Why Every Serious YouTuber Should Build an Online Course

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett discusses why any serious YouTuber should create an online course rather than depend solely on YouTube revenue. He contends that the toughest part is over for creators who have already developed an audience; the next stage is to transform that following into a business they own.

By utilizing LifterLMS to offer courses from their own WordPress website, producers can make a steady income without relying on sponsorships, ad revenue, or shifting algorithms. In his discussion of the distinction between renting and owning a platform, Chris explains how marketplaces such as Udemy may restrict long-term growth, price, branding, and customer connections. On the other hand, creators have complete control over their content, student data, email list, price, and company when they own a WordPress website. Instead of relying on outside platforms, he urges YouTubers to create digital assets under their own control.

Additionally, he suggests that rather than attempting to teach all they know, designers should focus their courses on a single change. YouTubers should listen to audience inquiries, study comments, use polls, or create waitlists to evaluate their ideas before devoting time to developing a course. Rather than waiting for perfection, Chris suggests beginning with a single, basic course, launching it immediately, and making improvements over time.

Chris also emphasizes that producers who own their platforms and establish direct connections with their audiences will be the ones who shape the future of online education. He thinks people will always value learning from real people with genuine experiences and knowledge, even as AI and shifting digital trends continue to transform content creation. Creators may develop a long-term company that isn’t reliant on algorithms or third-party platforms, diversify their revenue streams, and enhance their personal brand by integrating YouTube with an online course. Creators may develop a long-term company that isn’t reliant on algorithms or third-party platforms, diversify their revenue streams, and enhance their personal brand by integrating YouTube with an online course.

In general, Chris urges YouTubers to concentrate on building long-term companies rather than just views and subscribers. He suggests utilizing YouTube as a potent lead-generation tool that directs students to online courses hosted on a website they completely own and control, producing enduring value for both artists and their audiences, rather than viewing it as the ultimate destination.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris, and in this episode, I’m gonna show you why and how every serious YouTuber should build an online course. See, the thing is, if you’re a YouTuber and you have some audience, even if it’s small, you’ve already done the hardest part.

You’ve built an audience. Most creators just never turn it into a business that they own. And also, by the way, you’ve developed the skills of being on video, being in front of a camera, getting comfortable with that. So it’s time to build the business. I’m gonna talk about what’s going on in the YouTube landscape, an event I’m getting ready to go to, so let’s just dive right in.

See, most creators on YouTube, they rent their income, and they don’t know it. So if you think about things like ad revenue, sponsorships, Patreon, these services that YouTubers use to monetize They’re actually just renting that income. It’s not coming from a platform that they own and control, and it can be very fickle.

Most YouTubers don’t make any money at all, but of the ones that earn money as a YouTuber over 50% of them make under $15,000, and it’s only 4% of the YouTube income earners that earn over $100,000. So the cool thing to think about here is that views are the top of the funnel, not the actual business. So I’m going with my daughter to VidCon, which is the big YouTuber conference in California, so I’m really focused on YouTube right now.

I’m a grown man. I’m 47 years old, and I’m still… I feel like I was kinda early here in wanting to be a YouTuber when I grow up. I’m 47. I’ve been on YouTube… Gosh, it seems like it’s been about 20 years since I launched my first video. I fell in love with the platform before it became as famous and as popular as it is today.

I’ve been doing video marketing, creating video courses leveraging video in so many different ways for a very long time. I’m super passionate about it. The thing is, most of the course creators that we work with at LifterLMS think about YouTube later as a way to do marketing or get clients for their courses and memberships and coaching programs.

But this video is not necessarily for them. It’s for the people that come from a YouTuber-first approach. I’m a YouTuber, I make videos, it’s what I do. It’s also very relevant no matter what age you are. Like I said, I’m 47, my daughter is 14 years old, and we’re both YouTubers. So this isn’t something that is only relevant to the younger generation, middle of the road, or the older generation.

Anybody can be a YouTuber. And one fact I wanna share with you, which I kinda have a funny debate with my daughter, is that she has built in over about a year about four times the subscribers that I’ve built at LifterLMS after 13 years. So she likes to rub that in my face, but I always like to remind her, I just ask her one question, “Hey, what’s your revenue per subscriber?”

So if you don’t know LifterLMS, we’re the leading learning management system in WordPress. We’ve sold millions and millions of dollars worth of online course software, LifterLMS. We also give away a ton of value for free, including in the free version of LifterLMS, but that revenue-per-subscriber thing is very real.

There’s a lot of influencers and creators on YouTube that maybe they go viral, maybe they’re on a hot topic, and they get a lot of subscribers, but they literally make no money or very little money. Now let me Differentiate a couple different types of YouTube content. YouTube is big for two things.

