GSD 224: Is Selling Online Courses Profitable?

Welcome to today’s GSD Daily. We are going to be discussing whether selling online courses is profitable, and it’s kind of a tricky answer. So basically, selling online courses is, yes, very profitable, because there’s the cost of goods sold is next to zero. So after the course is created, the sales funnel is set up, the ads are online, and you break through and you break through that return on ad spend barrier where you’re spending more than you’re making, then online courses are incredibly profitable, to the moon profitable because you need so little help to build your business. At the same time, getting there is a very convoluted process.

So creating the course is pretty easy. You have a mobile phone. You can put yourself in front of a light, and grab a $20 light from Amazon. You have the material, you have the software and shit in your computer to be able to create and edit videos very nicely. So you can write everything up in Word, or you can create a training manual. All of that stuff is within grasp. It’s all at your fingertips, literally. So creating that digital product isn’t hard.

What is hard is differentiating yourself among a sea of hundreds of thousands of other digital products out there. They’re all vying for the same attention, the same eyeballs that you are. So with that, you got to build a website. You need some content, you need some social media marketing and some social posts. You also need an ad budget, and that is where it all starts to come together. So you need to build a website, you need a sales-to-funnel, you need a VSL page and a sales page, and all the other shit that we talk about. But you need to be able to grab attention, pull them in, and then ultimately sell your course. That’s what marketing is.

So you need to be able to get that flywheel started so that you’re up and running and everything is just humming in the background. That’s the biggest piece of it, and that’s where we come in a lot, right? So we build sales funnels and websites and marketing automation and write email copy and do videos and all that stuff. We help a lot of businesses with that. And we’re able to get them started. We’re able to get that flywheel started so that the ads, once they’re up and once we optimize them and they start spinning off revenue and profits, then enter this magical word called ROAS, return on ad spend.

So your ROAS, your return on ad spend, basically means that for every dollar that you spend, you want to turn it into $3. So for every $1, you want to turn that into $3 or maybe $30. So that would be a 30 times ROAS. So if you can give me a dollar and I give you back 30, how many dollars are you going to give me? A lot, right? So every dollar you can find you’re going to give me because I’m just going to turn back around and hand you a $30 bill. So that is what ROAS is. That’s what a good sales funnel can do.

That’s what good marketing can do. It might be a ROAS of three, it might be a ROAS of 30. It might be a ROAS of 52. It’s the best we ever got. 52 ROAS. In creating the system that spins up that ROAS then you have a dial. You say, “Okay, I want to sell, I want to make more. I want to sell more, I want to,” whatever. Then you just spin the dial and you just turn it up and then it starts shooting off more revenue.

We have a client in Buffalo at the moment, and they’re at about 24 times ROAS. It’s a manufacturing facility, so it’s not as easy as turning up a dial, but they want to generate more revenue, we just throw more ad spend at it. That’s what ROAS does. So once you get to that magical ROAS spot selling your digital product, it becomes wildly profitable and continues to be so, because you don’t necessarily need anybody else, you don’t need a huge team. All you need is an assistant, somebody who can watch and check for logins and work on some of the customer support things. You might need an accountant or a bookkeeper. There might be some other staff if you have like, so some coaching or some of that. It’s usually an element of digital courses that is a coaching element or virtual coaching or a group coaching element. You might need somebody part-time for that.

But these products are intensely profitable once you get that magical combination of a sales funnel and ads up and running. This turns into more of your path of growth, literally. It’s just phew. You might have to hire somebody here for assistance from an assistance standpoint, but then you get to ride the wave up.

If you got any value from this video, make sure to like it, share it, and subscribe on whatever platform you’re on. If you have any questions, just ask them below in the comment box. And if you are growing a digital business and you would like a second pair of eyes or a hand on the sales funnel, the sales pieces, the ad copy, or any of that stuff, go to DoneForYou.com/start. Fill in the little form there, book a call with me, and we will work up an action plan for you. And that’s it. So I’ll talk to you soon. Have a great day. Bye.