How to Choose a Profitable Niche For Online Course Business

Are you trying to figure out the perfect niche for your online course? It is especially hard when you want one that is both profitable and aligned with your expertise. 

In this article, you will discover how to identify a niche that not only taps into your strengths but also solves real problems for your target audience. To help you choose the right niche, I interviewed seasoned course creators and included tips and strategies from multi-figure course coaches who help other creators start an online course business. 

Plus, you can get our free downloadable guide, packed with a list of ten scalable course niches and 140+ actionable course ideas. Let’s get into it.

The most profitable niches of the year 

Since you are looking to start your course business, the first question that crosses your mind is, “What online course niche makes the most money?”.

Most course creators choose the following niche categories that are the most popular nowadays, including

• Self-improvement, especially areas like habit-building, mindset, and productivity
• Dating and relationship with topics like improving communication, dating tips, or relationship coaching
• Career, particularly in skill development, job search strategies, remote work tips, and career advancement.
• Health, with a focus on fitness, mental health, and nutrition,
• Finance, where people are seeking strategies to manage money or build wealth
• Technology, particularly in AI, cybersecurity, and software tutorials. 

If you are looking for a detailed and step-by-step guide on how to start your course business within those niches, check our Niches and guides to monetize your skills.

We have also created a list of the top 10 online course niches with course examples and 140 ideas so that you can take inspiration from them for your next course. You can download our free guide here.   
 

Yet, does that mean you have to jump into these areas and pick a topic from there to make a profitable course? Not necessarily. Because the right niche for your business is not always what is broad, popular, or spoken about so often. 

As Dan Koe, a popular creator who helps other creators with their businesses, mentions, “The most profitable niche is you.”

Let’s see how you can find the course topic and niche that works specifically for you, no matter how unpopular it may seem. 

What makes your online course niche profitable 

What makes your course niche idea work is NOT the industry you are in. There are two deciding factors when it comes to making your niche profitable.

• The pain. This is how big of a problem your course solves. If you cannot communicate exactly what your course helps students with, how would you expect to attract thousands of students who show interest in what you offer?   
   
• The urgency. This is all about how quickly your potential students need the solution and how you can provide it. Urgency is not always about the hot topics in the market. It is also about how you position your course in a way that solves that one problem quickly. 

Sunny Lenarduzzi’s quote sums this whole up perfectly. 

“If people aren’t in pain and there isn’t an urgent need to get a solution, they have no reason to do the work to create the solution. And they definitely don’t have a reason to invest their hard-earned money into your course.”  
 

Sunny Lenarduzzi

Entreprenuer, course coach 

How to choose a niche that makes a profitable online course 

Your ideal course niche is where your experience, passion, and market demand intersect. Let’s see if you can find that intersection point. 

Who am I?

One of the first steps when brainstorming niches for your online course business is digging deep into your expertise and passions. When you think about it, you will likely get a course from someone who is knowledgeable in the area, has built trust, and has proved that they are who they preach. 

To become that trusted course creator in the niche you will eventually develop in, reflect back on your expertise and passions. You do not necessarily have to have a degree in that area. Just think about:

• What are the best skills that can help me teach others or skills that I feel confident in transferring to others?
• What industries have I worked in, and what previous roles did I have?
• What do your friends and family mostly ask you for advice?
• What is a challenge or common problem you overcame yourself and can teach others to do so? 

Let’s say you have worked in project management. Throughout your career, you have most certainly developed skills like managing timelines, coordinating teams, and ensuring project goals are met efficiently. Meaning, that you can pick a niche where learners are seeking to develop those particular skills. 

I interviewed former headmaster and edupreneur Uwe Jens Gemba, and here is what he shared about how he found his niche. 

“I have become an enterprising edupreneur without even knowing that I was becoming one. I had numerous tasks that went way beyond the task of a traditional headmaster because suddenly, I was sitting on a board with CEOs, and we were discussing the development of the school and how we should project our future. And suddenly, people started to ask me, because of my background, if I could help them to do this and that”.

Uwe Jens Gemba 

Edupreneur

And now he is teaching others to set up their online schools and operate them.

Who do I help?

The next questions to think about when defining your niche are

• Who do you help?
• Who you do NOT help 

If you are making your course for everyone and trying to appeal to everyone, you will eventually get no one’s attention. Your course niche is about finding that one specific student to solve that one specific challenge and reach that one outcome. 

