Earn More from Your Book by Creating an Online Course

There I am. Hello, welcome to this edition of Book launchers livestream on YouTube. Thank you so much for joining. I'm taking over for Julie today. I'm Shane. I'm Book Launchers online marketing specialist. I've been on here a couple times before but yeah, I'm going to be taking over and talking about online courses and how to turn your online, your nonfiction book into an online course. Benefits of doing so. And yeah, I'll also, you know, I'll go through why non fiction books are perfect for online courses, how to identify core concepts for your online course, how to break down your course into modules, how to create engaging course materials, how to market and promote your, your course as well. So a lot of things that I'm going to go over in this live so stick through through till the end because we will first be giving away some prizes as usual for our all of our viewers here. So we definitely want to give away some prizes. And then also I will be giving away a ebook that summarizes basically everything that I'm going to be going over today. So if you want that definitely stick through to the end because be happy to provide all that for you and I'll show you how to get it. So again, I'm Shane, really nice to meet everybody. Thank you for coming in. If you are watching from somewhere in the world, make sure you drop that into the chat, let us know where you're streaming in from and ask any questions that you have in there. We have our operations manager Angela, who's in there to accept your questions and compile them and then I'll answer everything at the end. So again, yeah, stay tuned to the end because we got a lot of great stuff to cover. So today's topic is just about how to earn more from your book by creating an online course. So if you are interested in turning your book into an online course, make sure you stick around to the end. I'm going to be covering some important elements of doing this and be throwing a free ebook that will download that you can download and everything that we'll go over today plus some bonus prizes. Yep, all this good stuff already said it, but just saying it again for the people in the back. All right, so I do want to explain a little bit about why non fiction authors should consider turning their books into an online course and earning passive income from it. And I do have examples that I'll share with everybody here just so you guys can see, you know, some live action stuff. And I'm a very visual person. I like to share the things that I've built and all that good stuff. So. Hey, Alan from Tokyo, thank you so much for joining. Alrighty. So online courses, you already kind of know that your non fiction book is a jumping off point to a world of new opportunities. You know, some of these, some of these items being, you know, generating new clients for your business, nurturing a thriving email subscriber community, becoming a thought leader in your space and your niche that leads to keynote speaking engagements, panel discussions and other things of that sort of. And courses are really just another powerful addition to your digital author marketing platform. So some examples of success stories with our own clients. And I'm going to show you courses that I've actually built for clients here. So I'll start off with one of our old clients, Trent. Let me share my screen here. Okay. So the first thing that I want to share is this finding sustainability online course. So this. So I created this course for Trent. It's around his book. I wonder if I have a picture of it down here. I'm not sure. There he is right there. But he wrote a book all about how to incorporate sustainable practices into like the corporate world. So he's now able to use this course to train teams at large companies and how to practice sustainability with their business. And also it shows them how to create a department full focused solely on sustainability if they don't already have one. So the other thing that I wanted to show you is. Sorry, it's making me do this every time. Let's see if I can share my entire screen. That might be a little bit easier. All right. Yeah, it's like a mirror effect here. Hopefully you guys can see what I'm looking at here. Yeah, I think you can. So this is another course that we created for our client, Odile and Steve Remmer. They created a book called Change what happened to you? How to use neuroscience to get the life you want by changing your negative childhood memories. And now they are now able to teach people individually how to use neuroscience to get the life you want by changing those childhood negative memories through this online course. Because so the book is the first step, but then this is, you know, a deep dive into all the benefits that they have. Another one that we have is Susan Hensley here. This is a course on art journaling. She wrote a book called Art for your sanity and it's something that she's really passionate about. She's got a real passion for art journaling and she has been practicing it for years. She invested lots of time and energy and resources into writing a book, but then also worked with us to create this online course that helps empower individuals to try this method of therapy out for themselves. So these are just a few examples, and then I saved a really great one for last year. This is Robert A. Bell. He is an expert on how to use creativity to your advantage and transform your career. You know, he leveraged his online reach to get a virtual TED talk that was streamed over 2 million times. And this is actually him right here. This will actually show up after the ad, but you can see right here, it's got 2.2 million views. And this is, you know, a direct result from his digital marketing, from his efforts and just getting his name out there. But you'll see this is him actually talking to a huge