Would you like to learn how to sell online courses using YouTube, WordPress, WooCommerce and LearnDash because I'll show you a system that has worked really well for me?
Sell Online Courses on YouTube with WordPress, LearnDash, and WooCommerce!
The video you’re about to watch is a free preview lecture from my complete YouTube course available at https://jerrybanfield.com/courses/youtube/
How to sell online courses on YouTube, on your WordPress website, using LearnDash and WooCommerce.
After years of having a YouTube channel, the best way I've found to earn money on it is by making free preview videos from my online courses.
Thus, I put some of the videos from my courses up on YouTube as a free preview. Then I send everybody over to my WordPress website where I've got both WooCommerce and LearnDash to make sales and host my online courses.
I love this business system because it's resilient. It can handle fluctuations on any social media platform. When things go well, you can make lots of sales. When there's some downtime, you don't lose everything and you always direct people to your own website where you've got the most opportunities to earn.
Let's take a look at how this entire system works because you will want to see this. I've had years of experience teaching online doing different strategies.
This is the absolute best strategy by far for the long term. You're not completely reliant on any third party in this equation. YouTube does do a lot to make this possible.
However, you can substitute something else in here for YouTube, like Facebook, TikTok, whatever it is you use, and in this example, I'm using YouTube and I'll show you how it works.
Let's look over here at my YouTube channel and give you an example.
What I do on my videos, I'm filming a complete YouTube course right now and what I do each day is I put out a video from the course that begins with a ten second introduction.
The version of this on YouTube will have that introduction, whereas the version of it on my online courses does not.
That 10-second introduction says, "Hey, thanks for watching this video. This is part of a complete YouTube course available at https://jerrybanfield.com/learn/. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoy the video."
That way, every single time someone starts watching the video, they understand that this is part of an online course and even if the person doesn't watch the whole video, they might actually go buy my online course.
I do this every day now because that way every single video I put out is selling my online course.
I put an introductory video at the beginning, I do the full lecture in the middle. Then, at the end, I put a one-to-three-minute sales pitch for my online course that says, "Hey, go buy the full online course. Here's why you should buy it. Here's everything it includes."
I'm grateful for the feedback on this approach and people don't seem to mind the intro on the video and people do go over to my website.
I've tested this a lot of different ways and here's why I'm suggesting to do it all on your own website.
When you do it all on your own website, you get the most potential return. When I send everybody over to my website, then there's nothing that's going to happen to it.
I've tried this by sending people to other websites and on some of them I've lost my account, my account got suspended. Therefore, everyone on all my older videos that watches those now goes and looks for my courses on that website and they can't find them.
I've also made my own sub-domains, for example, the "University of Jerry Banfield" and that doesn't work as good because Google sees that as two different websites, which means when someone says, "Wow, this is a great course and writes a blog post about it and points it to u.jerrybanfield.com, Google doesn't count that for Jerrybanfield.com for my backlinks.
I want Jerrybanfield.com to rank high in search results because when someone googles me and they come in on one of my many blog posts on WordPress, and that's why I recommend to host with WordPress, then they go up here on the menu and click on "Courses," they end up in one of my courses. That is an ideal scenario where I've got a customer totally for free once I did the work to set it up.
This is why I recommend to use this exact setup because over the long term I have the ability to download my WordPress website and even if my web host were to kick me off, I could just stick my website on another web host.
It's important in a business to have survival and consistency, and putting all the courses straight on my website is also cheaper than using someone else to host them.
Thus, I'll show you.
I've explained why and I've shown how the basic traffic system works.
What I do is just put a video out.
I film about two videos a day for my online courses, two or three videos a day on average for my online courses, and I put one of them a day on YouTube, send people over to every single time on every single video now to Jerrybanfield.com to go get my courses.
Even if that doesn't work very often when the courses cost $297 each, that is a very good income for me that I'm very grateful for.
The courses have to offer something of value more than just videos. They offer lifetime updates, they offer a chance to join my group coaching calls for free. They offer a Facebook group for answers to questions and that gives me a unique value proposition on my website.
I'm then able to offer online courses and put them up on other platforms if I want to, and they just don't have those benefits, and then the other platforms can sell them and do whatever they want to with them, and I get the money and the information goes out there to as many people as possible.
Thus, this is a very good business system to do over and over again, and to be able to build on itself.
The starting place is to use WordPress if you don't already.
WordPress is a content management system where you put your words and your pictures, you put your links to videos and it makes it into a presentable website combined with a web host.
I recommend Kinsta for web hosting. I've tried several other web hosts and the thing that stands out about Kinsta, it's really fast.
I found Kinsta because I was looking for a web host on the Google Cloud platform.
It also does daily backups and speed according to Google's everything. Thus, when you're hosting your own website, the most important thing is that it goes fast. What you have on it is even secondary in some ways to how fast it loads.
You want a fast website that has lots of helpful blog posts and online courses on it that you can always forever send people to the exact same website.
The learning opportunity I had building my business is sending people all over the place and you lose a lot of unexpected opportunities.
With this system, you capitalize on your unexpected opportunities. For example, I think I'm trying to sell people on a YouTube course, but someone might actually come over and click on the YouTube course and look around on it and say, "Oh, what's this partner program, this coaching?" and they find my partner program.
Now instead of making $297 on a sale, I'm making thousands of dollars on a sale, and that's why we want everything on our website.
You can offer every single thing you do all in one place to everyone who's discovering you. Kinsta is the best web host for this because it is scalable.
When I'm constantly promoting my own website and sending people to it, I want a lot of traffic.
I'm grateful that I get thousands of visitors a day. I never know what day I might go viral, that something might blow up and I might get a million visitors in one day. In which case, that's a day I might make thousands of online course sales and I need to be ready for that. Kinsta leaves me ready for that.
What's nice with Kinsta is that it's scalable.
It starts at $30 a month, but what happens is if I suddenly go way over my plan, I'll just get a bigger bill and they'll help me work with that in real time instead of just my website crashing on another host.
Thus, the most critical decision to make when you're building your website, is where to host it and I choose Kinsta to host my website.
I've got a list of the things I use on my website and if you click and use any of these links, I can get an affiliate commission for which I'm very grateful.
You can check the pricing and see everything else I use and once you've got a WordPress website, then there are two other key things you need to do to be able to sell courses directly on your website.
The way I do, when you go into my shop on my website and you're looking for the complete YouTube course, this is hosted directly on WooCommerce and when you click "Add to cart," it is what makes this checkout process possible.
When you proceed to checkout and pay, all of this is hosted through WooCommerce and it can take a payment for my YouTube course just as easily as it can take a payment for my several thousand dollars in coaching, just as easily as it can take a payment for any service or membership.
If I wanted to have a monthly plan, I've done away with all of those, but if I wanted to have a membership, I could put that in with WooCommerce.
If I wanted to offer a physical product like the shirt I'm wearing, I could put that in with WooCommerce.
WooCommerce is the eCommerce solution that I use to sell anything on my website and what's nice is that it is integrated directly with LearnDash.
The third key piece of this, if you count WordPress, WooCommerce, and then LearnDash, which is what I actually use to build my online courses.
I also use Vimeo to host the videos because it has great pricing. They make things very simple unless you use a lot of bandwidth, then I've seen people complaining about that.
You can put $20 a month on Vimeo and you get 20 gigabytes of videos a week on it.
Then WooCommerce and WordPress are free.
If you use Kinsta for your web hosting, that'll be $30 a month.
If you go over to "Pricing" on LearnDash, you'll see that it $189 a year, and it actually is $229 once you renew.
As you can see, this is a very low cost and effective solution if you add it up, you've got video hosting and WordPress hosting for $50 a month and you divide the LearnDash cost by 12 and it adds maybe another $20 a month.
Therefore for $70 a month with this setup, you get your own website, you get your own video hosting, which is very good. You always want to have your videos somewhere else just in case anything happens on your YouTube channel or anywhere on Facebook, et cetera.
I've got my videos now from my online courses on Vimeo and on YouTube. The ones on Vimeo don't have the intros and outros or any ads.
This means for $70 a month I'm able to sell my online courses and all my services and memberships, and host my website at Jerrybanfield.com, which means for the long term this is a very powerful, simple and consolidated setup.
Instead of what I had in the past, I would send people over to a website to buy my courses. I'd send them over from there to my YouTube, then I'd send them back to my website, and to my blog.
From my blog, I'd send people over to Patreon, send people over to other websites, and what I've learned is that it's better to send people all the same spot all the time.
All of my social media channels send people consistently. It's not that I can't send people somewhere else, but the main place I send people all the time repeatedly, is back to my website, either for online courses or services or for blog posts.
All of this is $70 a month to set up, and it's something you can use for the rest of your life.
If you decide you don't need to sell online courses anymore, all the work you did to build up your website means something, whatever else you want to do, it could help your blog do better.
If you've built a blog up, you can just stick courses on your online website and put it all together. This is a beautiful setup and I'll show you the inside of how LearnDash looks.
As I'm making this course, what I do is I go through in LearnDash and I click on "Courses" up here on the left.
I've got another complete course showing how to actually go through and install all this stuff.
I'd just click on a new lesson or new section heading. I outline a course and I can actually have the course outline up before I've even filmed the videos as I've done in this case, since I already had this YouTube channel up, I just added the outline of the new section I was going to put in before I even had the videos.
In that way, people before they buy can see what's coming, and then as soon as I get that up, I make it a priority over the last two days and I just go through and film all the videos for this new section, so when somebody actually buys the course, there are videos to watch in there.
I click on "Edit" on any of the individual lessons here. Then, I've got my link from Vimeo. I just embed my link from Vimeo into the individual lecture, and then when students buy the course, it's delivered through WooCommerce.
Then, the videos are hosted on Vimeo and it's a very smooth watching experience without all the clutter that's on YouTube. This also helps to generate lots of income because according to Teachable, their most successful price for courses was $300.
On my own website, I'm able to sell my online courses there and services for $297 and up, which allows me to earn a lot more, and then if you're thinking, "Okay, Jerry, how do I actually get some views on my channel? What if I've got no views and no subscribers? Can this still work for me?"
Yes, because when you're selling courses for $297 each, you can afford to spend at least $100 if not $200 in advertising to get an actual sale for the course.
This means you can use YouTube ads to advertise the videos, and then get the views that way on the videos, help them rank higher and to get the organic discovery and all of that, then funnels over to your website.
What I'm doing now is I put ads on my videos, target them both to people who've already watched my videos on YouTube and put them out there to audiences that might find it really helpful to learn based on the exact keyword or interest that the users have.
Then, I send everyone all the time back to my website.
I've looked at my business thinking over the next 10 or 20 years, what it would be important to do right now and I've seen one big thing, make sure everybody all the time, everywhere always comes back to my website because that's something I actually have the most control over.
That's something where I can make the most money in sales. That's something where I can offer users a consistent experience that's not dependent on a third party who could change pricing at any time, or some company or person that is just deciding to take my profile down because they don't like me.
The website is the way to go for the long term and I'm so happy to share this experience with you and hope that you can set things up from the beginning in a beautiful way for the long term instead of doing it the scenic route like I did.
Final Words
Yes!
You just watched all that free preview video from my YouTube course.
I'm thinking the odds of you liking my full YouTube course are really high because you've already spent this much time with me.
Will you let me tell you a little bit about what the course includes?
The beginning of the course has a section with all the newest videos, all the best of what I've learned. It's meant as an executive summary that you can watch the whole thing, the first section and get a lot of value out of the course.
Then, there's 10 plus hours of more detailed tutorials. I add 10 to 20 new videos every year to this course. I even give you private label rights when you buy it, which means you can upload, share and sell it yourself and not pay me anything.
Of course, there's the 30-day money back guarantee. If for any reason you don't like the course, I'll give you a full refund on it.
What you're going to love is when you buy this course, you'll get three weekly group-coaching calls with me included and a lifetime to my students group on Facebook where you can share your YouTube channel, ask questions, get help, get love, get all that support you need for being a YouTube creator from me and all of the community of students along with you.
When you're ready to purchase, will you smash that "Take this course" button to add it to cart, using that button, and then hit that "Proceed to checkout" or "Pay with PayPal" to complete your purchase.
I imagine once you complete the purchase, you'll be so excited to use the link to log in, use the link to view the course, use the link to apply to the Facebook group and be ready to take your YouTube channel to the next level.
Thank you very much for watching this video here with me.
You can continue learning with us in the full class today “The Complete YouTube Course — 0 to 288K Subscribers!” at https://jerrybanfield.com/courses/youtube/
I love you.
You're awesome.
I'm so excited to see you in my complete YouTube course.
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.
I love you. You’re awesome. I appreciate the chance to serve you today and I will see you again soon.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/sell-online-courses/
Thanks for the upvote Jerry 👊🏼