The full playbook — from picking a topic people will pay for, to pricing, to where you host it, to getting people to actually finish. No fluff, in the order you'll do it.
There's no shortage of advice on selling online courses, and most of it skips the parts that actually decide whether you make money — pricing, where you host the thing, and how you get people to finish. This is the version I wish I'd had when I started. It's the same sequence I wrote about in my book, condensed into the nine steps that matter, in the order you'll actually do them.
The most common way to waste three months is to build the course you want to teach instead of the one people are already paying to solve. Start from demand, not from your syllabus.
A topic is worth building when three things are true at once:
Online course is three different products wearing the same name. Pick the one that fits your topic and how much of your time you want to trade.
Plenty of people do all three eventually — a self-paced course as the front door, a cohort as the premium tier, a membership to keep people around. Start with one.
Price to the value of the result, not the hours of footage. A two-hour course that lands someone a job is worth more than a twenty-hour course that mildly entertains them.
This is the step people rush and regret. Where you sell your course quietly decides who owns the customer, what margin you keep, and whether your marketing builds your brand or someone else's.
They bring traffic, which is genuinely useful when you're starting from zero. The trade: they own the student, they set the discounts (often steep), and your payout per sale can be a rounding error. Great for a first taste, bad as a business you control.
You bring the audience, you keep the relationship and the margin. Within this, there's another fork — a hosted platform that puts your course on their subdomain and takes a transaction fee (Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific), or a setup that runs the course on your own site and domain.
Full disclosure: this is the problem CourseKit exists to solve — it runs your course, community, and checkout as real pages of your own website, on your domain, with a transaction fee that drops to zero as you grow. But the principle holds no matter what you choose: the closer the course is to a site you own, the more of the business you keep.
Your first version does not need a studio. It needs to get someone the result. Over-producing is just procrastination with better lighting.
However you host it, aim to take payment on your own domain — every extra redirect to a checkout on someone else's URL costs you sales and trust.
The myth is that you build a great course and the internet finds it. The reality is that your first sales come from people who already know you. So build the list first.
Launch spikes fade. What compounds is the boring stuff you set up once and leave running:
Completion is a growth channel disguised as a support metric. People who finish leave testimonials, refer friends, and buy your next thing. People who don't quietly ask for refunds.
CourseKit runs your courses, community, and checkout as real pages of your own Webflow site. Free to start, and the fee drops to 0% as you grow.
It depends on what you're optimizing for. A marketplace like Udemy gives you traffic but takes the customer and most of the margin. Your own site keeps the audience, the pricing, and the money. Most people who are serious about it end up on their own site — the marketplace is a starting point, not a home.
No, but it compounds. You can start on a marketplace or a hosted platform's subdomain. The moment you can, move the course onto a site and domain you own — every visit then builds your SEO and your brand instead of the platform's.
Honestly, it ranges from a few hundred dollars to a full-time income, driven by three things far more than the course itself — the size and warmth of your audience, your price, and how many people finish and come back.
You can start for free. Recording gear you likely already own, and platforms (CourseKit included) have a free plan. Your real cost is time.
Anywhere from an afternoon (a tight mini-course) to a few weeks (a flagship program). Ship the smaller version first, get real students, and expand from what they ask for.
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