7 Scalable, Profitable Alternatives to Creating an Online Course

In the online business world a lot of people will tell you that the best or only way to scale your business is with online courses, and that’s simply not true. 

My specialty is helping entrepreneurs scale their business in the simplest way possible for them. It’s crucial to me that we find an offer that compliments their goals, their strengths, how much they want to work, and what their clients need from them. 

Creating and launching courses can be a ton of work. And when you create an online learning course it’s not a guarantee that you’ll have the flashy five or six-figure launch people brag about right out of the gate.

Plus the people you want to target might not want to sift through a course on their own. So here are seven different ways you can roll out new offers that can bring in new revenue, but with more ease.

An Intensive: This can be as short as an hour or several hours over consecutive days. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming the longer the better though. If you can get your ideal client results in just a couple of hours, build your intensive around that. 

A paid workshop: Spend an hour or two teaching on something that’s incredibly valuable to your ideal clients, and get paid to do it! Paid workshops are amazing because you usually don’t have to put a cap on how many can enroll. Plus you can offer the same workshop again and again, or even turn it into a passive digital product. Usually for just a few hours of your time you can make great money serving your audience. And often these participants will become hot leads for higher level work with you. 

A short-term group program: You can work people through your signature process to solve a problem in one to three months in a one-to-many approach. You can also pair this with some course content if you wish, but can often charge more for this since they get more direct access to you and can go deeper with the content and transformation.

A longer-term group program: Similar to a group program but this is usually longer than three months. How you structure this is up to you but you could have it as small as a handful of participants up to 20+ members. You can also base this around structured content if you wish. One thing to note is that you don’t want too many members at once for this or else it can lose the more personal touch and begin to feel more like a membership. If you want to serve more people, try rolling cohorts of members instead. 

Voxer support: Could be as short as a single day or up to a month. You can set it up so that they enroll in whatever time frame you want and then use the free Voxer walkie-talkie app to speak back and forth during the day, week, or month. This can be great if your schedule cannot accommodate more structured Zoom sessions or phone calls. And can be an excellent way to collect your thoughts and suggestions before giving your client feedback to their questions. 

A membership: Second most common to creating an online course, is to create a membership. Part of why this is attractive for entrepreneurs looking to scale is that usually there’s no limit on the amount of members you can enroll and usually the investment is much lower for participants. Something to keep in mind here is that the community will need to be managed well for people to want to stay, and you’ll need to be regularly coming up with fresh content. 

Special events: Things like online summits and retreats can be a great way to serve many people at once. These can also take some time to assemble and deliver successfully. There are many people who specialize in teaching profitable summits and online retreats, so if you are interested in really maximizing your results with these, I’d definitely recommend getting some support. 

While there are many ways to create a profitable online course, there are also many ways to create other scalable offers. Just because a lot of gurus teach courses, doesn’t mean they are required to grow a thriving business. 

Often when I work with clients we realize there are simpler ways to grow their revenue than with an online learning course. And sometimes we can still create their online course but pair it with another model to make it even more valuable. 

If you are ready to create a new offer in your business and want to be sure you’re creating the right one, reach out and we can chat about it.