Selling Online Courses and Digital Products with Heights Platform, Online Course Software

In addition to being the best way to create a learning platform for selling online courses, Heights Platform is also the best way to use your learning platform to sell any kind of digital product. We're so excited because these new selling features will be such powerful tools to help course creators provide even more value and generate more revenue.

Course creators can now create and sell downloadable digital products inside Heights, as well as sell online courses individually.

This means even after selling access to your learning/coaching program and courses, you can release downloadable products and supplementary courses for sale to increase your revenue.

Here are a few examples of how you could use digital products to generate more revenue:

• You could sell ebooks, presentations and project files
• Coaches could sell downloads of a recorded live event
• Photographers could sell photo editing presets
• Developers could sell an application framework
• The possibilities are endless!

We’ve made the product order process extremely simple for your students. If they’ve already supplied payment information when enrolling and purchasing your program, they can purchase a digital product or add-on course in just two clicks!

We’ve written about how offering multiple paid enrollment plans for your online course or coaching program can help increase sales, and that assumed that learners would gain complete access to all your content upon entering a paid enrollment plan. Selling a course or digital product individually in combination with paid or free program enrollment opens up a whole new set of possibilities and potential revenue models.

To provide some more detail about exactly how this can be powerful for you, the course creator, we’ll cover a couple of recommended ways to incorporate these individually sold courses and products below.

The Right and Wrong Way to Selling Online Courses and Digital Product Sales Into Your Learning Program

In general, we believe that offering all your main content together with a paid enrollment plan is the best option for most course creators. That said, there are multiple places where it might be beneficial to you and your learners to offer additional content in the form of add-on courses or digital products.

Before we go into a couple ideas for selling online courses and digital products, let’s cover what to be wary of.

Remember that the most important thing is that your online course or coaching program can provide a result for your customers. Selling pieces of your learning content as separate individually purchasable courses would not be a wise decision if the student would need to purchase all of them to get a result.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that it will actually be harder to sell your online courses separately, than simply selling a single package for a larger upfront fee or installment plan. As we’ve mentioned before, your students are buying your program for the result that they believe it will help them achieve. Selling courses that should be together as individual products can cause confusion and frustrate customers because they expect a result from your course. The second reason which ties in with the first, is that learners will be much less likely to complete all of your content if they have to make the decision to buy each time they progress. If you end up with a bunch of learners that aren’t getting results, then you aren’t going to have the great testimonials that you otherwise could. This means your ability to positively impact others with your knowledge is diminished, and your potential revenue is as well!

You don’t want to complicate the buying decision for your prospects. You want to your prospective customer to see clearly that your program is what they need in order to achieve the result they are after. Confusion stops sales from happening and if you present too many offerings of individual courses to potential customers, you could end up with less sales instead of more.

Now that you know what to be aware of when selling individual courses, how can selling online courses individually benefit your business?

We’ll present two potential scenarios that are great uses for individual digital course and digital product sales.

Remember that Heights Platform is a complete learning program, which means it offers much more than online courses. Heights also offers discussion forums, social profiles, our unique student project posts, points and badges, and more.

How to Use a Free Membership Site to Sell Online Courses and Digital Products

For your business you might decide that the idea of letting learners enroll for free is the best choice, instead of charging for enrollment. Even if you don’t have courses live in your program yet, you could still offer students a private discussion forum to learn from you and each other. Then you could release a course available for purchase inside your program once it is ready. This allows you to provide value to learners right away, even before your course is finished, and then once it is, you have a big list of members who could purchase your course. This means that those who purchase your course when it launches also get to immediately benefit from the community you’ve already created, rather than launching your course at the same time you’ve launched your program, which would mean that the first few students signing up wouldn’t have many others to interact with. As your business goes and you gain more members, the value of your membership program increases. You could eventually switch to a subscription membership model where new students need to pay a monthly fee to gain access to your membership program.

Another variation of this model would be to offer a free online course with your free enrollment, and then use it as a way to attract customers for a digital product you are selling. As an example, let’s say you are offer a free software development course, but if learners want the source code or project files, they will have to purchase them as a digital product.

Selling Online Courses and Digital Products in Your Coaching Program and Capture Revenue with Upsells

Another common situation might be that you have a coaching program or learning program which is already complete and offers a selection of online courses and a project at the end that drives learners to a specific result. Learners would have already paid a one-time fee, or signed up for installments or a subscription in order to access your program. While what is included in your program as a base already provides the result you are selling to your students, there will always be some students who want more to continue growing. They are the ones who would be happy to purchase an additional online course from you or an extra digital product that includes a download to use project files that can help them grow faster. You already have the billing info for these customers on file since they already paid to access your learning program. This means they can purchase your supplementary course or digital product in just two clicks.

You can also generate additional revenue from these customers during the paid enrollment checkout by offering an online course or digital product as an upsell. This captures customers in that dopamine release they experience when they are buying. Heights has built-in functionality to offer both digital products and online courses as limited-time upsells at a special price to learners immediately after they complete the enrollment process.

Having the flexibility to allow online course creators to choose the way they want to sell their content is one of many things that makes Heights the ultimate online course creation software.

Want to read more about selling online courses? Check out our post on How to Price your Online Course or Group Coaching Program.