Creating an accounting course is a lot of work, but you might be surprised to know that the aspect most people struggle with isn’t producing the content but deciding on a price.
It might seem simple, but figuring out what your course is worth and how much the students you find would be willing to pay for the content is no easy task.
Fortunately, there are several things you can do to work out what to charge for your course.
While we might not have a definitive answer for what you should charge for your accounting course, as it will vary according to the individual tutor, we have a general roadmap you can follow to reach a reasonable price point.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the most important factors when it comes to settling on a price for your accounting course.
Scope out the Competition
Before you can have a reliable idea of a possible price bracket your course might fall into, you need to know whether you’re hitting an area of high market demand with your content.
If you’re creating just another generic accounting course, that doesn’t bring anything new to the table, then you’re going to struggle to get students to pay much for it. Yet if you do your research ahead of time and create a course around an area of high market demand, you’ll be well within your rights to ask for a higher price.
Keyword Research
To find out whether your course will be in high demand, you need to know key information such as what your target audience is searching for. Through keyword research, you can ascertain what people are asking the likes of Google when they have questions about accounting.
That way, you can judge through search volume which the most sought-after answers are, which can help you determine the most profitable content to cover for your course.
Tools like Google Trends are invaluable in this regard, so watch a couple of videos on how to use it and then see if you can track customer demand. If you have your finger on the pulse of search trends, you’ll be in a much better position to create a more valuable accounting course for your demographic.
Browse for Similar Courses
Another useful strategy can be to browse the internet for courses similar to the one you’re thinking of creating, and how they are organised.
If your course is going to be about accounting advice for university students, then search that exact phrase and see what online courses pop up. You might also want to try with various synonyms such as ‘tips’ instead of ‘advice’ so that you can find any courses that might have slipped under the radar with your initial search.
As you do this, you can take note of what tutors are charging for these similar courses, and even track them in a spreadsheet with the view to creating an average from a sample of five or more courses.
Once you have an average, for example, £50, you’ll have a better idea of what students will be willing to pay for an accounting course providing advice to university students.
Of course, you can charge more than you see others charge, but you need to be sure that you offer more value otherwise why would students choose your course over the more affordable competition?
Check out our management accounting lessons on Superprof.
Decide on a Business Model
Putting a price on an online course isn’t always as straightforward as just slapping a figure on it.
While it certainly can be, this doesn’t take into account promotions, discounts, and different business models.
Some platforms, such as Udemy, host myriad online courses and allow the user to shop for courses as if they were products in a store. This is one way of selling your accounting course, so for each sale, you earn a fixed sum, minus whatever the company takes as a commission for hosting and promoting your content.
Another way is to fully own your course and host it on your own website.
This is a more complicated business model to adopt, and will often require you to create sales funnels that drive traffic towards your course from your blog or another medium.
As a result, you will most likely need to hire writers, sales experts, or others to help you along the way.
But the advantage of this approach is that you’ll get to enjoy all the profits of the course, and you’ll get to decide when and how often you offer discounts or other promotions.
If you’ve already got your own business, for example, you have a blog that earns you money from affiliate ads or an ebook, you can integrate the course into your business to boost your personal brand value.
In some cases, people will even go as far as to offer an online course they’ve created for free since it provides an immense amount of value that will in theory encourage the student to come back for more, and pay for some of your paid products like a book or online classes.
If you do give accounting classes, but you’re struggling to find students, Superprof can help.
When you successfully register as a tutor on Superprof, you’ll be able to sit back and wait for students to come to you.
How Much Value do you Offer?
An important factor in determining how much you should charge for your online course is how much value you offer, which will in term affect how much you get out of the job.
By that we mean what do you provide in your course that students can’t go and get elsewhere?
Here are some examples of how you can offer value through your course:
- You have a lot of experience in accounting
- You have relevant qualifications
- You bring new teaching methodologies to the table
- You are charismatic and teach with enthusiasm
- You present the content in a visually appealing way
If you can tick some or all of these boxes, then you can charge more for your course, it’s as simple as that.
For example, if you’ve been teaching accounting as a tutor for 10+ years, your course should be more valuable than someone who's only been teaching for 2 years. However, this isn’t always a black and white issue.
If one accounting tutor is able to breathe life into the course content with infectious energy and charisma, then they may offer more value to students than the tutor with more experience.
This may not seem fair, but at the end of the day, this is the knowledge you can use to your advantage. Students don’t want to be bored while learning, so by making your course as entertaining and engaging as possible you can add value and charge a slightly higher price.
Again, browsing similar accounting courses online will help a lot in determining how much value you offer relative to other tutors.
Another technique you can use to jack up the price is to throw in extra resources you’ve created, as this increases the perceived value of the course. If you create several PDF worksheets based on the content, for example, you can provide extra value to the student.
Production value helps, too.
If your accounting course is more visually appealing than every other course out there, students will flock to you. Of course, the content has to be good too, otherwise, the visuals mean nothing.
Consider Promotion
In some ways, while you don’t want to undersell yourself and the content you’ve produced, it can be a good idea to set the price lower than you might think is reasonable.
Hear us out.
It’s a fine balance with pricing because if you go too high you’ll risk being too expensive, but if you go too low students might mistakenly assume that your course isn’t valuable.
But sometimes reducing the price slightly can help, providing that you have the marketing skills to spread the word about it.
Marketing and promotion are hugely powerful tools, and you can use them to find more students and earn more from your course.
If you know how to sell, then this can relieve some of the pressure of worrying about whether or not students will be willing to pay for your course. It also means that you can drop the price and undercut your competitors, in an attempt to come across as the best value-for-money proposition.
Of course, if you truly believe that your course is worth £100 or more, then we wouldn’t suggest that you devalue it and charge less than £100, but clever marketing can definitely help you boost sales.
If you have your own business, you can also think about how you can make your course more enticing in the first few weeks of its release. A popular tactic is to offer it at a heavily discounted price for the first day or so, or as part of a package along with other products, you offer such as ebooks, memberships, or online classes.
You could even offer a free 30-minute class to the first 10 people to buy your course or something along those lines, as this will get the ball rolling and hopefully lead to your first five-star reviews.
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