6 Reasons Your Online Course Isn't Selling

There's nothing worse than putting in a ton of time and energy to build an online course, publishing it, putting it out into the world, and seeing no sales. Basically just hearing crickets. This is actually one of the biggest fears that people have when starting to create online courses. They want to get it right the very first time. And I can tell you from experience that that doesn't always happen. Sometimes it does, especially when you learn the process, you understand you have a way better chance of succeeding. I know this from experience because I've built 6 online courses, or I did build 6 online courses before I ever sold one that actually sold hands-off, totally on autopilot. I created passive income. I learned how to actually make it work. I had mentors that taught me, and in the process of building 6 of them until I was successful with it, I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. So today I'm going to share with you 6 of the number 1 reasons, I guess 6 of the main reasons that your online course is most likely not selling. But I'm also going to share with you how to fix each one of them. Let's dive in. Welcome to episode number 28 of the Profit Your Knowledge podcast. I'm your host, James Allen, here to help you turn your knowledge, passions, and skills skills into an online business so that you can be your own boss, make a difference in this world, control your schedule, and ultimately live a life of freedom. Super excited about today. I want to share with you the pitfalls that I have experienced myself in terms of selling an online course, specifically hands-off. If you really want to learn how to create passive income, you're interested in building online courses, digital products, and you want to sell them on autopilot, make them your own digital products, most importantly, then I highly recommend you pick up a 5-step action plan or action guide that I put together. It's going to show you how to make your first, it could be $100, $500, or even $1,000 in passive income. It depends on where you're at in your business. If you're just starting out, even just making $100 in passive income is such a great accomplishment because when you get that first sale, even if it was just $100, you realize that I could do this again and again and again. And really the only thing stopping you is just understanding the process, understanding the system. And that's exactly what this guide walks you through in 5 simple steps. So I highly recommend you pick it up if you're interested in turning online courses into passive income and making sure that they actually do sell on top of the tips that we talk about in today's episode. To get the guide, just go to profityourknowledge.com/guide. There's also a link in the description. It's my gift to you, totally free. Again, it's in the description. So let's dive into 6 reasons your online course most likely isn't selling and how to fix it. Number 1, the first reason, you just don't understand your customer well enough. This is probably the most important one. I'm going to kickstart it with that. What I'd recommend, and I'm not going to dive way too deep into this, I'm just going to give you the stuff that I think you need to know in terms of understanding your customer. In terms of understanding your customer, if you don't get your customer, you don't understand what they care about or what's important to them, then you're not going to be able to learn to give them or explain to them the value of what you have to offer inside of your online course. So what I'd recommend you to do right now, if you can, is to open up a document on like Google Docs or your Notes app or a piece of paper if you want, if you're old school like that, and create a document with 3 separate categories. Number 1 category or category number 1 will be pains, challenges, and frustrations. So write that down, create that as a category for yourself. The second category is hopes, dreams, and desires. That's category number 2. Category number 3, obstacles, barriers, and uncertainties. And now what we're going to do now that you have these 3 categories is we're going to fill them up with stuff that your customer is experiencing in terms of each one of those categories. So the ways that you can do this to fill this document up. Again, I'm not going to dive crazy deep into this, but the main ways is to survey your email list. If you have one, survey them. You can go to like, I think it's SurveyMonkey or Jotform. You can create an easy survey just asking them some questions about what you want to create an online course around. Like, is this important to you? Do you actually care about this? Um, you can also create polls inside of like Facebook groups as well to see if people are interested in whatever topic you're creating and what they're thinking about or experiencing. In terms of that product or service. It could even be doing coaching sessions with people. A lot of people that I'll work with, they do coaching one-on-one with people or in groups, and then they want to turn it into an online course. So with an online course, being able to sell it on autopilot, you need to understand copywriting, which we're going to get into in a little bit later. But hearing the exact words and phrases that people are saying, I'm struggling with this, I really don't know how to do this, I want to achieve this. That's— those are pains, challenges, frustrations, hopes, dreams, and desires, obstacles. This is why I can't do it because I don't have the time. I don't have the energy. I don't have the money to pursue this. Gold. That is pure gold. So take the bits and pieces, the words and phrases that are being said by the people that you really want to help and insert them into the given category that I shared with you earlier. Those 3 separate categories. You can also interview your target audience. A lot of people do this. I think I was actually on this person's podcast, but they had a podcast where they met with like coaches and entrepreneurs and different small business owners. It