The global eLearning market was worth $215 billion in 2021. If it continues to grow at its current CAGR of 13%, it’ll be worth $645 billion by 2030.
So it’s no surprise that savvy business owners are already thinking about how they can get a piece of that pie with their own online education courses. Maybe its already part of your business plan.
But not everyone knows that you can offset most of the costs of creating your course against your business profits which will reduce your overall tax bill. A welcome extra bonus!
Information sells
Businesses currently use their knowledge to direct potential customers to their website through blogs, guides and other information sharing content.
This does a good job of building reputation as a trusted expert in the industry and demonstrates that you understand your customers’ pain points.
It’s also a way to drive traffic to your site, as search engines also begin to see you as increasingly helpful to their users.
But it’s all free.
You invest time and money in producing the content. You do get ROI, but can you charge for sharing your expertise?
Some businesses have gated content. This means you need to part with your basic details to receive the information. So at least you’re growing your email list. We most often see this with online newspapers and assets like eBooks or long-form research based articles.
As the eLearning market grows, businesses are realising that people will happily pay to learn from high quality providers. And it’s a great source of additional income. You create the course, then distribute it forever.
Also, as the market share grows, it’s becoming a bigger funnel for advertising which is another way to monetise your specialist knowledge.
Read on for 5 top tips to creating a successful online education course.
1. How do I know what online course to create?
The best-selling courses address specific problems and provide answers to their ideal consumers. And the evidence for these issues is in several different places:
- Look and see what courses are already on offer. And then figure out what they don’t address – that’s where your course comes in.
- Google trends and SEO information.
- Subject matter experts in your business, especially when it comes to new features, knowledge or products.
- Formal surveys of your clients/customers – ask them what they want to know and where current information is difficult to understand.
- Don’t forget your sales team. What questions are they most commonly asked by customers?
2. Online Course structure
The most basic of learning plans involves: learning outcome, knowledge and skills content, consolidation, next steps.
- Learning outcome: based on your research.
- Knowledge and skills: your specific expertise, broken down into easily digestible chunks
- Consolidation: some kind of practical application that your course participants do.
- Next steps: guidance towards your follow-up course and ways participants can use their learning in real life.
Remember that there’s a place for courses of a variety of lengths, depending on what you’re teaching. 10 minute video tutorials, weeks of cumulative lessons and everything in between are all equally valuable to the right learner.
And of course your format is another important consideration at this stage. It’s worth including questions about this when you’re doing your research.
Not just asking what people want to learn about, but how they prefer to consume information. Everyone’s different and the same person might have a different preference depending on the learning context.
But perhaps there’s a commonality within your audience, you won’t know if you don’t ask. And, for example, there’s little point creating a string of YouTube video tutorials if the majority of your clients prefer a written course format.
3. What tools should I use to create my course?
There are several online platforms that are specifically designed for selling courses. For a fee, every element is catered for on these sites from building your course, to taking payments.
Alternatively, you can add your online educational courses to your existing website and run everything from there. This is a more likely option if you have an inhouse website design team. It may also make it easier to integrate your marketing strategy.
4. Tax help for online courses
You already have the expertise you want to share, but you may need other professionals to turn that into a course. Like most things in life, its likely to be more cost and time efficient to hire in, rather than try to do it yourself.
That’s everything associated with building your online education course, from writers and graphic designers, to videographers and ecommerce specialists. This type of investment in your course is considered normal business expense to HMRC, if you’re self employed. Good news when it comes to calculating your taxable profit.
The way you report other digital expenses becomes complicated by whether or not they are ‘revenue’ or ‘capital’ in nature.
Revenue costs are offset against your total profit, reducing your tax bill. For your online education course, this includes things like research and platform hosting fees. Most of the costs involved in setting up your course will be tax deductible.
But there will also be some capital costs that you need to report differently. They’ll include things like your physical IT hardware, website functionality software and domain names. With these costs, capital allowances may be available.
To be as tax efficient as possible when creating your online educational course, you need to be just as rigorous with your paperwork as you are in other areas of your business. Keep every receipt an invoice for all your expenditure.
Then you can work with your accountant or tax professional to make sure you’re only paying the tax you owe, while remaining totally tax compliant.
5. Online courses bonus extra tip!
You can use ‘it’s tax deductible’ as a selling point for your course! Professional development can be classed as a business expense meaning your clients can learn and save a bit on their tax bill at the same time.