audience of people. So really, an online course is going to help you expand your reach and just get your, you know, get your name out there and it just expand the offerings that you typically have and you're able to provide to people. So there's a lot of great benefits to actually having one. And the one thing that all these topics have in common is that they are skills that take lots of practice to learn. You know, reading a book is one thing, but being able to take a companion course that walks you through, step by step, how to apply your methods that you outlined in your book is an invaluable experience that is sure to leave an impact on your ideal audience. So nonfiction books, especially if you write them with us, are naturally structured for educational content. They're broken down into digestible chapters with hours and hours of thought that have gone into making it super valuable for your readers. And all we do is take the structure and turn it into a small. Into smaller, actionable lessons that your students will enjoy and refer back to whenever they need help on their journey. So I'll briefly break down the steps we typically take to turn books into an online course. So at this point, you know, feel free to take some notes. As you know, I think these are all really important things to know if this is something that you're interested in creating for yourself. So the first thing that we do is we identify the core concept of the course. You know, what is the main message or lessons from your book. Then we identify what the course's primary value will be for your students. You always want to think with your prospective students in mind. You know, what problem are they hoping to solve? And equally important, you know, why are you the person to teach them how to do it? What makes them more qualified than anybody? Else in this field. And next we want to break down your book into modules. So first identify the core concepts, identify what the course's primary value is. You know, what problem you're helping to solve. Why are you the person that teaches you how to do it? And then next I just want to repeat myself so I'm not moving too fast here. Next we break your book down into modules. We do this by starting with an outline derived from the chapters of your book. And a good, good guideline to work with is eight modules total, with four to five video lessons and an exercise or quiz for each one of these modules. And this is probably like the maximum that you want. It might even be a better idea to go smaller than this. You want to provide lots of value and you want to be able to answer everybody's questions, you know, everybody who's coming in to take your course to learn the skill that you're teaching. But there's a tipping point where it can be a bit overdone and there's just too much information to process it all in one sitting. So after, after that you want to create engaging course materials. So and the things that we recommend, including the things that we build into our online courses, are end of module assessments with open ended questions or multi choice questions just to kind of get students to test their learning and really directly apply what it is that they're learning. And then a course workbook is a really great thing to have so students can follow along and kind of take notes as they go. And you know, an engaging PowerPoint presentation is also amazing. You know, that matches your author branding. You can even just design it after your books cover. That's a really great thing to have. And another great addition to having an online course is also having, you know, a community where people can ask questions and, and talk to other students while taking this course. You know, this can be done on Facebook for free or online course softwares like Thinkific offer this in some of their packages. So you know, they have the course itself and then you have a community where these students can all interact with each other and you can even go on there live and like, you know, do ask me anything sessions or you know, work with your students directly and that's a really valuable thing to have. So, so going on the theme of, you know, of engaging course materials, another thing would be downloadable guides or companion ebooks that complement the student's experience with your course. Speaking of ebooks, anybody who joined late, I'm going to be giving away a free ebook at the end of this YouTube live. So make sure you stick through to the end and I'll make sure to send that over your way. The last engaging course material item that I think would be really important to include here is, you know, the more freebies that you can offer with your course are, it's the more the better. All items that your students can get great value from and it'll be easier to market and sell your course if you have added bonuses for enrolling that, that can be, you know, an ebook. It can just be like a three step guide. It can be a one on one session with you, it can be access to a webinar, anything like that. But just having those bonuses and not only provides value for your students and helps them walk away with something even better than what they expected, but it also helps you sell the course a lot easier as well. So the next big item that I wanted to go over is choosing the right platform to actually build this online course. And this is tricky because there's so, so many options out there. There's that, you know, it's, the options are kind of endless but I'll kind of give you our recommendations and maybe some other ideas as well so you can kind of run off that. We partner with and use thinkific to build courses because of it's very user friendly, it has tons of features and it has resources that allows you your course to grow at any level. So we want to be able to provide our authors with the tools needed to scale and grow their