Do you often find yourself wondering what it takes to make an online course a big hit?
In the recent workshop, ‘6 Figure Gameplan: How I Put my Course Sales on Auto-pilot’, Warikoo gave us more than a peek at everything he did to get his courses up and running and automate the entire engine.
Being an entrepreneur for twelve years, Ankur Warikoo has been a sought-after personality in the burgeoning market of coaches and online educators.
But did you know that it took a while for him to grease the wheels and get where he is today?
He first started his entrepreneurial journey as a startup founder in 2009. Doing multiple stints in countless brands since then, he decided to take a 3-month break to explore what more his life had in store.
In his heart, he knew he loved inspiring people but when the pandemic hit the market, corporate talks ran out of the road. That’s when he decided to go digital and he hasn’t looked back since.
He closed the financial year, 2021-2022 with a striking sales number of 13 crores! Can you guess where it all came from? That’s right! From online courses alone!
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Now let’s walk you through the things he did differently while starting his knowledge-based business and how he turned it into a gold mine, driving in almost $2 Million in annual sales.
5 tips by Ankur Warikoo to launch a wildly successful online course
1. What to teach
When trying to identify what to teach, Ankur says there’s one thing you always need to keep in mind – Don’t dismiss yourself before the world dismisses you. The self-doubts that pop up are all in the head. Whatever is it that you do, every single being has something to offer to the world.
Since driving startups was his forte, Warikoo believed that entrepreneurship would be a good niche to start with – teaching how to build a startup company from the ground up, build a dedicated team, and raise funds for the long run. Reality check? Out of all the graduates in this country, less than 1% of people decide to start up. While the percentage proved that it wasn’t that big a market to dive in, it was still his area of expertise. And when he tried digging deeper, he finally found the one thing that set him apart from most – Effective Time Management & Communication.
The best mantra is to identify what you’re good at – what it is that makes you truly you. And if you’re unable to pin it down, curate. For instance, if a 20-something boy has a knack for investing and decides to teach ‘Investment Decisions’, he might not be taken seriously. However, he can bring together the best knowledge available out there and build it into a fresh new course so that people can skim through it from a single source.
2. How to teach
There are multiple ways to acknowledge this question. You can teach people through highly interactive live sessions, both online and offline. While the offline delivery of content can be a bit tedious and geographically challenging, going online can solve it all. Live interactions can also be time-consuming and this is where recorded material comes in. You can leverage your time by recording your content in one go and club it together as part of your course. A one-time effort bearing lifelong fruits.
On the other hand, although a recorded course can significantly save time, there is also very minimal human interaction. In the course, ‘Take Charge of your Time’, Ankur Warikoo has enlightened students with engaging recorded videos, exercise materials, and one live session every month to resolve doubts and answer questions. So, a good blend of both live and recorded classes is always recommended.
Here’s a pro tip. Let the course participants watch the recorded content at their own pace, as many times as they want to fully understand the concepts, and then come to you for some live insights and clarifications. There is no good or bad ratio, you can combine both the formats the way you like and the way you think your students would prefer it.
3. How to price
The key to finding the best possible price for your first course is to seek feedback from the audience who is going to consume it. When Ankur Warikoo launched his first set of courses, he announced a ‘Pay what you want’ fee. People could come and purchase his course at any amount they could spare, the bare minimum being ₹1. Now, take a guess what the turnout was.
Out of the 400 people who registered, half of them paid ₹1 and the other half made payments of ₹49, ₹99, ₹199, and even ₹999! Isn’t that crazy? The average price they paid for his first-ever 60-minute live course turned out to be ₹167.
Experimenting thereon, he priced one live class for ₹99 and its recorded content at a ‘Pay what you want’ fee with a minimum of ₹199 since they’d be able to play and consume the content indefinitely. The average went up to ₹243 which also indicated that people would be willing to pay slightly more for recorded content with lifetime access.
The third and final experiment he did was to conduct 8 live classes of ₹199 each that would typically bundle up to ₹1600. And even with the ‘Pay what you want a price quote, the average turned out to be ₹1,237. Cut to today, he now has priced all his courses with a well-thought analysis of all the initial experiments. If you’re a budding edupreneur looking to pin down the best possible price for your course, don’t worry about the price, worry about the value you’d offer through the course. Let the pricing process be an outcome that you discover, not a mandate you automate.
