Skip to content

A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses

2024-05-21 · Workshop, masterclass or full course · Ali · recording, 1 h 7 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book, His medical past

In an hour-long masterclass Ali, who says he has made over $10 million from online courses, frames a course creator as a teacher using the internet and walks through building a course, platforms, landing pages and offers, arguing that getting traffic through free content, not making the course, is the hard part; then answers common questions on validation, pricing, expertise, piracy and refunds.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction: everything about making money with online courses

  • ★★★ Ali says he has made over $10 million selling online courses over the past ten years. — 00:00:00

00:01:26 — His history of selling courses: the scam, SixMed, the BMAT course, Skillshare, the YouTuber Academy and the revenue receipts

  • ★★★ In 2012, aged 18 and just admitted to medical school at Cambridge, Ali was scammed out of £1,000 of life savings from years of private tutoring when he tried to buy his first Apple product from a seller on Craigslist. — 00:01:27 · University of Cambridge
  • ★★ After losing the £1,000, Ali decided he needed a way to make money and in 2012 brainstormed money-making schemes in an Evernote document, starting from what he was good at. — 00:01:52
  • ★★★ One idea on Ali's 2012 list, a website on BMAT preparation he could charge for, became his first successful online business, because he had expertise in helping people do well in the BMAT. — 00:02:20 · 6med
  • ★★ In 2012 Ali ran his first BMAT course for about seven friends from the year below at his school, beaming a PowerPoint to the TV in his living room, and made perhaps £300. (hedged) — 00:02:46 · 6med
  • ★★ In 2013, when he started medical school, Ali decided to go big with the BMAT course: he built a proper website and started marketing it nationally. — 00:02:46 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali says the BMAT courses made around £6,000 in 2013, teaching about 150 students across five courses. (hedged) — 00:03:26 · 6med
  • ★★★ Ali says that from 2014 to about 2019 he made around £150,000 a year from SixMed's classroom courses. — 00:03:26 · 6med
  • ★ On one final day SixMed taught a lecture theatre of 150 students and made about £10,000 in a day. — 00:03:26 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali says the classroom courses gave him the bug: he realised you can make money by teaching, having thought being a teacher meant working in a school. — 00:04:06
  • ★★★ In the month of summer holidays between graduating in 2018 and starting work as a doctor, Ali filmed the BMAT Crash Course as an online course and hosted it on Podia. — 00:04:06 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali says the online BMAT Crash Course made a few tens of thousands of pounds in its first year, 2018. — 00:04:52 · 6med
  • ★★ The following year Ali partnered with his friend Akib on a UKCAT course, and the year after he filmed the Interview Crash Course for medical school interviews. — 00:04:52 · 6med
  • ★★ In 2019, two years into his YouTube channel, Ali made his first Skillshare course, on how to edit videos in Final Cut. — 00:04:52 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★★ Ali's Skillshare classes made $8,470 in 2019 and, after he made more courses, $515,000 in 2020. — 00:04:52 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★★ Ali calls the 2019 to 2020 Skillshare jump atypical: the timing was in his favour, with the pandemic and Skillshare's weirdly lucrative way of paying teachers. (hedged) — 00:05:31
  • ★★ Ali says Skillshare no longer pays like this, his YouTube audience helped, and jumping from $10,000 to $500,000 a year is very atypical. — 00:06:00
  • ★★ 2021, at the peak of the pandemic, was Ali's peak Skillshare year, with $859,000. — 00:06:00 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★ Ali describes Skillshare as a Netflix for online courses: members pay a subscription and watch any course, and teachers are paid essentially by minutes watched. — 00:06:00
  • ★ Ali's Skillshare courses have had 37 million minutes of total watch time. — 00:06:47 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★ Ali's Skillshare earnings fell to $778,000 in 2022 and $351,000 in 2023, decaying towards zero after the 2021 peak. — 00:06:47 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★★ In 2020 Ali made his first official online course, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, which has been running for four years. — 00:06:47 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy made about $294,000 in 2020, about $2 million in 2021 (a pandemic jump, when live cohort courses were the craze), $1.7 million in 2022 and $3.6 million in 2023. — 00:07:29 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali shows that his company has earned $2,579,138.19 in total from Skillshare. — 00:08:00 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★ Podia, which first hosted the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, shows revenue of $2,676,437.99 for Ali's courses. — 00:08:00 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali's company then switched to Kajabi, the platform he would mostly recommend for building an online courses business. — 00:08:00
  • ★★ From December 2022 to 24 April 2024 Ali's company made $3.6 million on Kajabi. — 00:08:26
  • ★★ Towards the end of 2023 Ali's company moved some online course payments to Shopify, where it has made $838,260. — 00:08:26
  • ★★★ Ali says Productivity Lab, a new experimental product, launched a few days earlier, with checkouts on a platform called Spiffy (as heard). — 00:08:26

