Making money online can be very easy or a bit complicated, this will depend on the kind of skill you have and how prepared you are to make money with your skill.
One thing that can help you better make money online are online courses, most of them are tailored to help you enhance you skills and fully monetise it to earn a living.
Some of these courses will be mentioned here for your ease and other ways to make money with online courses.
- Which Course is Best for Online Earning?
- Can you Make Money with Online Courses?
- 10 Best Ways to Create an Online Course
- Which Online Course is Best for Job?
Which Course is Best for Online Earning?
There is absolutely no excuse for you not to be making money online this year. With advances in technology, more jobs can be done from anywhere, and startup costs for launching your own business are little to nothing.
Read Also: How to Make Money With Online Courses
Best of all, there are affordable courses in a variety of niches that can get you up and running in as little as two weeks. Here are some online training courses you MUST check out.
Google Academy for Ads
With the rise of content comes more demand from creators who want to promote their content. Aside from social media, Google Adwords is an excellent online platform that can generate more leads and engagement through referral traffic.
With that said, brands and businesses creating content are looking for people who can set up pay-per-click advertising campaigns in Google Search, Google Display Partners, and Google Mobile Ads. Google Academy for Ads is a great starting point if you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity.
Once you complete this free course, you can choose to become Google certified by taking an exam.
The Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz
This free beginner’s SEO course from the SEO software company, Moz, tackles everything you need to get started with search engine optimization if you’re starting from scratch.
This course moves at your pace so you can learn while working full-time or studying another course on the side. With 8 chapters, it begins with all the need-to-know SEO basics and ends with how to execute an SEO strategy.
Hubspot’s Email Marketing Course
When someone mentions Hubspot, “marketing” is likely the first word that’ll come to mind. Hubspot is one of the best platforms out there to learn the ins and outs of digital marketing.
Their free email marketing course lets you master the fundamentals of email marketing – from recipient management and segmentation to email deliverability and analyzing your email engagement stats.
Another benefit is that the Hubspot certification program is recognized by brands and businesses out there so you can use this skill to negotiate your way to better rates when doing freelance email marketing management work.
A Crash Course in Data Science by Johns Hopkins University via Coursera
If you are prepared to tackle another technical course, learning data science can be your ticket to earning in the high five figures or more online. A Crash Course in Data Science by Johns Hopkins University via Coursera is a good jump-off point.
Many professionals take this course to add another skill set to their existing arsenal.
Understanding data science projects is one of the most sought after skills among project managers today. A job in data science is also one of the highest-paying in the tech field, especially where remote work or freelancing is concerned.
This week-long course is specifically ideal for managers or leaders who want to join data science teams and manage data scientists. Throughout this course, you will quickly grasp data science concepts without all the fluff.
Enchanting Marketing’s 16-Part Snackable Writing Course
Henneke Duistermaat is the writer behind Enchanting Marketing. She has taught copywriting webinars, and her book Blog to Win Business is recommended as a must-read for business writers by both Huffington Post and Inc.com.
Henneke’s 16-Part Snackable Writing Course is easy to access with just your email address, and you’re in without any other requirement. You’ll receive an email every day, with areas to focus on as a writer.
These snackable writing tips can help you with a digital marketing gig or your online business website. If you already have an interest in writing for the web, this free course is for you!
Comprehensive Blogging Course by Elite Blog Academy
Created by Ruth Soukup of Living Well Spending Less, this program is excellent for new and intermediate bloggers alike, and it consists of 12 units and includes videos and worksheets, as well as a lot of bonuses, and membership to private Facebook Group.
Enrollment for this training course only opens up ONCE a year (March 2020), so be sure to get signed up for the waitlist. The full cost of the course is $997, and payment plans are available.
Bookkeeping Course by Bookkeepers
After starting his own accounting firm, Ben Robinson needed to hire some bookkeepers to help him with his business clients. Unfortunately, finding good bookkeepers was tough.
So, Ben decided to take his CPA knowledge and train individuals to meet his needs. Over time he discovered that great bookkeepers shared seven main personal characteristics. Now Ben teaches others how to work from home as bookkeepers.
The full 10-week training course is $2,997 (split into three payments of $999). You can also pay in full and get a $300 discount making the price $2,697. Bookkeepers have a 60-day unconditional guarantee. Bookkeepers have an A+ rating on the Better Business Bureau website.
Copywriting by The Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting
If you want to work from home as a copywriter, then check out American Writers & Artists Inc.’s (AWAI) copywriting course.
This in-depth course (586 pages) covers all the nuts and bolts of writing persuasively, plus it gives you lifetime access to AWAI’s members-only website and copywriting job board.
