How Do EdTech Websites Make Money?
EdTech is a fast-growing industry and the pandemic has given it a healthy push forward. The global education industry is expected to grow at a combined annual growth rate of 16.5% between 2022 and 2030. A lot of entrepreneurs looking to get an EdTech website often wonder what could be the different ways to monetize their site.
How do EdTech websites make money? The most common way to monetize an EdTech website is by charging a course fee. Other popular methods include charging for a subscription, selling ad space in between free content, collaborating with an educational institution, or selling other products along with the course, like devices or study material.
The method you should choose depends a lot on your business goals and your skills as a business owner. And you need to get the features developed on your site accordingly. It is important to understand these and choosing the wrong monetization model can be fatal for your business.
The monetization of your EdTech Website
The simplest and most straightforward method to make money from your EdTech website is to charge a fee for the courses you offer. You can make your course content password-protected so that only enrolled students can log in and view it.
On the other hand, you can also enable eCommerce functionality where students can buy a course directly on the website and can pay online through a payment gateway. Thus, the access control is automated and they get access once they make the online payment. If you are using WordPress, you can install the WooCommerce plugin and integrate your LMS plugin with WooCommerce in order to enable online buying functionality on your website.
Another preferred method to make money is through subscriptions. Subscriptions basically mean paying a monthly or quarterly rental for access to all content on the site. Your customers can get access to all your content for a specific period of time, rather than buying individual courses.
You can even devise different levels of subscriptions. For example, the Silver plan, where you offer access to 30% of your courses, the Gold plan where you offer 60%, and the Platinum plan where you give access to all your courses. Some premium LMS plugins offer subscription functionality. Alternatively, you can also run the subscription model manually, where you manually enroll students in courses as per their subscription plan and manually remove them once the subscription expires.
You can go for another model referred to as freemium, where you offer some free service initially. It can be either for a limited period free trial, after which the students need to pay. You can get their credit card information in return for the free trial, through which you can charge automatically once the trial period is over.
You can enable auto-debit from your customers’ cards in WordPress. You need to enable Stripe Addon in your WP forms plugin. Next, you need to enable the recurring payments option in stripe.
In an alternative freemium model, you can offer some limited products/services for free to all your audiences. And through this free mini course or some other simpler info product, you can entice them to enroll for the premium version which is paid. You are likely to get a good conversion rate for the paid version if you genuinely help your audience and offer them great value in the free version. Udemy is a great example of this type of business model.
Making money through collaboration with Educational Institutes
Another way to make money, used by many EdTech businesses is collaborating with Educational Institutions. In the collaboration, the Edtech company creates online courses based on the lesson plan shared by the institution. The institution uses these online courses as a supplement to its regular classes.
Thus, the EdTech website gets users regularly and the institution pays them in return for the value delivered by them. Alternatively, you can collaborate with some corporate companies to deliver training and courses to their employees. Websites like Udemy, Verzeo, Knowledgehut, etc use this money-making model very successfully.
Another closely related scheme is where EdTech websites collaborate with student groups, class representatives, or prefects and get the contact information of all the students in the batch. This method is handy if you are a newer, smaller business and it’s unlikely for educational institutions to collaborate with you. Once you have the students’ contacts, you can reach out to them individually or by adding them to a Facebook group or WhatsApp group. The conversion rate is quite good in the latter since all the classmates are together and they may be more comfortable trusting your website.
Making money through ad revenue
Another effective way to make money through your EdTech website is by offering free courses and generating organic traffic on your website. Once you have enough traffic on your site, you can enable ads to run on your website and get paid in return.
Ezoic, Media.net, Monumetric, AdThrive, etc are some of the ad networks Ad networks are big players that acquire online real estate from website owners like you and sell it to advertisers. You can earn anywhere from $2 to $15 per 1000 page views on your website through ad networks.
Making money through selling other services/products on your website
Once you have enough audience for your content, whether paid or free content, you can consider creating other products like eBooks, learning software, or other course materials. You can also consider linking some affiliate products which are related to your industry. Again, the conversion rate boils down to how much your audience trusts you, and thus having high-quality content that’s genuinely helpful is the most important aspect here.
Which monetization method is best for you?
The monetization method or methods that you go for depends a lot on your skills, interests, and your company’s position in the growth cycle.
If you are just starting out, the easiest way to make money from your website is to create high-quality courses and charge a course fee for enrolment. Since you are just starting out and no one knows you, nor do you have enough traffic, it may be hard for you to get ad revenue or collaborations. Also, any new audience who hasn’t consumed enough of your content may not be willing to subscribe to multiple courses. Just simply charging a modest fee for your course, and selling it through discounts or other offers can be the easiest way to start getting paid.
As you build your authority as a business and start getting enough traffic and your audience begins to trust you, you can gradually expand into other ways to make money. Again, if you are trying to build a strong and independent brand over the long run, you might need to focus on getting more traffic and converting them into your loyal audience who trust you. Thus, sharing a lot of free content, along with paid ones, can be a good way to build organic traffic and subscribers for your brand. And traffic is power! Once you have enough traffic, you can make money through ads or affiliate products, or your own side products as well.
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