There are three core costs involved in selling and delivering your online course. In this article we’ll break it down, so you have a clearer idea of what’s involved to give you insights for your online course budget.
Here are the three costs, noting that two costs could be done in house.
3 Online Course Costs
1. Online Course Setup
The setup of your online course portal is usually a one-off cost that involved in the building out of the tech required to sell and deliver your online course. This would include uploading all of your course content – videos, PDFs, audio and written content in your portal. Also, this would include the setup of any sales page and relevant automation to be able to sell your course on autopilot.
2. Online Course Tech Stack
The second cost involved is the ongoing software/tools that you need to be able to deliver your online course. This could include a CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Course Portal, Ecommerce, Automation and more. (If you’re unclear on the tech stack needed, feel free to check out our free guide Your Online Course Tech Simplified here). There are typically ongoing monthly or annual costs involved as you require ongoing resources to be able to sell and deliver your online course.
3. Online Course Maintenance
The third and final cost is the maintenance of your online course. This includes updates, changes, and improvements that you need to make to the original course. For you may wish to make changes to your email messaging, updates to content within the course portal, including updating video content, or adding new content for your course participants to access. This cost is often forgotten about, and sometimes not required. If you don’t make any updates to your course or associated tech, then you may not need this at all. But we know that many course creators like to tweak and make improvements to their online courses, so this one-off cost for updates is something to be mindful of.
Online Course Budget Considerations
Two out of the three costs above you could incur internally. Meaning that you could try and figure out the best practice online course setup and maintenance of your own online course portal. This will cost you in internal costs of wages, time and opportunity cost if you are the business owner. But that is one way to reduce the costs. In saying that, be careful, as we’ve seen it time and time again. You have the best intentions to do it yourself, but you are juggling so many hats, that it’s often gets pushed down the list. Then, all of a sudden you are months down the line without your course launching, or potentially you just abandoning it all together ☹. We don’t want that for you! As they say, you either pay with time or money, so consider what will be the best option for you moving forward.
(P.S. If you’re unclear on the technology that you need to setup and pay for ongoing, feel free to check out Your Online Course Tech Simplified guide to give you clarity on how all the tech jargon comes together).