00:08:56 — Examples of other course creators and the caveat about business gurus

  • ★★ Ali says $457,000 has been made through the Productivity Lab checkout, bringing his course revenue across platforms to roughly $10.1 million. (hedged) — 00:08:56
  • ★★ Justin Welsh (quoted): Justin Welsh tweeted that his one-person business had crossed $7.5 million in total revenue in 1,712 days (about four and a half years), with zero ads and a 91% margin. — 00:09:18
  • ★★ Ali puts his own business's margin at about 60%, which he says is also considered very good. — 00:09:18
  • ★★ Justin Welsh mostly writes on Twitter and LinkedIn and sells three courses: Content OS and LinkedIn OS at $200 each and Creator MBA at $897. — 00:09:18
  • ★★ Ali says Amy Porterfield has apparently sold over $100 million of online courses in total. (hedged) — 00:09:56
  • ★★ Amy Porterfield posts mostly on Instagram and Facebook, has a podcast, and sells three main courses: Digital Course Academy ($2,000), List Builder Society ($500) and Systems That Scale ($300). — 00:09:56
  • ★★ Jenna Kutcher sells courses on Instagram, Pinterest, list building, podcasting and content in the $200 to $1,000 range, and is enormous on Pinterest. — 00:10:28
  • ★★ George Blackman, who used to work for Ali and now writes scripts for YouTubers, launched his first online course in January 2024 and wrote that it made $63,760 in 48 hours. — 00:10:57
  • ★★ George Blackman had only 7,000 Twitter followers and 2,600 newsletter subscribers at launch, and in March 2024 made $8,024.56 from course sales in 30 days. — 00:11:26
  • ★★ Kieran Drew, who sells a writing course called High Impact Writing, reported a March net income of $132,000. — 00:11:26
  • ★ Ali took Tiago Forte's course in about 2019, when Forte was his productivity guru. — 00:11:56
  • ★★ Tiago Forte (quoted): Tiago Forte tweeted that Forte Labs, in business for ten years as of 2023, made $8.9 million in revenue, spent $5.4 million and profited $3.3 million over the decade. — 00:11:56
  • ★★ Tiago Forte (quoted): Tiago Forte wrote that in his first four years he made only $49,000 a year on average, which shows the importance of sticking with it for the long term. — 00:12:19
  • ★★ Ali points to a 2021 pandemic effect in which everyone selling courses blew up and then overhired. — 00:12:19
  • ★★★ Ali says people who teach others how to make money with online courses are under 1% of those who sell online courses, which cover all sorts of subjects. — 00:13:22
  • ★★ Ali says Yoga With Adriene makes at least $10 million a year selling yoga courses. — 00:13:22
  • ★★ Ali guesses that JustinGuitar, whose course he followed to learn guitar, makes several million a year, and Mary Spender at least a million, teaching guitar. (hedged) — 00:13:46
  • ★★★ Ali says you mostly hear from people selling courses about business because it is in their interest to talk about how they do it and share their revenue numbers. — 00:14:16

00:14:45 — The courses business model: teacher x internet equals online course creator

  • ★★★ Ali says the business model of online courses is easiest to understand by thinking of an online course creator as simply a teacher. — 00:14:45
  • ★★ Ali widens the definition of a teacher to anyone who teaches others who want to learn what they know how to do, whether knowledge such as history or skills such as gardening, guitar, coding or parenting. — 00:16:28
  • ★★ Ali says teachers have always made money by finding people to pay for their expertise: a school or university salary, one-to-one tutoring, weekend workshops, training businesses or patronage. — 00:16:57
  • ★★ At his medical admissions workshops Ali charged £50 to £100 per person for a classroom of 30, making £1,500 to £3,000 in a day of teaching he enjoyed. — 00:17:55 · 6med

