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How to Create an Evergreen Course to Sell Online in 2024

Looking to create an evergreen course that sells?

Evergreen courses are a great way to scale your business and impact by selling courses in an automated way. So if you’re wondering how to create a successful evergreen course that is always in demand, you’re in the right place. 

Want to learn more? Read on!

What is an evergreen course? 

Let’s start from the beginning:

An evergreen course is an offering you create that works to sell itself.

Let me explain:

You can take your coaching, freelance, or consulting services and turn any of those into evergreen courses. In short, you take the knowledge you get from working with clients and turn it into a course that can be sold repeatedly. 

While I do recommend that you launch your course first (which we’ll talk more about below), you ultimately place this course into an evergreen funnel. This works to connect and sell the course to ideal clients automatically. 

Now, evergreen courses do take work to set up and sell. So what are the exact benefits of selling your course on evergreen? Let’s find out. 

The 4-Step Automatic Attraction System

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What are the benefits of evergreen courses? 

Evergreen courses offer several benefits to aspiring entrepreneurs. We’re going to touch on three: scalability, profitability, and flexibility. 

1. Scalability

One of the biggest benefits of creating an evergreen course is that it makes it possible to scale your business. 

To successfully grow your business, you need a constant stream of revenue. And selling a digital course means that you can sell them 24/7, even when you aren’t actively working on your business. 

Just think:

Since your evergreen course is doing all the hard work for you, you now have extra time to put into your business. You can think of creating new courses, starting new business ventures, or reaching a larger audience.

2. Profitability

While live coaching and group calls have their place, you’re still trading time for money at this point. By selling high-ticket courses at $1,000-$3,000, you ensure that you hit your revenue goals by selling a few of these courses every month. 

3. Flexibility

Finally, evergreen courses provide you with flexibility. Clients can purchase and enroll in your courses anytime. This means you don’t have to be stuck behind the computer with a 9-5 schedule. 

This is one of the main reasons my students want to sell courses–so that they can have more time and freedom for other things in their lives or other areas of their businesses. 

benefits of evergreen courses graph

Now that we know why you should set up an evergreen course, let’s dive into who should have them. 

Who are evergreen courses for? 

Evergreen courses are an excellent goal for all business owners, but they’re best for people with existing courses. 

Let’s say you have a starter course with great client reviews. You’ve sold it through your email list and testimonials from past clients. 

The general rule is this: 

Once you feel that this course is successful on its own, it’s ready to become an evergreen course. 

But what if you’ve never created a course before? 

No worries. 

If you’re a coach or business owner who wants to create a new course, I recommend using a launch system. This can look like using paid ads or affiliates to grow your audience as you launch. 

Or, you might launch your course to your email list and use your launch to grow your list. 

Either way, a launch strategy is a foolproof way to build and sell your course much faster for new course creators. 

Now, before we move on to creating an evergreen course, let’s take a closer look at the differences between evergreen courses and launches. 

Pros and cons of evergreen vs. launches 

Here’s the thing:

Evergreen courses and launches both have their place in selling online courses. However, while I’ve built pretty successful evergreen funnels over the years, I can’t say that they’re necessarily better than launching–just different. 

Pros and cons of course launches 

Launches have recently gotten a bad rep in the online business space. People think that they’re “dead” and that you’re much better off with an evergreen course.

This couldn’t be more wrong. 

Here’s the truth: Launches are alive and well. They’ve just changed

What do I mean by that? 

Well, customers are doing more research on the courses they buy. In the past, coaches could have slapped together some emails or live streams and called it a day. Now, it takes more effort to get big sales numbers. 

This means that to succeed, your launch needs to be effective. 

Don’t get me wrong. Executing a launch will take up more time and effort. You’ll need to engage with your audience and set up interactive prompts and posts. 

However, you’ll likely see a lot of audience engagement, momentum, and brand recognition, and build deeper connections with your audience. This, in turn, leads to high sales rates. 

Of course, there are cons to this course sales model, too. Because launches do eat up time and energy. 

And that’s why, at some point, I recommend that you start looking at evergreen courses to free up your time. 

If you want to learn more about launching, take a look at how to run a successful launch here: 

Pros and cons of evergreen courses

While launches are effective for new course creators, evergreen courses are the dream for most online business owners. They offer greater flexibility and can help you scale your business faster.

So what’s the catch? 

Evergreen courses take time. 

It’s not as if one day you can turn on your evergreen funnel and make thousands in profit. Instead, you’ll likely need to spend money on testing and optimization before your funnels start working independently. 

Before creating your evergreen course, selling it through a live launch can help you build a system that works. Then, you can put your time and effort into sourcing additional traffic streams and creating automated funnels. 

And that’s it for the pros and cons of both systems. 

evergreen vs launches overview

But how do you create evergreen courses? Here’s how. 

How do you create an evergreen course? 

Now you know some of the pros and cons of an evergreen course. But how do you create one? And how do you know it will sell?

Let’s start with the “how.”

The 4-Step Automatic Attraction System

for attracting more clients daily... without paid ads, social media, or "hustle"!

