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Well choosing an online course platform is kind of the same experience. After you’ve set your goals, sit and have a cup of tea before embarking on this decision because you’ll need a clear head to decide on which online learning platform you want to use. Why? Because there are so many and so many features to consider! Online course creation is a challenging feat. You want an online learning platform that will best serve your goals and online course creation needs and enable your online business to maximize revenue.
And because this is such a huge topic, in many sections we’ve included “TG Tips” and links to a number of great resources for creating courses online and how to sell online courses. Get ready to bookmark these!
Feeling old school? Do you prefer to print and peruse this guide offline at your convenience or don’t have time to read the whole post? Click to download the PDF version!
After your goal setting exercise, it’s a good idea to create a road map or a kind of checklist of things to do for achieving the goals you set for your online course that links your goals to concrete steps. It may take a while and require a few iterations, but it will help you focus on what’s important. The following steps will help you create that road map so read on!
Well choosing an online course platform is kind of the same experience. After you’ve set your goals, sit and have a cup of tea before embarking on this decision because you’ll need a clear head to decide on which online learning platform you want to use. Why? Because there are so many and so many features to consider! Online course creation is a challenging feat. You want an online learning platform that will best serve your goals and online course creation needs and enable your online business to maximize revenue.
Udemy.com and Skillshare.com are currently the most viable online course marketplaces because they both boast millions of students and thousands of courses. Another less popular platform you might consider is Skillsuccess.com. It has a slightly different business model from the other two in that it does not offer free online courses (but does let you try a course for 30 days free), courses are much higher priced than on Udemy and it offers an “All Access Pass” membership for $25 a month.
Not sure? You might want to check out our article covering 5 of these online course marketplaces.
Hosted online platforms continue to grow in popularity thanks to market leaders such as Teachable and Thinkific. These platforms allow you to build your online course website, host your course content (videos, tests, etc.) market and sell your courses, collect payments and interact with students.
With all the choices and features of hosted online course platforms, you might wonder why would anyone bother creating, hosting and managing their online courses on a personal website?
Chances are if you are reading this then you have an idea or two for creating an online course. If you don’t have a course idea, you need to generate some! We suggest reading our article that provides 10 tips for generating online course ideas. In it we explain popular suggestions for generating and researching course ideas.
The overriding theme for your topic regardless of which of these 5 approaches you take is that you should be solving a problem for your students.
Now’s the time to start thinking about how you can use your potential course topic as a launching pad for future courses, essentially a series. Knowing ahead of time that you can create a series will greatly increase your chances of success with future online courses.
The first step to doing this is online course idea “validation”. That’s a fancy word for describing the process of how to become confident that your online course idea will sell.
If you have defined a transformation or know what problem you are solving, then it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to identify who would be interested in purchasing your online course. Ask yourself who has this problem? Who needs this transformation? Who would want to learn how to do what I am teaching?
Create a simple survey for groups and friends on Facebook, Twitter, online communities, friends and family. You can even purchase survey groups on SurveyMonkey if you want to spend the money.
Ask respondents a brief set of questions aimed at determining 1) if they would be interested in your topic 2) what they would most like to know/learn 3) what experience and outcomes make such a course valuable to them
Instead of, or along with your survey, you could send a one pager on your course to an email list or social media group and offer your course for free or a discount in exchange for feedback.
Another popular and productive way to validate your idea is to create a free mini-course. This could even be just a first lesson. You can host a very short course on your website, list it on Udemy for free, or film it and put in on YouTube. Then solicit feedback and survey users. Try to find patterns in feedback and responses that help you hone in on groups that appreciate your course. Another good use for a mini-course is to offer it in exchange for emails to start creating your sales funnel. More on that later.
Try and gauge potential size of your audience course enrollments on all types of learning platforms. Also look at other topic distribution channels such as books on Amazon and YouTube videos. Note how many subscribers YouTube channels related to your topic get. What comments are people making? You can even join LinkedIn groups, Quora, and look at what is being shared on Buzzsumo and other social media to try and get a sense of how popular your topic might be, who and where your audience is.
At Teachinguide we’re all about knowing who your competition is and how they are doing. That’s what our dashboard helps you to assess and track. By looking at competitors you are trying to identify if there is a sweet spot in your online course idea - one where there is enough and growing interest in your topic, but not too much supply, or, there is a gap in the market that you can fill with your course. Selling online courses can be tricky without this kind of information. Make sure that you are well informed about the competition before you pursue online course creation!
