Episode Summary
In this episode of PartnerShip, host Alex Standiford talks about the best platform to sell your courses online. He evaluates popular platforms like Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, and Coursera, highlighting their benefits and drawbacks.
Alex argues that while these platforms offer some advantages, they often fall short due to saturation, restrictive marketing rules, and potential sudden changes. Instead, he advocates for owning your platform using WordPress, paired with LifterLMS for course management and Siren for affiliate management.
This combination provides greater control, flexibility, and profitability, making it the best platform to sell your courses online. By leveraging your website and building strong partnerships, you can ensure long-term success and stability in your online course business.
Key Points
- Generally speaking, it’s better to own your platform than to use hosted platforms like Udemy
- Alex advocates for owning your platform using WordPress for the website and foundation.
- Use a Learning Management System (LMS) like LifterLMS to build and manage courses.
- Use an affiliate management plugin like Siren to help build a promotion network.
Transcript
On the surface, platforms like Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, or Coursera seem to offer some nice benefits when publishing your courses online.
They claim that it’s easier sell your courses directly through them because the customers probably already have an account on the platform, and you also get to benefit from their marketing efforts, driving traffic to your courses without any effort on your part.
They also handle many of the technical aspects, such as, payment processing, content lockdown, and refunds. In return, these companies take a percentage of the profits from your course sales.
However, if you look closer at these platforms, the proposed advantages they promise quickly lose their value.
Ironically enough, the marketing these platforms do to attract people to their platform doesn’t help you as much as you’d expect. These platforms are often very saturated, with several people offering courses on the same content. This means you’ll still need to do a fair bit of your own marketing just to make sure people choose your course over your competitors. In many ways, you’ve just shifted how you have to sell this course.
It’s also difficult to get out of these platforms as you grow, because many of these platforms have strict rules about how instructors can market their courses.
For example, instructors cannot use email marketing to promote their courses outside of the Udemy platform if they collected those emails through Udemy. This makes it risky to use these as a lead-generation tool to convert later. Because all of these platforms limit the methods you can use to promote your content in one way or another, and that just makes it that much harder to stand out.
I think the worst part, however, is that these platforms can change their rules at any time.
For example, in 2016, Udemy set a cap on course pricing to $50. Depending on how you were using Udemy at the time, this change could have a major impact on your business, and could limit how you approach online course creation.
I believe strongly in owning your platform. It’s a bit more work to set up, but I feel that the perceived benefits of centralized course platforms are watered down after you take a closer look.
You lose access to their marketing efforts, but were those ever going to serve you when there’s so much internal competition on these platforms, anyway?
No matter what you do, you’re going to need to promote your business in order to sell your courses, there’s just no getting around it. Even if you’re using a course platform, you are still competing with the other course creators, and in order to stand out, you’re probably generating leads and sales yourself.
Instead, I think it’s better to build your own website, sell your courses directly through that site, create partnerships with other people, and pay them a commission to help you generate sales online. In many ways, this replaces your relationship with these centralized platforms, only this time you’re paying individuals for their efforts to promote your brand. The benefit is that you don’t end up getting locked into a platform in the process. Plus, you would be creating partnerships with multiple people, instead of a single monolithic relationship with a company, loaded with stipulations that are designed to serve them, not you.
Having multiple sales partnerships also helps to stabilize your sales pipeline because you’re creating redundancy in the process. With a course platform, you have a single point of failure. If the course changes their terms, or their algorithm, it might hurt your business, and you have limited options on how you can pivot to recover from that because remember, these platforms dictate what you can, and cannot do, and those rules are meant to serve their business, not yours.
When Udemy set the limit on course price, for example, there were people like James McAllister, who went from selling their courses for nearly $200 to being forced to sell them at $50 overnight. I’m certain this was devastating for his business, as he went on to say this:
“The problem with Udemy’s new pricing approach is that it completely disregards the segment of Udemy’s instructor base that brings their own customers to the platform. Some of us have spent months or even years building credibility with our following and can justify the higher price point – not only because our following has been engaged with us for so long, but because we actually know how to sell the value of our courses.”
