Create and sell your online courses quickly and easily

Nowadays, anyone can actually acquire the knowledge they are looking for, free of charge and just a click away at any time, because almost everything is available online. However, it is often difficult to tell which sources are reputable and up to date.

For this reason, the demand for serious and professional knowledge transfer services is increasing. The big advantage for providers is the high demand, because no matter which niche is served, there are numerous people online who are looking for expert knowledge. This is why online courses can reach many more people than face-to-face courses, as they are not tied to a specific location or time.

This also creates a high degree of flexibility for you as a provider, as you can create and sell your courses when and from where you want. They are also a useful addition to your portfolio and offer a good opportunity to earn a passive income.

The most common way of offering and selling online courses is the one-off payment. You can set a fixed price that your members pay to get full access to the course.

If you regularly offer your members exclusive content, then a subscription model could be very interesting for you.

This question arises at the latest when your course is finished and you have decided against an all-in-one platform. You now need to look for a suitable payment provider. To ensure that you are legally compliant and GDPR-compliant, it makes sense to choose a German payment provider.

The most popular payment providers for online courses in German-speaking countries are DigiStore24 and CopeCart.

DigiStore24 offers a huge marketplace where you can sell your online courses. The fees are 7.9% of the selling price + €1 per product sold, if you don't sell anything, you don't pay anything.

CopeCart uses the same principle as DigiStore24, but the transaction fees are significantly lower at 4.9% + €1. You can also get started straight away and sell your courses, as verification only takes place afterwards.

Both resellers offer the usual payment methods, such as SEPA direct debit, credit card, PayPal or instant bank transfer.

You can easily connect CopeCart and DigiStore24 to Memberspot, but you can also connect and automate providers such as Stripe using the popular Zapier web service. If you want to know more about how to connect these payment providers using Zapier, take a look at our blog article on connecting payment providers, where you will find detailed instructions.

1. You want to generate passive income or maximize your income because you are already working at full capacity in your business as a knowledge broker.
2. You want to achieve greater reach and use your online course as a marketing tool.
3. You want to offer a free online course to draw attention to your high-priced offers.
4. You want to use your online courses to train your employees or customers and use them as an e-learning tool.
5. You would like to set up a customer academy so that your customers can find out about your products and services independently in order to relieve your sales department and pre-qualify customers.

If you are just getting started in the online course business and have not yet built up a community, it may be a good idea to initially sell your courses at a low price that covers your costs, so that you break even at the beginning.

This way, you gradually build up a community and gain the trust of your customers, which you can build on and offer further courses at higher prices.

Online courses are all the rage, more so than ever since the coronavirus crisis, so you might think that this is just a trend that will level off again. But it doesn't look like that at the moment, demand for digital offerings continues to grow and this will not change in the long term.

Online courses are no longer just a trend, but have become an integral part of the social and working world. With an online course, knowledge can be imparted digitally in a scalable way, at any time and from anywhere, and you can also reach an enormously large audience that you would never and could never reach with a face-to-face course.