How to price my online course?

[DarkCarnage]

I'm planning to launch a niche software course in my niche. How do you justify charging $100 for your course when there are people selling courses on udemy on the topic for $12. It's not a very saturated topic, and there are only 1 or 2 persons selling courses in the in the niche, but they're selling the course for peanuts. Just to clarify, there's a large community of users interested in learning this software.

What I'm planning is to offer after-sale support/handholding through my Facebook group and forum. Also free access to digital downloadables/software which they can use with the software. I'm planning to go above and beyond to make the whole experience great for people who sign up for my course.

There is one other person who's doing it reasonably successfully pricing it at $100. He gets people to sign up for his course through his YT videos.

What I have is targeted traffic and a growing email list.

I'm looking for specific pointers on how to make the value proposition attractive. What really works in 2021/2022? Hoping to hear from people with experience in selling courses and developing a community around it.

Do you feel discouraged when you see your same course being sold cheaply on udemy or by other creators? Or do you just take it as an affirmation that there's an audience for the course?

 

[freshpeppermint]

How do people sell MMO Courses when there are cheaper ones in udemy? It's based on sales basically, you created a good sales page/video to sell it. On udemy they don't sell that hard.

Btw, if you are fine with being unethical/blackhat, what you can do is create a review of your course, pay someone on fiverr, make sure you change ur cursor and stuff, you have to write a good ass script and you have to make sure they talk less professional and have um's and just not fluent. I don't know what kind of angle you'd take since I don't know the niche but, this works pretty good.

You can also create another blog and review the courses on udemy and talk trash about them and then you link to the review of your course.

Create 5 sites like this or a few more reviewing it and then what you can do is on your authority site/main site you can do "Product Reviews" so not only do people only look at the positive reviews but you bump up your sites in case your product gets much bigger and others review it negatively and stuff.

 

[CCarter]

How does BMW and Mercedes Benz sell luxury cars when there are cheaper ones like Toyota on the market?

Answer, based on the customer's perceived value.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If the value is there, then the serious buyer won’t balk at the price. The value must be there in order to be honest and also not receive chargebacks and all that.

It’s all about value and then communicating that value through marketing. That’s where you also build trust and confidence that you’re a true expert. Why work with a stranger with a text course when I could work with @DarkCarnage who I’m familiar with after seeing his face in 50 videos on the topic and have seen proof he’s the real deal? And his course has videos, checklists, homework, support, a community forum, etc.

Create the value and make sure people see it.

People price their crap at $10 on Udemy and other places because they want it to be a passive numbers game where they just leach off Udemy’s internal traffic and don't do much extra themselves. Fighting on price communicates that your product is weak. Having luxury pricing communicates the opposite if you can back it up. Otherwise it’ll backfire.

 

[LinkPlate]

I have plenty experience with courses on Udemy and off of it.

You could use Udemy and other sites to build an audience first. Create a course that is comprehensive and still adds a lot of value. It needs to be a high quality course and obviously in the same niche that your main course is going to be about. Price the course HIGHER than all other courses about the same subject! Users always think more expensive courses have more information/are more valuable. Once you get a lot of students and reviews (since Udemy and other sites have a built in audience) - you can take those reviews and add them to your site as social proof. You can also email those students on Udemy with "informative" emails and push them to your site. Not to mention, you can open discussions with them there and start funneling them to your site.

My recommendation however would be to host your course on your site and advertise it yourself for a few reasons:

• Udemy and other sites take a huge cut of your profit
• They also limit comms on their platform so you have to be really slick to push people to your site.
• They limit the price of courses sometimes so you can't list it at your price
• You play by their rules and guidelines. If they don't like your subject, they might ban your course
• There are plenty of scrapers out there that rip courses of platforms like Udemy (I am not saying your own site might not be ripped, but chances are lower since you are not a large site like Udemy) and goodluck DMCAing/cease and desist 1000's of sites hosted in India! (Incase that happens, here is a tool you can try to stop them: https://harvel.io/)

It's best to have 100% control than 10% control.

 

[DarkCarnage]

@freshpeppermint I'll look into these strategies for social proof thanks.

@CCarter That was a great read! Will take some time for these ideas to sink into my mind.

@Ryuzaki Yes, that's what I'm thinking too. I'll try to make the whole thing really valuable, and design my sales page really well to communicate it to the reader.

@LinkPlate Thanks mate! I'll do exactly this. I don't want to price my course low. I'll just have a really valuable course instead of a cheap course. I'm gonna have to watch out for people who steal course content. But I'm guessing that's less likely to happen for audiences based in the USA and Canada.

So I'm getting some good traffic now, and a decently growing email list. I think I'll build the audience from there, and also through YT. I just don't want to upload a course to Udemy, as it takes a lot of time to make the course. What I'll do is funnel some customers from YT to my email list, and also develop a decent sales funnel for subscribers.

I'll post in this thread how it all goes once the course is live. Thanks, all.

 

[fstopeight]

The price of the course depends on 1- What people are willing to pay for it and 2- How good you are at communicating the value within the course. As a CRO guy I can tell you that most people are terrible at the second part. Long story short, assume nobody cares and speak in benefits to the reader.

And no, never discouraged when course creators are selling their stuff for $12. They obviously don't value their time and neither will their students.

However there is something else to be said about Udemy as a lead source, but that's another topic!