This is the sign you have been waiting for. How many times have you thought of turning your experience and success into an asset while helping others grow? If it’s more than once, and happened upon this blog, it’s your turn to take the steering wheel and start creating that content. Since the world is digitizing and online sources are continuously increasing every day this is an opportunity to turn your experience into a digital course and sell online. You’re in the right place. This is a guide to help you to make your first online course!
Online course creation and sharing your experience is the new way of entrepreneurship. A lot of entrepreneurs create online courses on different platforms and make millions of dollars each year. Now is the perfect time to create a home office and do this as your side hustle. You will be amazed at how many people are thirsty for your experiences.
ONLINE COURSES, WHY NOW?
What is the thing in your career that makes you proud of yourself? What was the thing that you gave yourself a pat on the back for? Was it creating a sales funnel, inspiring others, building a brand strategy? Now it’s time to give back to the community with everything you congratulate yourself with. Don’t ask yourself if you are qualified to teach; you are probably not a trained professor! But sharing experience while inspiring others is always a good idea.
Find your niche and write down your know-how as a draft. It doesn’t have to be an academic or professional topic. Maybe you are the master of multitasking while you raise twins? A lot of people create courses on helping others such as prepping meals for the week,how they managed to try and run a marathon. Just try to find your “niche”.
Also, don’t forget that creating courses upgrade your knowledge about the issue. This will be your brand and people will know you because you’re great at doing this. That’s why you will create an audience and if you can manage to grow this audience properly this might be your opportunity to be an influencer.
Also, a lot of entrepreneurs do this job to have a side income and create free time from their consultation hours. The first thing entrepreneurs love is to help other entrepreneurs like themselves and push them forward.
#1 Build Your Audience
Like in every business you need to make sure of your product-market fit. Here your product is your experience and your market will be the people that are willing to pay for your experience. That’s why before everything you have to build an email list! This is the number one rule before doing anything related to money-making. Even in crowdfunding platforms, people create this e-mail list to jump-start their campaign. Yes, you could build this email list from data suppliers but this wouldn't help you accomplish your goal. You need to find engagement. You need to find people that will sign up for that list. After reading this, create a landing page just to collect those emails.
#2 Decide On Your Subject
You need to make sure that you have a crystal clear offer. People shouldn’t be confused about what they are buying otherwise they won’t buy it. Their money is very important and if they don’t have a clear offer they won’t accept it. Think about it, when did you spend money on a package when you were not sure what was in it. Also, you need to make sure that the service you are selling will meet your audience’s needs. It is not important what this course means to you and what problem it will solve for you. It has to be addressed directly to your audience. There are a few things you can do about this. Think about the things you previously observed your audience struggling with by listening to their questions.
But also you need to make sure that the content that you are creating is something you enjoy doing;content creation is a problematic thing and is very time and energy-consuming. To make course creation more simple and fun the subject you choose should also meet your interest. Also, the thing we actually love is the thing we can sell the most; best seller authors can talk about their books for hours. If you can’t talk about it endlessly this might not be your go-to-market subject.
#3 Finding Your Platform
There are a lot of platforms that serve course creators. Platforms for email marketing, platforms to build landing pages easily, platforms to create presentations, and scripts. Make sure to use platforms that work with the no-code principle because those platforms are the ones that will provide the best support to you and will be the ones with better financial plans. Besides no-code platforms, we recommend that you have a branding theme like cheerful, elegant, retro, etc. To help inspire you with a sample color palette, we recommend you check out our templates.
#4 The Curriculum
You shouldn’t be overwhelmed by creating a curriculum because you are not a certified teacher. We have a great hack for this. You should be closing your eyes and come up with a goal for this course. What is the outcome of this course for enrolled people? The goal shouldn’t include your business purposes; it should meet your students’ needs. Give yourself time to brainstorm,write down a few end results, and shorten it. Is it to help your student create a sales strategy or help reduce your client’s bloating problems. Make sure to look out for your competitors too. What are they promising and selling? This is a good way to decide what you should cover and what titles are already selling; but of course, make sure to have a unique thing to differentiate yourself. Then go back to your problem list and make matchmaking between the problems and end results. This matchmaking will cover your outline.
#5 Content
You already have an outline that makes everything easier for you to navigate. Now it’s time for you to create your content. The first step is to gather your sources and your highlights. This is a boring and time-consuming process, so be patient. Make sure to write down your content as simple as possible to actually make it easier to navigate for your students too. The major suggestion we will give is to break down your course into 3 so you can actually create 3 courses out of 1, such as beginner, intermediate, and master. Also, make sure that you have a few bonuses where you can actually engage with your audience. Include one live Q&A and maybe a 1:1 mentoring session that actually converts to better results. Make sure to sign up for Decktopus and use the pre-prepared templates; since you have the content it will probably take 15-20 minutes to finish up your documents.
#6 Your System
You need to come up with a system that works like a clock and that defines how your students will engage with you and learn from you. Remember that everyone is different and everyone actually learns with a different method. Try to cover all methods such as giving them a video series and making sure to create a few documents. And, guess what? Decktopus is just the place to create written course content and add audio to your slides. Our users are saying that having audio over text makes the document more friendly and warm.
#7 Pricing
Look at your competitors! This is extremely important at each step of the funnel. Make sure not to exceed the minimum and maximum prices and make sure to make a few discounts or campaigns from time to time. Just make sure that you have a minimum gain from each sale. But don’t be extremely cheap. Be confident you worked and spent money for years to have this experience; now is the time you get paid back. Be confident to ask for money and set pricing. If you think that your audience is having problems with the price you can always come up with payment plans.
How To Create Course Documents Quickly
It’s always easy to have an all in one platform like decktopus. Generally, people create their content and pay for a designer to create a brand palette, brand kit, and course documents. But now you can use decktopus to have a palette, fonts, and free high-quality images in one place. So sign up now to create your deck and place your content. Then decide among themes and fonts to find what suits your brand best.
Some articles for inspiration:
- Ultimate Presentation Tools
- Creative Presentation Ideas
- Public Speaking Tips to Deliver the Perfect Presentation
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- https://linkedin.com/company/decktopus/
- Yes, you’ve guessed it! We have a survey too. Make sure you fill out the survey to support the content and community team and help us improve your Decktopus experience.