The benefits of creating and selling an online course include the opportunity to personally engage your audience, offer them great value, and turn them into lifelong repeat buyers.
That's because...
Your audience is looking for quality content; they need your help with the problems they're facing. An online course will help you establish a reputation for your expertise. It's your opportunity to impart knowledge about your niche to your audience personally and effectively, with little effort and desirable results, such as turning them into loyal brand advocates who tell their friends about you.
Who doesn't want that!?
While setting up an online course doesn't have to be complex; it involves several steps and moving parts. In this blog, I'll cover the basic steps to help facilitate your planning with a focus on the following:
Bonus: At the end of this blog, you'll find a link to a free downloadable course readiness assessment tool, just for you!
Know Your Audience
For your online course to succeed, it must be interesting and relevant to your audience. The best online courses tackle people's current problems and offer an immediate solution.
To create an effective and efficient course, you must know your audience well to target the kind of help they need. Solve a problem your audience is facing and assure success.
Before planning your course, you'll want to review and update what you know about your target audience.
Pick the Perfect Topic
The topic you choose will greatly determine the success or failure of your online course. Spend time brainstorming and trying out different ideas, then narrow your choice to the optimal one.
Here are three key factors to consider when selecting the best topic for your course.
Your Passion. You know, the thing that lights you up and you could go on and on about. The energy and enthusiasm you bring by sharing your passion will undoubtedly have a positive ripple effect on the participants.
Your Area of Knowledge. Choose something you know well. The whole point is to impart your expertise to the participants so you can help solve an issue they are facing. Think, what do you most often help people with? What topics were your best-performing content about?
Useful for Your Audience. The most important thing is that it's useful for your audience. What things you can teach them to do? They should leave your online course feeling empowered and mastering a new skill.
Choose Course Format
Now that you know your audience well and have chosen a topic, it's time to determine how you'll deliver this knowledge.
When choosing a format, first consider your audience's tastes. What do you know about their preferences? If you're unsure, you can test your ideas by asking them using a simple questionnaire or survey.
There are no cookie-cutter formulas you must adhere to, but here are further considerations when deciding on your format:
Will you offer a mini-course with just a few sessions or a longer course that stretches over weeks or months?
How much content will be online and in person? Or will it be a blend of both?
Will your course live vs. pre-recorded work be content at your own pace, or will it be a bit of both?
Will the coursework be done during sessions, or will there be workbooks and other outside assignments for participants?
Finally, consider adding some form of final assessment. This could be a test at the end of the course to demonstrate that participants have mastered the material, or they could receive a certificate of completion.
Tip: Want to make the learning experience more interactive, engaging, and enjoyable? Consider gamifying your course. For example, add points or fun sounds to reward participants for completing each module. Studies show that gamification significantly reinforces learning because it engages our brain differently by fuelling our feel-good hormone dopamine. Let's face it: who doesn't like a reward for completing a task?!
Create an Outline
With your chosen topic and format in mind, now's the time to sketch out an outline for your course. You don't need to have all the content ready right now, but it's a good idea to break the topic down into parts to plan the course further.
Tip: Once your outline is complete, you can use it as a handy reference when creating marketing materials to tell people what's included.
If your course will teach people how to do something, find a logical way to break it up into bite-sized pieces and identify the significant steps along the way.
One way to accomplish this is to include a learning activity at the end of each module or session. With the end in mind, you can work backward, filling in the content the participants need to know and what they need to do to reach their goal. This will also help you decide what additional learning materials, such as templates or worksheets, you'll need at different points during the course.
An excellent tip for breaking up a topic is to find books about your chosen topic on Amazon. Look at the table of contents to see how the authors organize the information and let that help guide your layout.
Choose a Platform
If tech isn't your thing, don't let this step scare you. You can offer an online course without a great deal of tech hassles. Choose a platform that's easy for everyone to use and test it so you're familiar with it ahead of time.