Now’s the time to start thinking about how you can use your potential course topic as a launching pad for future courses, essentially a series. Knowing ahead of time that you can create a series will greatly increase your chances of success with future online courses.
Do competitors individually and collectively have a lot of course (or ebook, etc.) sales?
What is the trend in these sales?
What marketing and promotion strategies are competitors using? Is it working? Can you do better?
What kind of reviews and feedback do they get? Are students asking for or suggesting something that they are not getting out of the course?
Can you do better or differently than what they are delivering? What and how so?
Is the competition’s course material updated and fresh?
In our Teachinguide database we facilitate keyword search for Udemy courses and topics. This is one of the most effective ways to gauge demand for a topic.
Start by making a list of related topic keywords, narrow or wide. Why a wider list? Because you might find a related keyword that has higher search than your chosen topic idea that you can work into your course topic and name.
Type in keyword phrases and look at monthly search volume and trends. Also look at the cost per click and relative competitiveness. High competition and cost generally means high demand for that topic.
This is an easy way to see gauge if demand is rising or fall or stable for your topic over time. Simply type in your keyword and Google will tell you a scale of 1-100 how interested in your topic people have been over time.
This is an alternative keyword search tool to Google keyword planner. You can do up to 12 free keyword searches. Wordtracker also works differently than Google in that it claims to be more comprehensive in terms of search demand.
Other software and apps provide keyword information. These include Hubspot, Ahrefs, Moz or SEMRush.
Make note of the highest volume keyword that describes your topic as well as supporting keywords. You will want to use these on your course landing page in the titles, subtitles and text.
Resource 1
This fun article from Ahrefs SEO platform provides a list of 9 free keyword search alternatives to Google keyword planner.
Resource 2
Teachable has created a comprehensive blog article 15 Ways to Validate Your Online Course Idea.
This especially works well if your course is on a marketplace because by sending potential students to your landing page, the marketplace website will install cookies on their profile and remarket your course (hopefully) whenever they return to that website.
Collect emails from friends, family, friends of friends, your website, mini course offering or other lead magnet. (make sure you get permission to email them!)
Start blogging, podcasting, hosting webinars, providing free content and creating links to your courses.
Create an introductory video explaining what students will get out of the course, when to expect it and solicit feedback. You can provide a link to where the course will be hosted if you have a mini-course or lesson developed and include it here. (Note: You’ll likely have to get through the next two steps before you can do this)
Create a few quick tutorials related to your course topic and upload them to get started. At the beginning of your tutorials/videos put a link to your course landing page as soon as you have it.
Create a page for your course topic and start posting to it and sharing it.
Join groups related to your topic and start interacting and engaging with others.
Start interacting with groups and people on LinkedIn in your topic area and start writing articles and posting here.
Start reaching out to bloggers in your topic area who might share a free version of your course, or a mini-course with their readers, or at least an announcement or review. Aim to have at least one blogger agree to do this before launch.
Open Twitter and Instagram, Quora, Pinterest and Reddit accounts. Start posting and trying to interact with and attract followers and following others in your field. Start answering questions on Quora related to your topic so that eventually you can post links to your online course in your replies.
Send out free coupons to your pre-launch followers and community a few days before launching your course with a deadline for a day or two after launch. In this way you will garner enrollments and reviews quickly which will help to propel your course sales.
Remember that mini-course idea? You can send your mini-course or introductory video out to drum up interest in your course launch. It will keep your funnel engaged and create a sense of anticipation for your course!
Remember back in step 1 when you were told that you should be solving a problem with your course? Your solution to those problems should be framed in the form of measurable learning outcomes.
Ultimately those in your target audience will purchase your course because of their expected personal outcome, whether that be a new career skill that lands them a job or a hobby that eliminates some of life’s stress.
Fill in the blank promise to your students below:
“By the end of this course you will be able to ___________ (fill in the verb).”
Create the same sentence but with different verbs that support the overall learning outcome for each course chapter and lesson that you create.
What do you do with these learning outcomes? Communicate them.
Be sure to communicate at the beginning of your online course what the learning outcomes will be. Then throughout the course, remind students of these and where they are on the path to achieving those learning outcomes. This will motivate students and also help you to organize your course better. Remember that selling online courses is not just about the money but more importantly, to help students.
The other use for your newly minted learning outcomes is to use in order them to back into your course outline. Work backwards from these learning outcomes by asking what steps do your students have to take to achieve these learning outcomes? What information do you have to convey and when, in what order and how?