4. How to market
Although there are countless automation tools out there to help you run your courses on auto-pilot, there is one thing you will have to do on your own, i.e., marketing your course. You need to make sure that the graph keeps going up and more and more people register for your course. And while you do that, a little brand polishing on the side can also go a long way.
If you’re familiar with his work, you certainly must have seen two different versions of Warikoo – One that creates content on social media and the other that runs digital ads promoting his courses. One markets his personal brand whereas the other markets his offerings. The key is to garner trust among your audience by creating content that adds value and tops it off with a solid Digital Marketing strategy.
Worrying about how much to spend on digital ads? Start with a minimum daily budget, analyze the results, pump in more money as your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) increases, and experiment away! And if they don’t bear the desired results, go back to your ad spends, realign the campaign and pump in more efforts. This approach has worked remarkably well for Warikoo since his very first course and can be your lucky clover as well.
With the rapid expansion of the online education market, there is ‘n’ a number of tools that offer digital coaches and educators a space to set up shop and a destination for online course hosting & content delivery. But how do you spot the one channel that best suits your course type and ensures a seamless delivery process?
The best way is to pen down a checklist before launching a course. A checklist for flawless execution. Look for a medium that allows you to collect payments, securely upload content, a session scheduler, an email service provider, channels for communication for and with learners, a certificate generator, and a feedback collecting system to constantly improve their learning experience.
Future of online education
Being one of the first movers in the Indian coaching industry, Ankur had to start everything from scratch, exploring and seeking the best available options out there all on his own. He first went looking out for an Indian payment gateway provider to facilitate UPI payments and net banking, followed by a Zoom license to conduct live classes longer in duration, a password-protected video-hosting software to securely deliver content, a space to build and encourage interaction between a community of thousands. The list goes on and on.
A lot of time, blood, sweat, and effort had gone into making his budding idea into a fully-functional education-based business. But for someone who is not much of a technological boffin, there are ways to mark the items off the checklist faster and make it less tedious.
This is where Graphy comes to aid. It is a web-based platform that consolidates all of these features & functionalities and places them in one unified dashboard. With an easy-to-navigate dashboard and drag & drop features, you can create, launch and market your online course in the shortest time.
What do you get with Graphy?
Branded Website & Mobile Applications
Graphy offers you highly customizable and branded websites as well as mobile apps (Android & iOS) to host your courses and build your brand. You get stunning predesigned templates to start with and a wide range of drag-and-drop sections to enhance the front-end look of your website.
launch Branded website and mobile app
Integrated Payment Gateways
Whether you’re in India or the States or Europe, you can collect payments directly into your bank account from anywhere in the world in any way you want. Graphy’s integrated payment gateway supports multiple currencies and you can price your courses concerning countries as well.
Premium Zoom Integration
You can seamlessly conduct interactive live classes and webinars using Graphy’s in-built premium Zoom feature or even integrate your existing license. As Warikoo said, you can never go wrong with a good mix of live and recorded content.
Most Secure Online Platform
With several encryptions and DRM (Digital Rights Management) in place, Graphy ensures 360-degree protection of your course content. Even if someone manages to screen-grab live classes illegally, by turning the Dynamic Watermarking’ feature on, you can drastically reduce piracy rates and prevent unauthorized access.
Irrespective of the file type,Graphy lets you upload content any way you want. Whether it is a recorded video or audio that you want your learners to stream, or audio, PDFs & SCORM packages, Graphy’s got it all covered.
Powerful Marketing Tools to Help you Sell More
There are several in-built advanced Marketing tools that you can make use of to further boost your sales numbers. Be it the integrated blogs, SEO, promo codes, or affiliate features, your course sales will be sure to shoot up in no time.
That’s not all, anything that you might not find on the dashboard,Graphy has third-party integrations for! Whether you’re new to the coaching business or someone who has an online teaching system in place, Graphy will always have more to offer.
The best part is that the pricing plans are as affordable as Rs. 3,499/ month and those wanting to test the waters can also sign up for zero cost, absolutely free.
