Others
May 30, 2023
Many experts and educators face a frustrating reality: they invest time and effort creating high-quality courses, yet struggle to turn that effort into real income. The problem isn’t the courses themselves and sometimes not even the built-in tools that most LMS platforms have. It’s what methods and strategies you apply to gain the most benefit from both – your course and the LMS platform you chose to work with. So, how do you actually monetize your educational content? Monetization is quite a comprehensive process. First you create the course, but what is next? How do you advertise it? How do you find your audience? How do you keep your learners engaged and motivated through time to pursue your course further? These and many more questions fall into the gap between course creation and revenue generation.
In this article we discuss methods and strategies you can use in your LMS platform that are aimed at gaining the most profit from online courses. We will delve into ways to keep your audience interested in your content and discuss how precisely MasterStudy LMS and its features can assist you in achieving your best monetization goals.
Free Trial Courses
Imagine you finally created your course? What’s next? How do you find your audience? Offering a free trial is one of the smartest first steps to take. It’s a thought-through way to increase revenue from the LMS course.
When learners can try a course for free, they can see the value of your content without taking any financial risk. This helps build trust and confidence in your teaching, making them much more likely to pay for the full course or sign up for a subscription. For you personally it means you will find your devoted audience that is motivated, interested to learn and ready to pay for what you have to offer.
For example, if you offer the first module of a 10-lesson course as a free trial, saying that it is a part of a larger and more comprehensive course. Thus learners will not only experience your teaching style, the quality of the materials, but will also see the results they can achieve if after the Free Trail they will purchase for more.
Once they see the benefits, many will upgrade to access the full course. In this way, free trials act as a bridge between attracting new users and turning them into paying customers, helping you generate more consistent and long-term income from your LMS.
MasterStudy LMS is a feature-rich plugin, which has everything it takes to turn curiosity into revenue. One of such features of the all-in-one plugin is Trial Courses.
Trial Courses of MasterStudy LMS can definitely help you monetize your e-learning business.
Let’s see how it works via an example:
An online cooking academy offers a full “Mastering Italian Cuisine” course, but also enables a trial course for the first two lessons. It can be a free webinar or masterclass you can arrange via MasterStudy LMS Add-Ons such as “Zoom Conference” or “Google Meet”.
The Zoom Conference and Google Meet add-ons in MasterStudy LMS let instructors run live, interactive lessons directly within their courses. Students can join sessions from the LMS, enabling real-time engagement, Q&A, and collaborative learning without leaving the platform. Amazing start of your Trail Course to show what you have to offer.
Here is a step-by-step guide of how you get your audience to subscribe to your full course:
Step 1: Free Access – Visitors can try the first two lessons for free, showcasing teaching style, recipes, and video quality.
Step 2: Build Trust – Students enjoy the trial lessons and gain confidence in the course’s value.
Step 3: Upsell – At the end of the trial, an automated email is sent:
“Loved the first lessons? Unlock the full course now and get 15% off for the next 48 hours!”
Step 4: Monetization Result – Many trial users convert to paid students because they’ve already experienced the value of the course. Some also sign up for a membership to access all available cooking courses.
Once trial users enroll in your LMS, you can send targeted follow-up emails encouraging them to:
Buy similar or advanced courses
Upgrade to a membership or subscription with broader access
Take bundled course deals
Email Manager
Another tool that can assist you in achieving your monetization goals is Email Manager. By sending targeted, automated emails, you can promote paid courses, offer discounts or bundles, announce new content or live sessions, and re-engage users who haven’t yet purchased.
This direct communication helps guide learners from free trials or basic courses to premium offerings, boosting conversions and creating steady, long-term income streams. In essence, Email Manager transforms your LMS from a content platform into a proactive revenue-generating system. That is why it’s important to choose an LMS platform that has a built-in Email Manager.
Email Manager by MasterStudy LMS is a user-friendly tool that will help you Boost Course Sales Through Better Communication.
The Email Manager feature in MasterStudy LMS lets you customize and automate email notifications that go out to students, instructors, and admins (e.g., new course announcements, promotions, reminders). This helps in a way that consistent and branded messaging helps you stay top of mind and can increase course purchases and engagement.
Support Marketing & Promotional Emails
Via Email Manager you can send targeted emails for special offers, new course launches, or limited-time deals. Well-timed, branded emails can drive more conversions and encourage repeat purchases.
