Growing an Online Business: Marketing, Sales & Customers
Learn to position an online offer, attract visitors through search, content, social media, email and ads, convert them with clear pages and funnels, and keep customers with measurable, legally aware methods.
Self-study course Self-study course: written lessons, videos and downloadable materials for independent learning. There is no supervision, assessment, individual feedback or tutoring. Self-check quizzes are evaluated automatically in your browser — we do not see your results.
All 12 lessons free
Before you start
- Basic percentage calculations
- A first business idea or an existing small offer
- Basic knowledge of costs and margins (for example from the business basics course)
What you will be able to do
- Choose a niche with a weighted scoring matrix and write a positioning statement
- Structure a sales page and calculate its conversion rate
- Prioritise keywords, content and social media by cost per lead and expected value
- Set up a GDPR-aware email list and evaluate campaigns by revenue per email
- Calculate funnel conversion, advertising returns, CAC, LTV, churn and break-even
- Describe the basic legal duties of online sellers in Germany and know when to ask a professional
Lessons in this course
From Idea to Online Offer: Positioning and Niche
Choose a niche with a weighted scoring matrix, write a positioning statement and turn your idea into a concrete online offer.
Your Website as a Sales Tool: Structure and Trust
Structure a sales page section by section, add credible trust signals and measure the page with a conversion rate.
Search Engine Optimisation Basics
Understand how search engines find and rank pages, match content to search intent and prioritise keywords with a simple value formula.
Content Marketing and Video
Plan content with pillars and clusters, script short and long videos, repurpose one piece into many and measure the cost per lead.
Social Media Marketing Without Hype
Choose platforms by customer fit, measure engagement and clicks instead of followers, and follow German rules for labelling advertising.
Email Marketing and Newsletters (with GDPR Basics)
Build an email list with valid consent, plan a welcome sequence, read campaign metrics and understand the basic GDPR and UWG rules in Germany.
Paid advertising: budgets, targeting and measuring results
Plan a small test budget for online ads, choose sensible targeting and judge results with CPC, CPA and break-even ROAS instead of gut feeling.
Sales funnels and conversion rates with numbers
Map your sales funnel step by step, calculate step and overall conversion rates, and find the bottleneck that is worth fixing first.
Pricing models online: one-time, subscription and freemium
Compare one-time, subscription, freemium and tiered pricing with expected revenue per customer, and choose a model that fits your product.
Customer service, reviews and retention
Set up simple service standards, handle reviews honestly and within German rules, and calculate what better retention is worth compared with new customers.
Legal basics for online sellers in Germany: Impressum, terms and withdrawal (general orientation)
Get a general orientation on the Impressum, checkout rules, the consumer right of withdrawal and the new withdrawal button for online sales in Germany.
Metrics dashboard: CAC, LTV, churn and break-even
Build a one-page monthly dashboard with CAC, churn, LTV, LTV-to-CAC ratio, payback period and break-even customers to steer an online business.
Trading Foundations
To apply this structured, numbers-based thinking to the financial markets, continue with the course "Trading Foundations".
View course outline