It’s the COVID-19 pandemic that made everyone dip their feet into eLearning. Online learning has been there for long, but only now have educators started embracing it due to the immense advantages it offers to both educators and students.
But the question is how to build an eLearning business. Is it that easy to set up your own online learning business?
If you ask this question a decade back, the answer would be it could be a bit more challenging task.
But today, with the modern technology available at your fingertips, starting an eLearning business is simple if you do it in the right way.
This blog is a guide on starting an eLearning business of your own from scratch.
Starting an eLearning business
Let’s get straight into the steps you need to follow when starting an eLearning business of your own:
Plan your eLearning business
When starting an eLearning business, begin with a clear business plan. It will help you map out the specifics of your online eLearning business and discover some important insights that could help your business succeed.
Start with identifying your target market, their challenges, what are the startup costs and ongoing costs of your business, how much to charge tour students etc.
Find your target students
This is the most important step of starting your eLearning business: determining whether your chosen eLearning services are in demand among your target client base.
To find your potential students, you will need to perform market research by engaging learners, educators and industry experts.
You can start by finding answers to the following questions about your potential student base:
- What age group do your potential students belong to?
- Where are they located?
- What languages do they speak?
- What type of tutoring services or online courses do they look for?
- What are they looking for in an online educator?
- Can they afford your premium eLearning services and courses?
Getting answers to the following questions will help you identify your target audience and know them more; this will also help you make the right curriculum and content for your eLearning services.
Decide the core services
Once you identify your target audience, the next thing to do is to decide what type of services you want to offer.
Ask yourself whether you want to offer synchronous or asynchronous learning services.
Now let’s look into each of these:
Synchronous eLearning services
Synchronous learning services refer to teaching that happens in real-time.
It works like a traditional teaching or learning environment; the only difference here is, the learning happens in a virtual classroom.
It could be:
- Live one-to-one online tutoring sessions.
- Live group classes.
- Workshops or webinars.
- Online coaching sessions.
Asynchronous learning
In asynchronous learning, the learning doesn’t happen in a real-time system. Instead, Tutors provide teaching materials like audio classes, videos, blogs, or PDFs, and students learn whenever they can. Asynchronous eLearning mostly happens through online courses.
Develop the core content for your business
Now, coming to the core content or curriculum, focus on what your audience would desire the most. Begin with preparing a list of core skills that your learners would want to achieve.
For instance, if you offer coaching services on sports training, here are some of the content ideas you can include:
- Improving physical skills.
- Acquisition of sports skills.
- Improvement of tactical efficiency.
Now, coming to developing your curriculum, you need to decide what would fit your student’s interests the best.
Think about what makes people pay for online classes when every type of expert content seems to be available on the internet for free.
The answer is the expertise of a tutor and a customized curriculum. You can leverage these to benefit you by ensuring that your lessons are properly planned and organized, and the modules are logically sequenced.
Prepared relevant lesson plans, handouts, spreadsheets, exercises, or quizzes for each lesson.
Build your first class and collect initial feedback
During this stage, you don’t even need to have a website. Before you invest your valuable effort, time and energy into that, ensure you have a product that your target audience would appreciate and benefit from.
Send your sample lessons to your peers or close contacts who are remotely interested in the subjects you teach.
You could also ask them to analyze how your classes work and if there are any potential audio problems, or technical glitches or anything that you have to improve to enhance the quality of your classes.
Based on your initial feedback, adjust your content and curriculum and make changes in the setup if required.
Build an online tutoring website
Now, we come to the most important aspect of starting an eLearning business, which is building an online tutoring platform.
An online learning platform is an essential requirement when starting your own eLearning business, as you need a platform to host your online classes and courses.
While there are several eLearning platforms out there that you can use to host your classes, building your own online tutoring platform outbeats everything.
Use an online tutoring software like Pinlearn to build your fully customized tutoring platform to host both live online classes and self-paced online courses. You get to know the entire source code, implement the customizations, choose your own hosting service and be your own boss.
Price your classes and online courses
Running an eLearning business comes with the goal of making money, so you have to price your online classes and courses the right way.
Now, coming to the right pricing, the price can vary based on different factors like class type, duration of classes, experience and expertise of the tutor or tutors.
When you are beginning, you can offer trial lessons or free online courses and then work your way towards offering premium lessons and online courses.
Marketing your eLearning business
Successful marketing strategies are important to promote your eLearning business. As you aren’t the only one offering tutoring services in your niche. Hence, it is important to let your audience know about you, which is possible by implementing marketing strategies that suit your goals.
Start with promoting your eLearning business with an active social media presence and running paid advertising campaigns.
Conclusion
So, are you ready to give your eLearning business a head start? If yes, you are up to a lucrative venture that can give you a reputable space in the industry and help you build a sustainable career and make money.
Do not delay the launch of your eLearning business, as you are missing out on lucrative opportunities.