Unless you think through how to specifically achieve learning objectives, you’ll be teaching without a compass and you and your students will be lost.
The main principle of creating a course outline is to take your learning objectives and break these into chunks of learning steps. These chunks can be broken first into broader modules or chapters and then into more specific lessons and even specific activities and resources that build up to your course’s overall learning outcomes. Each of these sections or chunks in turn will ideally have its own learning objectives.
Don’t just create a lesson outline in this phase. Brainstorm different types of content and activities you can include for each section you create and make notes.
Make script notes for each section as well. You may think you’ll remember what you wanted to say in each section, but once you start putting the whole thing together and once you start filming each section of your course, it’s quite easy to forget. Creating scripts for each section will also help you later to assess if the flow of the course is consistent.
Make notes about what types of engaging content and visuals you will create for each section. After finishing your outline, go back over these to see if there is enough variety.
Rather than starting to create your outline in a document or spreadsheet, start high level with colored post its or a whiteboard with colored markers. Write out your chapters, lessons and activities on them and experiment with moving them around to see what flow works best before committing pen to paper.
Resource 1
We recently wrote an article, 6 Principles of Online Course Design based on research into instructional design.
Resource 2
Want to really nerd out on instructional design principles? Check out this blog that covers the 4 major instructional design models.
Write it on a post it and stick it on your laptop while you design your course content. As yourself periodically, what am focusing on teaching material or how to get students to achieve my learning objectives? There’s a subtle but important difference between these two things.
You must incorporate course content that enriches the learning experience of your students and increases their chances of achieving your promised learning outcomes. Keep in mind the following factors that contribute to your overall content development. Understandably so, it can be quite cumbersome to create a
This part of the process is going to be long. There’s no getting around it. To stay motivated and on track, take your course outline and calendar each section and associated tasks. Be realistic about the time you have to dedicate including any technical or marketing learning curves you may need to address. Creating and selling online courses can be a time-consuming task. It would be best if your plan ahead.
Generally speaking your content will like contain talking head video. You’ll need to create at least a basic video studio, even if you are just using your iphone. We’ve written an article about how to create a basic video studio. This is the stage where those scripts in your outline will come in handy.
You might be doing a PowerPoint with voiceover or your talking head in the margin. Or you may want to create a mashup of slides or other visuals with video. Whatever you do, include visuals that support the learning objectives of each model. You can even make some, such as infographics, available for download. Watching a talking head for 3 hours is not all that entertaining!
We put together 10 online presentation tips in this article to get you started thinking about visuals.
Depending on which online course platform you use, you will be able to create a variety of assignments and projects. For example in Thinkific you can create assignments such as “create a video” and make them required if you want.
Depending on what online course platform you are using, you can create different assessment formats. Quizzes are the most popular. Assessments can
Your imagination is the limit here in terms of what you can offer that enriches the learning experience. Lists of resources, checklists, how to guides, community building, etc.
Recalling our mantra again, it’s important to at least be aware that even though you envision all of your students learning the same way, that is to say sitting in front of their laptop or on their smart phone watching your course, the fact is they don’t all learn the same way. We’ve written an article about the importance of taking into account different learning styles when designing your course.
At this point, once you’ve created some content, many online instructors would recommend that you test out your course, or a portion of it, with a small audience to garner feedback and reviews if you haven’t received either of those in your pre-sales marketing funnel activities. Try it out on friends, colleagues, people in your Facebook group, etc.
Before you launch your course you will need to create a landing page or sales page if you haven’t already done so in >Step 4.
Is it for beginner’s or advanced students? Is it for people seeking to do “X”? Try to convey this with a catchy headline if you can.
Tell them, “By the end of this course you will be able to (fill in the blank)”. Again if you can capture this in your headline, all the better.
Will they qualify for a new job? Lose weight 3 x faster? Be specific!
We highly recommend that you include an introductory video (which you would already have if you created one for YouTube or in your pre-sales funnel creation phase). Both in your video and in your landing page copy be specific about the three items mentioned above and use language on the page that feels personal in tone. Aim to tell a story that evokes emotion – about yourself, why you created the course, who you want to benefit from him, hopes, aspirations, etc.
Finally we all know that we are more likely to choose one product over another if it has better reviews or social proof. If you have reviews or feedback from any pre-sale or pre-launch activities, post them on your landing page. No reviews of your course yet? Include reviews of yourself or your business to build trust and credibility. Or send your course to friends and ask for reviews.