The cost is $497 or five payments of $99. AWAI has a no-risk, 100% satisfaction guarantee for one full year, and they have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau.
- Level: Beginner to intermediate
- Duration: Self-paced program – can be completed in 12 weeks
General Transcriptionist by General Transcription: Theory & Practice
If you want to do transcription work from home, this is the course for you. General Transcription: Theory & Practice covers everything from equipment requirements, transcription style guides, to where to find legit jobs as well as practice dictation sessions so you can hone your skills.
The full cost of the course is $597 and includes lifetime updates and access. Janet Shaughnessy, the creator of the course, also has a pay-as-you-go option and discounts for individuals who purchase both the general and legal transcription courses.
Virtual Assistant: Become a Virtual Assistant in 30 Days or Less
After successful launching a freelance writing business, Gina Horkey decided to add virtual assistant services into the mix. Today Gina teaches others how to launch their own successful freelance careers.
In this nine-module training, you’ll learn the essentials of starting, running, and managing a virtual assistant business. The full cost of the course is $397 or three payments of $167.
Can you Make Money with Online Courses?
The need for information and instruction has created a great opportunity for you to get paid for your knowledge.
While some people have done this by creating a blog or writing books, an online course is another method of selling what you know. Online learning is expected to reach more than $240 billion by 2021, according to Global Industry Analysts.
Many people don’t think they know enough about a topic to teach it, but the truth is, you don’t have to be an expert to create and sell an online course. You simply need to know more than most.
The topics you can cover are vast including art or photography, personal development, music, gardening, cooking, marketing, technology, language, and more.
Many people have made thousands of dollars a month with online courses teaching things like guitar, how to use specific software, or how to bake bread.
Before you dive in and start creating your own online course, it helps to look at the advantages and c to see if this is the right avenue for you to pursue.
Advantages
Several new online course platforms are available to make setting up and selling your course easier than ever. Additionally, due to continually advancing technology, many of the tools and equipment needed to create a course are very simple to use, with professional-quality results.
You can create courses to sell as an addition to your existing business. For example, if you’re a blogger, you can offer a course that delves deeper into something specific in your blog’s topic area.
If you offer a service, you can design and offer an online course for people who would rather learn and do the work on their own instead of hiring you.
Creating and selling online courses can offer you a passive income stream. You only have to create a course once, and then you can sell it over and over.
Additionally, because your course is online, you can have students from all over the world, in any time zone, without any additional effort.
One of the creative ways to use an online course for marketing purposes is to use it as part of a funnel system to lead students to your coaching program or other services.
You can give them a small amount of information or teach them a basic-level service, and then direct them to your other paid offerings if they want more of what you have to offer.
Disadvantages
Quality online courses usually offer students a variety of content delivery methods such as text and video, which can take time to create.
Users expect to be able to have the course in a format to access on their phone or laptop, with video and audio files so they can watch or listen on their daily commute, for example.
When designing your online course, you’ll need to choose an online service to host your finished product. This could be your own website, or it could be a hosted service such as Udemy.
Keep in mind that if you choose Udemy or a similar site, you don’t “own” the market or the platform, Udemy does.
Like all other money-making ventures, your success depends on the need or desire for your course, and your ability to attract your target market. It’s worth putting the time into keyword and trend research to focus on what’s trending now and what people want to buy.
It can be a challenge to correctly price your course to maximize your income while still making it affordable for students.
This part takes some trial and error and also involves looking at comparable online courses and getting an estimate of the market’s going rate vs. the amount you want to charge.
10 Best Ways to Create an Online Course
If you’re ready to delve into the world of online teaching, follow the steps below.
1. Choose a Course Topic
Make a list of things you know about. Perhaps it’s something your friends and family ask you for help on. Maybe it’s a skill related to your job (i.e., how to use Evernote or how to be productive working at home).
Do you have a hobby you can teach others about, such as watercolor painting for beginners or how to lower your score in golf?
2. Do Market Research
You don’t want to spend a lot of time creating a course that no one will buy. Many people might want to know about your topic, but the question is; are they willing to pay to learn it?
Before you invest time in your course, research who the best buyer for it would be, and whether or not they’re ready, willing and able to buy it.
3. Outline Your Course
If you’ve determined there is a market willing to buy your course, the next step is in determining what you’ll put in the course. By the nature of a course, the content you provide should go deep into the topic and cover all important aspects. A course isn’t like a blog post, which often just skims the surface.
To help organize your course, think in terms of modules and lessons. A module would be the overall subtopic, with the lessons providing the details of that subject.
For example, if you have a course on starting a home business, you might have a module on business plans. Your lessons in that module would include “How to determine your USP” and “How to identify your target market.”