author brand to however big they might become. So Thinkific is kind of the one size fits all from beginner to you know, multi million dollar course. You can do that all with thinkific. Now there are plenty of other options. You have Kajabi, which is another big one that would be one that would be suited for you know, big audiences. And then there's like big course taking sites I'm sure a lot of people have heard of like udemy skillshare, Teachable and you know, the list just kind of goes on. If you just look up course building softwares on Google, you'll definitely find a ton of stuff on there and they all have different features and benefits. So I would take a look at those. But if you're interested in Thinkific do just type in in your URL book launchers.com forward/thinkific and if you use that link we can actually, you can get a 30 day free trial so you can try it out. Start building your course in 30 days. If it's not something that you really like or if it's not not something you're willing to put the time and investment into, then you can just cancel it. So there's that 30 days for free now. So after you have your online course created, you have a good understanding on what your students will benefit from most. You know, you built your course and you've, you're ready to accept new students. You need to be able to sell this thing to even earn your investment back and then start making passive income. So that's kind of, I'm sure everybody's main goal, right? You know, you put in all this, all this work up front, you want to be able to recoup your investment back. So I do want to talk about that a little bit here because I think that's a really important topic. So a few things to consider before you start pushing that sales train, you know, too soon. So you want to start off first of all, you want to start off with a pre sale period and then reach out to your network, the people that are closest to you. So start off by tapping into your existing books audience. You know, if you have email subscribers, set up a multi email sequence or journey that explains the benefit of taking this course and do a 30 to 60 day discounted promotion for those already subscribed to your list. You know, if you already have an email list of 150 people, reach out to them and say, hey, I'm, I'm going to be releasing this course in two months. You can get first dibs on it and here's 60% off the course. And if you do it during this trial period, you know, you'll get that discount. So it's a really great way to bring in some people early and kind of test the concept and see what people are interested in. If you have lots of followers on social media, you know, start creating and scheduling some posts and promoting your new course and all the benefits from taking it and give them a discounted pre sale entry. So you want to get people in there, you want to have students, you know, ready to take your course by the time you're ready to launch it. And if you don't have any of these things, you don't have email subscribers or social media followers, that's totally fine. You're just starting out. I would recommend doing, running some ads on social media or Google, just promoting the course because this is just going to be the fastest way to get new students while closely monitoring the analytics of who's interested and who isn't. And that's all really valuable information. So just going to take a quick drink here. Okay, so hopefully this is, I'm not just throwing a ton of information at you guys and you guys are getting some valuable information from this. I know it's a lot, there's a lot of things to cover. I could probably do multiple lives with this, but I'm trying to condense it all into a manageable chunk of time. So one quick tip. After kind of you've done all of these things, you know, you have a say, you have a course built, you built the curriculum, you built, you know, you've recorded videos, you've done transcripts, PowerPoint presentations, all that good stuff. A really important piece of the puzzle is figuring out what to set your price at. And you want to make sure that you pick the right price for your course. And there's really no one size fits all, it kind of varies. So what I recommend doing is starting high and then you decrease your price gradually to find that sweet spot. You know, definitely recommend researching some similar courses and what they're charging. And like, while you're researching this, make sure you're asking yourself, you know, what kind of curriculum are they offering and how does it compare to yours? Do you have video lessons, an interactive workbook, a community where students can interact live lessons, one on one support? Like if you offer any of these things and you notice that some of your competitors aren't, you can charge more money. So I would definitely say start high and then kind of decrease it as you go down. And then, you know, when you start high as well, you can do discounts for pre sales and discounts for your like email subscribers or followers. And like you won't really lose a ton of money over it. And it's just, you know, it's a great way to start testing and you'll eventually find that sweet spot to see when you get the most subscribers and all that good stuff. So this next subject is probably one of, or if not the most important part of doing this course is building an effective sales funnel. This is going to be extremely important for those of you who want to make passive income from this course. If you just kind of want to build this course and just use it as a digital product and you don't really want to be too involved and you don't want to, you just kind of want to let the students come in and just earn passive income from it, this is going to be really important that you set up properly and you just do the proper testing to get it as strong as Possible. So building a sales funnel. You