The best place to start is to consider the platforms you and your customers already use. For example, suppose you communicate with them through Zoom or a social media site like Facebook. In that case, consider those platforms a viable/affordable option.
If you want a more robust platform with features like ongoing technical support, payment processing, analytics, and insight reporting, check out Thinkific, Kajabi and Udemy.
Ease of use matters most, so skimping on features is okay as long as everyone can easily log in, attend sessions, and communicate through the platform.
Pricing Your Course
The first decision when pricing your course is whether to charge for it or offer it for free.
Offering a free course has benefits. More people will sign up and receive the value it provides, which means more exposure and brand recognition. In addition, consider the principle of reciprocity, meaning that because you've offered something for free, they may be more likely to buy a product in the future.
Lastly, you can use a free course as a lead magnet to get people to sign up for your list and nurture them.
However, there are reasons to consider charging for your online course.
When people invest their own money into a course, it increases its perceived value. And can create a sense of ownership and responsibility. Although fewer people may sign up, they'll be more engaged and invested in getting the biggest bang for their buck.
To determine how much you charge, consider conducting market research to discover at what price points your target audience will pay. This doesn't have to be complicated. A little market research in the form of a simple survey or Google form questionnaire to existing clients can give you all the information you need to make an informed decision. Further insight can be gained by looking at what similar courses are charging.
One last pricing consideration would be the position of your course in your sales funnel. For example, your offering may be a reasonably priced course in the middle of your sales funnel to qualify leads or a high-ticket item packed with value at the end of your funnel.
Add More Value
If you plan to charge for your online course, consider adding some value to increase your charge. Most of the time, value can be added at little cost to you.
To determine what to add, put yourself in your participant's shoes. What extra material would help you master the course? For example, a cheat sheet or a resource guide might make the task easier and cost you nothing but a bit of time.
Plan Your Marketing
Your marketing plan is your strategy for engaging right-fit clients; here are three key factors to consider as you formulate your plan:
Determine where your course fits into your sales funnel. Will you use your course as a lead magnet to attract new leads or as a low-ticket offer to qualify them? Or is this course your final high-ticket offer?
Identify the marketing channels you'll use depending on where your target audience hangs out. Now, formulate the message you'll use to explain your course's benefits, unique value, and, most importantly, results. Remember the advice marketing guru Seth Godin shared in his book Purple Cow: "People don't buy paint; they buy painted walls."
Decide how you'll build expertise through helpful content posted elsewhere. For example, you might have a blog or an active social media presence where you're already building your brand. If people there see you as an expert authority, it will be easier to get them to sign up for your course.
Other elements of your marketing plan may include creating YouTube videos, seeking speaking engagements, and leveraging social proof—hello testimonials, reviews, business credentials and more!—
Set Your Launch Date
The final step is to set a launch date for your course. Over time, you'll figure out when your audience is most receptive. But if you're starting out, one tactic is to align with a holiday or significant event, such as Spring cleaning or New Year's goals. Be sure to set the date a few months out so you have time to build buzz and promote your course.
The goal should be progress over perfection. After your first run, reflect and assess what worked and what didn't so you can improve. Trial and error are often the best teachers when mastering online courses, so feel free to hurry up and get started.
Should You Get Help?
Here are a couple of points for consideration:
Your time is valuable, and spending your limited time on the details of creating and launching your first online course can significantly bog you down, keep you from doing what you are best at, and keep you from bringing your course to completion because there simply are not enough hours in a day to get it all done.
Your reputation is important to your business's growth and longevity. A poorly designed course and a bumpy delivery will diminish your audience's trust in buying from you again; no one wants that.
Your bank account. It goes without saying that professional help requires an initial investment before you ever make a dime. That can be a hard pill to swallow, but it's important to remember that with professional help, you'll get a polished finished product, and you'll be generating revenue from your course potentially for years to come with little to no additional time, effort, or investment. And that is, as they say, 'priceless.'
The only question is, how ready are you to create and sell an online course?
Click the link below to get your FREE downloadable .pdf readiness assessment.
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