Improve Brand Recognition & Trust with Email Manager
Adding your logo, consistent visuals, and personalized messaging builds trust with your audience and trust increases the likelihood that students will buy more courses or upgrade to subscriptions/memberships.
Automate Engagement That Drives Revenue
Automated notifications about new content, course availability, or course completion keep students engaged. Higher engagement often leads to higher retention and more upsell opportunities (like memberships or advanced courses).
Thus Email Manager enhances communication, marketing, engagement, and brand experience – all critical factors that help you increase purchases, retention, and long-term revenue from your LMS.
Sending a well-timed email before a course starts is a powerful way to boost monetization. A pre-launch message builds anticipation, collects leads, and warms up potential buyers by clearly explaining the value of the upcoming course. Many creators use this strategy successfully.
For example, a fitness instructor who pre-launched her “30-Day Home Workout Program” emailed her existing students one week before the release, offered a 20% early-bird discount, and filled 60% of her seats before the first lesson was uploaded. With just one strategic email, she generated upfront revenue, reactivated past students, and set the course up for a strong launch. Pre-course emails turn anticipation into actual income.
Email Manager in MasterStudy LMS has everything that it takes and even more to increase your income. You can effortlessly:
- Create Perfect Emails with Your Corporate Style
- Send custom emails for different aspects of your work to notify students about new courses, etc.
- Custom Template for Each Event
- Edit Visual Content
- Automate the Mailing Process
Custom Course Pages
Creating custom landing pages for your courses is a key strategy for boosting revenue in an LMS. Bright, engaging pages that clearly highlight your course’s key features, such as learning outcomes, lesson previews, testimonials, and pricing capture attention and build trust with potential learners. Well-designed landing pages guide visitors toward taking action, whether that’s signing up for a free trial, purchasing a course, or subscribing to a membership. By presenting your content in a visually appealing and persuasive way, custom landing pages turn casual visitors into paying customers and maximize the monetization potential of your courses.
MasterStudy LMS feature Custom Course Pages lets you customize the layout and design of individual course pages, meaning you can turn the page students see before enrolling into a conversion-focused landing page. You can choose from several built-in templates or build your own using Elementor, complete with sales-oriented sections like pricing blocks, testimonials, countdown timers, instructor info, and more.
A dedicated landing page focuses on one thing: getting the visitor to buy or enroll.
With a custom layout, you can highlight:
- Course benefits
- What students will learn
- Testimonials and success stories
- Instructor credibility
- Pricing and bonuses
- This clear structure typically boosts conversion rates, leading directly to more income.
You can create unique landing pages for high-value or flagship courses.
This allows you to:
- Tell a richer story
- Show more visuals
- Add countdown timers, guarantees, FAQs
- As a result, students see more value and have higher willingness to pay.
During launches, discounts, or holiday offers, you can create a special landing page with:
- Early-bird offers
- Special bundles
- Limited-time deals
- This will definitely drive impulse purchases and boost campaign revenue.
Let’s take an example, a design instructor created a custom landing page for her “Figma Mastery” course using Elementor + MasterStudy widgets. She added:
- A powerful headline
- Before/after student work
- Testimonials
- A countdown timer for early-bird pricing
Eventually her conversion rate increased from 2.1% to 6.4%, tripling her revenue during the launch week simply because the landing page communicated value better.
As it turns out custom landing pages are a major monetization booster. They help you convert more visitors, sell higher-priced courses, run better promotions, and improve traffic sources.
Taxes
Having built-in tax features in an LMS is essential for maximizing course revenue. By automatically calculating and applying taxes, the system ensures legal compliance and smooth, hassle-free transactions for learners. This makes it easy to sell courses globally, reduces the risk of payment disputes, and presents clear, professional pricing that builds trust. With taxes handled automatically, you remove barriers to purchase and open the door to more reliable and consistent revenue from your courses.
Proper tax management in MasterStudy LMS is the feature that can help boost your course sales by making prices transparent and ensuring compliance. With the Taxes feature you do not have to calculate taxes manually and there is no more need figuring out how much to charge on your own. Tax rates based on the buyer’s country are now automatically built into the course price. This makes tax management much easier for creators because they can instantly see which taxes apply, how much they need to pay, and factor those costs into their pricing from the start. It’s especially valuable for selling courses internationally, where dealing with multiple countries and tax rules would otherwise take hours of manual calculations. By setting country-specific tax rates and controlling how prices are displayed, students know exactly what they’ll pay, which reduces hesitation at checkout and increases conversions.