One is education, the other is entertainment. And I actually like to try and live in the middle in what’s known as edutainment. So predominantly what I’m into is making nonfiction YouTube content that’s educational, but I try to make it entertaining. I’m not the most entertaining person in the world, but edutainment is really what it’s all about.

So for the YouTubers out there, let’s talk about the difference of renting versus owning. Now, where I come from in the WordPress ecosystem, we know this already. Like we … When we build our website, we build it on WordPress on our hosting account. It’s a website that we have full control and ownership over.

So as an example, in the online course space, people sometimes end up on course platforms like Teachable or Kajabi or School or Thinkific, and they end up paying an exorbitant amount of money every month to rent a small piece of some other company’s website to put their online course on. That’s not what we’re about at LifterLMS.

We don’t want our users to have cookie cutter sites where they all look the same. We want people to build an asset that they own and control. So when you’re renting access on somebody else’s website for your online course, you’re subject to algorithm swings, platform cuts, policy changes. S- if your revenue is dependent on sponsors, they leave.

Sometimes you end up in this feast or famine like, “Let me go find money somehow for my YouTube channel.” But when you own your site, you own your students, you know their email addresses, as an example. Like in YouTube, you can have a lot of subscribers, but you can’t email them you’re de- totally dependent on the YouTube algorithm and people only being able to find your YouTube content if they happen to subscribe, if they happen to see it in their feed.

So owning a platform is very different than renting space. So when you own the platform, your income starts compounding because you just have so much control. One of the things that happened in the course creation space back in the day, in the early days of course creation, I’m talking about 15, 16 years ago, there was a company that got big called Udemy.

You may have heard of it. I… My very first online course before we built LifterLMS, I put on Udemy. You can go check it out. It’s called The Poet Omelet Method: Perfect Omelets Every Time, which was just a fun course. I challenged myself when I fell in love with the online course format in the early days to make a whole online course in a weekend and publish it, and I did that on Udemy.

And it wasn’t a very serious course. I just happened to love cooking But what happened is over time, I watched Udemy maximize for profit for Udemy and not take good care of their customers. So what happened is they… One of the big things they did is they created, this was a while ago at this point, a maximum of $50 that you could charge for your course.

They also made it impossible for you to ever provide a link to your own website from inside the course. So Udemy just wants to keep the people, the eyeballs, the traffic. They wanna keep everything on their platform. And then what they started doing is they started doing these course bundles where your course would get included in a course bundle with other creators that you don’t know, and they would discount your course price, the amount you would get paid and your commission by a serious amount, like 80, 90%, and then they would put coupons on top of that and stuff.

It was a real disaster if… And it made a lot of people clear about the value of owning your platform where it’s your rules, it’s your website, it’s more customizable, it’s more affordable, and it has the best support in the industry. So that’s just something that happened on Udemy. Udemy’s cool. I like it.

I’ve taken courses over there, but I would only put free courses on Udemy just as a form of lead generation. I would… In personal branding or whatever. I wouldn’t try to build my whole business on somebody else’s website when it comes to monetizing my YouTube channel. So the first thing as a YouTuber to think about when you’re ready to create a learning platform that you own and control and monetize your YouTube channel is to decide what to teach.

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And what I mean by this is that your YouTube channel probably already has a topic focus, a niche. You have a certain type of viewer or customer avatar that you make content for But sometimes YouTubers are so prolific and creative in making all this great content that you suffer…

you can suffer from what we call the expert’s curse, where you know a lot of things and you’re like what should I actually teach?” So the key thing to do when you’re making the leap to monetizing your YouTube channel with an online course on your website is to start small. Just pick a transformation of some kind of result, a specific result, even an identity shift.

Those are the best, where you create a transformation related to your subject matter expertise. So for example, I like to look at the big mega niches. So the big mega niches on YouTube, and you’re probably in a sub-niche under these if your content is somewhat educational and not pure entertainment, are health, wealth, and relationships.

So what do I mean by that? Health are things like personal fitness. It could be dealing with a medical issue that you have, and there’s many like you that have the same issue, and they’re looking for resources and things. It could be something to do with weight loss or getting your beach body ready for the summer.

It could be all kinds of different things. But if your content is broad, when you’re making your first course, I would look for a specific transformation. So if we look at the health space as an example, I’m an ultra runner, which means I run distances over the length of a marathon. This year I ran a hundred mile run across the st- entire state of New Hampshire, and so that’s like an, a health niche I really understand ’cause I’m been in this ultra running space for a while.

