As a real estate professional, you know things. You have specialized, valuable knowledge. And you can make money by packaging that knowledge into courses!
Our readers have been asking for more details on how to create online real estate courses since it was listed as one of our top 25 ways for real estate agents to add an income stream to their businesses.
So that’s exactly what we’re going to discuss today: how to create online real estate courses to diversify your income.
Quick note before we start: creating courses is similar to creating eBooks. If you’ve already read How to Make Money with eBooks, these steps will sound familiar. Courses are more complex than eBooks because they are more interactive and typically use multiple mediums to present the material. So our advice is to start with an eBook if you’re new to digital product creation. Then use that eBook as the basis for your course when you’re ready to take your side hustles to the next level!
Why Realtors® Should Add Courses to Their Businesses
Online real estate courses are a perfect additional stream of income for Realtors® for a few different reasons.
1. They position you as an authority
Teaching a course (yes, even an unaccredited online course) indicates expert-level knowledge of your subject. And it provides ample opportunity not only to demonstrate your expertise, but also to help people apply your knowledge to their lives. This serves to position you as an authority in your industry.
2. They earn passive income
One of the great benefits of courses is the passive income potential. Sure, you invest the time upfront to create and promote the course. And you may continue investing time in student support and additional promotion long after the course is launched. But you can literally go to sleep one night and wake up with more money in your account the next morning.
3. They get you more clients
Real estate courses can help you reach new clients. First, you could earn the trust and respect of buyers or homeowners in your area, which could make them future clients. You could target certain clients by catering your courses to them specifically. Create a course on investing to gain new investor-buyers. Or create a staging course to gain sellers.
Second, your sales page gives Google another page to index, increasing your rank online when people search for agents in your area.
4. They can recession-proof your business
When the market slows and there isn’t much movement, courses can bring you income through course sales (especially if you’re teaching information about surviving or capitalizing on a market downturn).
7 Steps to Create Online Real Estate Courses
What exactly is involved in creating online real estate courses? The process is actually quite simple:
- Choose your topic and your customer
- Choose your platform
- Design your curriculum
- Create your curriculum
- Launch your course
- Promote your course
- Collect your income
Simple, yes. Easy? Not exactly.
Let’s look at each step more closely. We’ve got some tips and tricks to help you with each step!
1. Choose your topic and consider your customer
There are already a lot of real estate courses available online.
So what do you do when you can’t be heard in the vast expanse of a crowded online market? You niche down.
Instead of competing with all the big name course creators in your general category, get super specific with your topic. You won’t appeal to as many people, but you will resonate with more people.
Consider an example:
You want to create a course about buying your first property. You figure it will help buyers make smarter buying decisions and it could even bring you a few more buyer clients. But there are already courses on this topic. How do you make your course stand out?
You niche down by creating a course for a very specific customer. Instead of trying to help all first-time buyers, what if you specifically focused on buying a first investment property in Texas?
Yes, your potential audience just shrank substantially! But if I’m a new real estate investor in Texas and have the choice between your course that specifically addresses my exact situation and a generic how-to-buy-a-first-property course? You can bet I’m choosing your course! The main benefit is that your course will be much more valuable to your customers; you’ll be able to really help them in a specific way. And a subsequent benefit: you’re more likely to get a buyer client or two since you’ve niched geographically! A few of your students might just be looking in the area you service.
Gather a small group for early enrollment
This early stage is the perfect time to gather your first set of students. Offer “early enrollment” to people willing to be the first to access your course and provide feedback for course improvement. Your early enrollment can include a large discount (maybe 50% off) in exchange for the time your beta-test students will spend providing feedback.
The money you receive for early enrollment validates your initial idea: people are willing to pay money for this! And it makes sure your early enrollment students are serious about learning what you’re teaching. If they have invested money, they’re going to be more committed to seeing your course through to the end.
You may have people in your sphere who would be perfect for this small group. If not, consider using Facebook Ads to reach your ideal market.
And yes, you can collect money before you even start building your course. Just stay in communication with your group so they know the course is coming. With this first group, you may want to release your course one lesson/module at a time so your students don’t have to wait too long to access some of the course material. That will also help you get immediate feedback lesson-by-lesson while impressions are still fresh in your students’ minds and you can make improvements before drafting future lessons.
2. Choose your platform
Choosing a platform to host your course might be the most technically challenging step.
You need to think about things like:
- how will users pay for my course?
- how will they be able to access the course?
- will the user experience reflect your level of quality?
- how much will this course hosting cost?
- which media are supported by the platform?
- can your platform accept pre-enrollment before your course is launched?
So what are your options?
