The global e-learning market is set to hit $325 billion by the end of 2025, and right now, it’s easier than ever to get in on the action. Why? Because it’s not all about coding courses and academic topics anymore—you can teach anything you want.
From sports betting to arts and crafts, everyone has something they’re good at, tricks and tips to share, or experiences others can learn from—and all you need to do to turn this knowledge into an online course is sign up to Whop.
Whop is the platform for online courses—you can build your course right on the Whop website, price it however you want, and even sell it alongside other digital products. And it’s all so easy to do that honestly, this guide probably doesn’t even need to exist!
This is why I’ve pumped it full of helpful tips to make sure your course has everything it needs to sell like crazy.
Let’s get started.
Why sell your course on Whop?
If you want to sell online courses (great idea, by the way), then Whop is the perfect place to do it.
Why?
There are quite a few reasons, actually, but the main one is simple—because you can create, sell, and maintain your courses all on the same platform.
This streamlined approach is exactly what you want when setting up a passive income stream like an online course—because the less work you have to do, the better. As for the rest of those reasons I mentioned, here’s a big old list:
- Setting up a whop only takes a few minutes and it’s completely free.
- Whop's fee starts at just 3% whenever you make a sale. That means for every $100 you make, you keep up to $97.
- You can make as many whops and as many courses as you want with no hidden fees involved.
- Course creation is super simple and it all happens in-browser.
- You can create as many chapters and lessons as you want.
- You can add videos, images, attachments, text, quizzes, and knowledge checks to your course.
- You choose how to price and sell your course—as a one-time purchase, a subscription, a freebie, a bundle—whatever you want.
With all these benefits and more, Whop is truly the best platform to sell online courses.
How to get started on Whop
If we start counting from the moment you type “Whop” into your search engine, I estimate that you can get signed up, set up a whop, and start creating your online course within around three or four minutes.
The website will guide you through the sign-up process naturally, but just in case you want a little extra confirmation, here’s a step-by-step:
1. Visit the Whop website.
2. Click the blue Sign Up button in the bottom left-hand corner.
3. Click the orange “Create an account” link at the bottom of the sign-in box.
4. Enter your email, and Whop will send you a confirmation code.
5. Enter the confirmation code from your email.
6. Next, Whop will ask you to name your whop and give it a headline.
Check out this guide on how to create your own whop for more information.
Once you click enter, Whop will configure a few things, and then—boom! Confetti will rain down on your screen and your whop will be ready to go.
From there, you can check out the handy to-do list sitting at the bottom of the page.
This will help you decide what to do next. It will guide you through things like adding a logo, choosing a category, and adding gallery images to your whop. At some point, you’ll want to set up Whop Payments too, so you can get paid when someone makes a purchase.
The to-do list will stick around as long as you need it, so feel free to hit pause on it for now. In the meantime, you can start checking out the online course builder.
How to create your Whop course
There are all sorts of things you can sell on Whop, but today we’re looking at online courses.
Here’s how you can build one and start selling it, right on Whop.
1. Add the Courses app to your whop
At the top left-hand corner of your page, you’ll see the Your apps bar. Click the button on the right with the little squares and the plus sign.
This is how you add apps to your whop. Whop apps are just like the apps on your phone or your laptop—they add various functionalities to your whop.
Click the + New app button and a searchable list of apps will pop up. We want to make a course, so you should pick the Courses app.
Next, a pop-up will ask you if you want your course to be visible or to be hidden. This is up to you—but if you think your course will take a while to put together, I recommend making it a draft that you can publish when you’re done. Whichever you pick, you can change it any time in the app’s settings.
Note: One Courses app equals one course, so every time you want to add a new course, you should add a new Courses app. To keep track of them, you can change the app name to match your course name—just click the little settings cog to edit them.
2. Set up your first course
As soon as you add an app, it will appear in your app list. The courses app will be ready to go as soon as you click it, prompting you to setup your course. Go ahead and click the Begin setup button!
First of all, you’ll be asked to name your course and give it a tagline. You can change these later if you need to, so don’t feel the need to spend too long thinking of something catchy.
Next, you can add a description. This can be a bit longer than the tagline, so feel free to go into a bit more detail about what users will learn when they take your course. Again, you can edit this later if you want to.
After this, the popups are done and you’ll be able to look around your course freely. You can add an image or get right to the lesson-making.
