6 Tips to Create a Digital Course from Your Book

Nonfiction books and selling courses and in fact doing speaking engagements are all a beautiful match made in monetization heaven. But if you're new to creating courses and selling them, but if you've already got your book done or almost done, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julia the Book Broad author and founder of Book Launchers. I also used to run a training and education company in Canada called Revenue with Real Estate. In that company I built a lot of courses, a mastermind group, and ran workshops. So when some of our authors were asking about turning their book into an online course many years ago, we jumped on it because I have a lot of insights to share and support authors. Plus now I've turned my book Self Publish and Succeed into a course, Self Publish and Succeed Live, which we run twice a year to help you apply the material from the book and actually get your first draft of your book done. I have an entire video on turning your book into a course which you should definitely watch. I'll link to it at the end and if you have questions or just want to say hi, please, please do comment on this video. Comments make my day. And I do read and respond to pretty much every comment. Plus, if you comment the day a video is released, which is every Tuesday and Friday, you get entered to win some of our fabulous noboringbooks and Book Launcher swag. Now let's talk tips. First, your course. Just like your book, it needs a hook. This is your offer. This is what you sell. This might take the hook from your book, but it might not. Let me give you an example. Self Publish and Succeed Live, which I already mentioned, is essentially straight from the book, Self Publish and Succeed. We cover a lot of the content from the book, but the course is set up as a workshop, working with me and members of my team over 12 weeks to write your book. You get accountability, support and feedback so that you can truly apply the material from the book. But the hook is very similar to the book in that the goal is to help you write a book that's set up to sell and achieve your bigger picture goals of brilliant brand and business building. To do that, we cover a lot of the same material as the book, but you would still take our course even after reading the book because the add on value comes from the personalized support, the learning from others writing their books at the same time, the feedback on your readers, your hook, your goals, your book description, your title, your hook, and so forth. Now let's contrast that with our course Book Marketing Magic, which is launching January 2024. It is coming out of Self Promote and Succeed, my latest book. But instead of teaching the entire book, we're taking the element of pitch pitching you and your book to other people's audiences, which is just one portion of the book. But we focus on that because that's where you can get a lot of leverage for your book fast, especially if you don't have your own audience. Yeah, running ads is helpful and knowing how to use social media is beneficial. And of course, understanding all the book review sites and book review strategies is fundamental. But for the course we picked a really powerful point of leverage and pain for authors and we focused on that. By the way, if you're interested in either course, the links are in the description below and I and if they're not open right now, there's a wait list to join and you'll get the best offer to join when you're on the wait list. So the hook is what you offer and sell and if it's not good, if it doesn't have a clear outcome to get the student where they want to go. The first draft of their book done was structured to support them to success or to be successfully pitching themselves to other people's audiences to sell books and build their brand and business. Well, it's going to be hard to sell the course, so get a good hook. Tip 2 Boost your profits with a bump offer or an upsell. You don't have to have an upsell, but there will be people who want more. For us, our upsell is to work with us in our full service membership. We offer that after the course is done, but many folks would have an upsell that immediately appears after the course has been purchased. You know it would look like want to implement these strategies faster. Have my team build X for you or bring me into the organization to teach X to your entire team or or add on this personal call or buy 10 hours of our time to support the implementation or buy these templates. Those are all bumps or upsells. This is going to vary widely depending on your book and your business. But know that there will be people who will want more and if you offer it, you'll start to get people who take you up on that offer. If you don't offer it well, you're not going to get people who take you up on an offer you don't make. All right. Tip 3 course creation is easier with a team. You have a lot to do to create a course even with the book already done. There's slides, there's videos. Of course, there's the course outline. There needs to be a place to deliver the course. You need a sales page to sell the course copy to sell the course, a way to collect payment. There needs to be supplementary materials like a workbook or worksheets. There's a lot more work involved than you think there is, especially if you're doing it all yourself. The easiest way to do it, besides being a book launcher's client and having us turn your book into a course with you, is to take