  • ★★★ Ali's formula: teacher x internet equals online course creator, a teacher using the internet to sell their teaching. — 00:19:54

    “teacher x internet equals online course creator”

  • ★★ Ali describes the self-paced course, such as JustinGuitar's: the teacher records it once, then people keep buying it for about $50 and follow along. — 00:20:32

  • ★★ Ali describes the cohort-based course, run live over the internet through Zoom calls for a cohort of, say, 300 people; Productivity Lab runs this way, as the YouTuber Academy did for about three years. — 00:20:32 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's friend Paul Millerd has made over a quarter of a million dollars in recent years from his self-published book The Pathless Path. — 00:22:09
  • ★★ Ali says anyone can write a book in Google Docs, export it as an EPUB and sell it on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing at no cost, since Amazon takes a cut of sales. — 00:22:09
  • ★★★ Ali says selling online courses is not for everyone: if you enjoy explaining things and felt a glow of pride helping others with their homework, you might enjoy being a teacher and could try it. — 00:23:23
  • ★★ If teaching is part of your life vision, what you might do with loads of money, Ali says you might go into online courses, since it is all about being a teacher using the internet. — 00:23:46

00:24:09 — Building Ukulele Unleashed step by step: the transformation and the target audience

  • ★★★ Ali says the point of a course is a transformation from A to B: a learner starts at one point and the course gets them to a certain outcome. — 00:25:11
  • ★★ Ali advises planning a course around the transformation the learner will experience and who that learner is, down to a dream target audience (adults rather than children for a ukulele course). — 00:26:13

00:28:24 — Choosing a platform and setting up the course in Kajabi

  • ★★★ Ali generally recommends selling a course on your own website rather than on platforms such as Skillshare or Udemy, which is how the people making millions do it. — 00:28:53
  • ★★ For the cheap route Ali recommends Podia, which is pretty solid and where he started; Kajabi is much more expensive and premium, with much better features. — 00:30:06
  • ★★ Podia lets you start free with a website, a blog, a coaching product and a draft course, and costs $33 a month once you publish a course. — 00:30:31
  • ★★ Kajabi's pricing runs from $119 to $319 a month; Ali thinks it is a better platform than Podia despite the cost. — 00:31:06
  • ★★ Ali finds Kajabi's AI course builder very good: it drafts the course outline and a landing page for you. — 00:32:15

00:34:28 — Landing pages, checkout pages and websites

  • ★★ Ali's BMAT Crash Course Online sells for £99 or three payments of £39. — 00:35:19 · 6med
  • ★★★ Ali says that when starting out you do not need a website, only a landing page, also called a sales page: one page with a button that lets people buy your course. — 00:37:05
  • ★★ Ali says Productivity Lab is currently sold out. — 00:37:33
  • ★★ Ali says course platforms such as Podia, Kajabi and Teachable have drag-and-drop landing pages built in, so you can make one without knowing how to code. — 00:37:33

00:38:02 — Creating the offer; teaching is the easy part

  • ★★★ Ali defines the offer as what you would answer in bullet points if asked what you are selling; bonuses are part of it. — 00:38:12
  • ★★ The Productivity Lab offer: 12 months of community access, the life productivity system, the daily focus lab, reflection rituals and expert workshops. — 00:38:12
  • ★★ Ali explains with a lemonade stand that the offer is the promise of the thing and the fulfilment is actually getting it. — 00:39:07
  • ★★★ Ali calls Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers the best book he has read on crafting an offer, built on making an offer so good people cannot say no, and says a better offer is one of the biggest levers for course revenue. — 00:39:35
  • ★★ Ali's test of an offer: present it to the target market; if they say "sign me up right now" you have a good offer. — 00:39:35
  • ★★★ Ali says you want an enormous gap between the perceived value of an offer and its price, as with a real Ferrari offered for $1,000. — 00:40:55
  • ★★ For writing a landing page Ali recommends Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards; copywriting is writing meant to persuade someone to take action. — 00:40:55
  • ★★★ Ali says that in the online course business the teaching is the easy bit; the hard part is building a business around it and actually selling the course. — 00:42:09
  • ★★ Ali says that skipping landing pages, offers, lead generation and email lists by putting a course on Udemy is easier but leaves millions of dollars on the table. — 00:42:54