“If you help a bunch of different people, it creates a confusing roadmap that is inefficient. Because you try to serve people at different strating points, instead of focusing on one person and giving them the efficient blueprint that gets them from zero to hero.”

Sunny Lenarduzzi

Entreprenuer, course coach 

You may think, for example, that since I am a nutritionist, I should create my courses for those who want to balance their diet. This sector is pretty broad, isn’t it? Are they people looking to gain weight? Are they athletes aiming to optimize performance? Are they individuals managing specific health conditions like diabetes or heart disease? 

If you cannot figure out what audience you want to target for your course niche, Sarah Cordiner advises asking yourself the following question: “Who were you when you most needed the thing that you are now an expert in?”. 

This question will help you discover the way you overcame certain pain points, which you can now teach your audience of students. 

What gap can I fill? 

Now that you are clear about where your strengths lie and who your courses are for, you can think about the way you solve that problem. It is usually that gap existing in the market that differentiates your approach and suggests a highly scalable and profitable niche for your courses. 

“What you really need to pay attention to is whether or not the course you are creating is filling a gap in your industry that nobody else is filling. Once you figure out the unmet gaps, think about how I can infuse more of my unique way of solving the problem into this topic.”

Eli Natoli

Course creator, coach, and marketing strategist 

One statement, called your unique selling proposition, helps you discover what unique approach you bring to that broad course niche you chose. Here is an example formula:

Here are a few ways you can find what unique approach you bring to the table within your course niche.  

• Do market research. The best way to do it is to survey your audience directly. Use social media polls, email newsletters, or forums to ask questions. 
• Look for common questions in communities. You can analyze forums, Facebook groups, or Reddit threads related to your niche. Check what people are asking, where they are struggling, and how your course can help them.
• Check other course creators. Explore existing courses in your niche. Pay attention to their reviews and testimonials. What are students praising? What are they complaining about? 

Is there a demand for it? 

We have worked with thousands of course creators who are very excited to share their course ideas with the students. Once they discover where their passion and expertise lie, they jump straight into bringing that idea to life. The results? They end up in a niche and with a course topic idea that does not sell as well as they planned to. 

 That is why you still need to validate that niche and course topic to see if there is any market demand. 

“When it comes to market demand, make sure there are at least 10.000 people on the planet who can be easily reached and actually want what you have to offer. Spend some time to see if there is market demand. Then, just look for the sweet spot where your expertise, passion, and market demand intersect. That’s your niche.” 

Marisa Murgatroyd

Course coach

There are a few ways you can check if people are willing to pay for the course in your niche. 

• You can search for topics in which you have expertise in course marketplaces like Coursera or Udemy. Here, you can analyze the courses which cover broader topics. You can also get into details and explore the outlines, what they cover, and how they perform. It will give you an idea not only for the niche but also for a specific course topic in general. 

• Check with tools like Google Trends and Answer the Public. Here, the results are based on what your potential students search for and what solution they are looking for. For example, let’s say you are a language specialist and choose it as your niche. As you type in your relevant topics, you will see the main directions that are in demand where you can provide quick wins and solutions. This helps you to target a specific group of students who are looking for a solution to a specific challenge. 

With Google Trends, you can even compare several of your course niche ideas to see where there is more demand. Just pick the time duration and enter your two or more niche ideas for comparison. 

In the example below, we can see that within the past 90 days, more people were interested in English language courses than French language courses. 

• Another way to see if there is interest in the niche you picked for your course is by checking what content creators teach to their audiences on social media. You can check posts on LinkedIn, Instagram, or even TikTok and analyze the content within your niche in mind. See if there is engagement, how the students interacted with that content, and how they showed interest. And if there is engagement, you are ready to fill in the gap with your unique idea or approach as we discussed in step three. 

Let’s find your sub-niche with AI

We hope the tips and strategies shared above helped you get a better idea of what your online course niche can be. If you have already chosen the industry, let’s use Uteach’s free AI tool to help you get scalable course ideas for your specific niche. 

All you need to do is type in a specific category you want your course to be in and click “Get Started”. 

As you sign up for free, the tool will show you a number of profitable niche ideas in that category. You can later choose one of the ideas and generate your course outline with the AI tool as well. 

Try AI Idea Generator and get started with your online course today.