was small business owners. That's what it was, small business owners. And what the person did was actually their service was to help small business owners get set up legally. That's their niche. So they created a podcast where they interview small business owners so that these people can hop onto the podcast. Deliver their message, be in front of other small business owners that they could potentially help and in front of an audience. So they're getting value. And then the person would offer, hey, if you want to, we can run over just kind of your legal documents and things. But they did it really casually. It was pretty, it was pretty sly and not sly as in like sneaky, but it was just, it was smooth and it didn't feel pushy or anything. It was just an invitation, but it was really, really cool. I already had my business set up legally and all that stuff. So I didn't really have an interest in it, but I was like, that's a smooth— that is a very smooth way to attract clients, interview them on a podcast and then invite them to work with you. But interviewing them will allow you to actually hear like what their story was, what they were thinking, what the challenges they had, the obstacles, the hopes and dreams that they have, etc. And then just plug it into your document. Okay. You can also study forums like Reddit or Quora As well, great places where people are just having conversations. Um, look for what people are saying about your offer, about your online course, and just put inside that document in those 3 categories. And that's essentially customer research, but just anything interesting that you find could be helpful in terms of understanding your customer and really what they're struggling with or want to achieve, put inside the document. So that's number 1. You don't understand your audience well enough or your customer well enough. Number 2, your offer isn't compelling or clear enough. This is typically due to poor customer research because you're not— an offer is just something like that you're offering people. It is very cut and dry. It's not super wordy. You don't want it to be. You want offers to be very straightforward. This is what you're getting. Boom, boom, boom. Like bullet points. That's really what we want when it comes to having an offer and you understand what your customer actually cares about. You can offer them what they're struggling with. You can offer them the solution. Okay. So your offer isn't clear or compelling enough, typically due to customer research. You see how they connect with each other. So what I'd recommend is to create a detailed course outline where you have a catchy, intriguing name, a really cool titles, and just the process, like a 6-step process to achieve X, whatever it is, or a 4-step process, whatever your, your online course does. It's very streamlined. And then share it with your audience for feedback, with your email list, sending surveys. You can make a video just running over the outline and being like, hey, does this actually sound like something would be interesting to you? And people will tell you, wow, that's really cool. And just the outline alone should be intriguing enough for someone to actually be considering buying it. So that— yeah, I mean, that's what I would really recommend. If you can create an outline that doesn't take nearly as long as creating the actual course, You're just outlining the course and sharing it with people and getting feedback on if that's something that people would be interested in, if they'd be willing to most importantly pay money for. Okay. That way, you know, that the offer is compelling and clear enough because if the name of the, the course and the content of the course is compelling, they're going to let you know. All right. Reason number 3, your online course most likely is not selling, is that your course is priced too high. Or it's even priced too low. This is interesting. There is this, um, phenomenon, if you want to call it that, uh, called price elasticity. It is just more of a rule and a principle of how this world works and psychological principle. Uh, price elasticity. If you think about a rubber band, you can stretch a rubber band only so far depending on the size of the rubber band. When it gets to a certain point and gets weak enough, it's going to break. So this is the same thing with price. Price is an interesting topic because you can, I mean, theoretically you could price things as high as you want. It comes down to how well you can explain the offer and understand your customer that is going to justify buying something for that price. That's really what matters. Okay. But you kind of need to play with this. You want to find a price if you're creating a passive income style, like I'm, I've learned and that I'm sharing with you now. Is you want it to be low enough where people are paying for it consistently. It can even be a stretch for them, but they're like, oh, but I want this, I want to do it, but high enough to where it actually brings in revenue. So a good rule of thumb, and Tim Ferriss talks about this, talks about this in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, is to price digital products. If you have enough people coming in and building traffic and all that stuff, one of the big components, price it around $47 to $197. So $50 to $200. That is typically a sweet spot where if you have enough traffic coming in, making sales, you can make some good revenue like that. I wouldn't go lower than $50. If you go higher than $200, typically you need to do, you have to have better copywriting or you can couple up like a really good like workshop or webinar as well with it. And that'll help you sell more of those high-priced products. But it really comes down to how well you understand your audience. Okay, so you might need to play around with your price. If you're not been making sales, maybe you're like, it could be a little too high for people, then you can try dropping it down. Maybe you'd start seeing those sales come in. But if it is too low and it's a huge promise, it can seem like too good to be