know, I mentioned there's a decent amount of upfront work to get this all going. I've already kind of discussed for the last 19 minutes on like how to actually build the online course and structure it and price it, all that good stuff. So there's clearly a lot of steps needed before we get to this stage. But there's alt. But this is ultimately what will make or break the success of your course. You know, if you do this right, it may take some testing and adjustments as you go, but you'll be able to put it on autopilot and watch the students come in on a regular basis and you're making passive income from it. So building a sales funnel. Step one is to create an amazing sales page. An amazing sales page includes things like a strong title and subtitle that briefly, briefly describes who your course is for and what students will get out of it. A short. You also want to have like a short video introduction to you and your course and how your students can apply what they learn right away. Like I mentioned earlier, you need to kind of be able to portray that you are the one to solve this person's problem. And a quick video, two minutes a minute is a great way to introduce yourself on that initial in that, on that sales page, which is the first time that a lot of people are going to see that this course even exists. Another great thing is just to have testimonials from previous students. This is where that pre sale period comes in. Or if you have a list of really trusted people who you know would really resonate with your content, give them early access to the course and let them go through the whole thing and then ask for feedback. You know, give them a survey and give them like, ask what kind of value they got from it and use those as testimonials on that sales page. Because social proof is super key when you're going to sell something as big as like an online course. Another really, really important thing is you want to make sure you add frequently asked questions on there and not just like generic basic frequently asked questions like how do I pay for the course? Or like, I don't know what some other really basic ones. But make sure that you really listen to your students and what it is that they typically ask and put it on there. Because you know, this is part of that passive income part. Part of it is that you want this to be on autopilot. You don't want to be answering emails all the time from, from your students on very Basic questions that they could have just found out online. So you want to make sure that that frequently asked questions section is stacked and that you. It's filled with everything that people could possibly ask. So. And then the last thing that I would recommend including, it's, you know, you can definitely include more. But this is just all the main key points that I'd like you to have in there is free bonuses for signing up during a certain time period. And I' already said this a couple times, freebies. It just makes the course easier to sell. And really, you know, it's a lot of initial setup, you know, to create like an ebook or, or a three tips guide or just something simple like that, or like a video series that's unlisted on YouTube that nobody else can access. You know, stuff like that. Just freebies that it just helped people make that purchase decision. Like, okay, I'm gonna sign up for this course and I'm gonna get all of these skills, but I'm also getting these free added bonuses to it as well. So I think those are all great things that should be on a sales page. So that's step one. Step two is to create multiple entry points for your sales page. Add the link to your website, add the link to your social media, create a QR code that you can share at networking events or when you're doing a podcast or giving a speech. You know, add the link in the ending pages of your book. You want to be able to easily share this with students whenever the opportunity arises. And then step three is likely going to be the most lucrative method, is to run ads on multiple channels to see which one works best. So once you have a sales page, once you have multiple entry points for your online course, so the entry points. So that just means when somebody clicks on it, they go to the sales page. And once you have all of those things in place, run ads on Google meta, LinkedIn, anywhere that your potential readers can be browsing. And the goal is to recoup your investment and make sure that you're getting conversions from these and not spending too much money without results. So it'd probably be wise to choose one method at a time so you're not investing too much money in it and you're able to keep track of everything that's going on. So once you are able to find a method that works, then you're on your way to earning passive income from your online course. So that is my analysis of how or analysis, my explanation of how to build a sales funnel, how to create Engaging course materials, how to break down your course into modules, how to identify core concepts for your course, and why non fishing books are perfect for online courses. With that, I think I'm going to start wrapping up here and I'm actually, I'll take questions in just a minute, but Angela is going to be giving away prizes to whoever is watching and whoever stuck through to the end. First of all, thank you so much for watching my presentation. I really appreciate it. And Angela's going to be able to randomly select a few of the viewers here and give you guys all either a self publish and succeed copy, self promote and succeed by Julie Broad and then a hashtag, no boring books mug and an oh so soft journal so you guys can get one of those. And then, so I'll let her randomly select a few of you guys or I think it's, I'm not sure how many we're going to be giving away, but I'll let her choose that. You can check it in the chat. And then also, as