5 Ways to Leverage an Online Course for Your Business

Originally published on metapress.com 

Online courses are growing in popularity, but not all business owners realize that there are ways to leverage an online course for their business. In this article, we discuss five different ways to leverage online courses. 

Way #1. Sell It as a Product 

The most obvious way to leverage your online course is to sell it as a product. This can be a digital product that generates an additional income stream for you, likely even passive income once you have your funnel set up. 

Way #2. Automate Training

Another popular way to leverage your online course is to use it to automate training within your company. You can do this by automating the onboarding and training process for new employees or people who are advancing in their roles. 

Automating training with eLearning frees up the trainees’ and the trainers’ time to do other vital tasks. It also puts trainees in control of their learning, letting them decide where and when to learn depending on the system you use. 

Way #3. Scale Up Your Business

The idea of using online courses to scale up your business is closely related to automated training. After all, automating training is one of the easiest ways to scale up. For example, your business is growing, and you need to hire more employees. Instead of having to hire people to train all those new employees or take time out of your current team’s workload to do so, you can create an online course. 

Way #4. Educate Your Customers

You can turn your online courses into a type of educational marketing. You can use it to educate customers about your product, service, or industry. By doing so, you build your customer's trust in your brand, which will likely lead to more clients and conversions. If you can incentivize your customers to learn, all the better. 

Coinbase, a major cryptocurrency exchange, shows a great example of this strategy. They created a course about cryptocurrency on their website, teaching potential investors about cryptocurrency and helping them decide whether or not to invest. On top of that, Coinbase gives students a small financial reward for completing the course. 

Way #5. Provide Customer Support

It’s strategic to educate your customers before purchasing, but you can also use online courses to provide customer support after the purchase. Of course, you can apply this at any other stage of the process. Think of it as a way to help customers troubleshoot their questions or issues. 

Take this idea to the next level and put your course on YouTube, so you can take advantage of the fact that most people turn to YouTube to search for answers to their questions. Of course, you can also provide additional support on your website or in your own learning environment. 

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways to leverage an online course. You can sell it for a profit or use it to automate training, scale up your business, educate customers to boost sales, and for customer support. Even better, once you create the content, maximize it for more than one of these things, saving you time in the long run.