Sell Online Courses Using WordPress in 2024

Do you have specific knowledge or expertise to spare? Do you have an area of expertise in which you want to share your knowledge? If so, then selling online courses could be the ideal solution. Many people want to learn new skills or improve on those they already have. The simplest method is to sell online courses directly through your website.

This gives you complete inventory and pricing control and allows you to charge whatever amount you want without worrying about refunds.

Video tutorials, audio lessons, and interactive quizzes can all be created. Online courses are easy to create, less expensive, and can be an automatic income source for you because they do not involve physical product development or shipment.

So, how are you going to go about it?

In this article, I’ll discuss how to follow the proper procedures of creating an introductory course, adding payment gateway options, ensuring digital product security, and promotional materials, and much more using WordPress and its plugins.

So, what are we still waiting for? Let’s get started.

Who Can Sell Online Courses

Nowadays, everything is going digital, and people are becoming more comfortable with relying on online activities. It has become the “new norm” since the pandemic, as the number of course creators has grown and the demand for online learning has developed rapidly.

You could be an educator, tutor, cook, fitness trainer, painter, guitarist, or anyone else who enjoys teaching others or sharing your knowledge with those interested in learning new things or skills.

No matter who you are or what you do, you can choose your target audience or a specific niche. There are numerous advantages to selling courses online, including increased control and flexibility for students regarding when, where, and how they want to learn.

How Long Does It Take to Sell an Online Course

Over the last decade, online learning has gained prominence. According to Statista, nearly half (48%) of adults aged 18 to 64 have taken at least one online course. As a result, the demand for online courses in various niches is limitless.

By simply owning a WordPress Website, you can easily provide the best learning experience to your audience. WordPress provides you with the most flexibility and freedom, allowing you to stand out from the crowd, gain more customers, and drive referrals to your online courses.

However, it is not that simple. Handling everything manually is difficult, from creating effective courses and updating modules and lessons to ensuring an excellent and user-friendly interface with round-the-clock customer support. Nonetheless, the estimate varies depending on the length of the course.

Importance of Owning a WordPress Website for Selling Online Courses

What would it be like to earn an estimated $5000 per month or even $60,000 per year from home without ever leaving your house? This can be accomplished by selling eBooks and courses online. If you intend to sell your courses online, you should think about using WordPress CMS.

WordPress is a free, customizable solution that offers full flexibility, allowing you to sell your digital content/online courses directly to customers. Consider creating a WordPress-built website if you want to sell online courses. The procedure is simple and costless with free plugins.

After you’ve created your store, you can upload your course content and start marketing it. This will enable you to create a community of students eager to learn from you. You’ll be able to attract a large number of subscribers if you provide free resources and tutorials.

You can also sell your online courses on Udemy, Skillshare, Pluralsight, Teachable, CreativeLive, and others. People who do not have time to attend classes turn to third-party eLearning platforms for learning new things.

But, It’s really complicated out there especially when it comes to standing out from your competitors.

Due to the high competition in every niche, you may have difficulty selling your courses over there. This is why you should ask yourself some questions first.

Questions

• Have you already established a web presence?
• Do you have a domain name and web hosting?
• Can you afford the monthly fees associated with this type of setup?
• Are you confident in your ability to manage your own website?
• Do you know what WordPress is?
• Do you have previous experience designing and editing HTML pages?
• Can you handle payments?
• Will you be accepting credit cards?
• Do you have the time to dedicate to creating your own eCommerce store?
• Is there another reason why you don’t want to build your own?

After you’ve answered these questions, you should be ready to get your own website or eLearning website. But you should also know something.

There is a fine line between Online Learning Platforms VS Online Course Platforms.

Online learning platforms usually act as a marketplace and online course platforms are usually software-based operations for managing your learning environment. The course-selling platform allows you to manage your learning resources with greater flexibility and freedom. You also get to influence the design and appearance of the entire website that hosts your online courses.

Want to know how?

Let me explain.

