The 11 Best Online Course Platforms in 2024

Once you’ve picked out a platform for selling courses, it’s time to get busy creating a course and a sales funnel. To do that, there are several rules of thumb to keep in mind.

1. Create Engaging Content and Learning Experience

This should go without saying, but here goes anyway. Having high-quality content is the most essential thing in an online course and the very thing that will attract students and have them spread the word about your course(s) afterward.

Ask yourself what do you want your learners to accomplish – is it an online certificate, new skill, or practical application of software/hardware/any other product or service? It also helps to focus on topics that aren’t already covered by plenty of other courses.

Your own course can ensure an engaging, enjoyable, and memorable learning experience with the use of multiple content delivery methods, such as video, audio, reading materials, documents, practical examples, gamification, and so on. You can complement these content types with other interactive options such as fun quizzes, completion messages, rewards, certificates, member communities, as well as scheduled (drip) content delivered to learners over time.

2. Establish Clear Learning Goals

Your course’s learning objectives and expectations will have to be outlined as clearly as possible. Detailed and precise outcomes will provide your learners with a guideline and overview of what kind of expertise and knowledge they can expect to have upon the course’s completion.

This will facilitate faster and more successful adoption of the training material. It will also help the learners determine whether your course is what they need in the first place and to remain dedicated to finishing it.

3. Choose the Best Equipment

Just having a good platform to make and publish your course isn’t everything. You’ll also need to consider what hardware and software will help you achieve your goals.

This includes:

a) Vlogging camera

Almost every online classroom involves video lectures, live webinars, and other forms of instructors addressing their learners (like personalized messages, congratulations, etc.).

After all, videos are more powerful in capturing and retaining the learner’s attention than reading materials as they have higher immersive power and build a closer relationship between the lecturer and learners. To make this happen, you should pick out a good vlogging camera.

Before you start producing your video content, make sure you prepare a good, detailed script that will include your words, texts, supporting images, and the like, which your learners will be able to follow easily. Also, rehearse everything.

b) Microphone

Having a good microphone is no less important than a camera in this business, as poor audio quality can affect your students’ learning experience and make it difficult to deliver your message. To avoid this happening to you, choose a quality external microphone that plugs into your USB port.

c) Screen-sharing/screen-recording software

Your interactive lessons will often require practical, on-screen examples, especially if you’re explaining how to work in a specific program.

Therefore, make sure to invest in quality screen-sharing or screen-recording software to make this possible and efficient, like ShareX or Screen Grabber Pro.

d) Audio/video editing program

After you’ve recorded your lesson and/or practical examples via camera, microphone, or screen-recording tool, it’s time to put it all together and create a final product, remove any bad parts, insert soundtrack and/or transition effects, and more. All this can be done via a good audio/video editing program such as iSpring or DaVinci Resolve.

e) Lighting and accessories

To ensure the top quality of your video lessons, there are other factors at play besides the USB camera and microphone, such as the lighting and accessories, including camera lenses. Good lighting makes sure your video looks great even if you’re only using your computer’s camera to record your lessons.

4. Get Help From Expert Educators

To increase your course(s)’ value and credibility, consider asking prominent educators and experts in relevant fields to contribute. They can participate as lecturers, guest speakers, or simply endorsers. Even better, you could try partnering up with reputable educational institutions.

Having notable names endorsing your platform or listed as contributors will result in higher interest and adoption rates.

5. Determine the Costs

To earn money from selling online courses, you’ll first need to invest money. According to some estimates, creating a professional online course can cost you anywhere between $5,850 and $15,600, if we assume that the time it takes to create it is between 90 and 240 hours, and one hour of work costs $65.

However, if you already have a solid camera, microphone, and video-editing and screen-sharing software, all you need is a good online teaching platform to make the magic happen and, as we’ve seen above, a decent course can be created for a couple of hundred dollars. Make sure to thoroughly study the platforms’ pricing information and features offered in each of the pricing plans prior to making the final decision.

And it isn’t just the costs of creating and publishing a course that you should keep in mind. You’ll also need to consider marketing and research costs, personnel rates, monthly management fees, integration and additional tool expenses, the price of scaling the service as you grow your business, and more.

That said, the final costs, be it in money, time, or effort, will ultimately depend on your requirements, expectations, the nature of your course, and your understanding of how specific media and interactivity tools can support different types of learning goals.

6. Make Your Course(s) Stand Out

Many course-building platforms will provide you with enough tools to distinguish your course(s) and/or online school aesthetically from the crowd leading to . They will allow you to choose your online school colors, insert a logo, and more to create a customized, pleasant, and memorable learning experience.

You shouldn’t just focus on aesthetics. Obviously, you will want your courses to stand out with their content, but also think carefully about how you want your course(s) to be named. The title of your course should make it clear to your learners what its expectations are, as well as summarize its objectives.

Therefore, you’ll want your course title to be as accurate and descriptive yet short as possible to avoid any confusion. Remember, a lot of learners will make their decision about signing up even before they read the course’s description, as long as they know what they require.

To get ideas on a course title that will attract potential learners, you can try typing some ideas in a search engine and waiting for the autocomplete feature to suggest a few queries. This will give you an insight into the most often searched phrases you can use in your title(s).

After you assemble a list of potential names and alternatives, you should analyze their potential. This can be done using Google’s Keyword Planner which will give you information about the search volume of each of the tested phrases.

Speaking of Google, make sure the most descriptive and interesting keywords are at the beginning of your course’s title, as Google only displays the first 50-60 characters in search results.

7. Invest in Marketing

Your work doesn’t end with designing, creating, and publishing a course. You’ll also need to dedicate time, money, and effort to marketing it.

How else are people going to find out about it? First of all, you should build a professional website where you’ll present your business, as well as a blog where you’ll regularly publish content related to your industry and business.

All the content should adhere to SEO (search engine optimization) standards if you want to attract an audience to it. Bringing people to your course website will mean more potential buyers of your course(s).

Another way to attract attention that may result in active learners is by leveraging popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. You can start by creating your own Facebook Business page, where you’ll interact with your followers, publish regular content and updates, and so on.

8. Leverage Integration Options

The very best online course platforms feature a large number of third-party integrations with solutions that add valuable and important functionalities to their core service. For example, online course platforms often include an integrated e-commerce tool to help you sell your courses to users.

They can also integrate with CRM tools to assist in organizing training by specific roles and monitor employee efficiency. Other integrations include analytics and insights, email marketing, automation, template design, web conferencing, payment processing, invoicing, exams, certificates, customer messaging, sharing buttons, and more.

9. Reach Out to Customer Support

Don’t hesitate to take advantage of the provider’s customer service if you ever run into any problems. After all, that’s what they’re there for. If you’re a beginner, you might want to go for a platform that has its customer support available at all times, and via more direct methods of communication, such as live chat or phone.

Some platforms will include in their pricing plans a personal instructor to get you started, and/or even a dedicated account manager that can run your account for you, which certainly takes some of the burden off.

But before you start using any of the platforms, make sure to go through all the reading materials and videos on their websites (and continue checking occasionally even after you sign up) to avoid missing any important detail or an extra feature you could add to your course. Some course platforms even offer courses of their own, teaching you about the best methods for course creation, customization, marketing, blogging,  upsells, and so on.