In this episode, host Julie Hood shares the secrets to pricing your online course… including her ideas on what it takes to have a high-priced course.
In this episode, host Julie Hood shares the secrets to pricing your online course… including her ideas on what it takes to have a high-priced course.
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Have you ever noticed how the prices for online courses are all over the place? And if you dig long enough, you can find almost the identical course offered for $10 and offered somewhere else for $2,000. So what price should you be using for your online course? Let's talk about it today. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses.
And now here's your host Julie Hood. Today I want to talk about one of the most common questions that I get from my students. And that is what should I charge for my course. And pricing is such a complex piece of marketing your online course and this whole puzzle of trying to figure out how to sell it. So today I want to share a few of my thoughts on how you can pick the perfect price for your course.
I've sold everything from a $14.95 ebook, which was the first thing I sold online way back in the day to a $60,000 consulting project and everything in between. So let's talk about some of the different options and what you should pick or why you would pick one price over another. So first I'm sure you've heard of, or possibly watched the game show The Price is
Right? And the concept of the game show was that the contestants would be answering questions about the prices for different products and how much they cost and they would win or lose depending on how well they could do that. So when I was really young, the summers were always very, very long and very boring in the middle of nowhere, Missouri. And so,
and this was also way before the internet. So I watched a lot of the game shows during the day to pass the time. And so The Price Is Right, was always one of them that I couldn't seem to get good at. And maybe it was because the show was filmed in California. And I grew up in Missouri. So our prices are always a lot cheaper here,
so I could never get it right or win at that game show. But today let's do a little bit better job for you and figuring out what your course prices should be. So let me give you a few suggestions on how you can think about setting your pricing and what you should be considering as you're figuring out what should my course price be. So,
number one of the most important of all of the advice I can give you, this is the one everybody comes back to me, this is the most important thing I can tell you. You have to 100% believe and feel comfortable in the price that you charge for your course, your confidence comes through in everything you do with your course, especially as you're trying to sell it and talk about it with other people,
that opinion that you have of the price is going to come through. So when you pick your pricing, start there like, do I 100% believe in this price? Not because some coach told me this is what I should charge, but because I believe this is what this course is worth to my students. And there's obviously a whole lot of mindset issues that you could relate into raising your prices and feeling comfortable with what you're charging.
And I'm not going to get into that today. That's a whole nother episode, but I wanted to start with making sure that whatever price you pick at the end of this podcast episode, that you feel 100% comfortable in people paying that to you. Okay. So number two is a strategy that has worked really well for me. And it might be something you could also use.
And by that, I mean start low and then raise your prices each time you offer your course. And so the way this works is for example, my 24 hour course creator program. I think the very first time I sold it, I actually sold it for $47 on a pre-sale pricing. And I didn't have testimonials yet. The people who jumped in at that price,
I actually still let them join in. So we have someone who jumped in this was years ago, and she's going through the current round of the 24 hour course creator with us at no extra charge. Now, I don't know if I'm going to do that forever. At some point, I'm going to have an extra charge for people who want to return.
So you get a one-time only, but right now, everyone who signs up can come back for free and continue through each time I offer it. So I offered it originally at that $47 price. And this last time that I offered it a few weeks ago, we were up to $797. So you can see I started at the 47, I think then I jumped it up to either a 197 or 297.
Then in January, it was 497. And then in June it was 797. So my audience has learned both the podcast audience, the email audience, that the first time I offer a new product is probably going to be the best price that you're going to see from me. And then, so that's the time to jump in. If, if price is a big deal for you,
just jump in early and get the upgrades and the improvements along the way. So that might be a strategy you want to do too, it also works pretty well if it's a new course and you're not quite sure what it's worth, like you can start lower and increase with each of your launches, increase the prices. So number three is to consider what price you need to make a living.
And this goes back to that $14.95 ebook that I first offered way back in the day. It was full of information. It was really, really helpful for the audience I was selling it to. They liked it, but you have to sell a lot of $14.95 eBooks in order to make any kind of decent living at it. And that was probably the biggest mistake.
And because that audience that I was working with, they weren't interested in stepping up to more expensive products with me. So that's why I left that particular audience. So sit down and really think about, you know, how much money do I need to make each month of the year in order to have a certain amount of salary at the end. And,
you know, remember to take out taxes. That can be a big chunk of what you have to pay. If you're going to have partners and you're going to give them commissions that also comes out of it, you'll have expenses in order to host and run your online course and to do marketing. So at the end of the day, you know, your prices may need to be higher than you think,
just to be able to cover everything and still end up with some income on the backend. Number four is that higher price courses may need a different sales process. And this tip is actually from Alma Bradford, who I listened to regularly on clubhouse. She's really, really sharp and has some fantastic ideas about doing online courses. And I heard her say this,
and I thought, you know what? She is really smart and really brilliant with this idea. And she pointed out that if you're going to have a course, that's over probably $2,000, I think was the dollar amount that she used. If you want to offer something, you know, 3, 4, or $5,000, you're probably going to have to have a different sales process in that you may need to have either salespeople or yourself getting on the phone with your potential students and talking with them personally,
because most people don't plop down $5,000 without talking to the person that they're working with, but you might be able to get away with a $1,500 or $2,000 course with the right amount of marketing and group workshops, group webinars, that kind of thing. People will sign up for that when they feel like they know you in and they don't need that individual attention.
But when she mentioned that, I thought, you know, you're right. If you really want to sell the higher price courses, how are you going to sell it? Is it going to require a lot of conversations and individual discussions that you have with people or that you have a sales person having with potential prospects? And do you want to do that?
