76: Easy Guide To Creating Online Courses - #GrowYourLife

Hey there, everyone. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski. On this podcast, I show you ways to grow in your life, in your business, to get more results, make more money. And on this episode, I want to show you how to take your knowledge that you have and easily create courses with it. This is a question that get asked a lot from people because you can take a course and either make it a free offer, you can do it in a Facebook group, you can sell it through a site like thinkific or Teachable and make money. There's multiple different ways to do this, but a lot of times people over complicate the process. And so I want to simplify this for you so that if you listen to this, you can go and create a course this week. You see, there's a lot of you that I know want to create courses, but you don't know where to start. It's because you have a vision in your mind of what you think the course is going to look like, what it's going to be. And yes, while that's great, that vision is also keeping you stuck because of if it's not exactly like that, it's failure, possibly could be, or you just don't know where to start, what to do. It's over complicated. So I want to simplify all that for you. Did you know that you can actually sell a course online with a Facebook group mailchimp account? And you could use a Squarespace site where they pay you and you send a link to where they get access to all of that simply by purchasing on a website like Squarespace, or you can use something like Cartra or clickfunnels or any of these other platforms. People over complicate this whole process because they're like, if I don't juggle everything perfectly and do it all right, it's gonna fail. And that gets people stuck. And so wherever you're at in that process, I'm going to simplify that for you. Or there's one person you're stuck because you know all the technical stuff, but you're not sure how to get it from here up in your head to the Internet and doing it in a sequential manner, doing it in a way that's going to impact people and help people and putting information out there that's going to actually work that people want to buy and listen to.

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So I'm gonna touch on all of that simply for you today to get information that's up here in your head, out there to the World, you can either offer it for free or paid. I want you to think of this kind of a paradigm shift for you. When I launched this podcast, my goal was I want every single episode to be like a mini course for people. This podcast episode is a miniature course on creating courses. And every single episode of my podcast before this is like a mini course on whatever the topic of that podcast episode is. And so if you haven't listened to other episodes of it, I recommend you go back and check some of those out. Now, a little bit of background on me. I have created and sold over 70 courses online, either with companies that I worked for. Actually, it might even be closer to 100 companies that I worked for, companies that I've worked with. And now I coach and consult people on how to get information out there and sell their knowledge for seven figures. We have a client recently, couple clients, actually, that we're working with, we've been coaching, and they've sold seven figures worth of information with simple master classes and courses delivered through Facebook groups. That's it. It's not complicated yet. Many times we're trying to do everything perfect and fit into this box of what we think things should look like. And that's what overcomplicates it. The first step with creating a course is identify. It's actually not the technical stuff. That's actually not the first step. I will talk about that in this episode, though, so stay with me on this, because I know some of you are stuck. There's two types of people that are listening to me. You're either super stuck because you don't know what to do technically, or you're super stuck because you know the technical and you don't know how to get the information out of your mouth. So that's one of the two. So this is for both of those people. The technical side is going to be so much easier than you think. But the information side is what's common across all of these. And so if you don't have a message to get out there to people, if you don't know what you're going to teach, if you don't know what your course is going to be on, well, that's the place we need to start. And so what I like to do is I will write down 10, 20, 30 different, what I call throwaway ideas, green light ideas for courses. These are just ideas that I'm gonna. I'm gonna write them down on a piece of paper with the. With the intention to never create any of them. And this is A concept that I want to encourage you to do is dream up ideas, come up with concepts that you plan on trashing. That sounds scary, right? Oh, I poured so much energy into coming up with these ideas. Why would I trash it? Because that's the creative process. You see, when musicians create hit songs on records, they write 10, 20, 100, 200 songs before they come up with those 10 that are on that record. When it comes to courses, it's the same way. Every time I create a course, I write down about 10 to 20 different courses that I could come up with and then I whittle it down to, okay, which ones stand out to me the most that are going to impact my audience. And as you build an audience, your audience is going to tell you what they want you to create, courses on, what they want you to create, content on, what products they want you to sell to them in the beginning. How do you know that? Well, take what you know, take what your expertise is, take what everybody has been asking you for help with for many years, and just dump it out on a piece of paper. So I start with that. Usually I never have the title of the course decided until after I map out what it's actually going to be. So the title actually comes last in that process. Now there's two ways to do this. You can either pre sell your course or you can pre record it and launch it.

Okay.

