Many people seek quality content, particularly when it comes to online learning. To meet the growing demand for knowledge in the digital space and generate income for yourself, creating and selling an excellent online course is one way to go about it.
Creating your own online course is an effective way to share your expertise and knowledge with your students. It enables you to place yourself as an authority in a particular field, create an online community of people with like minds, and broaden your reach from the comfort of your home.
Creating online courses requires specific steps and tools. Here is all you need to create successful online courses.
Step 1: Choose the Ideal Course Topic
There are virtually unlimited topics to create online course material on. However, selecting the right topic is crucial in creating a successful online course. Firstly, ensure that your chosen topic suits you and your target audience.
Pick a topic that you’re very knowledgeable in or a topic that sparks your desire to learn as much as you can. The bottom line is to settle for a topic you’re interested in and enthusiastic about. Then, you can reflect on the areas you’re outstanding in and the topics that draw people to you for consultation.
Before the online course creation process, know your audience and what they demand from a particular topic. Then, you can conduct a sample survey using an existing audience or a group of your friends to find out their opinions. You can also design questionnaires to be shared online or by an online poll.
Conduct topic research to ensure that there are related courses on that topic or a similar topic. This shows the competition for that topic, which means it’s a relevant subject matter.
Step 2: Experiment With Your Idea
It takes a considerable amount of hard work to create online courses. That’s why it’s essential to test-run your idea before you start. This will help you validate your course ideas that will become profitable online courses. To test-run your idea, utilize a landing page building tool to make a page for your upcoming online course.
Please write a brief description of the course curriculum, explain the learning objectives, and illustrate it with captivating images. There are tons of templates for customizable landing pages that you can use for this.
Use CTA (call-to-action) buttons to get site visitors to register for your online course for free or pre-order it to hold down a spot in your online class.
When you’re done promoting your website on various platforms, look at your overall data and see if you have an encouraging number of attendees and positive feedback. Then, decide on the metrics to use, so you’ll know the results to look out for when the trial period is over.
Step 3: Thoroughly Research Your Topic
This is where you’ll find out everything there’s to know about your topic. Let your research go beyond what your attendees will easily find on Google. Research from your competition and webinars. Carry out keyword research to see people’s queries on that topic. This will give you intricate knowledge of the questions your audience will be hoping your online course will answer.
Also, research sub-niches within your niche. If your course is a guide on how to care for indoor plants, ensure you cover unique angles for extra value- for instance, adding content on kinds of air-purifying plants.
Step 4: Create the Online Course Outline
Pen down the various lessons you intend on teaching online. Divide each lesson into the topics you want to teach. Arrange them logically to ensure they develop naturally into each other. The transition from one lesson to the other should be smooth.
Keep in mind that online education involves taking your audience step by step through an idea. To specify this in the course outline, define the learning outcome for each lesson in the outline.
Step 5: Create the Online Course Content
If you’re well-versed in the topic you want to teach, you may already have content. For example, you can revisit materials if you’ve created a webinar, written a blog post, ran a YouTube channel, hosted a podcast on that topic, etc. Reshaping this content to align with your topic can save you time.
On the other hand, if you don’t have any content, the abovementioned content sources are a few ways to gather relevant content for your topic. Content can be visual, audio, or textual. You can use any for your course, but a hack is using at least two of them: preferably video and written content.
Step 6: Upload Your Outline
If you own a website, you can upload your entire course there; if not, you should get a new website to upload your course. Tools help you to create custom courses, design your platform, upload video content, engage site visitors and monetize the course content.
Step 7: Sell Online Courses
Your journey as a course creator isn’t complete if you aren’t selling online courses and earning from online course marketplaces. There are various selling options:
Lessons for Sale or Rent: Attendees can buy or rent your course. You can opt for making your video downloadable or having it viewed directly on your online course platform.
Other options include paid plans, channel subscriptions, and one-on-one lessons.
To determine the price of your course, consider the time it took you to create an online course, the value of the course, and competitor prices.
Step 8: Marketing Online Courses
You can opt for any of the following methods:
- Email marketing: Email marketing campaigns, discounts, etc.
- Paid Ads: Banner Ads and Search Engine Marketing
- Social media: Promoting your course on Facebook groups, LinkedIn, and other relevant platforms.
- Third-party websites: Promoting your course via a third-party online course platforms
- Have it translated into different languages: This will help your course break into new markets and meet market demand.
- Affiliate programs: Begin an affiliate program and work with affiliates to promote your course.
Step 9: Collate Feedback
In the online course business, it’s essential to gather feedback to help you arrive at a decision influenced by your findings. Feedback is also helpful in the market testing phase and analytics. You can use surveys and online forms to get data about your customers’ learning journey.
Step 10: Foster a Community
This is a great place to keep your students engaged and share information about new courses and related opportunities that may be relevant to your target audience.
