How To Sell Art Courses Online: Best Practices and Examples

Monetize your talents and generate recurring revenue by setting up a successful and profitable online art course. Read on to discover the tools and best practices to dominate in a competitive market and earn a living from your passion.

What if you could turn your passion for art into a successful online business, where your creative talents inspire people and earn a generous income?

Sounds like a dream, right? 

But, it's not easy to sell art courses online. If it were, every artist would have been in the race already. Well, not that most are not trying, but only a few are succeeding.

There are usually two common reasons behind the majority of failures. 

• Not knowing the best practices 
• Not having the right tools  

In this blog, we’ll discuss the best practices for selling art courses online so you can overcome these obstacles and focus on making more of everyone's favorite color: GREEN!

We’ll also review a few success stories so you can learn from what they did right.

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Contents

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What’s The Best Way to Sell Art Courses Online?

So you need a home for your art course. There are a couple of ways to go.

The first route is to choose a third-party platform that will handle some of the technical aspects of running your course.

Alternatively, you can get full creative freedom and pocket more of your earnings by setting up a simple WordPress website..

Let's weigh up the pros and cons of each of these options.

Third Party Platforms

Third-party online course sites like Domestika offer access to a large, established audience, which can boost your course's visibility and enrollment.

They can also provide a level of marketing support, and handle technical aspects such as hosting and customer service.

This lets you focus on content creation while benefiting from the platform's promotional efforts and community engagement features.

However, there are some drawbacks to consider.

Third-party platforms typically take a commission on your course sales, which can reduce your overall revenue.

Another drawbacks is the high level of competition. With numerous courses available, it can be difficult to stand out and attract students.

The platform's established audience is both a blessing and a curse; while there are many potential customers, there are also many other instructors vying for their attention.

And while they offer some marketing support, these platforms often only highlight specific courses.

Unless you're lucky and your course is selected for special promotion, you may need to invest extra effort in self-promotion and leveraging the platform's community features to gain visibility.

Additionally, you generally have less control over pricing and branding compared to hosting courses on your own website.

The platform's guidelines and quality standards may also limit your creative freedom.

WordPress

Nothing beats the peace of having full control over your course, your brand and how it's sold and managed. And that’s precisely what you can do with your own WordPress site. 

Complete Control Over Branding and Design

Create a unique, personalized website that reflects your artistic style and vision.

This customization helps in establishing a strong brand identity and creating a more immersive experience for your students.

Higher Profit Margins

Unlike third-party platforms that take a commission from each sale, running your own WordPress site allows you to retain a larger portion of your earnings.

After covering initial setup costs and small monthly hosting fees, you keep all the profits from your course sales. This can be especially beneficial as your student base grows.

Flexible Pricing and Promotions

With a WordPress site, you have full control over your course pricing and promotional strategies.

You can experiment with different pricing models, offer discounts, create bundles, or even run exclusive sales events.

This flexibility can help you attract more students and maximize revenue.

Direct Relationship with Students

Selling courses on your own website allows you to build a direct relationship with your students. You can gather their contact information, engage with them through newsletters, and foster a loyal community.

This direct connection can enhance student satisfaction and increase repeat enrollments.

Enhanced SEO and Marketing Opportunities

By managing your own site, you can optimize it for search engines (SEO) to attract organic traffic. You can also integrate various marketing tools and plugins to track visitor behavior, run targeted ad campaigns, and analyze performance.

This level of control can significantly improve your marketing efforts and overall reach.

No Competition on Your Platform

Unlike third-party platforms, where your course might be one among many, your WordPress site exclusively features your content.

This eliminates direct competition on your platform, ensuring that visitors are focused solely on your offerings.

This can lead to higher conversion rates and a more dedicated student base.

Ease of Course Creation with LMS Plugins

WordPress offers a variety of Learning Management System (LMS) plugins, such as Courses by MemberMouse, which make it easy to create and manage online courses.

MemberMouse provides easy-to-use tools for building course modules, setting up quizzes, tracking student progress, and even issuing certificates.

Integrating seamlessly with your WordPress site, LMS plugins allow you to offer a professional and engaging learning experience without needing extensive technical expertise.

Sell Art Courses Online: 8 Best Practices 

While having the right tools is important, they alone won’t guarantee you the desired results. To sell art courses online effortlessly, you need some insider know-how. 

We've compiled a best practices blueprint to make your success as straightforward as a paint-by-numbers kit.

Know Your Niche

It's extremely hard to carve out a space in an already noisy marketplace. So your first mission (should you choose to accept it) is to find your specialty and pursue a niche audience that's looking for exactly what you have to offer. 

Here are some ideas: 

• Capitalize on a niche techniques such as paper cutting, ink washing, street art, mosaics, and calligraphy.

• Niche subjects like botanical illustration, urban landscapes, fantasy art, etc. 