promised, I'm going to be giving away a free ebook that literally sums up everything that I talked about today. So kudos on you if you were here taking notes and being super diligent and listening to everything that I was saying. If this is something that you're interested in. But I actually put together a. I think it's like about 10 pages. It's ebook that literally sums up all the points that I just discussed. So if you're interested in getting that, just email me shaneokentras.com and just say I want the ebook and I'll send it to you right away. It'll just be a link. It's just a little virtual flip book that you can go through and see all of these notes. So, yeah, anybody who's interested in, you know, doing an online course, it looks like Angela has already done the prizes. Yeah, Joshua, congrats on winning the first random prize. So you're going to be able to get, I think, yeah, one of Julie's books, a no boring books mug or a journal that's all got book launchers branding on there. Yeah. Alan and Efren, thank you guys for wanting the ebook. If you just shoot me an email, Shane, book launchers.com and then say I want the ebook and I'll send it over your way. And then that should be like a little. It should definitely give you a boost on how to get started. All right, so I think I'm ready for some questions now. If Angela's done doing the. The. Okay. Question. Are there any parts of the process that take people by surprise? That's a really good question. Oh, cool. We got it up on the screen too. Parts of the process that take people by surprise. I think what I normally see is the recording videos for your online course. I think it's a bit overwhelming in the beginning because there's a lot to cover, especially if you do like an 8 module, 5 lesson per module course. That's like probably an hour and a half to two hours of video where you're kind of recording like this and maybe just reading off a PowerPoint slide. And there's a lot to it. You know, you want to make sure that you have good lighting, you have a good microphone and you're coming through clearly and, and you're getting your point across and keeping students engaged and not just kind of rambling. Like. I think that's a part that takes, you know, some of our authors by surprise, is that how much work actually goes into making those videos. So we, if you work with us, you know, we give you a lot of support, we give you a lot of resources to help you put all these things together and then kind of coach you through how to present yourself on camera. And then. Yeah, it's just that it's like I said, it's a lot of work up front for these horses. But the, you know, the payout, the potential payoff once it's all set up and if it's done, if it's done well, is. Can be really lucrative. So. Yeah, hopefully that answers your question. Angela, do you have any more questions for me? Really appreciate you staying after five o' clock to do this. By the way. Thank you all so much for hanging out. Oh, that was the last one. Okay, cool. That was easy. It looks like. Okay, Alan had one. How much time would the students expect to receive per module? How much time would students expect to receive like, like the length of the video or. Trying to figure out what you're saying here. The students who expect to receive per module, I would say, you know, you don't want it to be too long and it's. I would say per module, five to ten minutes maximum. Yeah. How, how long each module should be? Yeah, I mean, you like video, like video content like this, you want to keep small and bite size. So I would say five to 10 minutes maximum. I think you can be able to cram in a lot of really great information in five to 10 minutes. That's what I would say. And then at that point, you know, if you're having 2030 minute long videos in there. One, it's going to take forever to upload those to your course. And then two is you don't want to like lose the students attention. You want to keep them involved and get them going. So I would keep it short and simple and just break it up into manageable sessions and chunks and you know, have materials with your, with your course and with those videos that students can like follow along with even if it's just a simple worksheet. Any other questions? I'll hang here for like another minute to see if anybody else has any specific things that they want to ask. But yeah, if you want the ebook, email me Shane book launchers.com to say I want the ebook. I will send it over your way right away. And okay, we got a couple here. What nonfiction type books are good for this and not good for this example? I imagine a memoir would not necessarily be a good book. I would argue that any nonfiction book can definitely be turned into an online course. You know, if it's just a memoir or if it's like a. If your memoir has certain messages to it that you're trying to get across and you're trying to like if you're writing a memoir, let's say, let's see, I don't know about your life in, in you started a business, you sold it and you realize that, you know, this is like you found your life's passion afterwards or something. Like it could be a course about how to discover your passions in retirement or how to discover your passions after you do an exit from a massive business. You know, something like that. Like I wouldn't say that there's certain books that aren't good for it because specificity is key. Like if you can get a main message from your book that you're trying to get across, it can definitely be turned into an online course somehow. You know, it doesn't have to be a huge 8 module thing like I'm talking about. It can just be be a small mini course, you know, just two or three modules that kind of helps them get started and you can use that as like a lead magnet to sign up to your email subscriber list or you know, buy more of your books in the future or you know, even prove that