Choosing the Right Platform to Sell Your Online Courses: Marketplace, LMS, or Website? (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Oh hi, so I've watched Sarah's other video on the three types of places that you can sell your online courses from, but I really need some more information. Do I pick the marketplace? Do I pick a learning management system? Or do I pick a website as the place that I'm going to sell my courses from? Help. Hello, I'm Sarah Cordner, your qualified course creation expert. So there are a number of pros and cons to any platform that you might choose when it comes to selling your online courses. So very fast, number one is a marketplace. A fantastic option for getting yourself out in front of a brand new audience. Think of a marketplace a little bit like a supermarket. If you were to put your course on that supermarket shelf, you're basically going to benefit from shoppers who are walking through looking for other courses and may come across your course completely by accident because you were inside a big supermarket of other courses that they happen to be inside as well. Now the cool thing about this is traffic. The limitations to using a marketplace are the fact that you do not get to choose your pricing. They will discount your courses for extremely low prices. You also do not get your customers contact details. They're kind of the main failings if you like or limitations for a marketplace. So why would you use one? I'd recommend you just use marketplaces to get yourself in front of brand new people. This is great for exposure, particularly if you're just beginning and you need to get your name out there. So I'd put your cheap or your free courses, small mini courses, little tasters of you up on these platforms where you are still delivering amazing content because no one's going to come and follow you elsewhere if you are not delivering amazing content. But it's also just enough for you to not be financially affected or devalue your course content if they do do those big discounts which is very very common on a marketplace. Now the second type of platform you can use is a learning management system. This is definitely my favorite. This is basically software that you purchase or pay a subscription to completely own brand and make your own. This is where you get to completely brand it how you want, you get all of your customers contact details, you choose your pricing, no one else is in control of your money or your income or how you sell your courses or communicate with your customers. And that's why I really love those platforms to be a completely independent course creator. Selling from your website pros and cons there are that pros are obviously that you can completely customize absolutely everything about the way that you're delivering your content. The cons however are that as you upload more and more content to your website you can actually dramatically slow the speed down on your site. Also you do have to be pretty techy to be using an online course plugin in that you don't have the same customer support as a learning management system would have. You're basically on your own. So you're going to be the one that's either going to need to call upon a web developer that you can afford to pay or have the skills yourself to be able to fix anything that might go wrong. So very briefly there and in the comments I will actually stick a blog post link to one of my articles that talks a little bit more about the different types of platforms that are out there and some recommendations specifically for the learning management systems that I recommend you go and try.