Another creator, named Leilani Joy lamented a similar thing about this same scenario. She said:
On Udemy, I was offering a 6 week art school training course, that requires me to work directly with students and provide hands-on critiques of assignments. $25 per student (which is how much she makes after Udemy takes its 50% cut) is not even minimum wage for my time.
Now, imagine you’ve spent years building your business, selling your courses, creating the content, updating that content, and earning your credential, only to have the rug ripped out from under you like that.
Now, I can’t give you a 1:1 example of this exact scenario, but let’s consider a setback where you’re no-longer able to work with one of your partners. only this time you own the platform. Imagine that one of your partners decide that they don’t want to promote your course anymore. Sure, you’ll probably feel the impact of that, but as long as you have multiple partners, and multiple sales channels, it’s unlikely to have a devastating impact compared to a forced, unexpected course platform change. By owning your platform, you’re able to diversify your business, a lot more effectively.
Another big benefit of owning your platform is it gives you the flexibility to sell things other than courses on your site. I love creating online courses because they can serve as a kickoff point to learn what your audience needs. In other words, purchasing your course is the beginning of your relationship with your audience, not the end. When you have a healthy series of courses, with a good-sized audience, the opportunities to cross-sell other products and services tends to naturally appear over time. It could be a book, a coaching service, pre-built project management templates, or maybe even software that serves a specific need. Owning your platform gives you the freedom to sell those things directly to your existing customers, without needing to worry about violating some kind of rule imposed by the platform you’re building on.
So, where do we go from here? It seems clear that owning your platform is the best approach, but if you do a little research into running your own website, you’ll quickly find there’s several ways that you can accomplish that. Far be it from me to be the arbiter of web platforms, and you should absolutely do your own research on which ones are the best for your business, but for me, WordPress has always been, and continues to be, my go-to tool for building websites.
I choose WordPress, not only because I know it really well, but because it’s stable, it’s reliable, it’s not owned by a single company, all of your data stays with you, and it doesn’t try to lock you into its platform over something else.
WordPress has a vibrant marketplace with thousands of themes and plugins, both free and paid. These themes and plugins allow you to customize the look and functionality of your site. Everything from advanced SEO capabilities, e-commerce, learning management systems, or affiliate program management, there’s likely a plugin or theme that fits your needs.
For me, it’s the plugins that make WordPress so powerful. By installing a learning management system, also known as an LMS, you can turn your WordPress website into a full-featured course platform that allows you to build courses, and lock down the content so only people who paid for your course can access them. There are several of these plugins, and they all offer course-building capabilities, and handle the technical aspects, as well.
I particularly like LifterLMS because the platform functions well, and Lifter is ran by a small group of people who are very passionate about creating, and using online courses as a part of a broad business strategy. They spend a lot of their time doing webinars and group-focused sessions with their customers, and it honestly feels like you’re getting free coaching alongside the actual software itself. I honestly believe that team would do anything to help you succeed. To me, that’s almost more valuable than the software they sell. There’s so many decisions that go into running a business like this, and it’s nice to know you have someone in your corner to lend a hand when you feel lost.
So, with WordPress and a learning management system, you have what you need to build your course online. You also have a way to sell those courses to people, but that’s only a part of the equation, right? What about those sales partnerships that can replace the sales and marketing boost that you would get from a centralized platform?
To solve this problem, you need another WordPress plugin. This time, you need an affiliate management plugin. These plugins will automatically track when your sales partners (also known as affiliates) drive traffic to your site that turns into a sale. When that sale happens, the system will track how big of a commission you need to pay to that person for that sale. Then, when you’re ready, you can pay your collaborators their commissions for their sales. Just like the LMS plugin, there are a few of these on the market, and they all can be used to, at minimum, build basic affiliate programs.