the core elements from each chapter and and think about how someone will apply it and what they need to know to be able to apply it. Turn that into content for slides and supplementary materials. Get a graphics designer to design those for you. Then you can record videos. You can record them live or record them and have them edited later, or both, and then use those transcripts to become part of the supplementary materials. We also use the slides as part of the workbook, which is supplementary materials. But then there's the whole piece of pricing the course, positioning it to sell, setting up a sales page. And I mean, probably one of the best things you could do is look at people at Thinkific or some of these other Guru.com places to hire, help with the copywriting and setup. Basically, creating a course is a big job and so you probably want to plan to hire help to get it done. Tip 4 Don't expect your courses to just sell Many people have this dream that their course will be evergreen and available on their website and people will actually just come to their website and buy it. Sure, that might happen once in a while, but most of the time a course sells because you drove someone to buy it. This means you ran a promotion, you did a launch, you opened the doors and closed the doors, which gave people a reason to act. Finally, now it's work. I know you dreamt of writing your book, building your course, and then sitting on the beach, and I wish it were that easy. You have to market your book and you have to promote your course. There are a lot of complex Internet marketing approaches to selling courses that but my favorite is to simply add a live component to any course and have a start and an end date. There's no false scarcity in this, it's just course starts X date. The group portion starts that week, so people are forced to start now or wait for a deal. This helps you avoid having nobody signed up for your course 48 hours before it begins, and then you're wondering if you should even run it, because humans will wait to the last minute. So you do need to give them some sort of an incentive, and lower prices can be a great incentive for them to finally just pull the trigger and join your course. Bottom line, the occasional course will sell just sitting on someone's website, but most people need a plan to promote that course on a regular basis in order to get people to take their class. Tip number five you don't have to do one big course. You could do several mini courses. Now this isn't what I'm doing at this stage because Book Launchers is far more about our service than selling courses, but we do want to help as many authors as we can. So we have added course components like Self Publish and Succeed Live and our Book Marketing Magic. But if I did want to, I could create a bunch of mini courses from Self Promote and Succeed like paid promotions to sell your book, social media strategies for brand building and book sales, leveraging podcasts for book sales and business building. Each section from the book is big enough to be a course, whether it's five modules of 30 minutes each or one month training with a class each week. There's a variety of ways I could package it up and sell them each for $297 or bundle them all together with book marketing Magic for deal. So if you're finding it daunting to turn your entire book into a course, you could pick one piece and start there. In fact, for many people, if it's your first time creating a course, creating mini courses might be far more digestible and attainable to get yourself started. Tip 7. Okay, I know I only said six tips and I think I already gave you seven because I lost count. I said tip six, didn't I? I said it twice. Tip six if this is your first time selling stuff to your audience and you're not certain your audience will pay for your courses, your training or coaching, you might want to set it up to sell before you build it. So you can try setting up a sales page with an early bird offer and selling it to see what happens. Add bonuses like one on one coaching or templates or quick start materials so they have something to do while you build the course. And of course be fully organized and committed to building the course before you do this, but I love pre selling when I'm entering a new market because then I don't build something people don't want. And you can set goals for yourself like I need 5 people signed up by X date. But also make sure you've done some work on your platform building or you're running ads so that you are getting people into that course, but those are topics for another day. Okay? And I know I said only six tips, but this is another shout out for using ChatGPT. It's a bit of a shortcut because you can tell it about your book, let it know that you want to create a course for these kind of people to get them this kind of an outcome, and it will quickly give you a course outline so you're not sticking staring at a blank page. Then you can take that outline after you make it better, of course. Because let's be real, what Chatty's giving you is not good enough. But boy, it's better than a blank page. So you can take that and then head over to Canva Magic and ask it to create slides based on what you've got there. Again, not good enough to go. But man, it's a head start. There's your bonus tip. But now if you're curious about paid ads for selling your books, well, this video is for you. If you want the latest and greatest from the channel, that one's right here. Go on over. I'm waiting for you.