And so the pre selling the course, you still want to come up with what you're going to teach. This is the foundation for both of these. What are you going to offer to people? What is the ideas that you are going to give to people? So you have to identify this. So the first place to start, put it down on a piece of paper. What's the overarching concept? You know, is it a squarespace course? Is it a Facebook ads course? Is it a course on, you know, if it's, you know, ministry, worship, music, whatever you're doing, come up with those ideas, write them down on a piece of paper. Once you land on what yours is going to be, say it's, you know, creating courses. And I, and I plan on in the future coming out with a very easy to follow step by step where I just, I break down every little detail on creating courses and selling them for you as a course. But for now, this is the next best thing is this podcast episode. Once you have that idea for your course, let's just say it's a course on creating courses, then what you're going to do is you're Going to start to write down some bullet points of what you're going to teach people, start to finish. And so there's another side of this concept is learning how to teach people what you know. To teach people what you know, you have to identify the starting place. You see, there's a big reason why being able to teach what you know is going to actually make you successful in business. Because you are going to have to learn how to organize your thoughts, start to finish, from step one to step 10. And so this is a framework that you need to wrap your head around is every single action that you do in your business, you have to identify what is the next step. Not step two, not step five, not step ten. Work backwards and figure out what is the very next step of where I'm at right now on this process and identify that clearly. Because then you can create a plan and a strategy to execute. That's what I do with my coaching clients is we identify and then we make a plan to execute. And so if your plan is making a course, come up with the overarching concept, write down bullet points of what it's going to be, what you're going to teach, what is the start to finish. Oh, by the way, you don't need to actually put these in order right now. Here's the fun part. You see, you can actually do this totally out of order. In fact, I encourage you to. Many times people get stuck because they're just trying to put it in the right order as they go. Instead, I recommend spitting it out, dumping your brain on a piece of paper out of order without worrying about it being in order yet. And then you can move them around and put them in the order later. That's how I do all of my courses as well as I dump all of these ideas out and then I put them in order. And so what happens is when I go to create a course now I have a Word document that has mapped out every point that I want to teach in the course. I've mapped out the entire course. If you're pre selling the course, you still want to map that out because that's going to go on your sales page and that's actually still going to be your guide that you're going to map out the same way then as you're teaching it live. Maybe over the course of six weeks or 90 days, something like that. Okay, so it's the same exact activity. What whether you are pre selling or pre recording exact same activity. Because if you're pre recording it, you're doing all that at once. If you're pre selling it, you're still teaching it start to finish to a live audience.

Okay?

And so it's the same exact methodology is dumping out on a piece of paper. What are people gonna learn? What are they gonna get from this? What concepts are they gonna get? And then this goes on your sales page, your landing page, things like that.

Okay.

Once you do that, figure out how you're gonna deliver it to people, what it's gonna be included. And then what I like to do when I pre record it is I just start recording. I open up obs, which is a piece of software that I like to use called obs. I open it up, and I just start recording. And I actually want to show you here real quick what my notes look like. If you're on the YouTube version, you can skip ahead to minute 11 and 40 seconds. Minute 11 and 40 seconds of this podcast. If you're listening to it on Spotify or Apple, you can go to the YouTube version and you'll be able to see the video video of me showing you what my course outline for a course looks like. These bullet points.

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And so, for instance, this is a course that I'm launching here very soon. And this is the outline that I outlined for that right here, this course that's coming up. Okay, so this is what I break down for people. All of these different mechanisms. It's funny, I even have, like, little notes in here, like, you know, oh, I burped at the end of the video. So what I do is this actually gives me a guideline. I burped at the end of the video while I was recording. So I know. Okay, I'm gonna edit that. Oh, no. Did I just scare you? I just talked about video editing. It's very easy to do. You can find software like Kapwing. You can find different things online that'll allow you to clip the ends of your. Your courses. That's why teaching it live is one of the best ways, because all you got to do is just hop on zoom and you have a video recording on zoom and then you put it up there. Okay, please stop overthinking and overcomplicating your process of getting information out there in your courses to people. It is killing you. It's gonna kill your profits to do that. So then once I do that, then I start recording with that software obs. Okay, so OBS is right here. I start recording with obs for my pre recorded. Or if you don't want to do that simply just use Zoom and hop into your own Zoom meeting and record the meeting. You can do this for pre recorded or not. And it'll work simple. Keep it simple.

Okay.

Now if you're gonna be pre selling it, you're gonna have to create the copy, you're gonna have to create an offer, you're gonna come up with a headline, and I have some podcast episodes on headlines that teach you how to do headlines and write and pre sell, stuff like that.

Okay.

And what you can do is you can deliver this in a Facebook group. You have people join a group and get delivered the content in the group. So they're paying for access to that group. How do you verify that they paid? You can sell your course easily through very simple platforms. We actually sold a course that we pre sold through a platform called Simpletic. So it was we basically sold these online webinar access. So it's a ticketing software. So we sold a ticket to our online course right here. So we created very simple pages and sold these.

Okay.

And so right there, very easily we're able to launch these and get in front of the audience of people that is buying our course. And then what we did was, okay, we got to print out other names and email addresses. We created a Facebook group. There's a question in the group that says, what email address did you use to sign up? We verify that, boom, give them access and then you can put the course information in the units section of the Facebook group right here. Facebook has built in to the platform. Course delivery under units right here. I have a free course right here in my group called the Internet Cash Flow Formula. It's right here under units. And you're able to go in and go through each of the lessons. Each video was pre recorded and I uploaded it every single day over the course of 21 days.

Okay.