Which brings us to our second to last point. Make sure that in your video and on your landing page that you establish yourself as an authority to be trusted on your topic. No one wants to purchase a course from a newbie!
So then, what’s the last thing you should do on your landing page? Tell your customers to buy your course! Don’t forget to include a big ole compelling call to action!
Offering a money back guarantee for a certain period of time will help convince students to take a chance on your course.
Resource 1
Check out one of our favorite Udemy instructor Phil Ebiner’s introductory video for a great example of what sells.
Resource 2
Neil Patel is THE guy for landing page conversions. Check out his Guide to Creating High Converting Landing Pages.
You need a strong sales funnel to back up your course launch. As we wrote in an article on launching a course email sequence, email marketing is THE way to promote your course and get people to move through your sales funnel.
People simply read email more than social media Tweets and posts.
So now’s the time if you haven’t already done so to set up an email sequence (i.e in Mailchimp or Hubspot) to have anyone who enrolls in a course added to your promotional email sequence.
At the end of the email sequence, you will offer a free or discounted coupon to enroll in the paid course by a certain deadline and present a call to action to “enroll now!”.
In your sequence of emails, you can include useful stuff such as blog posts, webinars, and other content. Webinars are a great way to grow your course sales funnel.
Remember in Step 1 when you set goals? You should have had an idea of what kind of price you wanted to charge for your course. Now that you have created it, go back and compare. Is it the same? Why or why not? Thinking about this will help you further reality check your pricing assumptions.
By now most of us know what affiliate marketing is. We’ve all seen the review websites that list the “Top 10 ‘X’of 2019” and provide links with discounts to the products on Amazon.
Why not have your course be included in a review website? Wouldn’t it be nice to have others talking up your course on their websites and social media?
Affiliate marketing just makes sense! Sure, you have to pay a fee to the person promoting your course, but think of the selling opportunities. Someone else is doing the marketing for you!
How do you set up an affiliate marketing network for your online course? There’s an app for that! They’re actually very simple to set up. So there’s really no reason not to use affiliate marketing.
The “easy way” to set up an affiliate program is through the platform that you sell your courses on. In the case of Udemy, this is as simple as checking a box to sign up for their affiliate program. We like that fact that Teachable offers affiliate marketing capabilities in their basic package.
Other platforms such as Podia offer affiliate marketing capabilities within the platform for a higher hosting fee.
If you want to DIY it or if you are hosting your courses on your own website one very popular option is Rakuten Marketing, a marketplace that matches people selling products and services to affiliate marketers.
Another option if you have a WordPress website is to set up your own affiliate program with a plugin called AffiliateWP. Two other easily integrated plugins for any website are Tapfiliate and Rewardful.
Remember Step 4 – Create A Pre-sales funnel? Well if you didn’t do so well at that, affiliate marketing can go a long way making up for the audience you did not create in Step 4! Get you started thinking. If you want the motherload of course marketing strategies, Thinkific put together 55 of them.
Not only does improving your course make students feel as if they are getting something even more valuable, it engages them and builds trust and credibility. And over time as you improve and update your course, you can include real student examples that you garner from Q&A emails and feedback in your landing page, course communications and so forth, further enhancing your virtuous circle of marketing.
Keep getting reviews, testimonials and leverage them on your website, in email marketing and social media.
Monitor your conversions over time. Experiment and try different headlines, change up your video, add new social proof etc. See what works.
If you are offering an ebook in exchange for emails or if you are sending out content via email marketing, keep track of clicks and engagement. Keep improving your lead magnet too.
Keep monitoring keywords over time. If you are hosting your courses on your own website, SEO is especially important. This would be a good time to educate yourself more on SEO by doing what else but taking an online course on SEO!
Once you get some sales and reviews under your belt and are feeling comfortable, why not raise your course price and see what happens?
It’s not enough to just make a course as an expert and then call it a day. The best experts are always learning. You should too. Learn more in your craft and incorporate that into new course material. Go out and speak about your topic, go on a podcast, write guest blogs, etc.
Whether your first course or the most recent course you launched is successful or not, you will have learned a lot and most certainly have ideas about how to do even better with your next course. The key is to keep the momentum going and build your reputation and brand as an online course instructor by leveraging the audience you have worked so hard to create. That’s ultimately how you will get more sales and grow your business!