How to Turn a Service Business Into an Online Course

5 minute read

Are you looking to expand your service business and reach a wider audience?

One way to do this is by creating an online course.

By selling online courses, you can share your expertise and knowledge with learners from all over the world while diversifying your service-based business and creating a leveraged income stream.

If you are looking for a real-life example of someone who successfully integrated an online course into their service business, we recorded an interview with Jasmine Williams in our podcast show, The Creator's Adventure.

Jasmine started as a freelance copywriter, offering copywriting services to other business owners who needed help with their website or ad copy. She then decided to create an online course to teach fellow copywriters how to start their own service businesses. Watch the full interview below:

Content Marketing and Copywriting Tips with Jasmine Williams - The Creator's Adventure #10

Even though you are teaching what you know and what you are passionate about, creating an online course means entering an entirely new market and starting a brand new business that is different from your service business. This means that you will need to carry out market research, learn how to create engaging course materials and how promote this new product.

It can also be challenging to distill the knowledge and skills that you have gained through years of experience into a comprehensive and easy-to-understand curriculum.

In today's article, we'll go over the steps you can take to turn your service business into an online course. Whether you are a web developer, photographer, copywriter, marketer or any service-based business owner, keep reading below to learn how to add a course to your online business and enter the world of online learning.

Why should you create an online course for your service-based business?

Many creators believe that to grow a successful online course business, you need to have a service business first. That's good news for you, and here is why offering an online course is a great idea for a service business owner.

You already are an expert in your topic

If you have been running a service-based business for a while, you already are an expert in what you do, and it won't be hard for you to create course materials and teach about your topic.

It helps you gain credibility

Creating an online course is a way for you to share your knowledge and expertise with others, helping them to improve their skills and advance their careers. It is also a great way to prove your expertise to both your online course students, and your service business clients!

Reach a new audience

Online courses allow you to reach learners from all over the world, potentially expanding your customer base and increasing your revenue. The target audience who is looking to buy your online course is different from your potential clients who are looking for your services.

Scalability and leveraged income

With your service business, you are trading time for money. An online course can be accessed by many learners at once, allowing you to scale your business without having to invest more time into it. This is what we call leveraged income. Learn more about it here: Is Passive Income Real? How to Create Leveraged Income in Your Online Business

Creating courses is also generally less expensive than providing services in person, and once the course is created, it can be sold over and over again.

Can help you educate your clients

Many service business owners create online courses with the purpose of educating their clients and helping them reach the level of knowledge needed to work with them before or after providing a service.

For example, let's say that you are offering web design services. You might build an online course to explain to your clients how to keep improving their website even after they are done working with you.

How to turn a service business into an online course business

Now that we learned the benefits of creating an online course from a service-based business let's see how you can actually do it.

There are several steps you can take to turn your service into an online course:

Step 1: Come up with an online course idea

The first step in creating an online course is to identify the key concepts and skills that you want to cover in your online course.

What parts of your service business can you translate into an online course? What is your unique value proposition?

For example, if you run a photography service business, your online course topic might be about lighting, composition, editing, or about teaching others how they can become professional photographers (and so on...).

Make sure to identify a clear and appealing result for your online course, that will translate into its title. Learn more about coming up with a topic for your online course in these articles from our blog:

Step 2: Create the content and materials for your online course

Once you've identified the topic and result of your course, you can start drafting a course curriculum and creating the course content and lessons.

It is a good idea to draft a course outline before you start creating any content. Learn how to do this here: How to Create an Online Course Curriculum Quickly and Easily

Your course materials can include lesson plans, assignments, video tutorials and resources to help learners understand and apply the concepts and skills you are teaching.

Step 3: Create your Heights Platform account

To deliver your course online, you'll need to use an online course platform like Heights Platform.

Online course platforms allow you to upload course materials, track learner progress, communicate with students, collect payments, build your own website and more.

Create a free account with Heights Platform and start outlining your course. Heights Platform is the all-in-one course creation software designed to offer a great learning experience for your students.

Unless you plan to offer your course for free, an important step in creating online courses is choosing the right price. Use our online course pricing calculator to come up with the ideal price for your program.

Step 4: Promote your course

Once your course is created, you'll need to promote it to reach potential students.

Since you are already running a service-based business, start promoting your online course to your existing clients and audience (assuming it doesn't create a conflict of interest).

The way you promote an online course might differ from how you are used to marketing your services. Chances are that you should target a different audience, use different messaging and promote it on different channels.

Email marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, and digital marketing in general, are some of the most popular ways to promote an online course. Check out these articles from our blog to learn all about it and come up with the right marketing strategy:

Bonus Step for Heights Creators: Build a community

Creating a community for your students will help to improve the learning experience and make it more interactive.

If you have created your Heights Platform account in step 3, you also have access to our community feature, which allows you to build a thriving community in a few easy steps.

Conclusion

Turning your service business into an online course can be a great way to expand your customer base and increase your revenue.

By following the advice provided in this article, you can create an engaging online course and build a successful business by diversifying your product offering.

If you haven't done it already, create your free Heights Platform account and start building your online course today!

Create Your Online Course Today

Post Topics: Build and Promote Your Course