Building a course is the part everyone plans for. Selling it is the part that actually decides whether the work pays off, and it gets far less attention. This guide picks up where course-building tutorials stop: pricing, checkout, and the realistic first stretch of getting paying students in the door.
If you have not built the course itself yet, start with the build guide first. This one assumes you have lessons and a quiz in place, or close to it, and you are trying to figure out how to turn that into revenue.
Why sell on your own WordPress site instead of a hosted platform
Hosted course platforms handle everything for you, and that convenience has a cost. Most charge a recurring monthly fee, and on top of that many also take a cut of every sale. The more your course sells, the more that cut adds up, and you cannot switch it off.
Selling through your own WordPress site works differently. You install a plugin, connect a payment processor, and the checkout runs on your domain. The only deduction on a sale is the processor’s own transaction fee, the same fee that applies whether you sell through Stripe directly, through a hosted platform’s Stripe integration, or through your own site. Nothing else is skimmed off the top.
The tradeoff is that you take on the setup yourself: hosting, the plugin, the payment connection, the emails. None of that is difficult with modern tools, but it is real work you would otherwise hand off to a hosted platform. This guide walks through each piece.
Choose how you’ll take payment
Before you set a price, decide how buyers will pay. On WordPress this usually means one of three paths.
Built-in LMS checkout. Some course plugins, Learnomy included, ship Stripe and PayPal checkout as part of the plugin itself. You connect your Stripe or PayPal account in settings, mark a course as paid, and the checkout, payment confirmation, and enrollment happen automatically. Nothing else to install.
WooCommerce. If you already run a WooCommerce store, or want the broader ecommerce features it brings, you can sell a course as a WooCommerce product and connect it to your LMS plugin. This adds a second plugin to maintain and a slightly more involved setup, but it makes sense if you’re selling courses alongside physical products or need WooCommerce’s specific extensions.
A hosted checkout page. Some creators point buyers to a separate checkout tool and manually grant access afterward. This works at very small scale but does not hold up once you have more than a handful of sales, since every enrollment becomes a manual step.
For most people starting out, the built-in checkout is the lazier and more reliable choice. One plugin, one settings screen, no reconciliation between two systems.
Set up your payment processor
Whichever checkout path you choose, you’ll need a Stripe or PayPal account (or both) tied to your own bank details, not a shared or platform-managed account. Sign up directly with the processor, verify your business or individual details, and get your API keys or client credentials.
In Learnomy, this connection lives under Learnomy Settings > Payments, where you paste your Stripe publishable and secret keys, or your PayPal client ID and secret. Both support a test mode, so run a full test purchase with a test card before taking real money. Confirm three things in that test run: the payment goes through, the student gets enrolled automatically, and the confirmation email arrives. If any of those three fails silently, you’ll find out from a support email instead of a test run, which is a worse way to find out.
Price your first course honestly
There’s no formula that spits out the right number, but there are a few things worth checking before you pick one.
Price against the outcome, not the hours. A student is not paying for the number of video minutes; they’re paying for the result the course gets them to. A tightly scoped course that solves one real problem can justify a higher price than a sprawling course that covers everything loosely.
Look at what comparable courses charge. Search for courses on the same topic, on any platform, and note the range. You don’t need to match it exactly, but pricing far outside that range without a clear reason (a well-known name, a much narrower promise, extra support included) will confuse buyers more than it impresses them.
Resist the urge to price low “to be safe.” A very low price doesn’t remove the risk of low sales, it just caps your upside if the course does sell. It can also signal low value, which works against you. If you’re unsure, price toward the middle of the comparable range and adjust from actual sales data rather than guessing downward before you have any data at all.
Decide between one-time and subscription pricing. A one-time purchase is simpler to explain and sell. A membership or subscription model, where students pay monthly or annually for ongoing access, suits situations where you’re adding content regularly or running an ongoing community alongside the course. Learnomy supports both: mark a course as a one-time paid purchase, or gate it behind a membership plan with recurring billing.
Consider a coupon for your first cohort. A time-limited discount for your first batch of students is a reasonable way to get early feedback and testimonials, as long as it’s framed as a launch offer with an end date, not your permanent price.
Publish the course for sale
Once pricing is decided, the mechanics are short.