3. Add your first lesson
When you create a lesson in your course, you can choose from a range of lesson types. The Multimedia lesson type is popular because you can add videos, attachments, and rich text content all in one lesson.
You can click the Upload file button to add a video (.mp4, .mov, .mpeg, or .webm files), click the Upload attachment button to add an attachment, or scroll down to the Notes section to add text.
The Notes section is just like a normal word processor—you can add headings, images, links, bullet points or numbered lists, code snippets, or quotes. If you’re making a video-only course, you can also use this space to add a transcript so people can follow along as they listen or search for key phrases without needing to check each part of the video.
If you choose a quiz or a knowledge check lesson, you can easily create multiple-choice questions by filling in a question and multiple options to choose from. You can also choose the completion requirements—the score a student needs to get to pass the quiz.
Lessons also have Drip feeding settings. This allows you to decide when a lesson unlocks for each user. You can either set it to “unlocks immediately” so a customer can access any part of your course as soon as they buy it, or you can choose a delayed unlock and choose the number of days you want to wait.
4. Fill your course with content
Now that you know how to create a lesson—you can go ahead and make as many as you want. You can organize lessons into chapters if your course is long, but it’s not a requirement. Whop’s course builder is super flexible, so there are a lot of different things you can do with it. Here are some examples:
- Full-length courses: Programming, languages, SEO, etc
- Mini-courses: How to post your first video on TikTok, how to invest in crypto, etc
- Step-by-step recipes
- Lifestyle/self-help courses: How to switch careers, how to become a morning person, etc
- Arts and crafts courses: How to knit, how to crochet, how to make your own t-shirt, etc
- Fitness courses
As long as the content you want to create can be broken down into steps, you can make it into a course. If you’ve sold other online content before like ebooks, you might even be able to make a course version of your ebook.
This can be a great way to draw in customers who prefer video over text or just aren’t interested in reading “books.”
5. Check out your course analytics
When your course is finished, you can publish it to make it visible to your customers. Once you start making sales, you can click on the Analytics tab on your course to see how your students are progressing.
You can view your course analytics by student or by lesson, so you can see which lessons are getting the most attention and see how far into the course each individual is.
This can help you see where improvements need to be made, and it could help you know when to reach out to a student to see if they need any help.
Top tips for making a course on Whop
So, now you know the basics of making a course on Whop. But knowing how to put a course together is a bit different from knowing how to make a successful course.
In this section, I’ll share some top tips for making a course that actually sells.
1. Choose the right type of course
If you have a passion project you want to bring to life, you can go ahead and do that—but if you’re here to make money, then the first step is always choosing something that will sell.
Online courses are huge right now but there are still more popular and less popular topics. On Whop, we find that courses covering affiliate marketing, social media growth, crypto, and sports betting are super popular.
Other growing topics include fitness, reselling, ecommerce, and personal finance. Creating online courses is all about sharing knowledge, so you’ve got to find a balance between what sells and what you know.
Of course, you can always learn more about a topic yourself before starting your course. If you’re willing to find the right resources, do lots of reading, and compile everything into one convenient course—that’s a product in itself, even if you don’t have a lot of personal expertise or experience to add.
2. Add lots of personal branding
Online courses really are everywhere right now, you can even buy huge PLR bundles of ready-made courses to sell—but there is a problem with these. They’re super generic, they’re boring, and they give off “mandatory workplace training” vibes.
To set yourself apart from these kinds of boilerplate courses, all you need to do is add your own personal touch to the products you create. You can do this by adding your logo to the attachments you upload, filming video lectures of yourself going through the material, creating your own images and graphics, and adding your own thoughts and opinions throughout the content.
Keeping your communication style personal and chatty is often a good tactic as well. Even if the topic you’re focusing on is often discussed in an academic setting—there’s no need for you to copy it. Online courses are available for anyone to buy and consume, so it’s a good idea to make them accessible and easy to understand.
If you do have personal expertise in the topic you're covering—emphasizing this is a great strategy for success. Build your course around your own experiences, teach your students to do what you do, and share the secrets that will allow them to find success as well. If you want to see this strategy in action, check out our interview with Alex Sedlak!
3. Set the right price
Pricing an online course isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Some courses have hundreds of hours of content presented by industry experts, and they cost hundreds of dollars. Some come with one-on-one coaching and these can cost thousands of dollars. Others are short and simple courses that can cost anything from $10 to $50.
