The demand for online education has skyrocketed in recent years, presenting continued opportunities for educators, entrepreneurs, and experts to monetize their knowledge. Whether you’re an experienced teacher, a skilled professional, or a passionate hobbyist, creating and selling online courses can be a highly rewarding venture.
However, there’s no shortage of competition when it comes to the e-Learning market. So, what can you do to stand out?
Well, it all comes down to two primary elements:
- The quality of your online course, and
- How you market it
Enter LifterLMS and Siren, two powerful platforms for creating, managing, and selling online courses. LifterLMS is a robust learning management system (LMS) that offers comprehensive features for course creation, student management, and seamless payment processing. Siren is a revolutionary affiliate management plugin that enables meaningful partnerships and multiple incentive programs.
Why are both of these platforms highly beneficial for selling online courses? We’ll break it all down for you.
In this post, we’ll talk about why you should sell online courses. Then, we’ll talk about why you should use LifterLMS to create and manage your online courses, as well as how Siren is a game-changer when it comes to marketing your course. We’ll also give you a step-by-step process for selling online courses using LifterLMS and Siren.
You’ll learn how to maximize your reach and revenue with these two essential tools, whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking to optimize your existing online course business.
Let’s dig in!
Why You Should Sell Online Courses
The eLearning industry was already growing steadily when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, but along with the pandemic came a surge in demand for at-home learning solutions. The industry has only continued to grow, with latest predictions forecast an eLearning market size of 1 trillion USD by 2032.
Source: Global Market Insights
That would be a 500% increase from the market size of $200 billion in 2019.
But besides the fact that it’s a rapidly growing industry, there are a few more reasons why selling online courses is particularly appealing:
- There’s very little overhead cost when it comes to creating an online course
- You can reach a global audience, giving you a wider impact
- Selling online courses helps you monetize your expertise and knowledge
- It’s a flexible and scalable business model that generates passive income
- Online courses provide a foundation for other income streams, such as coaching, sponsorship, and upselling additional products or services
Using LifterLMS to Create and Sell Online Courses
What is LifterLMS?
LifterLMS is a comprehensive and user-friendly eLearning plugin for WordPress that allows you to create, manage, and sell online courses. With a variety of tools for course creation, student management, and payment processing, LifterLMS is a robust all-in-one solution for eLearning entrepreneurs.
However, eLearning is a competitive industry, which means high-quality courses that keep students engaged are more in-demand than ever.
The Benefits of Using LifterLMS to Create and Sell Online Courses
With LifterLMS, you can design engaging and interactive courses using multimedia content, quizzes, and assignments to enhance the learning experience. Plus, it offers seamless integration with popular WordPress themes and plugins, and you can customize your eLearning experience to match your brand.
The platform also supports various pricing models, from one-time payments to subscription plans. This makes it a flexible option for different course creators and eLearning website owners who may have different needs.
Using Siren to Market Your Online Courses
Creating an online course is just one piece of the puzzle; you also need to get your course in front of the people who want to buy it.
Marketing is the key component here, and it’s often overlooked. This is where Siren comes in.
What is Siren?
Siren offers unique capabilities that allow you to do things like personalize affiliate earnings and run multiple incentive programs.
How Siren Helps You Sell More Online Courses Through Partnerships
Whether it’s a niche-specific YouTuber, blogger, or company, partnering with other businesses, influencers, and organizations can seriously boost your online course revenue.
Siren allows you to set up affiliate programs for partners, so they get rewarded for sending students to your site, buying your course, or something else. This incentivizes partners to drive traffic to your online courses.
A Quality Affiliate Program Attracts Online Course Creators to Your Site
In this post, we are focusing largely on how creators and educators can maximize earnings from selling online courses, but what if you want to run a website that sells online courses made by other creators?
In this case, it’s important to attract course creators to your site in the first place. Siren helps you incentivize course creators with royalty programs and other rewards for selling their courses through your site.
Affiliates Can Upsell Sponsorships and Coaching For You
Selling online courses doesn’t have to stop at the course itself; Managing reward programs with Siren can incentivize your affiliates to upsell things that bring you additional revenue streams—like sponsorships, coaching, or other products and services—on your behalf.