As you probably know, I sell an affiliate management plugin, called Siren, so of course that’s the one I think you should use, but hear me out, because I know that it’s the best affiliate plugin on the market, particularly for when you’re trying to sell online courses.
I’ve discovered when running affiliate programs online that I inevitably want to make more than one program. After all, there are many ways you can partner with other businesses online. A sales partnership alone can look completely different depending on the approach that the salesperson takes when promoting your product. Some partnerships become more-focused on generating leads than generating conversions, for example, and the details of how those two people can be effective is very different. In other words, they both needed a different set of rules that cater, and reward exactly what I need them to-do.
A lead-focused program might offer a smaller commission, but have a much longer expiration window, and rewards the first person who referred a visitor who makes a purchase.
Conversely, a conversion-focused program might offer a higher commission, but with a very short expiration window, and instead rewards the last person who referred a visitor who makes a purchase.
And that doesn’t even touch partnerships that aren’t sales partnerships. For example, maybe you want to build your own online course platform for other people to publish their courses, and you want to pay them a royalty for building, and selling their course through your platform. I know that goes outside of the scope of this conversation, but my point is that there are many ways to approach online partnerships beyond the obvious affiliate program that you need at the onset of your business.
Siren is the only plugin in WordPress that can build multiple different partnership programs that can run at the same time. All of the other options only allow you to build one monolithic, complex program. Siren gives you get flexibility on how your programs work, and can build a much more-effective set of programs that serve the different partnerships that drive traffic and sales to your business. Because Siren has a multi-program approach, it can integrate much deeper with LMS plugins, and that allows you to make programs like the royalty program I just mentioned.
Okay, so owning our platform seems to be the best approach to take for higher profits and better stability in our businesses, however, that doesn’t mean that these centralized platforms are completely useless to us. What if we took a step back, and looked at Udemy in the same way we look at something like YouTube? What if instead of thinking of Udemy as the primary source of income, we instead considered it as a piece of our marketing funnel?
If we think of Udemy as a small part of our online strategy, much like how we look at YouTube or social media, it drastically changes the value proposition it offers us. This opens up an option to generate sales on their platform with a short, easy to maintain, course. That course can then be focused on leading these customers to purchasing bigger, and better courses directly our website. This allows you to lean on the discoverability of their platform, but avoid depending on their platform in the process.
I’m not personally convinced that this is the best approach for everyone, since you could also just sell this course directly on your website, or even give it away for free when people sign up for your email list. In-fact, if your partnership program is robust-enough, you’ll probably do better by selling this inexpensive introduction course directly through your site, since your partnership network can most-likely replace that course discoverability. Plus, you can probably sell it for less than $50 and still make as much, or more than you’d make selling it through another platform. That being said, if you’re just getting started with building your partnership network, using a centralized platform to help generate sales might be a viable approach.
To me, the best platform to sell your courses online is a combination of WordPress, LifterLMS, and Siren. With these tools, you gain complete control over your course creation and sales process. WordPress provides the robust foundation you need, LifterLMS equips you with course management, and Siren empowers you to build diverse and effective partnership programs.
This approach not only frees you from the limitations and risks associated with centralized platforms but it also enables you to diversify your business with various product offerings, and multiple business partnerships. Owning your platform means you can tailor your strategies to your unique needs, and ensures that you aren’t at the mercy of the whims of a platform that may not consider what’s best for your business.
The cherry on-top is once you’re set up and running, you’re likely to get a higher profit margin than what you would have gotten through the centralized platform, and all of that is the beginning of your relationship with your customer, so you can upsell and cross-sell to them in the future.
To me, the only time I would use a centralized course platform, is as an early piece of my marketing funnel, but even in that context I would be actively working to build my partnership network to replace that step in the funnel. These platforms would never be my primary source of income, and any manner in which I work with them would be to ensure that I can stop working with them without destroying my business in the process.
