How to Price Your Online Course: What You Need to Consider
What should I price my course?
You’ve probably asked yourself this question a million times and then posted it a million and one times in different Facebook groups.
Each time you get different answers and you still have no idea what to price your dang course at 😤. On the one hand, you don’t want to scare away potential customers with a price that’s too high (or even too low). On the other hand, you need to make money! So you can’t just sell it for $7 and call it a day.
If you want to solve your pricing woes, keep reading.
In this article, I’ll talk about:
5 factors you need to consider when setting your price
3 techniques you can use to quickly price your course and get moving into launch mode
Plus, I’ve got a special bonus for you at the end that will give you some price points to play with (no opt-in required!).
Let’s jump in!
Table of Contents
5 Factors to Consider When Pricing Your Course
So when you create an online course and you’re trying to price it, you need to consider:
1. Where Your Course Fits in Your Offer Suite (a.k.a. your Value Ladder)
The pricing of your course is going to be driven by how you have (or will) structure your product suite. For example, if your course is a mini-course, you wouldn’t price it for $697. That is waaayy too high a price for a mini-course. You can learn more about Value Ladders on Clickfunnels.
2. Whether You’ll Offer Payment Plans
If you’re going to offer payment plans, then you’ll likely need 2-3 price points.
They usually look like this:
Pay-in-Full Price (offers mega bonus and is only available for 24-48 hrs; the most expensive)
Mid-Tier Price (shorter payment plan than lower-tier price; price is lower than full but higher than the low-tier)
Lower-Tier Price (longest payment plan; lowest price; not as many bonuses usually)
In this case, you would need to find out the lowest you are willing to sell your course for and the highest.
3. The Cost It Took to Develop the Course
The other thing you need to think about is the cost it took to develop the course. So think about the:
Equipment you bought
Contractors you paid
Time it took to shoot
Time it took to script, etc.
At a bare minimum, you’ll want to recoup some of these costs. So, your course needs to be priced accordingly.
4. Your Audience
An even more important factor to consider is your audience and how much they would be willing to pay for a product like yours.
You can do this by emailing your list or posting on social media and asking,
“I’m thinking about creating a course on [INSERT COURSE TOPIC]. How much would you be willing to pay for a course like this?”
Take the responses with a grain of salt though. Why? Because you audience is just one piece of the puzzle.
When I first launched my Course Creator VIP Intensive, I reached out to ideal clients and asked them about what they expected to pay for something like this. In my mind, I wanted to sell the intensive for $697. I mean, each client gets 3.5 hours where we fully map out their course structure and outline their content. But when I asked my ideal clients, they said they would be willing to pay about $200.
Talk about a smack in the face.
Did I change the price? NOPE.
Here’s what you can do in this situation:
A) Reduce the price (which I DO NOT recommend) or
B) Better highlight the value of how your offering is worth more than what people will be paying.
Let’s take my VIP intensive for example. $697 gets them 3.5 hours with me where we fully map out their course content.
If they sell their course for $197, they could make that back by just selling to 1 person. On top of that, we are mapping out a product that they can sell over and over and over again. All they will have to do is improve it over time.
So let’s consider if they sell this $197 course to JUST 5 people per month. That’s almost extra $1,000 per month…and an extra $10k per year. So they could either let their course idea gather dust (like it has been for the past 6 months) or they can hire me and get it fully mapped out in a weekend.
See what I mean? Now this service is much more valuable.
5. Your Competitors
Okay, last consideration!
If you haven’t already, you need to check out any competitors who offer a similar course and what their price points are. At bare minimum, I would look at 3 different competitors and note their prices.
This will give you a good idea of the market rate for a course like yours and what people would be willing to pay.
3 Techniques to Determine Your Price
1. The Goal Technique
The first is to price your course so that you meet a certain revenue goal. Well you’ll also need to consider:
Your audience size and its growth
Your conversion rate
How often you’ll launch (if it’s a mid or high ticket course)
So let’s say you want to make at least $1k from your course this year. You have a current audience size of 100 and you add about 50 people each quarter to your audience. Let’s also say that your conversion rate is 1.5% and that you’ll launch 4x per year. **DOES SOME FREAKIN MATH**
You would need to price your course at $111 to make $1k per year.
Now, this technique is great but it doesn’t consider the market rates. Plus, if you want to make more money, then you have to be building your list and adding tons of people.
2. The Value Technique
The next technique is called The Value Technique. With this technique, you add the value of everything you have in your course together. Then, take 10% of this value and use that as a starting point for your course.
For example, let’s say I have a course on copywriting for new business owners. They get:
5 in-depth modules of training (value = $997)
4 blog post templates (value = $97)
2 sales page templates (value = $197)
So to figure out my course price I would add all of the values together and multiple that sum by 10%:
The tricky part here is determining the value of each piece. There’s essentially two ways you can do this:
Determine how much you would sell that individual piece for if it was standalone
Look at competitors with similar prices for each individual piece and take an average of the prices you find
3. The Average Technique
Okay this one is pretty basic and probably the easiest to implement.
To find out your course price, what you’ll do is research 3 competitors with similar products, note the prices, and take an average of all 3 of those prices.
For example, let’s say I found three competitors with similar copywriting courses for new business owners.
So the average price would be $863.
Now, you do need to be careful when you implement this technique because if one of the competitors’ prices is much higher or much lower than the other two, it will really skew the prices.
Course Pricing Calculator
By now, you should have a pretty good idea of what goes into pricing a course and have considered some techniques you might use to get a base price.
BUT, you’re probably like “Well dang, this is a lot…I’ve gotta do some math and I’m still not quite sure what technique to use.”
Enter The Course Pricing Calculator 🎉.
Now, you still have some work to do before you start using this (e.g., figuring out where your course sits in your offer suite, calculate the number of hours of course content you have, research your competitors, etc.). But once you’ve done the work, you can have a price spit out in under 20 seconds!
Final Notes
While the calculator can get you pretty close, keep in mind that the price is just an estimate. And that’s the case for all of the techniques I mentioned too.
You may have to test a couple of price points and see what works for your audience.
After all, entrepreneurship is kind of like one big experiment.
Did you have any other questions about pricing your course? Comment below and shoot ‘em over.