4. Decide the Best Methods to Deliver Your Lessons
There is an expectation that online courses will offer a variety of teaching methods, such as text, video, worksheets, checklists, infographics, audio, and anything else that delivers information.
The trick is in determining what format is best for what you’re trying to teach. In some cases, you might offer two methods for one lesson.
For example, if you were teaching a course on how to use Quickbooks, you might have both a step-by-step text instruction and a video tutorial on how to install and set up the software.
5. Create Your Lessons
It is the most time-consuming aspect of creating an online course. Consider creating a logo or a color theme that appears in all lesson content. Proofread your text lessons and watch your videos to make sure there are no errors or glitches.
6. Determine How You’ll Sell Your Lesson
For the most control, create a website to host and deliver your lesson. There are membership site scripts and WordPress plugins that can help you set up a system for selling and delivering your course.
For faster, less technical effort, you can use an online course service, such as Udemy or SkillShare. Pay from these sites varies. For example, Udemy’s instructor pay depends on how the sale was generated (through its marketplace, an affiliate, or directly from you).
The benefit to these resources is that you simply upload your course and the sites take care of selling it to their members/market, including payment processing.
The downside is that they own the market and platform. Plus, you’re competing with other course providers, which can mean the need to reduce the price of your course to compete.
A final option is a service such as Teachable or Ruzuku, both of which offer some of the benefits of self-hosted with the ease and speed of Udemy.
These options have easy creation and upload like the course service marketplaces, but you can add your own domain, and customize your school like in self-hosted options.
Some offer their resources for free, with more bells and whistles with paid plans. Most integrate with PayPal, or you can use their payment service.
Most of the above options don’t require exclusivity so that you can sell your course on more than one platform. Even so, be sure to read the terms of service before offering your course on multiple platforms.
7. Load Your Course Online
Once you’ve picked your platform, upload your course. If the platform allows you to customize your course, such as adding a logo or color scheme, add them. It will help you create your unique brand.
8. Market Your Course
Regardless of your platform, you need to promote your course. Even using a service like Udemy, in which students can find you by perusing the Udemy marketplace, you want to do your own marketing.
Start by creating a marketing plan that includes who your market is, where you can find them, and how you can entice them to check out your course.
Great course marketing options include social media, PPC advertising, such as Facebook ads, and article marketing. There are many other free and low-cost marketing options as well.
9. Keep Your Course Information Up-to-Date
Every few months or so, check that your course information is current and relevant. Outdated information doesn’t help your students and can lead to bad reviews. Don’t forget to check and fix any broken links to resources.
10. Rinse and Repeat
There’s no rule that you have to stick with one course. If there are other courses you can teach related to your initial course, create those. You can then refer your students to these other courses.
For example, if you offer a course on how to write a mystery, you can add a course on how to publish a book and/or how to market a book. You can also create new courses in completely different areas.
Creating and selling online courses can be quite lucrative if you’re able to provide a great course and reach your target marketing.
Plus, with easier to use and more affordable resources to host your course, there’s no reason to avoid becoming an online instructor.
While it can take time to create all the lessons in your course, once uploaded, it can become a profitable source of passive income to your existing business or as a business all on its own.
Which Online Course is Best for Job?
If you are struggling to decide which program you should choose for post-graduation, or you are working and want to acquire high criteria for promotion, then below are the best online computer courses to get a job in 2021 to support a good career in the future.
1. Cybersecurity
When everyone is executing their financial activities online, cybersecurity is a must. According to Statista, cybersecurity jobs are the most highly demandable jobs in 2021.
If you are interested in the Internet, you can conduct a cybersecurity course. Right from fin-tech to eCommerce market, the consumer is making every transaction online or through their mobile app. It is mandatory to provide high cybersecurity to prevent theft, cyberattacks and unforeseen ransomware.
You can conduct a cybersecurity course online, which will help you to understand the nature of cyberattacks, identifying the online threats and taking preventive measures.
In this course, you will learn to assess technical risks and understand how to take preventive and predictive measurements to avoid different kinds of online threats.
2. Data Science
As per the job posting on LinkedIn, India is expected to see nearly 150,000 jobs of a Data Scientist in 2021, which is more than 62% form 2019. Industrial sectors like Pharmaceutical, aeronautics, oil and energy and marketing are seeking Data Scientists for their analytics.
Data Scientists with just three years of experience can earn up to Rs. 20,00,000 annually, thus makes data science one of the best online computer courses to land a high paying job.
The program consists of Data Science training including mathematical, statistics, Phyton, Advanced Statistics in Python, Deep Learning and Machine Learning.
