Online Cooking Courses: Get Started Teaching Online Cooking Classes

Do you have a passion for cooking? Now is the best time to start selling online courses and monetize your knowledge!

The global online cooking class market is expected to grow and reach over $2 billion in revenue by the year 2029.

So if you have been considering creating a cooking online course, you are on the right path!

Learn from Successful Online Cooking Course Creators

At Heights Platform we get in contact with thousands of online course creators from all niches, including creators selling cooking courses.

In one of our case studies, we had the pleasure to interview the founders of Rustico Cooking, Dino and Micol, who created an online membership site with Heights Platform.

Rustico Cooking is a membership site that specializes in teaching authentic Italian cuisine. Dino and Micol started their online course in early 2020, and now the membership counts more than 10 online courses.

Aside from providing great content, the success of Rustico Cooking comes from the structure of the online courses and lessons. The content inside the membership is divided into online courses: each course specializes in a different dish type. They have a course for appetizers, one for pasta dishes, one for meat, desserts and so on.

Inside the online courses, each lesson represents a different recipe. This way of organizing content makes it easy for their students to find the lesson or recipe they need in a very fast way.

We analyzed in detail the story of how Dino and Micol founded Rustico Cooking, how they structured their membership and how they promoted it. Click the bottom below to learn from the success of Rustico Cooking.

How to Create a Cooking Online Course

Now that you got a better idea of what a cooking online course looks like, let's see what steps you need to take in order to start your own business selling online cooking courses.

Step 1: Find Your Niche

The first step to building a successful cooking online course is choosing your topic and niche. Since cooking is such a large industry and it incorporates many different niches, it is important to decide which topic to focus on.

What kind of cuisine do you want to focus on? What are you most knowledgeable or passionate about?

Focusing on a single, relatively small niche will increase your chances of attracting your ideal clients. If you are not sure which cooking niche to pick for your online course, check out this article from our blog: How to Find the Right Niche and Topic for Your New Online Course

Step 2: Structure Your Cooking Online Course

Once you decide which cuisine or cooking niche you are going to focus on, it's time to get a better idea about your online course business model and its structure.

Cooking is an extremely adaptable topic that can work well with almost any business model. You can decide to offer standard online courses, where you create content and structure it in a series of lessons that students can go through at their own pace and enroll in the course at any time.

You could also decide to offer a membership site, like in the case of Rustico Cooking, where students get evergreen access to your content by paying a monthly fee.

If you are a Heights Platform customer you also have the option to sell online challenges, a type of online course where students get access to lessons on set calendar days and go through your course together as a group.

These types of business models are not mutually exclusive, you could decide to sell online courses and membership sites at the same time. You can also play around with your online course launch strategy and content delivery.

Step 3: Create Content on Heights Platform

Now it's time to start building your online course content. Cooking online courses generally use a variety of content formats: from video to text, downloadable pdf recipes, audio, step-by-step graphics and so on.

Video is one of the easiest and most effective ways to deliver information in online courses, and it is especially important for cooking online courses, as students can visualize the cooking process and reproduce it on their own by following the video.

In the example of Rustico Cooking - an Italian cooking course created with Heights Platform - each lesson includes a video recipe, the text transcription and a downloadable pdf so students can print it at home and follow along with the video without having to switch between different tabs.

Step 4: Promote Your Online Course

When you are done creating content for your online course, it is time to launch and promote your online cooking classes!

You can even go ahead and sell an online course before it's finished, but here are some of our favorite ways to gain momentum and start getting sales:

• Grow your audience: even before you are ready to launch your online course, it is a good practice to start growing an audience around your business. Start by setting up your social media accounts and post informative, valuable content around your niche.
• Collect email contacts: email marketing is an extremely powerful way to promote your online course. To grow your mailing list, set up an email marketing account and add any previous client or customer you may have. You can create lead magnets and promote them for free or at a low price to collect new email prospects.
• Use word of mouth: referrals and word of mouth marketing are a great way to get your first few sales and gain some social proof. Spread the word about your new cooking online course to family, friends and people in your network and incentivize them to refer you new students by offering a friends & family discount.
• Partner with other course creators: if you know other online course creators in a similar niche (not your direct competitors) try to set up a partnership where you can promote each other's products to your respective audiences.
• Start a blog: SEO and content marketing pays off in the long run. So start creating content and writing blog posts now to improve your SEO and Google ranking.

There are many more ways you can use to promote your new cooking online course. From starting your own affiliate program to contacting influencers in your niche, to paying for displaying ads on social media. Check out this article from our blog to learn all about promoting an online course: A Complete Guide on How to Promote Your Online Course and Boost Sales

Conclusion

There is no better time to start your own cooking online course and turn your passion into a business.

To get started, pick a niche you want to focus on and decide on your business model, start generating content for your lessons and then promote your cooking course to the world!

Heights Platform gives you all the tools you need to create an online cooking course, sell membership sites, digital products, online challenges and much more.