In selling online courses, your expenses are close to zero and your profit can be limitless.

Here’s what you need to do to start selling online courses:

Step 1: Choose a profitable niche

You first want to find a profitable niche to build your blog. I wrote a very detailed article about how to find a profitable blog topic idea, you should read it.

Step 2: Build a blog with WordPress and Bluehost: Go to Bluehost, find a domain name, choose your plan and set up your blog with WordPress. This should take a few minutes.

Step 3: Use ConvertKit to start building an email list
Building an email list is key in this process.
Growing a highly engaged email list is one of the best ways to sell your products and services online. To build your email list, you will need an email service provider like ConvertKit, Mailchimp, or Aweber for example. Since building an email list is so important, the following steps (4 to 9) will show you 6 ways to grow your email list rapidly.

Step 4: Optimize your blog to convert visitors into subscribers
Use your blog to collect email addresses. Add optin-boxes to your site, pop ups…
You can do that easily with Sumome. (google it)

Step 5: Write 5 high quality blog posts with content upgrades
Share some epic content on your blog. Don’t hesitate to give away your most valuable tips and advice to establish yourself as an expert in your niche.  Use these amazing pieces of content to grow your email list by creating and adding content upgrades to them.

Step 6: Drive traffic to your site with Pinterest
Pinterest is an incredible way to drive traffic.

2 months ago I didn’t have any Pinterest account and no following. Now I’m getting 10,000 visitors/month from Pinterest and attract 15 – 20 email subscribers/day just with Pinterest.

If you want to get the same results, create a free Pinterest business account, set up 10 boards, create 10 pins to share your blog posts, join group boards and automatically share your pins with Boardbooster.
To get more details, read my in-depth post about Pinterest.

Step 7: Drive traffic to your site with StumbleUpon ads

If you added content upgrades to your posts, you should get between 3–10% conversion rate, which means that if you pay StumbleUpon to send traffic to your blog post, you will get 3–10 subscribers for every 100 visitors. That’s a great way to build your email list.

Step 8: Grow your email list with other bloggers’ newsletter

Build relationship with other bloggers and ask them to promote your newsletter in their newsletter. Basically ask them to convince their subscribers to join your newsletter.

To get bloggers to do that for you, you can either offer them to do the same thing for them or pay them (you basically sponsor their newsletter).

Step 9: Run a contest and promote it with Facebook ads

Running a contest is powerful way to explode your email list especially if you promote it via Facebook ads.

A few months ago, I ran a contest, spent $100 on Facebook ads and attracted more than 1,000 subscribers in 14 days. I wrote a whole post to explain how I did it.

With a $5,000 budget you should be able to get much more susbcribers than that (don’t spend all your cash on Facebook ads of course 😉 ).

Step 10: Send a survey to your email subscribers

Step 4 to 9 were all about building your email list (aim for at least 5,000 email subscribers).
Now you want to figure out what your email subscribers want.  The best way is to send them a survey using Google Forms. You want to know who they are, what they need, what they want so you can then…

Step 11: Create a product/service/program that your subscribers want
Now that you know your subscribers better, you want to create the product/service/program/software they actually want.
To learn how to do it, read the following post: How to Sell Your Product and Services Online

Step 12: Launch your product

When your product/service/program/software is ready and that you’ve set up your shopping card with Clickank or Gumroad for example, you want to create an email campaign to sell your product.

Step 13: Make money

Depending on the size of your email list, your subscribers’ engagement, your landing page and your email campaign, you should be able to make anywhere between $10,000 to $200,000 with these 13 steps.