As a training professional, creating and planning your online training courses seems simple enough. You only have to follow a series of steps, which you can see in our previous article Create your own online training course in 6 easy steps!
Establishing a price is almost always the tricky part for most teachers, especially at the beginning of their careers. What do you base yourself on to sell and estimate the value of your knowledge? Here are a few hints and tips that will allow you to find what your content is really worth.
1. Who, Why and How?
Before thinking of launching your online training course, it’s important to ask the following question: is there a need for this? You have to understand that easily gaining access to information is a determining factor to ensure your project’s success. If your content is easily accessible online for free, then your chances of actually selling your content will go from slim to none.
Here comes the Who / Why / How?
Good content is usually specific, answers to a specific need and targets an audience who has some kind of knowledge about the subject. Always try to avoid presenting your subject in a broad sense, then it’s always easier, right from the start, to be different from a lot of the free online content.
Once you have chosen your angle, it’s easy to target your potential market and to identify a demographic trend. Is your client old or young? Old school or technology friendly? This kind of information allows you to determine if your content should be a video, plain text, with or without tests and will help you adjust the amount of work you need to do.
To learn more, check out our article Tailoring your strategy to your client and market.
2. Content and container, two very different ideas
Once you are set on the way you want to share your content, it’s important to look at some facts. Does my content, regardless of the time required to create it, target a huge amount of potential clients or a small group of insiders?
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Evaluating knowledge is no small task, you need to listen to your guts and your market knowledge. It’s all about supply and demand. If your content is popular then you have more wiggle room. Would you rather lower your prices to target a greater amount of people, or hike the price up to create a form of rarity and only train the elite?
You cannot make any direct correlation between the time required to create your course and its value. An online video course is always a bigger investment than if you only had PDF files. You need to be realistic and accept that the most beautiful videos will not be interesting is the content is not important for anyone. Let’s be efficient! A concise and dynamic content will stand out from most traditional courses.
3. Your training creds
Let’s think about the future. Yes, we often forget that the online training industry can be quite a change in someone’s culture. We have to remember that your online training course can be the trigger of your loyal customer base. If your clients like your online course, where you showed your credibility, chances are they will come back on your platform and to take other courses and generate new income. Even better, they will talk about your offer and you will get new clients.
It’s important to plan a broadcast strategy in order to maximize the repeating learning cycle of your students, to generate stable and additional income. Whether it be with subscriptions, packages or with services such as coaching by telephone or web, a loyal student will always be willing to view your whole product range.
4. Finding your balance
No matter how you plan on selling and evaluating your content, let me remind you that the only constant thing is balance. You will know the perfect price when you will find the balance between profit and peace of mind. One thing you need to know: your prices will be questioned. Obviously, we all want to make a profit, but with a little experience, we usually start to understand (rather quickly) that lowering your price by a few dollars can go a long way, especially when it guarantees a sale.
What are your thoughts on this topic? What pushes you or slows you down when it’s time to open up your wallet and invest in learning?
