Why Selling a Course Is the Highest-Paying Part-Time Job in the World

In 2016 I stumbled into this incredible opportunity by accident. I was making videos on Youtube, sharing what I was learning, selling on Amazon. Followers started asking me to coach them. After months of one-to-one coaching I created my first course.  

That was 2016. 

The next year I did $1.5 million in course sales.

The next year $2 million.

The next year $2.8 million.

The next year $3.9 million. 

This can be you too. 

No matter what your life experience is, I guarantee that you know something on a specific topic, that at least 100 people would pay you to know. And if you sold it for $10,000, you just made $1 million dollars. 

Today I give you 10 proofs that selling a course is the highest-paying part time job in the world. 

Proof #1: You can build your course while you run a full time business or work a full time job. 

Guys in my Craftsmen Cohort spend up to 10 hours a week building their course and funnel. Some weeks it's less. But that's only for the first few weeks. Once you launch your course, you don’t have to keep remaking the course. The time you need to spend goes down. But the income does not. 

“Seth, how can this take such little time?” Because you are taking something you already know a lot about, and simply converting it into a digital format. You are not going out and learning a whole new craft. You are monetizing knowledge in a skill that you’ve already been cultivating for years. 

This is why I have yet to meet a single man of faith who didn’t have a skill people would not pay good money to learn. 

Proof #2: Build it once. Sell it many times. 

In most businesses you need to keep remanufacturing or debugging your product. 

But courses don’t have bugs. Nor do customers eat courses. 

Build your course once. Sell it over and over and over again. 

Yes, the up front work is a heavier lift. But once you finish that, all you need to do is tweak your course over time to improve it. 

Imagine I gave you three product options to sell: a banana, a lamp, and a course. 

• Will the banana need to be reproduced? Yes, because consumers eat it. 

• Will the lamp need to be made over and over again? Yes, because consumers break it. 

• Will the course need to be re-created again? No, because consumers don’t eat courses and can’t break them. 

Proof #3: Get paid every month. 

You might be thinking, “Seth, once someone buys the course, I have to go out and find another customer in order to keep making money.” 

First, even if that was true, and all you did was sell a $10,000 course to 100 people, how would you feel about making $1 million? 

But it’s better than that: All your customers are in the same online community. You can provide monthly meetings with members of the community as well as answer questions and provide support. 

This means that in addition to them buying your course, you charge a small monthly fee. Your work is not for free. Not only is that fair to you, but that’s called residual income: it’s consistent and regular. 

For example, let’s say 250 people buy your course for $5,000. You made $1,250,000. 

Now let’s say you charge $39/month for each member. That's $9,750 monthly income. 

Proof #4: Low COGS and no overhead. 

“COGS” means Cost of Goods Sold. If you sell products on Amazon you have to purchase those products before you sell them. You’ll easily spend up to 10 grand just to get your first batch of products and that’s before you’ve made any money. Now you have to sell them if you want to see a profit. If you don’t sell them, you’re stuck with dead inventory. 

But with a course, there are no COGS. Because the goods to be sold is the knowledge in your brain. 

Your cost for your brain goods is the years and years of cultivating this skill you have honed.

“Overhead” means monthly expenses like your office lease, salaries, accounting, maintenance, software, and office supplies. When you run a course business you need almost none of that. 

On average most brick and mortar businesses today require $250,000 up front capital just to launch. 

So what are the approximate costs for creating and selling a course? Here is a broad average of up front costs and monthly costs based on our own course and the clients in our cohort:

Proof #5: No college degree hours or bills needed.

This is so powerful it’s almost invisible. 

When I was a child, people expected you to go to college–that is if you were serious about being a success. And for the next 25 years of your life you’re paying off a school debt working a job that has nothing to do with the degree you got at that school.

But when you sell a course, no college degree is needed. Nor do you need to spend years in school before you are ready to launch. 

You can start now. You can start today. Because people aren’t looking for your college education. They want your expertise.  

Proof #6: You do not need to be a marketing expert.

This one is specific to my clients in Craftsmen. Not all coaches use this method that I use. 

I show the men in my cohort how to set up an evergreen reward funnel that runs for them. They focus on creating content they love that attracts prospects into the funnel and the funnel literally does the rest of the work. 

Proof #7 You have no shipping costs.

You never have to ship anything to your clients. No inventory costs. No shipping costs. No physical overhead.

Proof #8 Profit margins can be 50-95%.

Because you have no cost of inventory and shipping, margins on a course are incredibly high. The reason I gives this profit margin such a wide range is because if you do run ads for advertise your course, your margins will go down. This is not a bad thing if you can increase your sales volume enough to end up making more money and impacting more people in the long run.

Proof #9 Once built, it can turn into passive income.

Once your funnel is set up, people can go online and buy your course while you are still sleeping. You go to bed and wake up wealthier. 

Proof #10 Unmatched scalability. 

If all you are selling is a course, with no one-to-one coaching, then it does not matter if you sell 10 or 10,000 copies of your course, your workload does not go up. Which means this is one of the most scalable businesses on the planet.

Be careful which path you choose

Let’s say you get this idea. “I’m going to use AI to collect a bunch of information on a specific topic and turn that into a course and then try to sell it.” 

If you choose this path, you need to understand something. 

There is an almost indescribable, highly invisible element that draws people to buy one course over another. 

And that is because when you sell your course, you are not just selling knowledge. 

You are selling experience. 

AI cannot give you experience. But life will. 

But it goes one step further. If your experience comes from a heart surrendered to God, it is something even more. 

It is wisdom. 

Why did Queen Sheba pay King Solomon handsomely in lavish gifts of gold, spices, and precious stones? 

Did she seek him out for knowledge? No. 

Did she seek him out for experience? Not at all. 

She sought wisdom. In fact she was so overwhelmed with his wisdom, she was left speechless. 

Don’t take this knowledge and bend it to the carnal desire of just trying to make money with no interest in actually helping people. It might make you a few bucks here and there. But foolishness will catch up with you. Solomon wrote, “Whoever ignores instruction comes to poverty and shame” (Proverbs 13:18). 

When you gain knowledge, through life experience, from a heart surrendered to God Almighty, you offer so much more than a course. You offer wisdom. 

And that will last forever.