Remember those summer breaks teachers used to enjoy?
While traditional educators now sadly must scramble for temporary jobs during their “off” months, online course creators have discovered a better way: building sustainable digital education businesses that can actually provide both profitability and freedom.
The fundamental principle is simple yet powerful: how you create your paid content has no connection to how you’ll eventually sell it. This distinction opens up a world of possibilities for course creators who want to build both wealth and lifestyle flexibility.
Further, creating profitable online courses doesn’t mean being chained to your desk year-round. With the right business model, you can develop valuable content that generates revenue while giving yourself the freedom to take extended breaks. Here’s how to build an online education business that works for you, not the other way around.
Start With Live Teaching
The key to creating high-quality online courses lies in treating them as real-time training programs initially. Instead of spending months developing content in isolation, begin with a solid instructional design plan and build your course as you teach. This approach offers several advantages:
- You’ll create better content by incorporating real-time learner feedback
- You get paid while developing your product
- You’ll validate your course material with actual students
- You’ll build a proven product you can sell for years to come
Strategic Content Development
Once you have your initial content created, you have multiple options for restructuring and monetizing it. Here are five proven strategies:
1. Compensated Product Development
Compensated product development is a fundamental model for creating and selling educational content. The approach involves teaching your product live to learners over several weeks or months while being compensated for your time and effort.
This allows you to incorporate initial feedback into the final product, which you can then continue to sell for a one-time fee. In other words, you get paid to create the product you will go on to sell over the long term.
To manage ongoing support, you have several options: you can remove initial learner forums entirely, make them read-only supplements in the main course materials, or compile common questions into an FAQ. Alternatively, you could maintain community engagement by dedicating 10 to 30 minutes daily to answering questions, or delegate this responsibility to a virtual assistant or one of your outstanding students.
2. Hire Content Producers
Another effective strategy is hiring a content producer. This model begins similarly to the compensated product development approach, but structures the course as a recurring membership from the start.
Using your initial earnings, you can bring on staff or a freelance content producer to continuously add new material, allowing you to scale without upfront costs. The key is to focus on attracting high-quality partners and affiliates, enabling you to step back while your content producer keeps the site fresh and engaging while others send you traffic, leads, and sales.
3. Smart Partnering
Smart partnering offers a variation on the content producer theme in that you partner with a content producer rather than hiring one. Essentially, you act as the producer/developer in partnership with a content expert.
While this may mean sharing more revenue, it reduces the risk of paying upfront fees to freelancers who might leave if revenue decreases. Partners with equity stakes tend to show greater commitment and dedication, making this both a business and lifestyle choice.
As an example, before I sold Copyblogger, I helped create Copyblogger Academy. After I was bought out, new owner Tim Stodz partnered with Charles Miller to run the membership program for him while growing overall revenue.
4. Content Unbundling
Unbundling presents another valuable opportunity. Many training materials naturally lend themselves to unbundled, a la carte sales. For instance, while you might sell complete access to a program like our Leading Expert Alliance, individual courses and presentations can be sold separately.
This creates an interesting pricing strategy where you can contrast individual course prices with the total access fee, creating a compelling psychological incentive for full membership. Additionally, you can create niche reports or tutorials in various formats—text, audio, or video—from smaller content segments.
5. Controlled Delivery
The controlled delivery method offers a clever way to convert content between formats while creating time freedom. Consider a course with five distinct sections. After teaching these initial sections, you can use a learning management system to control access, allowing new members to unlock one section monthly.
If you plan to expand to twelve sections, this creates a five-month window before new learners reach the end of existing content. This buffer allows you to take a break before returning to complete the full twelve-month course, which you can then sell either with a discounted upfront fee or through monthly payments. Meanwhile, you’re able to maintain steady income through subscription-based access.
The Long-Term Benefits
This approach to online course creation offers remarkable flexibility. You can:
- Earn a full year’s salary in a few months of focused work
- Create multiple revenue streams from the same core content
- Build a valuable asset that appreciates over time
- Design your work schedule around your lifestyle preferences
Most importantly, you’re creating an asset that can be deployed in multiple ways over time. Some content creators find that their future spin-off offers generate more revenue than their original course, creating a truly sustainable and scalable business model.
Remember: How you create paid content has nothing to do with how you sell it in the future. By starting with live teaching and then strategically restructuring your content, you can build a profitable online education business that gives you both financial success and lifestyle flexibility.