true kind of deal. Maybe you can bump up the price. What I want you to understand with this reason is to play with your price. Just 'cause you came up with a price doesn't mean this is what it needs to be. You can create multiple different price points and try and find which one, if you have 3 different tiers, you can find, oh, the one in the middle is always selling. The other ones don't even sell. Then you can just keep that one tier. Okay. Or you can just get rid of the lowest price one and just keep the top 2. But also notice other people in your space. And if they're selling similar products, look at what they're pricing it for, what offers they're creating. Don't necessarily like copy them. You can model the cake and innovate the icing, if you will. Uh, so what is that? We're on number 4. Okay. So number 4 reason that your online course most likely is not selling is that you haven't developed your copywriting skills. I love this one. This is huge because I didn't for the longest time. And when I started to develop my copywriting skills, that is when out of all those courses I created before, I was able to make sales. Because of copywriting. If you're creating passive income, copywriting is everything. Copywriting is your emails, which is your email funnel. It's the content that you create, assuming you have like a blog post, but even just like your titles alone, that's technically copywriting. Your sales page is copywriting. Your website is copywriting. All the text that you see in terms of marketing and sales, that is copywriting, and so on. So, I mean, really the two biggest things are having an email funnel where as soon as people opt in from your content, they give you their email address, then it triggers an email funnel. It's over the course of 5 days, and inside my 5-step guide, I share with you how to do this. But that triggers an email funnel. Those emails are copy that build trust and then transition into offering your product, being like, hey, I found a solution. If those last emails resonated with you, then they go to a sales page. Again, that is copy. Copywriting. Okay, so if you haven't paid for a course on copywriting, if you haven't hired a coach to learn copywriting, or you have a coach that doesn't teach you about copywriting, or if you've never even gotten a book that shows you how to do copywriting, do it now. At least get a book, get something on Audible, learn about copywriting and just practice it. That's really the biggest thing that's going to actually help you. One, one great thing you can do is also just study great copy, read about it, learn about it, but study it, you know, by buying a course, like I said, getting a book, joining a copywriting newsletter is great as well. They're free. You just give them your email address. They might say you try and sell you products, whatever. If it's good, buy it. I paid $2,000 for a copywriting course and it was life-changing. Okay. It still is. It's something that I'm just constantly using to get better and better at copywriting. Okay, so don't be afraid to invest in the skill of copywriting, especially if you want to create passive income with online courses. It's going to be paramount to making those sales. But just type in on Google, uh, best copywriting newsletters, and you'll get a list and you can join a couple of them, find which one makes sense for you, and then stick with it. But the biggest way to get better at copywriting is to practice more. Practice writing compelling, um, copy more. It's really what is persuasive writing is what copywriting is in terms of marketing and sales. That in a nutshell is copywriting. So I, to do this, what I did was I started emailing my, my email list an extra day each week. I used to just share my YouTube videos and my podcast, my content every week, but then I started doing 2 days a week. And that second day I would really just focus on writing and sharing ideas, principles, strategies, things, just something extra that's only for my email list, which is beneficial to them because it's exclusive, but also helped me get better at my writing skills. And I've gotten better. I'm getting better every single week. It's a never-ending process. The other thing I started doing was I started blogging. So I have an outline that I teach for my YouTube videos and my podcast, and then I take that outline. I pretty much just copy it onto a different document and I turn it into a blog post. I fill in the gaps of all the main points I wanted to share. In terms of my writing, and I make sure that it sounds compelling and it looks good. Okay. All that is copywriting. Those are the two biggest things that didn't take up a ton of my time, added more value to my audience, and helped me get better at my copywriting skills. So what can you do this week to really get good at copywriting or get better at copywriting, even if it's just buying a book? That's totally fine. Reason— oh, wait. 1, 2, 3, 4. 4. Reason number 5. Okay, I should have numbered these. This would be easier. Reason number 5 that your online course most likely is not selling is that you haven't built enough trust before making your offer. This is kind of a touchy subject because some people are like, oh, you need to spend months or years building trust before you can ever make an offer. Then there's some people who only sell and that's all they do, which in my opinion, I'm not really into it. You got to find a nice medium. But if you think about the way that I've learned and that I teach people how to build an online business now is you're creating content like a YouTube video or a podcast or a blog. Someone can be following that content. If you're putting out content consistently every single week, week in, week out, maybe multiple times a week on YouTube, we'll say, just to keep it simple, people are watching YouTube videos and they're like, wow, this person's really cool. I like the way that they teach. I like their personality. I like their content. It's fun to learn from this person. They start to build trust with you every time you teach them something that they