• Focus on the teaching method and count this as a niche. For example, “Transform your sketches in 30 days” to make your course stand out from the rest.

As a result of choosing a niche topic, it’ll be easier and less competitive for you to reach the target audience.

Also, by focusing on a specific niche, users find it easier to differentiate your offerings from others. 

Create Useful Content

Note the word “useful” here. Focus on demonstrating that your course can provide real value for your learners.

Your success relies on both your existing and prospective students feeling confident about the quality of what you're selling and how they personally can benefit from it. That’s why ensuring your content is up to the mark is one of the most important things you need to do. 

We don’t mean just course content, we're also talking about the blogs, design, and the overall copy on the website. All of these are markers for your students to gauge the quality of what you have to offer.

Course Content

1. Detailed Lesson Plans: Each lesson should have clear objectives, outlining what the student will learn and achieve.
   
   
2. Invest in High-Quality Videos: Good lighting and sound equipment are worth the investment to ensure your videos are clear and professional. Use multiple camera angles to show detailed work and overall progress.
   
   
3. Interactive Elements: Incorporate quizzes to make learning interactive and engaging.
   
4. Regular Updates:
   • Keep your content fresh by regularly updating it with new techniques, trends, and tools.
   • Respond to student feedback to improve and expand your course material.
     

Complementary Content

1. Blogs:
   • Write articles that dive into specific art techniques, industry trends, and success stories.
   • Use your blog to answer common questions, provide tips, and showcase your expertise.
     
     
2. Website Copy:
   • Ensure your website clearly communicates the value and benefits of your course.
   • Highlight testimonials, student successes, and unique selling points (USPs).
     
     
3. Design:
   • Use a clean, professional design that reflects the quality of your content.
   • Make sure your site is easy to navigate, with intuitive menus and clear calls-to-action.

Enhancing Perceived Value

1. Consistent Branding:
   • Use consistent fonts, colors, and imagery across all your content to build a recognizable brand.
   • Ensure your brand conveys professionalism and trustworthiness.
     
2. Social Proof:
   • Include testimonials, reviews, and case studies from satisfied students to build credibility.
   • Showcase student artwork and progress to demonstrate real results.

Engage with Your Audience

Maintaining engagement with the audience is the part where brands struggle regardless of their industry. That being said, it's easier with your audience when you and your customers are passionate about the subject matter.

While selling art courses online, you have many opportunities to create engagement.

For example, you could create a few quiz sections free for any user to access. If their score is low, you can include a call to action encouraging them to enroll in your courses to deepen their knowledge on the topics they are passionate about.

You can also write blogs and discuss design tools that can help them. Create a forum page where other art lovers can gather and discuss.

All these small acts can lead to higher engagement on your website and, thus, more conversions. 

Offer Free Previews

Why do you think many restaurants or perfume shops offer free samples? 

True, many will just enjoy the free samples and never buy, but some will be blown away by the sample if your courses are top-tier. And if you can get that sure sale by letting them have a few lessons for free, there’s no harm in it. 

Free preview works as the best lead management for your courses. If you can hook the users with the free preview, you are guaranteed to get a user. 

Employ Proper SEO Strategies 

You have the right content, you did your best to engage, yet there might be no interaction if you haven’t got a solid SEO plan in place. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to ensure visibility for your brand. 

When someone searches for “Art Courses Online”, your website needs to pop up on the first page at least if not in the first position. You need to be super serious about SEO to ensure that golden spot. 

Remember how we talked about choosing the right niche? 

Well, it can come in handy with your SEO strategies as well. Ranking for long tail keywords will be easier than ranking for a core keyword. Sounds complicated? 

Imagine you are trying to rank for “Art Courses Online.” You’ll have to compete against other big brands who are already ranking for this keyword. Instead, if you target a more niche topic like “Oil Painting Courses for Beginners,” it’ll be easier for you to nab that top spot. 

Pull Out Your Marketing Chops

When you think about marketing your course, your initial port of call is probably social media. These days it goes without saying that posting regularly on social media is a great idea to draw in an audience.

This is especially true when it comes to selling your art course online. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok excel at showcasing visual content, helping you highlight the skills your students will gain from your course.

Don't Forget Email!

Email marketing is still a great way to keep in contact with customers and leads. What more personal way to reach them than directly in their inbox?

What's more, with the right learning management system (LMS) and email service provider (ESP) it's easier than ever to set up automated responses and drip emails when someone starts your course.

That means that after a little initial setup, you can sit back and let the emails roll out.

Success Stories of Top Online Art Courses 

Need a little inspiration? Here are some success stories from independent artists who made their dream of selling an online art course not only a reality, but a success. 

We’ll also talk about how they did it and what helped them achieve their goals. 

Kirsty Partridge

Kirsty Partridge, has been teaching people of all ages how to improve their drawing skills and make their art look more real for eight years and counting.

