How to create an online course by yourself in 8 easy steps.
Each person has something to teach another. Every person needs to learn to maintain their level of well-being. These two facts make learning a sought-after business that can bring you income.
True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.”
Nikos Kazantzakis
Before the development of the Internet, teaching was difficult. Today online learning solves almost all of the problems for teachers and students. Now, to start earning from your knowledge, you only need to understand what you want to teach, create a course program, upload lessons to a special platform and set up access to them.
And all this set of actions can allow you to work from home and bring a tangible and legitimate income per month.
Below is a detailed plan for starting an online school that will help you even if you have no idea where to start.
1. Determine the goal
An online course starts with a learning goal, a result that you will give to your student.
Ask yourself three questions:
● What is the purpose of your training?
● How will the student benefit from your course?
● What results will they achieve by completing their studies and applying new knowledge in life?
Knowledge and information are the same product as a car, apartment, or toothpaste. No one will buy a tube that says it can clean their teeth. Therefore, at the heart of any online learning is the promise of a specific result.
This result is the reason why a person will pay for the training. This result is what you have to give to your student. This result will make you unique among your competitors.
Examples:
● “Learn French and start watching movies and reading books in the original language.”
● “Get started as a copywriter and start earning from $3000 per month.”
2. Come up with a name
An online course is your personal brand and choosing the name of the future course is a very crucial moment for brand planning.
A good title should be short and concise, yet bright and memorable. It should evoke associations with a powerful result or an unusual approach to the learning process, and reflect the client’s dream, their goal, and what they will become after training.
For example, “Effective Leader”, “Million dollar psychologist”, and “End the Dieting Cycle” for a weight loss course, etc.
Once you have chosen a name that you like, you can move on to the next step.
3. Form the program
First you need to form the “skeleton” of the training – the stages that lie in front of the student from the moment of enrolling in the course until the result is obtained. Kind of like your table of contents.
Here you divide the training into separate steps that a person needs to take from the most difficult situation in order to come to the best. For these steps, you will need to write LESSONS.
The lessons must be structured: introduction, theoretical analysis of the topic, summing up, and the task of consolidating the material. That’s your syllabus.
It’s always a good idea to mix different types of content: video + text description, tests, diagrams, and instructions.
The video must be of high quality and last no more than 15 minutes. To make the material easier to digest, supplement the video lesson with a presentation with the main theses, important points, and other supporting material.
Videos can be edited in special programs before publication (like free video editor Camtasia Studio and the like). If you’re recording a podcast and need a computer screen recorder, use the Movavi or Ocam screen recorder software.
4. Choose the platform
Learning via the Internet is associated with many small routine activities. Online learning platforms automate these processes.
A good platform simplifies the work of an expert on the Internet: they only need to upload lessons, check challenging assignments, and give feedback to students. It takes care of the issues of payment, reminders of lessons, the provision of material and superficial control of knowledge.
Platforms that you can use to create your own online course are Coursify, Udemy, Teachable, Skillshare, Gumroad, etc.
5. Organize automation
After you have decided on the platform, you need to automate all the processes of providing the product on it. There are 3 general steps that need to be taken to form an online course:
Create and design a course. This is usually done with the push of a button. Don’t forget to make a colorful profile picture of the course and its description, giving the reader an idea of the benefits of learning from you.
Form lessons and homework. Upload learning materials for the platform, divide them into lessons and add homework. When you finish the work, look at the resulting course, and evaluate how interesting and understandable it is from the outside.
Set up additional functions and test the course. If the platform you choose gives its users additional options, use them. Set up gamification, cash register, and integration with other services. Before starting the course, check if everything is working correctly so that future students do not encounter errors in their work.
Once you have done this, your course is ready. Now it’s time to deal with the pricing, promotion, and direct sales of your training.
6. Formats and prices
For a course to be accessible to a large number of people, it must take into account the interests of people of different incomes and preparation of a pricing strategy. A popular and effective way to make your course more accessible is to break it down into three pricing tiers with different prices and services. Usually are:
● Economy – the cheapest and with a minimum of services;
● Medium – more expensive than the previous one and more complete;
● Premium – the most expensive full-service plan.
The price of the entire course depends on the value that the student will receive in training. The value must exceed the price by 10 times! If the course helps to earn $10,000, then it should cost about $1000.
7. Prepare a selling product description and landing page
The course is ready, now you need to attract students to it. Your sales page copy should include:
● Who will benefit from this course.
● List of skills and knowledge that a person will receive during training.
● How these skills and knowledge will help the student in life.
● Guarantees you can give your students.
● Reviews and cases of your students who have already completed training and got good results.
A good option for promoting an online course is to write a landing page – a web page that presents your product and offers an easy way to learn more about it or buy it.
Technically, this can be done using website maker like Wix, Tilda, Squarespace, WordPress, and
the like. And this site should be self-owned and no one should have access to it except you.
8. Sell the course
In order for your online course not to be idle, it needs to be promoted on the Internet. The most common free promotion methods are:
● Webinars. Requires preparation and takes a lot of time, but brings the most applications.
● Free consultations. In the process, identify the client’s problems and offer to solve them as part of a paid course.
● Selling texts published on social networks, a personal blog, or in a mailing list based on subscribers.
You can attract people to a webinar or a free consultation by posting about them on social networks or by running paid ads, for example, on Instagram or Facebook.
Conclusion
We hope that after reading this article, you have understood the key points of creating your online course. This process is laborious, but the main thing is to start it. And after the first payments for your work and feedback from grateful students, a second wind opens.
So don’t put off the opportunity to start making good money making small business from your knowledge.
“In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply.”
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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