Teachable is the current gold-star standard. For $39/month + a 5% per sale transaction fee (as of the date of this post), you can host a high-quality course with a smooth user experience. Teachable handles secure payments from your students, takes their transaction fee, and pays out the remainder to you.
Udemy is the best option for anyone looking to host a course with no monthly fee. If you’re new to courses and unsure of your ability to sell your course, you may want to host with Udemy so you’re not footing a bill for a monthly fee while you have no buyers. But this convenience is expensive when you do make a sale. Udemy’s commission can be as much as 50% of your course fees.
Take a look at Teachable to Udemy, and if you’re not thrilled with either option, check out Forbes’ list of the Top 10 Platforms for hosting online courses.
3. Design your curriculum
Your platform will determine your curriculum design to some extent. There may be limitations on the forms of media your platform accommodates and how your platform breaks up the material.
Working within your platforms’ organizational structure, start by creating a course outline. What lessons will be included? And what are the learning objectives for each lesson? What do your students need to learn to master the skill you’re teaching and to take action?
Then determine which medium will best suit each topic of your course (text, audio, video, worksheets, quizzes, etc).
And here’s the important part: run your curriculum design by your early enrollment students! Make sure your curriculum design is meeting their needs.
4. Create your curriculum
Following your outline, start building each lesson. Write your text. Record your audio and video. Create your worksheets and quizzes.
As I mentioned, you may want to work one lesson at a time, allowing your early enrollment students to provide feedback on each lesson before moving on to the next.
Of course this phase is where you’ll be investing most of your time. Your early enrollment students should help keep you accountable and on a timeline. You wouldn’t want to disappoint them after they paid for your course in good faith, right?
Create your lessons and edit as needed to based on feedback.
5. Officially launch your course
Now you can launch your course to the public!
One thing you’ll want to consider is the timing of your lesson delivery. Do you want new students to immediately have access to all lessons so they can work through at their own pace? Or do you want to release lessons at specific intervals (one lesson per day or on lesson per week, for example)? There isn’t really a right or wrong answer. It depends on your topic and your market.
You also need to decide whether to allow evergreen enrollment or enrollment cycles.
With evergreen enrollment, anyone can enroll at any time and work through the material alone. You’ll never miss out on a sale simply because of timing.
With enrollment cycles, you open enrollment for a set period of time and all students for that cycle work through the course together. Most enrollment cycle courses only offer between 1 and 4 cycles per year. Enrollment cycles offer the opportunity to build hype leading up to each open enrollment period. Plus you can create a community around your course since students are working through the chapters at the same time. And if you want to be active in the learning process, you can better serve your students by guiding them through the material as a group (as opposed to spreading yourself thin trying to help individual students at different points in their journeys).
6. Promote your course
Simply putting a course online isn’t enough. You need to help people find it and show them why your course is worth the investment. You could build the greatest single course ever created on your topic, but if people don’t know about it, you’ll still sell 0 courses.
Expect to spend just as much time promoting your course as you spent creating it.
You know as well as I do that promotion and marketing are an extensive topic all their own. But let’s go over a few tips and tricks for strategic promotion of your new course.
- Ask your early enrollment students for testimonials and referrals to help with your marketing efforts. You could even offer referral fees!
- Center your marketing efforts around the transformation your readers can expect from your course. The reason people are signing up fo!r your course isn’t just to learn, but to implement their new knowledge to change their lives. So make sure you promote the transformation your students can expect in their lives.
- Get it all over social media! Take advantage of the free advertising opportunities afforded by social media. This is perfect for anyone with a sizable following. And even if the specific subject doesn’t appeal to your whole social network, you’ll still be boosting your perceived perception as an authority in the real estate world to your entire network.
- Consider paid promotion. If you’re willing and able to spend some money upfront to promote your course, Facebook Ads are a good starting point because you can quickly and easily target your demographic.
7. Collect your income
Ta-da! Now you have a course that can bring you relatively passive income for years to come!
Here are a few tips to keep your success going long after your first launch:
- Review your course materials annually (or each enrollment cycle) to update as needed.
- Pay attention to your students’ feedback.
- Consider building additional courses to help your past and present students take their skills to the next level.
Get a Small Win
Great victories come from small wins. Before you move on with the rest of your day, get a small win!
Today’s small win challenge is to choose a topic for your first course. Start by brainstorming ideas. Set a timer for 5 minutes and list as many topics as you can think of. Then choose the one you feel will most help your audience. If you have a hard time choosing, remember: you can always create additional courses later.
And if you’re having trouble getting started, maybe check our list of 100+ blog topics for Realtors® for inspiration! Not only are these brilliant blog topics to help you build an engaging, lead-generating blog, but a genius course idea could also be hiding in there.
All the best to you and your business!