And if I was doing a lot on my YouTube channel, I know a lot of ultra runners, influencers, micro influencers and stuff that have a lot of great YouTube content, but they’re not creating online courses. So if you’re, like, sharing your races and then you’re doing like, “Hey, here’s what’s in my pack. Here’s h- how I fuel for a hundred miles.

Here are the challenges you face on your first hundred mile,” and so on, I would pick my first transformation and I would get specific. So I would do something like- How to go from finishing a marathon to finishing your first 50-miler. And then I would create a course content around that to help somebody kind of transition, just like I did.

Before I ran long 50-milers and 100-milers, when I was younger, I ran a marathon, so I knew what it ta- took to run a marathon. But running double that distance or even four times that distance or more is a totally different game. But anyways, notice how I said I would focus on how to run your first 50-miler, having previously finished a marathon at some point in your past.

So I would go into certain things to facilitate that transformation in my course, like getting into the gear, getting into the training, getting into the nutri- nutrition, getting into the hydration, getting into the recovery, getting into how to work with a coach or decide if you want a coach or not. So I could easily come up with eight key videos or lessons

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 that would make that course.

I don’t have to teach everything I know about long-distance running and all the science and all the health and all the stuff. I’m just picking a specific transformation. And if you’re a YouTuber not in the health space, just to briefly touch on other transformations. If you’re in the wealth space, so for example, I’m in the cr- make money with online courses space.

That’s the space I live in. This podcast has a ton of episodes about that. It’s something I’m really excited about and have a lot of experience in, both myself and across many, We’ve helped over 100,000 people create and sell online courses. And I actually have an online course called the Six Figure Course Plan Challenge.

It’s on the LifterLMS Academy, and it’s literally designed to help you go from zero to your first 100K course. So that’s an example of a transformation within the wealth space, so for courses. But for you, if you’re in the wealth space, it could be something else. It could be about investing or crypto or real estate or boring businesses or any kind of career path that people are, wanna learn how to do and go down.

And then on the relationship front, it could be everything from dating to parenting to other issues with relationships that happen at different phases in life, whatever it is. But I would get specific. I watched a s- a sleep coach, or an s- i’m sorry, I’m getting into health again, but let me go to the to this one example I saw was a for new parents, it was a course on how to basically figure out a newborn and sleep, both for the baby and for the parents.

Super specific. It’s time-bound. Your work- the audience is people with a newborn baby at home up to one year old who have a burning desire to figure out this whole sleep thing, and they’re a first-time parent. So that would be an example of a transformation in the relationship space of being a good parent, and also the relationship with yourself and your own needs in terms of sleep and so on The next piece that’s key, particularly if you’re a prolific content creator you just want to go and just start making the course and stuff, but it’s good to do some validation and not to build in the dark.

So you probably already have some validation. What are the questions that your audience asks you frequently? What’s the most popular question? What do you see in the comments? Which ones of your videos have the most views with the strongest education and transformation intent? You can make some videos about a course you’re thinking about making and ask people to go sign up for the interest list or the wait list.

You can even use LifterLMS as an example to set a course start date in the future, like a month away or even three months away. See how many people sign up for the interest list or pay in advance, perhaps at a discount for an early adopter discount and so on. There’s all kinds of different ways to validate, and you have something as a YouTuber that a lot of course creators or would-be course creators don’t have, which is you already have an audience.

So your audience is free market research, and you already have one. Try to validate before you really commit and do all the effort and so on. You can even make a light version of the course as a standalone video and see what the uptake or popularity of that is But if you’re just getting started, definitely start with a simple course, like one simple course.

It’s easy to start thinking about, “Okay, I’m gonna build a membership, and there’s gonna be this whole course catalog. I’ve got ideas for 50 courses.” That is all good, and I would encourage you to, explore that creatively and stuff, but take it one step at a time. Rome was not built in a day. You’ve already been building.

You already have a YouTube channel. It’s fine if you only have, 200 subscribers or if you have 200,000 or two million. I’ve seen people be very successful in small YouTube niches with a very small audience because it’s super niche. It’s a super kind of pain point, opportunity-seeking niche, and you can do a lot.

So don’t get distracted by vanity metrics like number of subscribers, number of views, and so on. If you have some traction at all on your YouTube channel, you’re doing well, so y- it’s not about keeping up with MrBeast and getting millions of views per video. So the perfect thing to do is just to start and create one course and launch it.

Done is better than perfect, and done is definitely better than fai- failure to launch or never releasing anything at all. And it’s one of those things where once you do it once, it’ll be so much easier, and you’ll be– you’ll go 10 times faster the next time you do it. And you can always expand to more courses and more y- membership and coaching programs and stuff as you go.

