your market in other ways, because let's face it, people want teaching.

People want to be led and taught and they want instruction, they want ideas and they want implementation, and if you can sell online courses, online courses plus group coaching programs, or online courses plus a mastermind component, this can be a huge, huge source of cash money and frankly it's a beautiful supplement and complement to other investable opportunities in your world, whether that's as a high-fee consultant, executive coach, virtual speaker, or corporate trainer.

If you're in a "thought leadership" service business, online courses could be the hidden prospecting gem or the hidden revenue-generating gem that you've been looking for.

4. Online courses create passive income

Once you create a course, your online course output is going to be the video recordings, the audios, the slides, the transcripts, anything that you shared by way of models or worksheets or templates, tools, and scripts.

If you leverage online courses the right way, you are never going to build anything once that you're not able to sell twice, and that is a huge difference because it takes your business model from being a painter, meaning you have to take out a custom canvas and paint and work from scratch every time to something where you're no longer a painter, now you've become a printer and you can systematize and crank out profitable program after profitable program.

5. Diversify while still specializing

The other thing that online courses do for you for your business, it's what I call the "diversify while still specializing" strategy. You may have all kinds of high fee professional services. You may have training, coaching, consulting, speaking, mentoring programs, and elite access masterminds.

Online courses are simply a different channel for your same value proposition, and this mitigates the risk of the “feast or famine” revenue cycle with the highs and the lows. Instead, the steady sales of online courses will give you higher highs and higher lows, so it smoothes out that up and down curve because now you have something else to sell and it gives you a broader range of investable opportunities.

Not everything has to be a $5,000, $10,000, or $50,000 sale. With online courses, you can start to fill your funnel with $499, $799 or $999 course buyers and then upgrade those course buyers selectively to your much higher-fee services once they’ve experienced the value of your content.  

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6. Online courses are especially valuable for authors and professional speakers

Courses let you repurpose, repackage and recycle content that you already have. This lets you monetize the ideas in your books, in your ebooks, in your blogs, in your presentations. Wherever these ideas are hiding right now, even in your outbound emails, because as a trusted advisor, you're giving your clients advice and insights and recommendations all the time. Just check your email outbox and there could be some great ideas that are the beginnings of a paid online course.

People devalue information and they highly value implementation, so it's great that you have a speech. It's great that you have a book. But if people really want to engage with you, you've got to give them something to engage with so they can grab a hold of your ideas and implement. A high-fee online course is a great first step to get them there.

7. Online courses let you put “handles” on your expertise

Building an online course lets you capture lightning in a bottle. In other words, you can organize your intellectual property into modules, into a sequence of steps. It's your methodology, training, and tools that have been captured and systematized and leveraged to become a competitive asset.

This is going to help you skyrocket the positioning of your business to literally the top 10 percent, that super premium, elite group of experts who have taken their intellectual property -- their philosophy, practices, and principles -- and packaged it up so it's scalable and it's repeatable. The perception of your expertise goes way up. As does your earning potential. (We’ll talk specifically about how that works, plus a $540,000 example, on the webinar tomorrow!)

8. Online courses are a fabulous way to qualify and upsell new clients

For your clients, it's a low-risk way to start. The barrier to entry is low. Most online courses could be priced anywhere from $499, $799, $997, but generally less than a thousand dollars.

It's a low risk way for clients to start and it's a high profit way for them to continue, so someone who comes into your world through your course might be your next $25,000 coaching client. They might be your next $50,000 consulting engagement. You never know, but this is a way for them to dip their toe in the water, and frankly for you to qualify them, so once they're in and they've sampled the goods, you can have a much easier time upselling and cross-selling the other services and programs that you offer.

9. Online courses are a huge amplifier of your prospecting activity, so think of it as one-to-many prospecting

Also, in a delivery mode, if people pay you a nice sum of money to come into your course, it's a beautiful way to do fully scalable one-to-many program delivery. If you've never done this, you can do a little bit of retooling of your existing coaching or training programs to get them into an online course friendly format, and this is a great opportunity to create brand new programs that are designed from the ground up to be delivered as online courses.

10. Lead generation has never been easier with free online courses

This is a classic case of "everything old is new again." This used to be huge. Back in the late 1990's and the early 2000's, you couldn't spit without hitting 3 or 4 gurus that were doing some kind of free teleseminar, free lead-generating white paper, or free email course.

Then they disappeared for a while and if you're paying attention, what you'll notice is the last 18 to 24 months, free online courses and mini-courses are back. They are back bigger and better than ever, and I'll tell you why. It's because they work.

All the gurus in podcasting, social media, online video, webinars, Facebook ads, Linkedin – you name the topic – have a free online mini-course because they work so well in pulling in leads and because they generate fast results if you know what you're doing.

Want to put some of these ideas into action and get going on your own high-fee course adventure?

Join me for tomorrow’s masterclass and you’ll get the full strategy on how to build, market, and monetize YOUR high-fee online course using expertise you already have.