Online courser are really one of the best product to sell of our times (in small scale sector of course). The usual pricing for well one is about $1000, but they are running on constant promotion for $100-$300 so that’s the more real value. And for fully digital is straight up amazing! You can sell it infinite amount of times! Without any additional costs, maybe except hosting with is pennies compared to the profit.

It’s so good that one of the best gray area marking agencies are centering around it in their MLM pyramid schemes,

If your audience is >15yrs old and centered around specific niche, then you are good to go. Thing about it is white tier product, meaning masturbation. The consumers think doing something morally correct, and it’s good for him, what’s usually not the case as most of those online classes are no better than free YouTube videos. Not like it matters still people are buying them, I’m guilty of doing that as well, but It does always feel good to invest in yourself. It often comes spontaneously, you are seeing yourself with all the shine new skills obtaining after watching the whole thing, which frequently don’t happen, most people don’t finish the curses they bought, but that doesn’t stop them from buying another.

Fabricating the issue

There are many bad things in the world you can attach to in leavening your agenda, you now the fortune-teller generalization, things so universal that everyone can relate. Some examples: feeling tired, not realizing yourself, not having enough time, feeling distracted… So after telling your viewers how shitty their life is they all agree, now it’s time to pinpoint the blame to some other entity, as no one ever like to hear that’s the issue is on them. You have many things to chose: the system, bad parenting, school, gender inequalities, racial discrimination, cold war, Jews, fluoride in water… The conspiracy needs to be precisely chosen, but at this point it’s should be already obvious.

Snake oil

The solution should be simple, and obvious, not necessary factual and working. Hollow words with no substance, but it needs to sound good, and be easy to implement with just a little guide.

Pre-production

Tho host

One and only thing that matters is charisma, but I believe that’s trivial at this point, every one knows the self-proclaimed experts are just reading from the prompt. To be fair it requires some practice to sound confident while talking about things you have no slightest clue. So the usual approach is to fool the host as well, applaud him couple times and he will gradually start to believe that he actually understand the thing, you could call that calling Dunning-Kruger effect, but that’s not factual the case, nonetheless it gives general understanding quite well.

The other thing well worth considering is the general appearance, good-looking people inspire trust, ugly not, simple as that.

Script

I’m big fan of those flexible scripts, meaning it’s very simple script showcasing the main topics and some comments, and leaving rest to the host, who presents everything on fly. After some practice the effects is significantly better than reading from prompter.

As amazing it works for YouTube videos, the course production requires some more deliberate information containg, you are a teacher you cannot make up stuff, at lest to not

Creation

Platform

Tutor based on Opend edX video educational platform

Based on my research this is the best option for doing video courses, other than developing everything from scratch, but this is not the level of production and management I’m aiming for.

It’s FOSS, and self-hosted, meaning no excessive cost and full control and privacy,

Alternatives

Those are other alternatives that caught my attention, but were disproved later on.

• https://www.oppia.org/
• https://www.podia.com/
• https://www.thinkific.com/
• https://teachable.com/ The prices ranges $100-$500/mo, and even then they have some serious limitations, but maybe you have other needs than me.

Deployment

I’m not big fan of Docker, I almost always have some dumb issues that takes me ages to resolve, but their documentation is quite extensive.

Anti-piracy

Honestly not something worth doing, as most of the people that will download it for free wouldn’t buy it anyway. So you are not losing anything on that other that “potential” profit, and actually working countermeasures will consume more money that it will possibly generate. Only thing that’s maybe worth doing is the one time set-up covering the Google keywords and occasionally reporting the first links as well controlling SM. Most people these days don’t know how to torrent stuff, have no access for private trackers, and really know nothing about obtaining digital goods.

Members group

One of the thing that should be additional selling point should be a private group for other buyers, it not only sounds good, but also is something that cannot be pirated, so it’s only for people who actually paid. Is it all that worth it? Well depends, more often not than yes, there are obviously some niches that connecting with other people might be more worth it than the course itself. It does kinda crosses off the whole “passive” idea of this business since it will be required from you to provides something on this channel, but it’s not all that much work honestly. Give some trusted people the moderator role, “with syndrome of power comes free labor”, at least this is how it’s been since the start of social media era. And after all this is a community people will be handling themselves, but it is usual good practice to check it out from time to time.