Open the course in your Course Builder and go to the Access tab. Set the access type to Paid (or Paid or Membership if you also want a subscription path), and enter your price. Save, then set the course status to Published.
Your course now has a live URL on your /courses/ catalog and its own landing page. Before sending any traffic to it, read that landing page as a stranger would. Does the description explain who the course is for and what changes for them by the end? Does it say what’s actually inside (number of lessons, format, whether there’s a certificate)? A course page that only says “learn X” without saying how or for whom tends to convert worse than one that’s specific.
Add a short FAQ section addressing the two or three questions you already know buyers will ask, refund terms, access length, whether there’s support included. Answering those before the sale avoids the drop-off that happens when a buyer has to email you to find out.
Add proof and structure that make people trust the checkout
A course page competes with everything else in a browser tab, and buyers are cautious about paying for something they can’t preview. A few things reduce that hesitation.
Offer a free preview lesson or two. Seeing your teaching style before paying removes a lot of the uncertainty around an unfamiliar course. Mark one or two early lessons as free access inside the course structure so anyone can sample them without buying.
If you have a certificate, mention it on the sales page along with what the verification looks like. A certificate with a public verification link (Learnomy issues one at a permanent URL) is a concrete deliverable, which reads as more credible than a vague promise of “certification.”
If your course includes a quiz or graded assessment, say so. Buyers evaluating a course against a cheaper alternative often want to know whether it’s a passive video series or something with actual checkpoints.
None of this requires testimonials or reviews you don’t have yet. Manufacturing social proof you don’t have is worse than not having any; a clear, specific description does more work early on than a fabricated quote.
Get your first students
The course being live does not mean it will sell itself. Selling anything, including a course, is mostly a distribution problem, and it’s worth being honest about that upfront rather than assuming a good course markets itself.
Start with people who already know you. An email list, a social following, a community you’re active in, these are warmer than any paid ad to a stranger. If you don’t have an audience yet, building even a small one (a newsletter, a niche community, a consistent posting habit somewhere specific) tends to matter more than any single launch tactic.
Write about the problem the course solves, not just the course. Blog posts, videos, or social threads that address the underlying problem, and mention the course as the deeper resource, tend to bring in people who are already looking for a solution rather than people who happen to be scrolling.
Use a coupon for a launch window, not indefinitely. A discount tied to a specific date creates a reason to buy now instead of bookmarking the page and forgetting about it. Learnomy’s coupon system supports percentage or fixed-amount discounts with usage limits, so you can cap how many people get the launch price.
Expect the first weeks to be slow, and don’t read that as failure. A brand-new course from a creator with no track record on that specific topic rarely sells briskly out of the gate. The realistic pattern is a small trickle of sales from your closest audience, followed by slower, steadier growth as the course gets shared, reviewed, and found through search. Treat the first month as a data-gathering period, not a verdict on whether the course works.
Watch your actual numbers, not vibes. Learnomy’s Commerce dashboard shows enrollments, revenue, and completion rates in one place, so you can see whether people who buy are actually finishing lessons. A course with strong sales but poor completion is a different problem than a course with weak sales and strong completion, and the fix for each is different.
What you keep after a sale
This is worth stating plainly because it’s easy to gloss over. When a student pays through Stripe or PayPal on your own site, the processor deducts its standard transaction fee and the rest goes to you directly, settled into your own bank account on the processor’s normal schedule. There is no LMS platform fee subtracted on top of that. If you’re running Learnomy’s instructor commission system because other people teach on your site, that split is something you configure yourself (a default share between the site and the instructor), not a fee imposed by the plugin.
This is the main practical difference from hosted platforms, where a monthly subscription fee and a per-sale cut both apply regardless of how the course performs. On your own WordPress site, your costs are mostly fixed (hosting, and a paid plugin tier if you use one) rather than scaling with your revenue. That matters more the better the course sells, and matters less if you only ever sell a handful of seats. Neither approach is wrong, but know which one you’re choosing and why.
Where to go from here
If you’re still deciding which plugin to build on, the best LMS plugins for WordPress comparison covers what’s free versus paywalled across the major options. If you’re specifically weighing Learnomy’s free plugin against Pro, free vs Pro lays out the exact feature split, and pricing has the current numbers. For the build side of this guide, the documentation covers every setting referenced above in more depth.