For a lot of people, courses are seen as an investment, so high prices aren’t too discouraging. However, since a $1,000 price tag is a lot to pay all at once, some course creators use subscriptions to keep the pricing more accessible.
This usually works best for longer courses that will take a few months (for monthly subs) or weeks (for weekly subs) to complete. It also works well if you have a large catalog of different courses because you can sell a subscription that lets customers access as many courses as they want.
With the drip feeding settings I mentioned earlier, you can make sure your subscription-based course still has a minimum price tag. Say the sub costs $25 a week and you want to make at least $100 per user per course—you can split the course into four sections and have a new section unlock each week.
That way, to complete the course, a customer will have to subscribe for at least four weeks and pay at least $100. Just make sure you’re transparent about the pricing so your customer knows exactly what they’re signing up to.
The best way to price your course isn’t to think about how much money you want to earn but to think about how much you would be willing to pay if you were the customer. There’s absolutely no need to undervalue your products, but it’s also important not to overvalue them and risk driving customers away.
4. Revisit and update your course regularly
No one likes a course that’s been abandoned. The content is too old, you can’t find help when something goes wrong, and you just end up feeling like you’ve wasted your money.
On the flip side, a regularly updated and well-maintained course is an instant trust-builder with potential customers. You can even tell your customers when the next update is due, so both new customers and old know that your course is still relevant and up to date.
As for the changes you make during these updates—well it completely depends on the topic of your course. Maybe you’ll have enough new information to share that you can make a new lesson, or maybe you’ll just make some edits and add a few extra quizzes.
5. Create channels of communication with your students
Another great thing about Whop is that you can add loads of different types of apps to your storefront alongside your Courses apps. A lot of the apps we have help you communicate with your customers, and this can really help boost the success of your courses.
Here are a few of the apps we have so far:
- Chat app
- Announcements app
- Forums app
- 1-1 Coaching Calls app
- Whop Wheel app (for prizes)
- Events app
- Discord app
- Webinars app
If you want to keep your online course business as a passive income stream, you don’t have to go too crazy with different communication channels. You can just create a Forum where your users can ask each other questions and get in contact with you if they need help.
If you’re willing to put in some hours and make some extra cash—you can go all in. Create a Discord server for your users to chat in, sell one-on-one coaching calls where you help individuals work through the course, hold events or live seminars, and so much more.
At this point, you could argue that your whop is less of an online course and more of an “exclusive community.”
6. Add paid add-ons and extras over time
Many of the communication channels I just mentioned can be monetized. Your Discord server could be paid, live events could cost money, you could sell a “super subscription” that gives users access to everything on your whop—the possibilities really start to open up.
And once you have paying customers, you know what the smart thing to do is, right? Keep creating more content for them to buy! More courses, add-on modules, downloadables—the more you create, the more loyal your customers will become.
There’s nothing more exciting as a customer than discovering new content from a creator you like, so you absolutely don’t need to make multiple courses and products upfront. Release your first course, build up a customer base, and keep adding more over time.
It’s a great way to make your customers feel like they’re part of a thriving community, and it’s way easier for you as well. And if you’re not sure what to make next—just use your communication channels to ask your users what they want.
How to promote your course on Whop
Once your whop is all set up and you’re ready to start welcoming customers, you can share your link with anyone you want. Post it on social media, share it with an existing audience, create ads—do whatever you want.
If you want a bit of help with promotion, however, Whop has got your back. First of all, you can add your whop to the Discover page. This is a directory where users can search for certain topics and browse thousands of different products hosted on Whop. It helps boost your visibility and bring in customers who likely wouldn’t have found you otherwise.
This service does cost money but you don’t need to pay anything upfront—instead, Whop will just charge a larger fee when someone finds you through the Discover page and makes a purchase. If they find you any other way, you’ll only pay the usual 3% fee.
Another way to market your whop is to join Whop Affiliates. This works like any other affiliate program out there—you give your affiliates a link that they can share with their networks, and when someone makes a purchase through an affiliate link, the affiliate gets a commission.
This system is a win-win for everyone and it works super well when you have a thriving community full of customers that are excited to see what you release next.
So, what are you waiting for? Everything you need to create your first course is waiting for you on Whop, and it will only take a few minutes to get started!