And we have all kinds of resources on the LifterLMS website to help you with the beginning stages as a course creator So own your platform, own the revenue, the data, the student relationship. WordPress plus LifterLMS is the owned alternative. If you’re brand new to setting up a WordPress site, just reach out to us.

We’ve got content and resources and recommendations to show you how easy it is, and you can look at our case studies. We have Y- YouTubers like Frank Kane, who’s, at the time we interviewed him, this was a while ago, he had made over $2 million with his online courses. He was in the he’s in a tech niche in terms of Amazon skills and things like that, but he has over 600,000 students.

He’s in one of those situations where he had started building on Udemy, but he got unhappy with all the restrictions and new policies and everything, so h- he’s been building up a mirror LMS or learning management system platform on his own WordPress site with LifterLMS. There’s another YouTuber named Christian Taylor who does a lot of software reviews, does some affiliate marketing with that, and some of his views have gone viral and whatnot, and he’s stepped into the course creation space with LifterLMS and WordPress.

Check out the LifterLMS reviews. There’s 389 reviews on wordpress.org. There’s more reviews on Capterra, Trustpilot, and G2 as well. LifterLMS has a really high review rate, rating ’cause it’s affordable, it’s infinitely customizable, and it has the best support in the industry. So you already have a audience, you just need to launch to the audience that you already have.

It’s not like you have to go find more people. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, you’re already ahead of the game. You’ve already done 80% of the work by building the channel, getting comfortable on video, making video, editing video, and, building that audience and getting comfortable up there.

So your own influence that you already have YouTube beats cold traffic or paying for ads. You don’t have to do all that kind of stuff when you’re launching your first course when you already have an audience. So in, in summary I wanna see more YouTubers building online courses. I’ve– I know a lot of young people or friends with kids, and a lot of these younger folks, including my own daughter, says they wanna be a YouTuber when they grow up.

It’s the– it’s like the number one skill. When I was a kid, people wanted to be an astronaut, now they wanna be a YouTuber. So there’s so many people coming online, going to YouTube with hopes and dreams, but it’s important to think about monetization. Yes, you can do sponsors, monetize your channel with ads and things like that, but that’s not the way the pros do it.

The pros do it by building their own information products so that YouTube becomes more of lead generation for the back catalog, their online courses. And if you’re gonna go to the effort to build an online course, it makes a lot of sense to do it on a platform that you own and control. So I’ve got a free resource for you Called Turn Your Subscribers into a Business You Own.

You can go get that at lifterlms.com/vidcon. So VidCon is a YouTuber conference I’m going to in California to connect with the YouTube community, hear their stories. I wanna see more young people getting involved in creating education products and figuring out monetization, becoming entrepreneurs. And by the way, if you’re not young, I c- I’m sure I’m gonna feel old at the YouTuber conference.

It’s- I am definitely way past the average age that’s gonna be there, but these are my people. We’re the creators, we’re the video makers, we’re the entrepreneurs out there that are figuring this whole thing out. And so much is going on in the business of education. There’s never been more opportunity in all these niches to create micro-learning, just-in-time education in very specific niches, very specific transformations.

There’s never been a better time. And if you’re worried at all about artificial intelligence taking over the world In my view, YouTube is going to remain an outpost for humanity. So what I mean by that is a lot of people will read blog posts and articles that may have been written with AI or heavily written with AI, but nobody really wants to watch educational content made by a non-human.

And really, as a human, there’s only one of you out there, so if you think that, oh, 

it’s already been done, this famous person has already done a course on my topic, yeah, they’re not you, and you have your own take, angles, insights, and ideas as well. So I wanna encourage you to, monetize your YouTube channel and become an education entrepreneur, and YouTube is a great place for that, and having an online course to monetize your YouTube channel is the way to go.

At the end of the resource that I mentioned at lifterlms.com/vidcon there’s a link to a YouTube playlist where we go from zero to hero. We show you how to create your very first online course from scratch using LifterLMS and WordPress. We show you the essential steps. We don’t show you everything under the sh- the sun, but in about 40 minutes of content we show you how to create your first online course.

So see what I did there? That’s a transformation. It’s a… We actually have that course on our website, but for the YouTubers out there, you can go find that playlist. It’s in the resource at lifterlms.com/vidcon. If you wanna see the official quick start course from LifterLMS, just head on over to academy.lifterlms.com.

You can’t miss it. So that’s it for this episode. Keep making videos. Everybody can have a TV channel now on YouTube. If you’re already doing it and you’re a creator, no matter how young or old you are, I wanna encourage you to please make your first online course. LifterLMS is here to help you on the journey.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode