14: 5 Simple Steps for Creating your Online Course

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Welcome to the Course Creators MBA Podcast. I'm your host Destiny Kopp, and in this podcast we're covering actionable tips to grow your online course business. I'm excited to chat with you about our topic for today, which is five simple steps to create your online course. I've spoken with future course creators in my private Facebook group and in some strategy sessions and you are telling me that you're struggling with creating your online course. You're saying that it's overwhelming to think about the amount of content you need to create even if you're not starting from scratch. Some of you are pulling together PowerPoints or worksheets from live trainings that you've done in the past, but even then, it's difficult to organize your content into an online course format. But before we get started on the five steps, I want to talk about three mistakes that I see many course creators making that I want you to avoid. And these mistakes are easy to make and they can have a really negative impact on on your progress. So let's jump right in. Mistake number one is creating a course about a specific topic rather than trying to solve a problem for your ideal customer. Remember that people pay to solve problems. Period. Always remember that your customers may be able to live with a headache, but they will pay you good money to get rid of a migraine. You need to first ask what are their major pain points? And then work to solve them with your online course. Mistake number two is making it difficult for your students to succeed by producing a huge amount of content and overwhelming them. Not only does it make it difficult on you to create this huge amount of content but but it can affect your student success. Remember that they only want to solve their migraine their problem. They don't want to spend 10 or more hours a week in your online course. Just like you, they are very busy and they are paying you to get their issue resolved as soon as possible. And mistake number three is thinking that your course is just passive revenue and that you can sit back and enjoy all this money coming in. The truth Truth is to truly make your online course business successful, you still have to get personal with your audience. You need to be around for them to ask questions, check on their progress to ensure that they are successfully completing the course material. This is one of your differentiators in the marketplace and many online course creators don't follow up after the sale. So let's jump right into the five simple steps for creating your online course. Step number one is validating your course idea. So the first step in your course creation process is validating that course idea and making sure that it meets the need in the market. So this will involve surveying your audience to ensure that your course idea and your content creating meets their needs. Now this can be done through an online survey, through phone calls with prospective students, or even a combination of both. But I will say that I highly recommend the phone calls because you will get some gold nuggets by having these conversations with your ideal customers. And just remember that the primary goal of this exercise is to make sure that what you pull plan to offer is exactly what your audience needs and wants. As mentioned earlier, you want to make sure that you are creating a course that solves a major pain point which is their migraine. After all, you don't want to go through all this hard work to create a course that no one will buy. Step two is outlining your course content. So after you have validated your course idea and you clearly understand your customers fears and challenges, it's time to outline your course content. So in this step you are going to brainstorm all content that you think should be included in your course. You can capture this information on a Google Docs, a word, or even a sheet of notebook paper. If you are that type of person. You can also use a mind mapping app such as Coggle to organize your contents into steps, modules and lessons. And I love mind maps. I love them because they are great and they allow you to translate what's in your brain to a visual picture. It's also very easy to organize and kind of move around your course content in a mind map so you can develop a Clear learning path for your students. And then moving on to step three. Step three is when you build your course content. So in this step, you are creating content for your course like any of the slides. So right now you're just creating the slides themselves. You can do them in like Google Slides, you can do them in PowerPoint or keynotes. And you're also working on or thinking about the course enhancement that you're also going to include, like any workbooks, any cheat sheets or checklists. But here's where this gets a little tricky. When you build a course for when you build course content for like a lower price course, like a mini course, and generally, you know, I kind of define that as something that costs $99 or less, you can approach the course creation process differently. So when you are creating a lower price course, in many cases you can create all the content up front. For instance, you can go ahead and create all your slides using PowerPoint or Keynote and then all of the course enhancements. But if you are creating more of a signature type of course, one that takes your students maybe four weeks or six weeks or even eight weeks to complete, and perhaps one that your bundling in group coaching, the approach is much different. So for a signature course, I recommend that you co create along with your ideal customer. And let me just paint this picture for you what I would want you to do in this type of situation. If you're building a signature course, I want you to find, you know, a handful, maybe 10 or so of your ideal clients, your ideal students, and co create along with them. So you have your outline, you have it broken out in different modules, figure out how long your particular system program will take. In this example, we're going to assume that it's going to take six weeks long. So in week one, you deliver your week one content. So you can deliver that live, like via a zoom call where you know, all of your participants get on that with you. You deliver the information, they can ask questions if they like, and then you give them some time to go through the material if you have any like workbooks or what have you. And then at the end of week one, you have them fill out a survey or you contact them individually and get feedback if they got stuck or where they might have recommendations for improvement. And you repeat that process for all of the weeks. So weeks two through six, and then at the end you have all of this valuable feedback from your students where you can tweak and make changes if necessary. You have awesome testimonials, right, because you've gone through the process with them, you've ensured that they actually were able to complete, complete the transformation that you promised. So it's a win win for everybody. What I also like about this process is that it keeps you accountable as the course creator. So you're developing a pretty robust program, right? This is your signature course. And every single week you know that you are on the hook for delivering that information. So it keeps you moving along in the course creation process. So can you see how, you know, creating a signature type of course may be a little bit different than a mini type course? Okay, so let's move on to step four. In step four, you are actually recording your videos. You're making any changes. If you developed a signature type program, you're going to take those, you know, lessons that you created when you delivered the information live and you're going to break them out into smaller type PowerPoints and record videos. So now it's time to record your voiceover. So basically what you're going to do, let's assume that you created your course content slides in PowerPoint, you are going to record your voiceover. And there are several tools in the market that you can use for this, but really you only need something that records your screen. So here's what I do. When I record the videos for my online course, I have my slides up on my screen and then I do a screen recording of the slides themselves and I leave my notes up in PowerPoint on each slide so I can use them as speaker notes. So when I'm going through to record my videos, my speaker notes are also up on my screen and it's just taking a screen recording of my slides themselves. And it is so, so easy. And it's basically the same process you would use if you're doing a software demo for your course. So let's just say you're teaching people how to use Excel. Excel, you're taking a screen recording of your computer and recording over it. So very, very simple. Another option is to record direct to camera. So if you were speaking directly into camera and doing your teaching there. So that is super simple also, and I would say that many course creators do a combination of recording from slides and also direct to camera and then moving on to step five. So in step five, you need to decide where you're going to your course content. So in the step, you should decide what's best for you and your students in terms of what platform you're going to use to host your course. So that my bottom line here is what I recommend is to stay away from course marketplaces in many cases because they own your customer and they own their email. I would highly recommend, if you want to build a sustainable online course business that is that will provide income for years to come and allows you scale your business and grow, is that you explore using a standalone course management system. And there are a lot of strong players in the market to consider for this. You can look at Kajabi, you can look at Teachable, you can look at Think of it. And those are just a few examples. There's tons of them out in the marketplace and then some course creators feel very comfortable hosting the course on their own website which with a plugin such as course caps. So there you go. The five simple steps for creating your online course and as I always say, an online course business is 90% marketing and only 10% product creation. And because I want to make it super easy for you to create your online course, I have a special promotion on my Course in a Box solution which is a plug and play system for creating your online course in as little as a week. I've included the link in the show notes below and I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you have any questions about creating an online course or marketing your online course, please send me a DM on Instagram. My handle is estinycop. Have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.