you are a great speaker. You know, something like that. So there's a lot of benefits to actually having the course and I wouldn't say there's like a limit. So hopefully that answers your question. Kevin, have I seen successful upsell opportunities with the course. Absolutely. This is a real, I mean what I showed you, one of our, one of our authors, Trent, he had, he wrote a book on sustainability and his course is Finding Sustainability. And it's basically how to train big corporate companies on, on becoming more sustainable themselves, implementing like a sustainable department inside of their, inside of their actual company. And he was able to use that. He would just give the course away for free to these companies so that they can train, they can in train their internal team on everything that they need to know about how to be more sustainable. And then you know, he would be able to get consulting gigs from that and like get referrals from other businesses. So that's one example. And then like, I mean there's. Have I seen any other successful. I'm trying to think of exact examples, but I mean that's probably one of the biggest ones. Like to be able to get consulting gigs from this, that's really great money and really great opportunities there. All right, what experience is required? I mean specific. Well, I mean any experience and any, any. Whatever your niche is, whatever you're good at, you can really make an online course about anything. You know, I'm talking here specifically about turning your non fiction book into an online course. Just because they're just naturally structured to be that way. They're naturally structured for educational content, so they just work well. But like what experience is required is, you know, it's, you don't really need specific experience per se. It's just if you're good at something and you're willing and if you're good at teaching somebody how to do this and you have a really good understanding of it, you can definitely turn it into an online course. So hopefully that answered your question. Dorothea, your book is for the reader, so it can be a course. Yeah. All right. Brian asks what other quality issues should avoid, should a video avoid besides sound, lighting, background and distractions. The, well, the quality issues would be like if you recorded it on like an iPhone 3 or something. That's, that's probably an annoying answer. But when you, when you actually record like on a laptop or like say like a camera or something or even like on. I don't know if YouTube does it, but there's like certain quality, video quality levels that you, that you are looking for. You know, there's like 1080p and then like 1400p or something like that. I'm really not a video guy. But you want to make sure that you record it in the highest quality possible and then there's tools. So if it's like, too big of a file, there's tools on where you can reduce the file size and all that good stuff. But quality issues. So the video quality is important. And then I think that about covers it. I mean, if you have good sound, good lighting, decent background, and no distractions like dog barking or kids running around or anything like that, you're basically pretty good. And you can always hire a, like, video editor on, like, fiverr.com to do, like, basic editing things and, like, make it look really professional. Like, put a thumbnail on it and, like, maybe some, like, effects and graphics and stuff. All right. And also Angela mentioned in here, for those people who have commented on a video the day that it was really the day that it was released, we'll do a double prizes on the next YouTube live. So I didn't include any prizes on this one, but the next time you tune in, there'll be double prizes that will be given away. All right. Another question from Alan. So, Alan, that's a great question. We handle essentially everything from start to finish. If you were to hire us to build your online course, and that includes basic video editing, so like, kind of trimming the beginning and end of the videos. But we coach you into actually making great videos from the start. Site production. Yep, that's all included. Uploading on the platform, publicity, marketing it. We do everything with you from that. We actually make an outline for your book and. And, you know, turn your book into an online course, like an actual curriculum that students will be able to use. So we essentially do everything. The only thing that you would have to do is record videos and, you know, meet with us a couple times and we'll. You'll actually be meeting with me and I'll get your vision for the course. You know, we'll be able to hone in on what the specific messages that you're trying to get across. And then, yeah, it. You know, in a process of five to six weeks, we'll have an awesome online course for you paired with a workbook and transcripts and notes, lessons, all that good stuff. So. All right. Dorothea Livingston. I only have life experiences to teach people. That's totally fine. You know, life experience is the best feature. Okay. There's more about online course creation. Yeah. Angela dropped a link to our book to course page on our website, so you want to check that out. That actually has info on what we do for you, what the pricing is, and actually link to buy it if you're interested. So. Cool, Alan. I'm glad I was able to answer your question and any other, any other questions that we have, anything, please take a quick moment, show some appreciation. Oh, look at that. Thank you so much. Okay, cool. Well, I think I'm gonna sign off now. I really appreciate everybody coming in and anybody who sent me an email shane.com saying I want the ebook. I will go check my email right now and send those all to send them your way. So good luck with your online courses. Thank you all for tuning in and I hope you all have a great day. See you.