can go implement that day. Like I'm sharing with you these 6 reasons. Okay, if you actually go and implement this and you practice this stuff, you're going to start to see results, assuming you actually do it. And that's going to help you build trust, because if you get results from the things that I'm sharing with you, you're going to say, I like that guy. That was cool. Same thing with your business. And this works on a podcast as well. If you find a podcast and you start listening to it, you're like, wow, this This is really cool. You want to keep going back to that podcast because it's enjoyable, it's valuable for you, and you start to trust the person behind the mic or the camera or the letters and words from a blog post. Okay. So the way that we fix this problem is to just consistently create quality content. That's what's really going to build trust because people can follow you for— it could be the day that they find you, they start getting on your email list and finding out about your course. It could be 6 months or even a year that they've been following you through your main channel like YouTube or a podcast, and then they finally decide to pick up your lead magnet and get through your email funnel, etc., etc. Okay. Your lead magnet also builds trust. So when people find that quality content, they follow you, then they get your lead magnet, which just gets them a quick win. Like my action guide that I have, it shows you, it gives you clarity on how to actually make this work and it has action steps. That you can literally start running with and using, that's going to build even more trust. Wow. And then they start reading your emails, building more trust, and then you transition into this offer. The beautiful thing is that this all can be automated. And if you go through the 5-step guide, I show you how to make it automated. Also, your copywriting, that's your emails, okay? That builds trust. And then people go to the sales page, they get to build more trust, get to know you more, see what kind of results you're getting for other people and for yourself. And then you offer a product. Okay. So this is a beautiful system where it doesn't need to take a ton of time when you put the pieces together in the right places and you get good at the different skills like copywriting or creating content. Okay. That's how you're going to be able to build trust automatically. And the more momentum you get, the more sales you'll be able to make because you've built that momentum. You built the system that does all of this for you again, inside the 5-step guide. Number 6, this is the last reason that your online course most likely is not selling. There's no social proof on your sales page and there's no guarantee. This is almost twofold. Okay, you get a bonus here with no guarantee, no social proof, no guarantee. I see people's sales pages all the time and they don't put a guarantee. Adding a guarantee works a lot of ways because it gives people a chance to relax and say, I really want to get this. And they have a guarantee where I can get my money back if I don't like it. Cool. It also, it's good for the customer, but also it forces you as the creator to create a quality product that can actually deliver so that they don't want to ask for a refund. If they get a really good product that gives them everything that you promised on your sales page, they're going to want to stick around. Okay. And even if they did love the product, but maybe they need the money or whatever, and they're in that window, then of whatever your guarantee is, then you just have to give them their money back. It's just the way that the game is. That's part of being a business owner. Okay. But if you really create great products, you're going to get rid of having to give people their money back because you created something that they didn't want to get their money back because they got value from it. So great guarantee. I just say keep it simple. You know, 30 to 60 days, 30 or 60 days is perfect. Some people do like 7 days. I don't, I don't think that's really cool in my opinion. I like to give people a generous amount. I like to be generous with my audience. I usually do 60 days. 60 days in my opinion is more than enough time. It's 2 months to go through the content, to apply things, to try it. And if you don't like it, I'll give you your money back. Okay. In my opinion, 30 to 60 days is perfect, but some people will do 7 days, like I said, or even a year long, depending on what the product is and depending on what the price of the product is as well. Okay. But yeah, people are too afraid to add a guarantee because they feel like they're going to lose money. But in reality, it's so powerful because it gives people more trust with you. It shows confidence that you're like, I'll give you your money back if you don't like this. Like, that's how confident I am that this product is going to deliver for you. So add a guarantee, 30 to 60 days. Keep it simple. Okay. Just say, try out the system, try out the process. If you don't like it for any reason, you don't like the way I talk or whatever, it wasn't what you were expecting, then just email me at whatever your email is and ask for a refund. I'll give you one, no questions asked, no hassles, promise. And then do that, deliver on the promise. That's what builds trust and makes you an ethical brand. In terms of no social proof. On your sales page. Testimonials are huge. And what I mean, people are more likely to buy things online nowadays than like early 2000s because it's become more and more normal. Think amazon.com, people buy things all the time. But if you went to amazon.com and you were going to buy something like a bed frame or, you know, a computer or whatever it is, or video game console, anything, you like to look at the reviews and see what are people saying about this product. And if the reviews are great, the majority of them, you'll be like, sweet, it's got 5 stars, 4.5 stars, I'm going to get it. If it has 3 stars, you're like, I'm kind of curious, like, why isn't it that good? Same thing with your