There are hundreds and thousands of online courses being created every day. In order to offer something powerful, offer a combination of communities and courses. Let’s learn how to sell online courses by creating a community.
If you are reading it right now, you’ve probably dipped your toe in the proverbial pool of online courses. Whether you are in the phase of creating them, delivering them, or selling them—you very well know how powerful of a tool it can be.
But, do you know what’s even more powerful?
Running your courses alongside a dynamic community!
Whether you’re offering a pre-recorded course or a cohort-based course, the community is essential. Not just for your students, but also for your overall digital business.
Let’s begin to understand it better.
Table of Contents
The Importance of Community in Online Courses
The community enables people to connect with each other who would otherwise never meet. That’s so true now. With our lives becoming increasingly digital, we can build relationships and connect with people sitting thousands of miles away.
People that we will barely even meet in real life.
If these connections unite together for a common purpose, it will naturally turn into something more powerful.
Learning through an online course can be that common purpose.
Within a community, all the members come together, build new relationships with each other, share their growth and learn together.
Especially if you want to launch memberships, having a dynamic community will make members stick around longer. Having people with the same motivations, interests, and goals somehow leads to something called the network effect.
But, what does the network effect have to do with it?
The network effect is a situation where the value of a network increases with every person joining and contributing. That means, every person is individually responsible to make it a thriving network. The network effect is the factor that distinguishes between communities that run themselves, and communities that don’t.
For online course creators, the network effect is valuable because it enables them to focus less on producing huge content, and more on creating a thriving community. Here, members get to learn, as well as, collaborate with each other, while accomplishing similar things.
Especially when you’re building a community from scratch, add a course into your community structure. It is the key to achieving your member’s results and transformation, way faster.
Related: How to make money as a creator
Want to sell online courses? Package it with a community!
More often than not, creators build out courses for mainly three reasons.
To help people get faster results.
Online courses run their course, as it’s structured and finite. However, that also means it can be overwhelming at times, which in turn can become a lengthy process. Having a community with an online course helps members curb this problem.
Giving yourself an opportunity to focus.
As a digital owner, nothing can be as structured as an online course. You can create a community or a membership, having a course gives a sense of focus, structure, and direction. This helps both creators smash the business goal and your members can get their desired results.
To charge premium with confidence
Adding an online course makes any community worthwhile. People don’t mind paying for online courses and programs that promise results and give them exactly that. This can help creators like you charge a premium. People tend to be more invested in higher-paid programs, and you can create the best resource pool through an online course.
In all the above-mentioned scenarios, if you offer a community, you give your course a way to grow exponentially!
Related: How to market your online courses
Graphy helps you run a community alongside a course
We’ve talked a lot about how having a community can spur growth within an online course business. However, it takes some technology hassle and operational challenges to establish that.
But, hey, it doesn’t have to be this way anymore.
Spoiler alert: It’s pretty simple.
With Graphy, you can launch your multimedia courses and memberships with an in-built community feature, within the platform!
They don’t need to move to a Discord server or a Facebook page, they can interact and grow using “Course Discussion Forum”.
It can be hyper-focused as they learn together, collaborate, and troubleshoot with each other. All of this is possible on a single web platform and your own mobile app!