This automatically expands your revenue potential.
Siren Lets You Run Multiple Different Programs at Once
While Siren is a game-changer for all types of businesses, it benefits people who are selling online courses in particular because online courses are not necessarily an impulse buy. In fact, they can sometimes be quite expensive, which leads buyers to take more time in considering a purchase.
In our other post How To Sell Expensive Things Using Siren, we go into more detail about how using the multi-program approach helps you appeal to people at different stages of the buyer’s journey. But the point we’d like to emphasize here is:
A one-size-fits-all affiliate management solution is limiting.
With this in mind, perhaps the coolest thing about Siren is that it enables you to put together multiple different incentive programs at one time, in any combination you like. There are five program structures you can choose from:
Oldest Engagement Wins
Oldest Engagement Wins rewards the first collaborator to engage a customer.
Newest Engagement Wins
Newest Engagement Wins is a program structure designed to reward the last collaborator who successfully engages with a customer.
Shared Engagement Pool
The “Shared Engagement Pool” is a program structure where rewards are evenly divided among all collaborators who have interacted with a customer throughout their journey.
Performance Weighted Pool
The Performance Weighted Pool is a program structure where rewards are distributed among all collaborators based on their performance relative to each other.
Top Score Wins
The Performance Weighted Pool is a program structure where the person with the top engagement score receives the entire reward.
These different program structures appeal to different types of affiliates, allowing you to custom-tailor your programs in ways that leverage the strengths of each affiliate type. Here are three types of incentive program examples to illustrate how this might look in an eLearning context:
Affiliate Program
The basic concept of an affiliate program is that you pay a portion of your online course profits to a person who refers a visitor to your site. This is the default choice when it comes to incentive programs, and often functions with either a coupon code, percentage of sales, or a reward for site traffic.
Royalty Program
In this example, you sell courses created by other educators on your site, and pay a portion of profits to each creator when their course is sold.
Blog Content Program
You decide to publish free educational content on your site in an attempt to cross-sell site visitors on your course or other products and services. So, you pay a portion of profits to the author of the free resources when their content successfully cross-sells paid resources.
Siren Lets You Personalize Affiliate Earnings
The multiple programs you can create with Siren also allow you to stack commissions—giving you maximum flexibility when it comes to rewarding your affiliates in whichever way you want to. That means more personalized earnings for affiliates, and more robust affiliate management for you.
You Can Track Anything With Siren, Including LifterLMS Events
Gone are the days of tracking cookies alone; With Siren’s tracking system, you can track site visitors, coupon codes, blog post visits, and more.
More specifically, Siren offers tracking capabilities specific to LifterLMS, such as:
Course Completed
This allows you to credit course creators when a customer completes their course.
Lesson Completed
This allows you to credit course creators each time a customer completes their lessons.
Course Track Completed
This allows you to calculate and reward when people complete a course track.
Plus, future plans for Siren include support for many other kinds of tracking events and different ways to make incentive programs.
How to Integrate Siren with LifterLMS
Integrating Siren with LifterLMS is a straightforward process that combines the powerful features of both platforms. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Install and Activate the LifterLMS plugin on your WordPress website.
- Create your online course in LifterLMS.
- Install and Activate Siren on your website.
- Set up LifterLMS. See Lifter’s documentation to get started.
- Set up Siren. See Siren’s getting started guide to get started.
LifterLMS and Siren Work Together to Help You Sell Online Courses
LifterLMS and Siren are a seamless duo when it comes to selling online courses. The combination of a comprehensive and user-friendly eLearning platform like LifterLMS is revenue-boosted by a robust multi-program affiliate management solution like Siren.
In tandem, these tools enable you to create a thriving eLearning business, whether you’re a course creator or you run an eLearning website that sells courses by other creators. Just remember to think carefully about the different ways you want to market your online course, so that you can customize your affiliate programs to maximize impact.
Ready to supercharge your online course business? Download LifterLMS and Siren today to start building the perfect system for creating and selling online courses.
Swim fast, dream big!