online course. You want to get testimonials, but you don't need to have 50,000 testimonials or 20 testimonials. If you have 3 to 5 really focused testimonials that are about your product, that's really all you need. And then it's just a matter of you strategically placing those testimonials. One of the best places to put testimonials, even if you only had a couple, like 3, we'll say, is when you get down to the offer, you've built some trust in your sales page, then you offer your product and you have your guarantee and you can say, this is the stuff that people are saying about this course. And it's like, this course helped me achieve this in this amount of time. This course saved X amount of time for me. It helped me make this amount of money. It helped me do this, but it's this course specific. Helped me achieve this or saved me this. It value— it benefited me in some way. Okay. Make sure they're very specific when you do this. A great way. I mean, if you're like what I did with my course, my newest course, Effortless Income, that's coming out, hasn't launched at the time of this recording yet, but it will be. It is all about all the stuff in this, this business model, creating passive income and building your online business in the way that I have learned over the last 4+ years of building my own online business. What works and what doesn't. What I did was I created a beta test offer and I just made it like $50. And what I did was I emailed my list and I said, hey, I'm just looking for a few people to go through this. I made a quick video that went over the outline and everything like this is what you're going to get. And I said, it's only $50 because I just want you to have some skin in the game. So a handful of people ended up signing up for the course for the beta test. And then I closed the offer. It was just a week-long promotion. I got a couple of people in there and they have been going through the course at the time I was recording and engaging in it. They're doing everything I wanted, which is awesome. So I'm getting all these different comments inside of the course. But also I created a quick little feedback form that I'm going to have them fill out. Just literally, what, what are 3 things that you liked about Effortless Income or whatever your course is called? And then what's one thing that you think we can improve on to make this an even better product? Those are two different questions. You're going to get three things they liked about it, one thing that they wish was a bit different. And then the last question I like to say is, why did you choose Effortless Income over other products? Why did you choose to work with us over other people? Three great questions to ask. And you can create this literally for free, this document inside of Jotform, jotform.com. Add those 3 questions and then put it inside of your course at the end of your course as like a closing remarks kind of lesson. You'll be solid. Okay. Off to the races. That's plenty of information. People have these huge testimonial-like things. No, keep it simple. Okay. 3 things you liked about it. 1 thing you wish were different or that you think we can improve on, and then why you chose us over the competition. Keep it simple. Okay. So let's do a summary of these 6 reasons that your online course isn't selling. Number 1, you don't understand your customer well enough. 2, your offer isn't compelling or clear enough. 3, the price of your course or product is either too high or too low. You might need to play with the price a bit and just kind of adjust it, see what makes sense and what actually works. You want consistent amount of sales where it's at least just trickling in and, um, to where like no one's buying it versus it actually trickling in. Okay, but it's also high enough to where you're making as much money as you can from it. Number 4, you haven't developed your copywriting skills yet. Okay, get some books, learn about it, practice. 5, you haven't built enough trust before making your offer. Study my 5-step guide. It'll show you how to do all this on autopilot. And then number 6, there's not enough social proof or there's no social proof and there's no guarantee on your sales page. Add those two things. I guarantee that you are going to make more sales. Okay? And really pick up the 5-step action plan. It's going to put all this together and really teach you about how this stuff actually works. It's actionable. It's short. It's just a PDF that's going to walk you through and break it down into 5 simple steps. Okay? Each page is one step. I give you a little bit of knowledge about it, teach you about it. And even in some of the steps, there's links to separate videos that will walk you through to give you a bit more of a deep dive on how I do things. Okay, my gift to you, totally free. Use it to earn your first $100, $500, or even $1,000 or more in passive income depending on where you are at. To get the guide, just go to ProfitYourKnowledge.com/guide, link in the description. And hey, if you got value from today's lesson, please leave a comment. If you're on YouTube, give me a thumbs up just to let me know that you're there and that you're enjoying this. And if you are on the podcast, please leave a review. It really helps not just grow the channel, but also again, just I know that you're there and I'd really truly appreciate that. Either leave a review or if you can share this, that would be amazing as well. Okay. I hope you got value from today. I hope there was something was eye-opening. If you do leave a comment on YouTube or review, let me know one of these reasons that you feel is the number one reason that your course most likely isn't selling is that you don't understand your customers, that you need to work on your copywriting skills. What is it? Let me know just one of them and then make a commitment to really work on that one specific thing. Okay? Take what you learned here. Get out there, apply these things to your business and to selling your online course. And I guarantee that you will move more product. Till next time. See you later.