Her journey has helped her figure out the common problems that new artists have and devise a teaching method that helps students learn faster, enabling them to get great results more quickly.

Now guess how she become a great businesswoman as well as an artist? Well, she chose MemberMouse plugin as the solution for her membership site management. 

This plugin helped her run two courses on her membership website, Drawing Decoded and The Coloured Pencil Academy. Through these courses, she teaches people the fundamental drawing techniques and the principles behind shading and coloring with pencils. 

Kirsty uses MemberMouse to enroll thousands of students and provide online courses through a customized members area.

She cleverly offers a free mini course as a lead magnet to demonstrate her teaching style and engage potential buyers. 

Pencil Kings

Pencil Kings aims to provide world-class art education to anyone, regardless of background or geography.

Mitch Bowler, a creative artist from a small Canadian community, founded Pencil Kings in 2010 to help young painters enhance their talents and connect with other artists.

Pencil Kings switched to MemberMouse after facing various issues with the previous platform and the lack of customer support.

MemberMouse has helped them host professional courses and build an exclusive community of artists. 

Makers Gonna Learn

Makers Gonna Learn is an exceptional example of how you can pick a specific niche and become a successful course seller. Now, what do they do? 

Well, they they've focussed on the art of Cricut design! 

Since they have chosen a niche art form to sell courses, it became easier for them to reach the target audience.

Makers Gonna Learn moved to MemberMouse to operate professional courses and a dynamic Cricut community. Their membership grew from 1,800 to over 15,000 after moving to the MemberMouse platform.

What do these Successful Art Course Sellers Have in Common?

If we look at the stories of how these online course sellers became successful, we see that they all struggled at some point while starting. But then MemberMouse came in to save the day (and their business).

This helped them overcome the issues by smoothly streamlining their courses from one place and ensuring they received the top-tier customer support they deserved. 

MemberMouse: Your One-Stop Solution for Course Selling 

MemberMouse has helped multiple successful online art course sellers achieve their dreams. 

It’s an advanced membership plugin specially designed for online entrepreneurs, course creators, coaches, service providers, membership organizations, education sites, and more. 

Let’s check out how its features can help you sell your art courses online more effortlessly. 

Build Courses in Minutes

Sometimes, building the courses itself is the hardest challenge. What if the Learning Management System (LMS) you chose had the features of creating content as well? 

MemberMouse offers an amazing drag-and-drop visual builder feature that can help you structures and organize your course more smoothly.

You can also add quizzes to keep your learners more engaged, and track their progress to see where students get stuck and help improve your course to maximize satisfaction and course completion.

As a result, your users become more interested in the courses, increasing your overall retention rate. 

 

Sell Products as Well as Courses

Make extra money by selling supplementary products like an ebook or art supplies.

With MemberMouse you can offer one-time purchase products, and maybe even provide members-only pricing on your platform to offer extra value to your members. 

You can even create coupons and give these out to your users based on their membership level or the course they've signed up for.

What's more, MemberMouse lets existing members purchase products with a single click, making upselling and cross-selling a cinch!

Keep Revenue Rolling In With Recurring Subscriptions

MemberMouse makes it easier than a Bob Ross tutorial to accept recurring payments in exchange for access to your courses. 

It’s also set up to help you maximize your reach by offering multiple courses and levels. 

You set up levels based on proficiency (e.g. beginner, intermediate, and advanced) or based on access to your products or services. 

For example, you could set up a bronze level for access to your video course, a silver level with access to a supporting ebook or and access to a private community forum, and a gold level with access to exclusive live workshops or personalized feedback sessions.

Plus you also have the option to offer free trials or preview courses to pique interest and really demonstrate the value of what you have to offer.

On top of that, you can create a custom login page to give each user a personalized feeling. 

CRM Features to Manage Members Smoothly 

Since MemberMouse is designed especially for entrepreneur-level sellers, it has the amazing feature of tracking each user's activity. It is no less than a complete CRM solution integrated into your Membership plugin. 

With the power of this feature, you can track info, activity, transaction history, and more!

Automation for More Efficiency 

From sending welcome emails to setting up recurring payments, you must ensure everything is automated so your LMS's large user base gets the best experience at every stage.

MemberMouse's tools and integration features allow you to automate member engagement, support, and marketing. 

Analytical Reports for Growth Tracking 

Last but not least, analytical reports are amazing for measuring growth and noting areas for improvement. MemberMouse provides detailed information about almost every KPI. 

As an art course seller you’ll be able to see which courses are selling well and what content keeps users more engaged. 

Start Selling Your Art Courses Online Today!

We hope this article has inspired and empowered you to start living your dream by selling art courses online.

Make sure to implement the best practices to stand out with your art courses among the competitors. 

Also, if you’re struggling to manage your courses and members with your current LMS, consider changing it.

MemberMouse is an excellent option with all the necessary features to streamline the process of running a successful online course. 

Let us know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions about how to sell art courses online. 

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