How To Sell Video Courses Online?

Educational videos as well as Training videos can be sold and turned into a very profitable venture in today’s world. It is estimated that this market will grow into a $350+ billion dollar industry by the year of 2025. One of the most notable benefits of this market is that all of it can be done online. No matter what your niche is, be it yoga, functional training, tech-based videos, digital art, and so on, there is an audience for all of them. You can make a good amount of money by offering video courses for your particular niche.

If you do a Google search on “How to sell video courses online”, one of the most common kinds of tips and guides you will come across will be regarding either how to come up with an online course, or how to price them. There aren’t many guides that will show you how it is done step-by-step from scratch.

How Do You Publish A Course?

This is the stage where you might come across some technical requirements that will need to be taken care of. Hence, we will make it the point of focus for this article. A few commonly asked questions pertaining to creating courses and training videos, and publishing them will be answered in this article:

How to prepare videos for your courses?
Where can you host your training and educational videos?
Should you publish your videos on your own site or use a course builder?
How to make sure that a person who has paid for the course doesn’t download the material and distribute it?
How are online courses and training videos sold?
And other similar questions….

Table of Contents

How To Prepare Videos For Your Online Courses?

If you are doing this for the first time, it is quite possible that you might feel a bit nervous, and that’s completely normal. You might have come across courses that cover similar topics and are visibly done with professional shooting equipment. Individual elements such as sound and lighting are done with utmost care in these professional videos. And you might think to yourself, how do you as a beginner match up to that level and offer something of value?

One of the things that you should know since the very beginning is that if you try and wait until you have all of those professional elements in place for your own videos, and then get started, you will probably never end up completing that course. You need to realize that even the most successful course instructors were once beginners just like you. The main piece of advice they would give you is to just get started without worrying too much about the kind of gear you are using to make those videos. The point is to simply get started.

If the value your videos are providing in terms of knowledge is good, the quality can be compensated for, especially in your early years. It is more important to make sure that your viewer has learned something from your course.

In order to make your video production simpler, these are some of the things that you can do:

Using slides and voice – You can set up presentation slides and guide your viewer user in a narration voice-over. You can sync it with your presentation by using any video streaming platform.
Using a screen recorder– If your course is related to teaching on some kind of software, then a free screen recorder can really help you with this. It will enable you to not only record your screen but also let you provide narrations.

Where Can Your Educational Videos Be Hosted?

Before that, let’s talk about where you should not:

Free Platforms

It is a common assumption by many that downloading unlisted videos is not possible. This is not correct. For example, in an article in PCMag, 30+ ways are listed on how YouTube content can be downloaded along with information on browser extensions, mobile apps, downloadable software, and helper sites that aid them. Apart from this, there are websites that offer this tool through which any YouTube video can be downloaded.

From this, it is clear that video hosting for free is not a good idea unless you are unaffected by the fact that your paid videos are being freely downloaded by everyone and also being shared with their acquaintances.

Personal Website

This is an option provided you are able to simply embed online tutorials as well as courses after hosting them elsewhere. There are some constraints which do not make it feasible for you to upload them directly to your personal website, such as:
Limited bandwidth – Very limited bandwidth is available for most website hosting and a higher bandwidth is used up by video content. There is a possibility that your personal website might crash once the number of students taking your 300 technical lessons or watching 6-hour videos increases to say 10 per month.
Multiple devices, formats, and platforms – Just uploading a video is not as simple as it sounds. You will have to also think about providing different versions of the video to facilitate it to be accessed by different end-users who would be using varied devices such as smart TVs, computers, and smartphones. To host content on your own website, it must be converted into all possible formats that are being used. All this requires large GBs, which leads to your next issue.
Limited storage – You get very limited storage from most host providers. Given the fact that you have to make the videos available in various versions, the storage space provided will not be sufficient.

Therefore, just two options are available, namely video hosting sites and course builders. To learn more let us list out a few details:

Which is the best platform for you? Video Hosting Platforms or Course builders?

Step 1 – Content of your course

An online course platform is an appropriate solution if you need to host a bunch of PDFs together. And these platforms do a really good job at that. There is one disadvantage; Your content is completely under the control of the online course platform.

Let’s take Udemy for instance. Here are various reasons as to why you shouldn’t use Udemy, and this is mostly applicable to all online course platforms.

Your course needs to get approved first
You need to adhere to the naming guidelines
Discounts can be placed on your course by the platform, making your brand appear cheap
Courses can be easily pirated
Udemy’s logo and the watermark will be presented on all of your content
Students can’t be mailed
They take a significant cut from your profits
You won’t be able to sell your course in other places

Hence, after looking at all these disadvantages, one might decide to embed the course on their own website in order to have control over their content. More importantly, you can directly communicate with your students. While this example might sound extreme, we want to make it clear that it has both advantages and disadvantages. So, it is worth doing your own research before deciding.

Dedicated video hosting platforms allow you to be in control

This is an important reason as to why one would decide to go ahead with a video hosting site as an alternative to an online course builder. Using a video-hosting site is pretty easy as well. All you need to do is to upload and ember the videos. Some platforms even give you a universal embed link which can be pasted on your social media pages such as Facebook.

Step 2 – Get Payments for Online Video Courses

Will there be a transaction fee?

A transaction fee will be charged by both an online course as well as a video hosting platform. While you might feel that this is an added expense, it could most certainly be worth it.

How to set up payment?

Will you need extra plugins to set up payment? How will it work with your preferred payment gateway?

Take the platform SteamingVideoProvider for example. The only thing you need to do is to set up a price for the playlist or the individual video. After this, you will be automatically connected to your preferred gateway channel. Hence, no matter where your video is embedded or shared, a PPV paywall will always show up.

When will you get your payment?

It totally depends on the platform. Some will pay you when you have hit a milestone and some might pay you on a monthly basis.

Step 3 – Security

How to stop people from illegally downloading course videos?

Unfortunately, a video downloading software can work on any website or platform similar to how it does on YouTube. There isn’t a solid way to stop illegal downloads. However, you can render the downloaded video useless if you are using a platform with DRM and video encryption features. So, do check if the platform you are on is offering these services.

How to stop people from screen recording?

A screen recorder will essentially capture everything that is present on your screen and this includes video playback as well. There isn’t a way to stop the screen recording itself but there is a way to stop people from sharing the video.

For instance, most platforms put a watermark on the course videos with both the name as well as the user’s IP address. This ensures that the person recording it won’t be able to sell the video elsewhere as it their data might get used by hackers. They might even shy away from sharing it with their own friends.

Step 4 – Branding

Can the player be white-labelled?

In a business, your personal brand is probably the most important aspect. The more your name is out there and the more people trust your brand, the higher the prices of your course can be. You will also be able to attract more students this way. Hence, branding will be quite essential to your business.

Even the smallest details of your brand matter here. Even the smallest details such as the videos carrying logos and colours will be noticed by the viewer. You will only be able to establish your authority in the industry if the viewers notice your brand. So make sure that your platform allows flexibility in terms of branding your video library.

Conclusion

If we talk about selling courses and training programs, two of the most effective options are video hosting platforms and online course platforms. Choosing which one will completely depend upon what your needs are. If you are looking for total flexibility and control, then you can go ahead with a video hosting platform and then embed all your selected videos.

If you want to have your process more simplified and are okay with sharing your profits to get rid of some workload, an online course platform will probably be the better option for you.

If there’s anything you think I’ve missed – talk to me in the comments below!

Like This Post? Share It With Your Friends! And For More Tips On How To Make Passive Income Online, Make Sure You Check Out The Following Posts…