00:43:48 — The biggest problem: traffic and leads, paid ads versus free content

  • ★★★ Ali calls getting leads, traffic to your landing page, the biggest problem of an online course business: crack it and you can make millions, fail and you won't make a penny. — 00:43:50
  • ★★ Ali says a new course will not rank anywhere near the top of Google search, which takes years of high-quality content and domain authority, so Google is not an option for traffic. — 00:44:55
  • ★★ Ali recommends Alex Hormozi's book $100M Leads on getting leads. — 00:45:23
  • ★★ Ali says people in the online course world get traffic in two ways, free content or paid ads, or a mixture of both. — 00:45:52
  • ★★★ Ali says paid ads are really expensive and getting more so every year, often several dollars per click, so at a 1% conversion a $30 sale can cost $300. — 00:46:46
  • ★★ Ali calls running paid ads before you know how one of the quickest ways to bankrupt yourself; it still works for some, but most would not recommend it for beginners. — 00:47:08
  • ★★★ Ali says most people he knows who make millions or tens of millions from online courses get their traffic through free content. — 00:47:08
  • ★★ Andy Guitar's free ten-day ukulele starter course on YouTube, a basic video filmed on a phone five years ago, has 11 million views and links to his paid course. — 00:47:36
  • ★★ Andy Guitar sells a membership to his courses at £11 a month or £110 a year. — 00:48:04
  • ★★★ Ali says getting traffic through free content is why he started making YouTube videos. — 00:48:52
  • ★★ Ali's early video on BMAT Section 1, made as a fifth-year Cambridge medical student and SixMed co-founder, gives free teaching, links his online BMAT course and has 225,000 views. — 00:48:52 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali says free content builds trust: after JustinGuitar's YouTube videos he bought the beginner course and then the intermediate one, which paid ads would have made much harder. — 00:50:15
  • ★★ Ali says most people who make a lot from online courses have a ton of free content: Amy Porterfield a podcast, Jenna Kutcher Instagram and Pinterest, Ali his 800 YouTube videos over about seven years. — 00:50:15

  • ★★★ Ali says the hard part is getting traffic, which is why course creators build organic audiences, and that building a business is mostly about winning the work, less about doing the work. — 00:50:50

    “The game of building a business is mostly about winning the work and less about actually doing the work.”

  • ★★ Ali says a good online course you are proud of takes weeks, if not months, to put together. — 00:51:44

  • ★★★ Ali says selling online courses is neither a get-rich-quick nor a get-rich-easy scheme, but absolutely a way to build a career on the internet. — 00:51:44
  • ★★ Ali says that to make millions as a neurosurgeon he would have to train for about 20 years and work 80-hour weeks; making money takes a lot of work, and courses are work that is fun if you enjoy teaching. — 00:52:13

00:52:42 — What if you feel you have nothing to teach?

  • ★★★ To people who feel they have nothing to teach, Ali says they probably do: they could list five to ten things they have learned in the last ten years. — 00:53:11
  • ★★ Ali's prompts for finding what to teach: what your 20-minute talk to an audience of your choice would be, what advice you would give yourself three or five years ago, and what skill you would teach someone five years younger. — 00:54:46
  • ★★★ Ali says you do need something to teach, but if you have no skill you can start today, learn one over two years and then make a course about it. — 00:55:12
  • ★★★ Ali taught himself video editing from scratch between 2017 and 2019 with YouTube tutorials and Skillshare classes, first in Premiere Pro and then Final Cut, and made a course about it in 2019. — 00:55:12 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★ Ali says his 2019 video editing course has made him $5,000 every month for about five years. — 00:55:12 · Skillshare classes