The course will give you an entire toolbox that you need to become a good Data Scientist. You will also get training in debunking command and common misconceptions from the pool of data.
3. Big Data Engineering
As the name itself suggests, Big Data is a large pool of data that is processed and utilized systematically to collect information. These days, when the consumers prefer online mode of transactions, Big Data plays a vital role in understanding the companies how the consumers are spending online.
For pursuing the Big Data Engineering program, you need to create, maintain, evaluate and test Big Data solutions within the company. Building large-scale data processing systems is the primary job of a prominent Data Engineer.
It would help if you also had an expert in data analyzing and storing systems and will be able to work with the latest data technologies like R, MySQL, Python, NoSQL, and many others.
The senior prominent Data Engineer can earn up to $146,000 annually, which is unsurprisingly the highest average salary for the IT professionals.
4. Data Analyst
A Data Analyst requires to apply proper statistical techniques and logical thinking to extract the necessary data from the unstructured pool of data.
You need to help the organizations to carry qualitative research for producing structured data that further, the organization can use to carry out their marketing, administrative and production operations.
It is closely related to Data Science, but there are many critical differences between the Data Analyst’s job and Data Scientist’s job.
Unlike the Data Scientists, don’t need to do much coding and programming. But you should be aware of the latest data technologies and programming languages like Python, Ruby on Rails, R, MySQL, and many others.
According to Glassdoor, the Data Analyst can earn up to $105,000 annually and as low as $69,000.
5. Big Data Analysis
The role of a Data Analyst is to understand the latest industry trends and relevant insights into the vast data pools. Many companies, including Fintech, can hire you to get informed decisions and for improving business practices based on relevant Big Data.
You can gather essential data from the varied online and offline activities including email marketing, digital marketing, social media marketing and many other sources.
In Big Data Analysis, you will need to understand different ways of storing the data. The plan will also cover processing and analyzing the data from unstructured data to structured data.
The program will prepare you for all the skills that you need to analyze, process, manage and store unstructured and structured data for organizational use. According to Indeed, the Data Analyst can earn up to $139,000 annually for his roles and responsibilities.
6. Web Designing
If you love visuals, then the Web Designing course is the best one for you. Web Designing includes creating beautiful designs, including logos, web designs, web pages, brochures, and other graphic and print media elements.
Besides the visual part, you will have to learn programming languages like HTML, XHTML, Javascript, CSS and more.
With the rise in mobile-first experiences, you also need to design websites for creating better user experience and user interfaces. The web design program covers all the horizons, including the responsive web design, HTML, PSD to HTML and PHP.
It would help if you worked with tools like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw to finish your design. The average annual salary of a web designer is $64,000 approximately.
7. VFX Training And Character Animation Degree
The technology focusing on gadgets and smart devices brings a new gaming and movie era. The gaming industry is fuelled by augmented reality and virtual reality, which gave birth to modern technology, namely VFX and character animation.
In the VFX training course, you will learn the advanced VFX effects, software skills and innovative techniques extensively used in making movies. A VFX artist has massive scope due to increasing demand in films, animated films, and games.
You can also try out character animator creating unique characters just like in the game “Pokemon Go.” The average yearly salary of a VFX artist with 5 to 7 years of experience is $75,000, while the character animator makes $65,000 annually.
8. Software Development
The demand for Software Development is high, with the emergence of mobile apps and web apps. A Software Developer works out on different programming languages including C++, Java, .NET, ReactJS, Native and many others.
Being a Software Developer, you need to create mobile apps, web apps, and software that are useful for organizations.
The Software Development and programming languages course needs you to focus on the latest coding techniques and latest development methods including Hadoop, JavaScript, iOS, Android, Unity and many others. Software Developers can earn up to $108,000 annually.
9. Computer Hardware Engineering And Networking
The computer hardware and networking course focus on maintaining and repairing the core elements of the computers.
You need to work on common problems arises due to the regular use of equipment. You can strategize predictive and preventive measurements to avoid major repairs in the device.
Read Also: Earn a Living Online
In computer hardware and networking course, you will learn different topics like LAN, DTP, CCNA and many others. The average salary of a Computer Hardware Engineer is around $114,000.
You can conduct all these online computer courses for job which will save your time, transportation costs and provide flexibility to your routine. So, sign up now for pursuing your favourite course, which will ultimately lead you to your dream job.
Finally
Having the right combination of skills can make the difference between earning just enough to get by and having more cash that you can use to grow your rainy day fund or add to your retirement savings.
Now you have the list of courses above, try it out and commit to sticking to a course until the end. You need to be committed to learning skills that will improve your career prospects and your overall standard of living.
