Tips for putting a price on what you know

You’ve creatively packaged all the content for your course, warmed your audience, and are just about ready to launch your online course. But first, you need to set the prices for your course and coaching packages. While this may sound easy and straightforward in theory, it can trip up a lot of creators—and even cause some mental turmoil or debatably worse. It can lead to online course pricing that undervalues what you’re offering without even realizing.

In the moments of determining a price that feels fair and profitable, you might find yourself having these thoughts come up:

“I don’t want to put a price on my passion project.”

“I’m not technically an expert on this subject anyway.”

“People could just find this information on Youtube for free.”

“I don’t know if I feel comfortable charging my friends and family.”

If you do, you’re not alone. Read on to find out how to overcome common mindset barriers along with pricing tips that will make your online course pricing process streamlined and easy.

Shift the perspective away from you

The tricky part about looking at profit margins as a creator is that without a physical exchange of goods, it can feel like it’s a matter of putting a price tag on the time you worked and energy you expended. This is a place where a lot of people tend to undervalue themselves.

This is where you might wonder why someone would pay for your course when they could just Google the information, or possibly question who you are to be charging for this information in the first place. Here’s the thing:

It’s not about you.

At least, not personally. It is about you in the sense that your students are paying to learn from you. They’re not paying for just the information—which despite possibly being able to find for free somewhere on the Internet, they’re still choosing to pay for content that’s being delivered in a unique way that could only be done by you, specifically.

Once you recognize your own expertise as fact, and see how valuable what you have to offer is, the reciprocal relationship between you and your sales dashboard ends.

Keep yourself separate from your prices

When your sense of self-worth gets tangled in the pricing process—which usually happens in a quiet way, sometimes you might not even realize that’s what’s going on—it can feel really uncomfortable and easier to just slap a (low) price on and be done with it.

If you find yourself wanting to do this, pay attention to what you’re thinking and remind yourself that it isn’t about you personally. Now it’s time to shift the lens to your online course and the value it provides to your students. This allows you to confidently put a money-making price on your courses and bundles.

Value, value, value

Instead of considering the time you spent creating the course and trying to figure out what an hourly price would look like depending on how many people purchase the course, zoom out. Look at the value you’re providing for your students. (We talk about transformations so much for a reason.)

Likely your course has the potential to positively impact or even transform someone’s life in some way. This is where you get to shift into a more value-based pricing outlook. This is where prices are centered around how much your service and product is worth to your client as opposed to its direct cost.

You’re also providing massive value to your audience by offering a shortcut to the end results that they seek. This is a huge factor in why people will pay top dollar for your course. It allows them a means to circumvent the potholes of trying to piece together information on their own.

Your course and coaching services have the potential to be a serious boom in your students’ lives. Your prices get to reflect that.

Tips for pricing

Allow for wiggle room

If you set your number on the higher end of what you’re considering for the price range, that means you can do things like:

• Offer your students generous discounts for Black Friday
• Send special discount codes to your most loyal followers
• Send people on your list an automatic discount code on birthdays

Making frequent use of discount codes and sales is a great way to make new customer connections, welcome back existing students, and sell to those who haven’t invested in your course yet. It can help introduce new people into your marketing funnels too.

Take advantage of bundles and order bumps

With our Bundle feature on Teachable, you can bundle together your course and coaching offerings. This can make your services even more accessible to your audience, and of course will bring in more business for you.

You can make your bundle even more appealing by raising the prices of your individual offerings so that people will be more inclined to purchase bundles or order bumps. Reminder: Order bumps are easy ways to offer add-ons that your student can purchase while checking out.

Use visuals to help convey value

It’s great to determine your product’s value. But for it to be obvious that you have a generous discount available (and to make more sales,) you need to communicate the value. Even something as simple as using the strikeout font on your promotional collateral can help sway a potential customer to make a purchase. All you do is use the strikeout font to reflect the original price—the juxtaposition of the two numbers will make it even more evident that it’s a juicy deal.

Remember you’re not going to be a yes for everyone. And don’t take that personally. It’s just the nature of business and that’s OK.

Instead of doubting yourself or lowering your prices to try to get more sales, stay firm in your numbers and know that your ideal audience finding you can sometimes be a slow process. Keep showing up and staunchly believing in the value of what you’re offering.