Why WordPress is The Best Option for Selling Your Online Course

WordPress offers numerous learning management system (LMS) plugins to assist you in professionally designing courses and improving the learning experience through advanced features, functionalities, and customizations that best suit your online course and the needs of your audience. These LMS are the perfect option for you to sell courses online.

Before going for one, let’s know about LMS plugins and how they work.

How Do LMS Plugins Works?

WordPress LMS plugins are WordPress plugins for your website that allow you to easily host, create, and manage online courses and training programs as well as add learning-focused features like quizzes, assessments, and certificates to your website.

You can use these plugins to create and deliver engaging online courses that include a variety of content formats and exciting features such as videos, text-based study material, Q&A sessions, fun quizzes, and customer support.

They will also assist you in tracking, documenting, and reporting back to your students as they progress through the course. This will allow you to keep track of how many people complete your courses, what problems they encounter, and how you can provide a better learning experience to them.

You can enroll students, update information, track progress, configure payment options, and manage other admin panel tasks from a single, convenient location (administration dashboard), making course creation and management easier than you can imagine.

LMS plugins for WordPress also make eLearning more accessible to your target audience. All they have to do to access your course is log in to their accounts and consume your content whenever and wherever they want, making learning easy for them and making money and teaching easy for you.

Now that you understand what LMS plugins are and how they can assist you in providing great content and learning experience to your audience, let’s take a look at the market-leading WordPress LMS plugins.

Best LMS Plugins for WordPress

• LearnPress LMS
• Tutor LMS
• Sensei LMS
• LearnDash LMS
• MemberPress LMS

LearnPress LMS

LearnPress is one of the best WordPress LMS Plugins for creating and selling courses online. You can create a course curriculum with lessons and quizzes that are managed through an easy-to-use user interface.

You can now quickly and easily create education, online school, and online-course websites without any coding knowledge. LearnPress is and always will be free, but it is a premium high-quality WordPress Plugin that will undoubtedly assist you in making money from your WordPress-based LMS.

It is flexible and extremely powerful, with numerous Add-ons to support its core system.

Features

• Compatible with your Theme
• Supports Multiple Website
• Create course
• Manage course
• Sell course
• Communicate with your students
• Numerous of add-ons
• LearnPress is actively developed

Tutor LMS

Tutor LMS is a comprehensive, feature-rich, and strong WordPress LMS plugin that allows you to easily create and sell courses online. This learning management system’s features meet all of the requirements for a full-fledged online course marketplace.

It allows you to create challenging and enjoyable quizzes, interactive lessons, powerful reports, and statistics. Without writing a single line of code, you can manage, administer, and monetize your education, online school, and online courses.

Features

• Minimalistic Design
• Unlimited Courses and Lessons
• Course Preview
• Personalized Dashboard for Each role
• Lesson management
• Earning & commission allocation
• Multiple withdrawal options
• Centralized monetization settings
• Page builder support
• Gutenberg compatible
• Advanced analytics

Sensei LMS

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, WooCommerce, and Jetpack, created the Sensei LMS teaching and learning management plugin. Indeed, Sensei LMS powers all of Automattic’s employee training and courses.

You can create effective and engaging online courses, lessons, and quizzes with Sensei.

Features

• Compatible with your Theme
• Learning mode
• Multiple Quiz types

LearnDash LMS

LearnDash comes with a variety of tools and features for selling courses, dripping content, and rewarding learners, allowing you to transform your WordPress website into a fully-functional online learning platform.

You can deliver courses to your learners according to the schedules you set for providing periodic content access and allow them enough time to absorb the previous concept before moving on to the next.

Using this plugin, you can track courses, offer certification, and create interactive quizzes and assignments to provide your audience with an extensive learning experience.

You can also create specific discussion forums for learners to interact with one another, build accountability, resolve doubts, seek support, and share their successes.

Features

• Focus Mode on LearnDash
• Advanced Quizzing
• Drag and Drop Course Builder
• Dynamic Content Distribution
• Adaptable Prerequisites

MemberPress LMS

MemberPress is one of the best WordPress LMS plugins. It includes lesson plans, subscriptions, access control, payment management, and other features.

The best part about this plugin is that no additional plugins are required to sell memberships or protect your course content. It also lets you add a course component to any WordPress site.

The Courses Add-on handles the addition of online classes as an optional product. There is no need to use a separate plugin to create and manage your courses.

Features

• No complicated coding is required.
• Tracking of course progress.
• There will be no tinkering with pages, sub-pages, or custom post types.
• Visual builder only.
• Create and manage access rules with ease.
• Sales feature intended to increase subscriptions.
• Advanced features for power users.

Benefits of Using WordPress for Selling Online Courses

WordPress is an excellent choice for selling online courses because it integrates seamlessly with popular platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and many more. So publishing your courses on various platforms and promoting your online course is extremely simple.

WordPress includes a subscription option. Subscription functionalities enable you to offer recurring payments over time, making them ideal for monetizing your online courses.

Another possibility is to sell individual units at a set price. These types of sales are ideal for anyone looking to earn money quickly.

Finally, there’s the freemium customization, in which you give away some of your content for free while charging for the rest. This method is especially effective when it comes to attracting new subscribers to your email list and sending email notifications.

The advantages of WordPress are endless, let’s check a few more.

1. It is completely free!

Normally, a solution like this would cost money, but WordPress is completely free to download and install. You don’t have to give up all of its great features just because it’s free.

2. It’s not just about eCommerce!

You can create a fully functional store within a professional website while also maintaining your blog, and you can do it all from a single platform that is delivered seamlessly. Because WooCommerce is a WordPress-based plugin.

3. Full customization!

Choose from thousands of available WordPress themes, many of which are available for free. When you choose a theme, you can choose from pre-configured CSS styles and color themes, as well as change the code and experiment with the special features that each theme has.

4. Continue to Grow!

WordPress allows you to grow and expand in terms of how you manage your website, courses, and customers. Modifying templates, for example, is simple whether you use the theme files and filters.

5. Multiple Payment Gateways

WordPress offers various WordPress plugins to handle online transactions for your store. WooCommerce is the most convenient option because it not only works well for e-commerce sites but also provides a vast number of generic payment gateway extensions for any specific purpose.

It’s an excellent way to reach a broader audience and potentially increase overall revenue for your both course selling and e-commerce business.

6. Digital Product Security

WordPress is secure and a protected platform that can easily provides digital product security to help prevent product piracy and theft. If you officially register a copyright for all of your products, you will be able to directly sue any digital product thieves. That is why it is critical to give your works a distinct identity. There are tons of security plugins for both your courses and website.

7. Discounts/Coupons!

Want to run a course sale to attract new students to enroll? What about a referral code to encourage new students to invite their friends? WordPress makes it simple to provide discounts, and coupons and run promotions for your course.

8. Enrollment by default

When most students sign up, they want to start taking lessons right away. WordPress LMS plugins allow you to enroll new students in your course automatically.

9. Refunds are issued automatically.

Another thing that most students do not want to wait for?

Yes, It’s the refund. Save yourself and your students time by providing automatic refunds if they drop your course within a certain timeframe.

10. Manage your LMS, WordPress, and WooCommerce from a single dashboard!

The best part about selling online courses with WordPress is the WooCommerce integration functionality, which eliminates the need for users to notice the transition from the WooCommerce platform to your LMS or CMS.

Everything is designed for maximum usability, so the user does not have to leave the platform.

Wrap Up

Hopefully, the information in this article has provided you with everything you need to begin diversifying your WordPress-built website as an online course-selling platform. Aside from that, WordPress LMS plugins make it simple and easy to provide an excellent learning experience.

Start sharing your unique knowledge and skills with your customers right away! However, make your decision based on your course and audience requirements, business needs, and budget.

That’s all for now, and best of luck selling online courses using WordPress.