Some people do some people don't, I'm not a big fan of that. I, I have wasted too many hours over the years, talking with people one-on-one that I don't particularly like to do that anymore. So one of the things that worked really, really well this time was doing the challenge. So I was talking to a lot of people every single day of my five day challenge and trying to give them as much individual advice as I could.
And that worked really, really well. We had a 20% conversion rate on the folks who were active in the challenge. So think about how you want to sell your course, because that may help you decide what price point you need to use for your course. Number five is I want you to plan a sequence of prices of what you're putting together. So here's what I mean.
If you're just getting started, you're going to come up with your first course, you'll have your first price and then consider raising the price each time you offer it again. And then I also want you to have a freebie in here. Maybe it's a free mini course, whatever kind of free thing that you're giving away, because we need to start building that email list.
So you've got your first course and you've got your freebie and that's where you start. And then after that, you start adding in the pieces. So the next piece that I'd like to see you add is a course, maybe in the $197 to $497 range that you can sell, but then you also offer it and giveaways to help build your list.
So I'll be talking about this more in future podcasts episodes, but giveaways are where you participate. You give away a high value item and the host connects you with people who are interested in it, who sign up to get it for free. And then you're building your email list that way. So that's the next thing I like for you to have is a course that you can use for giveaways.
Then in between there, depending on what you've got going on, you may offer a couple more higher price courses, or you might want to start an add in something in the $7 to $47 range. And here's why I like this price point. You're going to grab those impulse buyers, the people who stumble across you, especially maybe through advertising and they don't have to do a lot of consideration.
It's just something they whip out their credit card and buy from you. And this can help you with advertising costs. In particular, if you can get people buying impulse right away, as soon as they find out about you, then you're getting some revenue coming in as you're spending on advertising. So this is also not something I came up with. This is a Russell Brunson's idea.
He calls this a value ladder, which is you have your free, your low price, your mid price and your high priced items. And so if you're interested in finding out more, check out his books on, on the value ladder, he talks about it a lot. And, how you can use that in order, his concept is that sometimes people will start out and work up the ladder with you,
but I found that's not necessarily true, you know, sometimes they'll jump in at your first course level. So it's not always that they're working up this price point with you. It's just that you're offering things at different levels so that you can catch different people at different points along the process, because they may not be ready to pay $2,000 with you today,
but they'll jump in for a $47 getting started kind of package and then hang with you for a while. Okay. Number six is some ways to add value and increase your pricing. So first off, make that offer that you're giving away really irresistible and notice, I didn't say, make your course irresistible. I said, make your offer irresistible. And so this is another Russell Brunson lesson.
Your offer is the combination of everything that you're selling. So it's the course that you're offering. It's the Facebook group that you're offering. It's the coaching calls that you're offering. It's all the bonuses that you're throwing in and all that gets combined to create this really irresistible offer. So that has worked really well for this last launch that I did. I was trying to figure out how could I just make this incredibly irresistible?
So the people who did the fast action bonuses actually are getting three bonus workshops from me in addition to the course that they're getting over the next few months, they're going to get in for free to three different additional workshops and courses that I'm doing. So sometimes those bonuses, those little extra things that are part of your offer, that's what pushes people over the edge.
I know there's been a few times when I was like, oh, I'm kind of interested in this course, but I'm not sure. And then I read one of the bonuses and I'm like, absolutely, that's what I need. I was considering a workshop the other day. And the bonus was that you got the recordings. And I was like, you know what?
I can't be there the whole day. I want the recordings. This price point makes sense. That bonus is what pushed me over to actually get me to purchase. And then another thing you can do to increase the value is any way that you can add personalized advice. And you know, this might be Q and a coaching calls where you're giving specific advice to your students.
It can be that they're posting comments and questions and you're answering their specific questions. Anytime you can give people advice on their specific situation, that adds value to your course. And then the third thing is to actually get some students in here and start getting some results because while most of my client work that I'm doing, it has non-disclosure agreements around it. So I can't tell you specifics about what we're doing.
I've now gotten some students who've gotten through the 24 hour course creator program. So I can talk all about them, get their permission and talk about their courses, talk about what they've done and that action of getting those results increases the value, because it shows that I've done. When I said that I would teach you how to do so as maybe not the first time you launch your course,
you may not have a lot of those kinds of results situation. Hopefully you have a few that that's getting you started. And that's why you pick this particular course because you've worked with at least a couple people on. So you got a few results and you know that you can get, get them for your students. But then as you go, you'll get more students who have more experience who have gone through your program that you can also use to help provide testimonials and case studies so that you can talk about how successful they've been.
And then the last piece of advice I would give you on this is really just have to play with your pricing because there are there aren't exactly black and white kind of answers. And in the end you just have to choose because you're the owner of your course business. You get to choose what your prices will be and trying to, to figure it all out at the beginning.
Hopefully some of these ideas will help prompt where you think you should start with your pricing, but you can go from there and see what's best for you and for your students. So please let me know how this goes for you. I'm very curious where you land with your pricing, what works, what didn't one of the only last suggestions I will make is sometimes it can be hard to decrease your pricing.
So if you started $2,000 and then want to go back later and change it to a thousand dollars, though, those $2,000 students will probably get upset that you're offering it cheaper. So keep that in mind, as you're thinking about playing with your pricing and let me know how it goes. I'm very curious to hear what kinds of successes you have with pricing.
And thanks so much for listening. I appreciate this time in your podcast app and taking the time to listen. I also really appreciate it when you subscribe or follow on apple podcasts. And if you learned anything helpful today, if you could leave us a five star review, I'd so appreciate it. It helps us show up more to other potential course creators.
And thank you so much. So have a fantastic week. We will talk again next time and I can't wait to share more suggestions on creating and marketing your online courses. Take care.