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Decide on a topic 

Your evergreen course topic could come from an existing course that you sell. If you haven’t created a course yet, start by choosing a course topic

Your topic should come from skills you have that are in demand. For example, when I started my business, I didn’t know what to sell. Then I realized I had a skill that people wanted to know more about: digital advertising consulting. 

Now, you might be thinking:

“But Luisa, what if I don’t have any skills?”

Of course you do! But if you need help figuring out what skills you can offer, start by answering these three questions:

  1. What are your skills/experiences?
  2. What do people regularly ask your opinion on?
  3. What are you interested in/what are your hobbies?

Remember, you don’t have to know everything about a topic. But you should pick a topic with some results to show (e.g., you’ve helped others grow their freelance business/scaled your own).

But now that you’ve decided on your topic, how do you make it sellable? 

Create a sellable course 

A sellable course is one that’s in demand. 

People need to be willing and able to pay for your course. A course about the best car cleaning products might be useful, but people probably aren’t willing to pay for that information. 

You also need to put some thought into how you package it. 

For example, how will you present the information in your course? Will you use video, pdfs, slides, or a combination of all three? 

Of course, what you teach in your courses is much more important than how it’s presented. But remember that people are generally more willing to pay for courses in video format. 

Ultimately, your course is the same course you sell through launches, but just sold through an evergreen model. 

In this short video, I explain the steps of creating your course: 

How do you sell an evergreen course? 

You’ve created your course; now you need to sell it. 

When you first start selling your course, you can sell it organically to your email list. Once it’s got more traction, you can begin setting up your evergreen funnel. 

Here’s how. 

Set up an evergreen funnel

Since an evergreen funnel takes time to build, you should only start creating it when your course has a good amount of sales.

An evergreen funnel needs three things to succeed:

  • An evergreen course 
  • A traffic system (like ads or SEO)
  • A sales system (automated email marketing and webinars)

We’ve already discussed how to create an evergreen course, so let’s talk about your traffic system, preferably through SEO.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is done by optimizing your website and coaching offers for search engines. This makes it easier for potential paying clients to find you on search engines and buy from you. 

But why use SEO when there are so many other traffic sources out there?

I’m so glad you asked. 

SEO makes up 53% of all trackable web traffic, making it one of the most effective ways to get new traffic and clients. 

In addition, SEO is often an overlooked traffic source. By focusing on your website’s SEO, you could potentially beat out your competitors in the search rankings.  

SEO also pays off as a profitable marketing strategy. When I started working on my site’s SEO, there wasn’t much information available. I didn’t even know if it would work.

But the results were far better than I ever expected. Six months into using SEO, I started making more than I was investing in it.

The 4-Step Automatic Attraction System

for attracting more clients daily... without paid ads, social media, or "hustle"!

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{insert photo here of rankings proof}

Once you’ve got your traffic source squared away, it’s time to focus on your sales system by automating your funnel. 

Let’s take a look. 

Automate your funnel

Last: 

You need to automate your funnel. 

Automating your funnel makes it run in the background without you actively needing to work on it, AKA you sell your course on evergreen. 

This is how it works:

Your SEO traffic will lead people to your email list. Then, you sell to that list by engaging them through regular emails and sales emails for courses. 

Emails are a key part of selling your evergreen courses. However, avoid overly sales-y emails. 

You know, the ones that sound like:

“Buy this course now, or miss out…forever!” (as if the course won’t open again later this year)

“You only have 12 hours to purchase the course of a lifetime!”

Instead, create straightforward sales emails that encourage people to buy through fun, interesting emails. 

Use emails wisely by first creating a welcome funnel. These emails get sent out when people initially sign up for your email list. Then create a webinar funnel, which are emails that go out after people watch your webinar. 

To set up your email funnel, I recommend using a combination of Active Campaign and Lead Pages. These online course tools make it easy to create eye-catching landing pages and engaging emails that convert to sales. 

As people move through the funnel, the goal is to motivate them to buy your courses, and that’s how you sell. 

To get your webinar up and running, I recommend tools like EverWebinar, for a simple evergreen webinar setup. It automates webinar creation and works as a one-stop shop for all your needs.  

In this short video, I explain how to use webinars:

And that’s how you set up your automated funnel. 

What’s next?

There you have it. Now you’re ready to go out and create your own evergreen course that sells. 

The 4-Step Automatic Attraction System

for attracting more clients daily... without paid ads, social media, or "hustle"!

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Evergreen courses can make a BIG difference in your business.

From having to rely on launches, you can make your business much more enjoyable with an automated funnel.

However, to sell evergreen courses, you also need the right system.

That’s what I’ll share in my free PDF on how to build a 4-step system that delivers clients to you…every day. Get it now!

Read more:

About Luisa Zhou

Luisa Zhou has helped thousands of students build and scale their own profitable online Freedom Business. Fun Fact: She used to work as an engineer for the Space Station and holds a B.S.E. from Princeton. Click here to learn more about Luisa.

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