00:55:45 — In what order to build the business: leads first

  • ★★★ Ali recommends flipping the usual order: do not create the course first, since you will lack traffic; start any business with lead generation, seeing whether people sign up for a free version. — 00:55:45
  • ★★ Ali recommends his Deep Dive podcast interview with Daniel Priestley, which is all about leads. — 00:56:11 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ For a ukulele course Ali would first run a completely free 45-minute beginners' webinar over Zoom and see how many friends, family and people in his network attend. — 00:56:37
  • ★★★ For a productivity course Ali would first make a free five-day educational email course: if 100 people will not give their email for free value, 100 people will not pay for a course. — 00:57:05
  • ★★ Ali says someone becomes a lead when they opt in to show interest, giving you permission to contact them. — 00:57:05
  • ★★ Ali says the free value can be a webinar, a quiz or scorecard (ScoreApp, which he has invested in) or an educational email course, followed by a survey on people's challenges and willingness to pay. — 00:57:42
  • ★★★ Once people say they would pay, Ali would still run a pre-sale before making the course: a landing page with pre-orders or a waiting list. — 00:58:04
  • ★★★ Ali advises pricing a course low at first and raising it over time: lowering a price angers early buyers, while people do not mind increases and feel good about having bought cheaper. — 00:58:33

00:58:42 — Pricing a course and what a funnel is

  • ★★ Ali says the opposite school, charging a high price such as $1,000 and giving $10,000 of value, also has merit. — 00:58:56
  • ★★ Ali explains a funnel, the subject of Russell Brunson's DotCom Secrets, as the customer's journey from first hearing about you, say on YouTube, through your website and checkout to purchase. — 01:00:55
  • ★★★ Ali says you need something to teach but not to be an expert: you only need to teach people one or two levels below you. — 01:00:55

01:01:05 — Not feeling like an expert, common mistakes, piracy, free content, refunds

  • ★★ Ali was not an expert video editor when he made his editing course and did not promise to be; he promised the simple 80-20 way to edit YouTube videos and delivered it to people two steps behind. — 01:01:18
  • ★★ Ali says a professional video editor has the curse of knowledge and, with too big a gulf, little valuable to teach a complete beginner. — 01:01:39
  • ★★★ Ali says that although his book calls him the world's most followed productivity expert he still does not feel like one; feeling like an expert is an internal social construct, and what matters is giving value people a few steps behind will pay for. — 01:02:08
  • ★★ Ali says to try a course idea out for free first: if people get no value from your free material they will get none from your paid material. — 01:02:08
  • ★★★ Ali names the single most common mistake in a course business as not validating demand before making the course; a waitlist page takes five minutes, and no sign-ups means no demand. — 01:02:08
  • ★★ Ali says his courses, priced at $1,000 and more, are available free online, and that impersonators of his Instagram account have messaged his followers (all 800,000 of them, he says) offering the courses for about $7. — 01:02:48
  • ★★★ Ali says course piracy will always happen, you cannot do anything about it, and there is no point trying. — 01:03:17
  • ★★★ Ali's view is that the more you give away for free, the more you make from your course, because buyers are making a commitment to themselves and paying for everything in one ordered roadmap. — 01:03:17
  • ★★★ Ali offers a frictionless money-back guarantee: if someone does not find the course valuable he does not want or deserve their money, so refunds take an email and a form. — 01:04:16
  • ★★ Ali says guarantees are a great way to start a course business or any business because they take away much of the imposter syndrome about whether the course is worth its price. — 01:04:16
  • ★★ Ali accepts that some buyers download a course, upload it to a piracy site and request a refund, calling it a cost of doing business. — 01:04:45

01:05:13 — Recommended books, courses and podcast interviews; sign-off

  • ★★★ Ali's recommended resources on course businesses: Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers and $100M Leads, and Russell Brunson's trilogy DotCom Secrets (on funnels), Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets. — 01:05:13
  • ★★ Ali recommends Brendon Burchard's $1,000 online course Experts Academy, on being an online thought leader, as one of the best he has seen; he has not yet read Burchard's book The Millionaire Messenger. — 01:05:43
  • ★★ Ali points to his Deep Dive podcast interviews with course creators Tiago Forte, David Perell, Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole. — 01:06:12 · Deep Dive

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: 6med · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Skillshare classes

Also: Alex Hormozi · Building a Second Brain · ChatGPT · Daniel Priestley · Deep Dive · ScoreApp · Tiago Forte · University of Cambridge

← Previous: Here's how you can read more books this year 📚 · Next → This is why writers track their word count ✍️