MasterStudy LMS Taxes feature is easy to use. It gives you:
- Quick Tax Control
- Customizable Tax Display
- Easy Country Tax Set Up
For example, an online design academy selling courses to students in multiple countries configured taxes for each region and displayed prices clearly. As a result, international students were more confident to complete purchases, reducing cart abandonment and increasing total revenue. While taxes don’t directly generate income, they support monetization by building trust and creating a smoother, more professional buying experience.
One‑Time Course Purchases
Another way to boost your monetization is to offer one-time course purchases in an LMS. It is a powerful way to generate immediate revenue. By allowing learners to pay once for full access, you create a clear, upfront value proposition that’s easy to understand and purchase. This approach encourages commitment, boosts conversion rates, and provides predictable income for each course sold. One-time purchases also give you flexibility to price courses according to content depth or demand, helping maximize revenue while building a solid base of paying customers.
Courses in MasterStudy LMS can be set up with one‑time purchase pricing so students pay a single fee to access a course. This is the most direct way to earn revenue: once the payment is processed, students get access to the learning materials. You control the pricing in the course’s pricing settings.
For example, you can set the price on a course and let students purchase it directly via the “Get Course” button, this generates revenue each time someone buys.
Course Bundles
Offering course bundles in an LMS is an effective strategy to increase monetization. By packaging multiple courses together at a single price, you provide learners with greater perceived value, encouraging them to spend more than they might on individual courses. Bundles also promote cross-selling, helping learners discover related content and increasing overall engagement. This approach not only boosts immediate revenue but also strengthens customer loyalty by offering comprehensive learning paths that meet multiple needs in one purchase. You can use this feature to separate your course materials and structure them into bundles, offering discounts to attract more customers.
MasterStudy includes a Course Bundle add-on that lets you package multiple courses together and sell them as a single product for a set price. This adds value for students and increases your revenue per sale.
For instance, bundle 3 related courses on web design and sell them at a discount compared to buying individually, leading to higher total income. Despite that you can offer special season discounts for bundles to get more customers to buy them at a better price.
Subscription Plans
Implementing subscription plans in an LMS is a powerful way to generate recurring revenue. By giving learners access to a range of courses for a regular fee, subscriptions create predictable, ongoing income while encouraging continuous engagement with your content. This model increases customer lifetime value, allows flexible pricing strategies, and makes it easier to upsell premium content or new courses. Subscription plans turn one-time learners into long-term subscribers, maximizing monetization and building a stable, scalable revenue stream.
With the Subscriptions add‑on in MasterStudy, you can offer access to courses through recurring payments. Students pay regularly (e.g., monthly) to continue access, creating a steady income stream rather than one‑time sales.
You can set up a monthly subscription that gives access to a specific course and renews automatically, generating ongoing revenue.
Membership Plans
Memberships provide learners with exclusive access to courses, resources, or community features for a recurring fee, creating a steady and predictable revenue stream. This model encourages ongoing engagement, fosters loyalty, and allows you to offer premium content or perks that justify higher pricing tiers. By turning learners into members rather than one-time buyers, membership plans maximize customer lifetime value and support sustainable growth for your e-learning business.
One of the standout features of MasterStudy LMS is its Membership system, which gives students access to multiple courses, entire categories, or even the whole site through flexible subscription-based plans. With easy setup of content access rules and automated recurring payments, it delivers a seamless, premium learning experience that keeps learners engaged, encourages long-term retention, and turns your LMS into a powerful revenue-generating engine.
Each of these purchase methods helps you generate income in a different way:
- One‑time purchases → direct, straightforward revenue
- Bundles → higher value per sale
- Subscriptions → recurring revenue, improved lifetime value
- Memberships → steady income and better engagement
- WooCommerce → advanced e‑commerce capabilities and flexibility
Together, these features let you tailor your pricing model and build a more profitable online learning business using MasterStudy LMS.
MasterStudy LMS is more than just a platform to create courses, it’s a complete revenue engine for your e-learning business. By leveraging features like Email Manager, custom course pages, trial courses, memberships, subscriptions, and flexible purchasing options, you can attract students, build trust, boost conversions, and generate both immediate and recurring income. Whether you’re launching your first course or managing a full online academy, MasterStudy LMS gives you the tools to turn your knowledge into a sustainable, scalable, and profitable business.
