You’ve already conquered the insurmountable. You made online courses that people actually wanted to buy. You’ve learned how to create content that attracts those buyers and built funnels that convert strangers into paying customers.
While the path to earning $100,000 in course revenue was tough work, the good news is that the march to $1M in revenue will move much faster.
You’ve got all the ingredients. Now, it’s about combining and amplifying what’s already working into something truly spectacular.
In this post, you’ll get a complete guide to help you leap from $100K to $1M in online course sales by combining your existing success into high-ticket membership programs.
The million-dollar math
When we work with successful course creators, the first thing we show them is what we call the Mighty Pro Math. It’s a template and path we’ve used to help hundreds of course creators go from having a lucrative set of online course products to a self-sustaining subscription business.
With our customers, we show them this math in the context of Mighty Pro, which means they’re bringing all of their online courses, group coaching, events, and upsells into their own branded apps.
Whatever tech stack you have for your courses, the math holds so long as you’re making it simple for people to discover your courses and memberships and community in one central place.
Here are three scenarios that would take you from $100,000 to $1M in revenue
with a few enhancements to your course offerings.
Grow to $200,000 by refreshing your flagship course offering
Let’s say you have a flagship course you offer. It delivers real transformation and results for people. Right now, you’re selling around 30 courses per month at $299, giving you an annual revenue of $107,640.
What if you add a few more modules to that course, do a visual rebrand, and relaunch that same course at a higher price point?
You could raise your prices by a modest 20%. And if you hustle to sell just 15 more courses per month, you’ll reach $193,320 per year. That’s double your current income with little extra effort.
Or you could keep selling the same amount of courses per month and double your price which gives you now $215,640 in revenue. Even less effort. While doubling your prices might seem simplistic, most creators undervalue and underestimate what people will pay.
So it’s worth a shot, especially if you’re delivering real results for your students. And a great experiment to learn the true ceiling of what your customers are willing to pay.
If doubling your prices makes you uncomfortable, you could increase your prices by 50% and aim for selling 15 more courses per month. That easily gets you to almost $250,000 in yearly revenue without changing much of what you’re already doing.
Grow to $500,000 by expanding your revenue stream
Now that you’ve got a refreshed flagship offering there’s a simple way to instantly add more income from each customer: give people the option to buy a monthly or annual membership.
You can still let people buy your courses and get lifetime access to your self-paced content. But you’re also adding the option of getting access to your courses plus a monthly or yearly membership.
What if you added some live weekly coaching calls, a monthly livestream, and a dedicated community? Now, you can justify not just selling one-off courses but a complete program that delivers results and transformation for your members.
Offering a yearly membership option for $999 and selling just 15 memberships per month means nearly $180,000 in new income. Stretch yourself and sell just 5 more memberships per month and you’ve added nearly $240,000 new income. Combined with your course sales from the previous step, you’re now a half a million-dollar business.
Plus, these new membership sales are not one-time course sales. Instead of people joining a course for a few weeks and then going on their way, they’re engaging in your membership, taking multiple courses, and spreading the word as you help them achieve more results.
You’ve entered a much more wonderful world of subscription revenue, where every dollar compounds so long as you keep member churn and retention at an acceptable level.
Hit $1M by selling both individual courses & memberships
The last $500,000 in revenue comes from the magic of offering it all: individual courses, monthly memberships, yearly memberships, and new premium upsells to existing members.
From high ticket group coaching programs to new monthly challenge themes to premium access for your most passionate students, there’s no shortage of new revenue opportunities.
And as you already have the attention of these people in your membership, your customer acquisition costs are extremely low.
Now, you have an army of customers who have purchased your online courses.
Plus, a growing community of members who are diving deeper into your education and programs.
As your membership starts to gain traction and naturally add new members, you can add new high-ticket programs and new flagship courses you can create and sell.
While this math might seem abstract, it is absolutely achievable. At Mighty Pro, we work with hundreds of high-ticket course creators, professional networks, and successful creators. The opportunity is vast and with the right strategy, traction quickly gains hold.
One of our Hosts, for example, earned $300,000 within three weeks of bringing his specialized marketing courses into a paid membership. Another Host quickly went from offering one-off courses sales via Instagram to creating a $2M membership business within a year.
We also worked recently with a Mighty Pro customer who had a lot of success with Coursera. Once they launched their branded apps with us, they saw hundreds of members join within the first 48 hours with the majority of new members choosing the annual subscription, earning them $20,000 revenue within the first 48 hours.