And so easily you can deliver and sell access through platforms like Simpletix. Give people access to training through a Facebook group. Each lesson just like this and record it on Zoom. And you can link up software like that to your mailchimp. If you get a mailchimp account, deliver an email to people to get access to that email is going to then have the login to join the group. And then you just start recording each of those lessons based on your list that you wrote down of lessons like I did. Whether you pre sell or pre record, it's the same way you're going to record those lessons and then you're going to deliver them over a course of a schedule. If you're going to do live Q and A included in that. That group is a great way to do this because then you can deliver Zoom calls that people can log into. And right there you can very easily sell access to online courses and classes with very little technical expertise whatsoever. You use Zoom to record it. Honestly, I would recommend using Zoom over obs. You can sell tickets through Simpletix. You send them to a Facebook group group. You connect it through Mailchimp. SimpleTix connects to Mailchimp, adds them into the Mailchimp. Or you can send emails right through SimpleTix and give people access to the group, verify them, and boom, you literally have a start to finish system to sell online courses. Yet people complicate this so often, and it's sad because there's so many great, easy to use tools out there. There's no excuse to complicate it. Now, how do you know that your content is going to be good enough to be in a course? Well, only you can know that. If you feel confident in what you can deliver, what you can teach people. Teach it. How do you know it's good enough? Teach it to some people. How do you teach it to some people? You just do it. You see, the way that I tested, a lot of the stuff that I teach is this podcast and my social media content. When I create social media content and my podcast, I'm testing out what people are resonating with in my audience, and that's helping me figure out what to sell and what to create offers for people with. And when you put all this together, you can build a business that allows you to take the information that you have and sell it to people. If you're making it more complicated than what I just shared with you right now, you're making it more complicated than people that make seven figures doing this. And so keep it simple. Keep it very simple, okay? Get experience teaching other people what you know. Get a crowd of people around you. If you don't have a platform, gather some people, give away your content. Give it away for free as a free course. Start doing the process of communicating, whether it's verbal, the written word, and teach people what you know. That's one of the very first parts to do that. That's why I recommend people do social media live videos on their Facebook pages at least every single day. Because what that does is if you do that every day for at least six months, you're gonna have so much confidence to be able to create a course and sell it to people. When I created my first course, my website building course. I was doing social media videos every single day. Then I created a Facebook ads course. Now I got an offer course and a course building course and probably a social media course and a sales course and all these different things that, you know, that's my business. I have courses, I have teaching, I have coaching, mentorship, things like that that I'm doing for people. But I'm creating all of this. And the ecosystem is my content and my podcast. Stop over complicating the process of coming up with what you are going to say and teach to people. That's the biggest part and the biggest lesson that I would tell you. Just speak, open your mouth and let the words come out. And you know what, if it doesn't sound good, you can delete the video, you don't have to use it and you can rerecord it. It's okay. It's not the end of the world if it doesn't work out. Now sometimes I've seen people where they delete their video and they're way too critical of themselves about what they're saying, about what they're putting out there. And oftentimes this is tied to either if we got in trouble for teaching something some way, or the way that we judge other teachers, if we judge others, we're going to judge ourselves that way. So I had to give myself some grace to say, you know what? I don't have to do everything perfect. And guess what? My teaching, my confidence, my content all got better as soon as I stopped judging how other people do what they do.

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And so if you're somebody that wants to create online courses and sell them online, this is the foundation of how you do that. If you want to use social media ads and Facebook ads to sell to people. My course, social media ads, that works. The best course on using the all Facebook ads. My website building course, the best course out there on Squarespace, super easy to learn. And if you would like to work with me one on one coaching, or just have a call with me 15 minutes where we could talk about this process. Share with me where you're stuck on this journey where you're stuck in this process of what you're doing, keep it simple. You might say, well, what do you, what do you put in your emails? What do you put in the mailchimp? You just type to people what's up here? And you talk to them like they're real human beings, people that you care about and people that you want to connect with. That's it. You just talk to people like they're real people. When I'm talking to you here, when I'm talking to you on my social media, when I'm talking to you on my, my email, I'm just talking to you like you're, you're a real person. It's not this complicated little Rubik's Cube that I'm playing with. It's literally just a conversation. Every single thing that I do is conversations with people. And so get to that place where you're having just conversations with your target audience. You're just having a conversation with people. Doesn't matter if you do it all perfect. What matters is that you take action, make a plan, put it into action, keep moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other. Alright, so if you're somebody that wants some help with this again, you can go over to my website, schedule a free 15 minute call with me. It's under the tab that says coaching says free 15 minute call. You can schedule that time with me. If you want to win a free 30 minute call, you can leave growyourlife on my Instagram and I will pick one winner every single week on Sunday to win a 30 minute coaching call with me. If you want to purchase coaching as well, we can purchase a package or we can do one on one coaching over zoom and I can coach you through and really it's kind of like a hybrid coaching consulting type thing where I can coach you through, consult through this process that we've talked about and any of the processes that I talk about that I do with my clients. What I love helping people with is creating products that people love, marketing them to people and scaling businesses to seven and eight figures from zero. Going from zero to eight figures, there's nothing more that lights me up is to help somebody else do that. And so you might be that person that I help do that next. Look forward to talking with you. Grow your life, everybody, and we'll talk soon.