And for authors and experts with established followings, the traction they see is immediate with their communities adding thousands of paying members within the first 30-60 days.
To really speed up growth, you’ll need to deliver a better product
As you level up, you’re going to want to upgrade your product, too. This means not delivering your content and courses in a complicated user experience such as outdated WordPress plugins, complicated payment gateways, or multiple logins to access different parts of your courses, coaching, and content.
The best place to start leveling up your product is to bring all of your Facebook Groups, monthly challenges, and scattered engagement into ONE community that lives alongside your courses.
One of our customers is Cristy “CodeRed” Nickel, author of “The Code Red Revolution,” is a speaker, #2 world-ranked boxer (retired), celebrity nutritionist, award-winning personal trainer, and elite-level athlete. She offers weight loss and nutrition programs, monthly challenges, and personalized coaching.
As her course and coaching programs grew, so did the number of Facebook Groups. She’s now moved 20 Facebook Groups into her own branded apps with Mighty Pro.
Within 30 days, she had over 12,000 members join her membership, giving them one place to access coaching experiences, courses, livestreaming, and a supportive community. This has simplified her community management and lifted member engagement, especially with her morning livestreams which see hundreds of members joining.
Now, she can give members one login to access a lifetime membership, upsell them into different programs and digital products, run group coaching events, and give members an easy-to-find library of training videos.
Flip your funnel
Most marketers are good at creating content for the top of the funnel. And creating sales activation and direct response tactics for the bottom of the funnel. But it’s the middle—that messy part of the buying journey—where most prospects lose momentum.
Adding a free community as a call-to-action is a powerful way to propel more prospects through your funnel and create a self-sustaining pipeline into your paid membership products.
Aaron Doughty is a popular spiritual mentor with 1.2M YouTube subscribers. Over the years, he’s created multiple top-selling courses, as well as group coaching programs. His courses teach students energetics, spiritual awakening, mind-shifting mediations.
Aaron’s HighViber app offers a free community for his audience to grow spiritually and surround themselves with others who are on the same path.
Inside, thousands of members support each other, complete challenges, and can also easily go deeper into Aaron’s paid offerings such as his courses and group coaching programs.
Another successful tactic we’ve seen is hosting new workshops in your paid membership as a way to create FOMO and urgency for signing up for a membership. In our case study with LO sister, an online community of young women founded by Sadie Robertson Huff, their team broke down how they use workshops to structure new member campaigns.
Sadie is a New York Times best-selling author, speaker, TV star, and one of the world's most influential voices for young Christian women today, with over 4.6 million Instagram followers, national speaking tours, and a top-ranking podcast called, WHOA, That’s Good.
Her team found that it was hard to just promote people joining the membership on Instagram. So, they started creating new flagship workshops as a way to create excitement, have a compelling event to promote and raise awareness for new members to download their branded community apps.
“Building new workshops has been a key strategy in us releasing new content that allows us to really encourage new members to join the app every six to eight weeks,” says Courtney Leatherwood, Brand + Creative Marketing Manager at Live Original.
“It's our built-in way of always releasing new content and trying to attract new girls on a really consistent basis without ever feeling like we're saying the same thing over and over.”
This strategy has helped to bring new members into the app, building excitement around new workshops and exclusive content that goes beyond daily encouragement and social content.
Surround yourself with a high-performing team
On your journey to $1M in revenue, you’ve likely now reached the limit of what you can achieve alone. Trying to manage freelance developers to fix technical issues, responding to support tickets, writing copy for your email funnels, and digging into the data—it’s a lot to run even a small digital business.
This is why with Mighty Pro, we learned early that our customers needed more than just a platform to run their community and courses. Our customers also needed help with getting the work done so that they could launch faster, get support, and learn from other successful course creators (which they do in our private community).
From world-class design for your branded apps to help with onboarding and community migration plans, getting the space to delegate and speed to conquer your corner of the market faster is a leap that many entrepreneurs need to make.
You can see the services we offer for course creators here, along with the branded apps and community management platform that you get with Mighty Pro.
Take home the Mighty Math
Use the Mighty Pro Math Template to plot a path from $100K in course sales to a multi-million dollar membership business.
Better yet, book a 20-minute call with our team and we can walk you through the math and show you the exact steps to go from $100,000 in online course sales to building a multi-million dollar subscription business.
