Tips For Creating A Successful Online Course From A TOP Online Teacher

The key to making a successful online course is first you have to have an audience. Okay? You have to have a market that you can advertise to. And advertise to isn't necessarily the traditional means of advertising. I'm not talking about spending money on YouTube ads or spending money on Facebook ads. Like I'm technically advertising to you right now. This exposure is advertising. It just happens to be free advertising. Okay? So you're gonna, you're gonna put yourself out there to people in hopes of gaining an audience, finding the right people. And one, you have to know their problems. Okay, what are their pain points? So I teach guitar online. That's my primary business is I'm a guitar teacher here on YouTube and I help older adults fulfill their lifelong dream of playing guitar. Now, what are their pain points? Okay. That, you know, they've tried it before and they failed. They went and took lessons with another in person teacher. And that in person teacher made them feel stupid or told them to quit, which is horrible. I hate that they, you know, maybe they're old because they're older than. Maybe they have arthritis in their hands. So I have to address, like, I'm getting older. Am I too old to do this? No, you're not too old. So you need to know the pain points of your particular audience. Because, you know, if my audience was younger, they're probably not thinking about arthritis. Okay? Okay. So it's probably not going to be a pain point for them. But if I'm like, hey, if you're an older learner and you suffer from arthritis, I have a method for you where we can use easier chords so that you can still have fun and play the guitar even though you know your fingers don't work as good as they used to. That's a pain point. And I just gave them the solution. I have a solution to still help you play guitar even though you have this problem. So you're putting yourself out there, you're advertising yourself on social media, and you figured out who your person is, who your audience is and what their problems are. Okay? Then what you got to do is you've got to create this course that helps them have a transformation, okay? Courses themselves won't sell. Okay? You are trying to help people transform from one state into another. Think of like a fitness business. You're trying to create a transformation. Fitness is actually a physical transformation. Okay? I'm going to help you lose 10 pounds in 90 days or whatever it is. And you want this win to happen somewhat quickly. All right? So you need to Figure out a way in your course to help people to have wins very early on. So they keep getting motivated to one, finish out the course and then hopefully buy another product with you. That's going to get them even further onto the next transformation that comes after that. Now, the biggest thing that keeps people from having a successful course is they're guessing what the problems are. They're guessing what their audience will benefit from. And the thing to ask yourself are, what are the most common questions you get asked as an educator? Okay. Or as a trainer, as a plumber, whatever. What are the most common questions? How can I answer those questions and give people the wins that they need inside a course? You guys know what it is, right? You all have experience in something and you have the knowledge and you have the answers. You just have to put it in a video format or a text format. You have to put it in a course where this information can be digested. And once you do that, you have to again, you can market this course. And a big thing that people forget to do. You know, I've spent lots of money on landing pages. You know, I've paid people money and I've had some landing pages work and others don't. You have to always be testing. But the first course I ever did, I wrote the sales page. And it probably wasn't the greatest sales page, but it was honest, it was from the heart, it was in my voice. And I was just telling people, like, I made this course. This is what it does. This is what it can help you to do. And this is how much it costs. And this was during COVID and on a really, really crappy sales page that like I wrote myself. It was, it wasn't a long form, you know, like those standard long form sales pages. It's like a million miles long. It was just a really short sales page that was brutally honest about, hey, this is what's what I can. These are probably your problems. This is how I can help you. This is what's included. You know, when you buy the course, it's, you know, it's this many videos and it comes with a workbook and all that stuff. I didn't even have any testimonials yet because people hadn't bought the course, maybe had a couple, but I sold $16,000 in one month on this course. And that was April of 2020. And it was the most money I had ever made online. And it made me realize how important it is to, to get that exposure, because the more exposure you have, the more eyeballs you have on your products, on your experiences and what you can do to help. Okay, so what do you need to do that you need a website? So you need a functioning website to have an online course. And I tell people like, oh, well, what's your secret to being big on YouTube? And it's like, well, I was consistent on YouTube and I kept posting content, but not only did I post the content on YouTube, I also posted it over on my website. So it's very common that you will find a YouTube video that has a website page associated with it on my guitar teaching website. Why do I do that? Because I'm a big fan of search engines and organic traffic. It can be very, very hard to get the organic traffic train running on YouTube. It just takes time. It takes consistency, but it also takes some time over on Google. But I found from my personal experience of building websites, I've been building website many, many moons since. Since the late 2000s. I used to build informational websites. And if you can tie in with the right keywords, you can actually get a lot of visitors to a webpage. And over time, your webpage will grow. And as your webpage grows, guess what's over here? YouTube. YouTube's growing along with it. So I think that was kind of the secret, because people are like, wow, your channel grew really, really quickly, considering. And I think that was the secret. It was like I had this website over here and I had this YouTube channel, and I was right from the beginning synchronizing them and getting them to work together. So I wasn't just focusing on just the organic traffic I was going to get from YouTube. I was also focusing on organic traffic that I could also get from Google. Those people go to the website and then they check out the YouTube and those two are kind of funneling each other together, and they're working together because, you know, the YouTube is the visual. And I do a lot of teaching. And hopefully you're an educator if you're watching my channel, but if you're not, YouTube is the ad. Just like I said, this is the exposure. This is the advertisement of, one, do I like this person? Do I like Lauren? Or I hate her, because if I don't like her, I'm going to click away and go find someone else who I can relate to better. So, one, do I like this person? Two, is this person helping me? And three, if they are helping me, what else can I do with this person? Okay. Because that's the funnel of having a successful online course. You know, people going to know you, you have to help them, you have to help them achieve some type of transformation and then they got to go buy from you, okay? But they need to know they have a problem, okay? Because there's, there's different types of buyers. There's the people who like they're ready to buy right now, they know they have a problem and they're ready to buy. But that's only like 3% of people, okay? There's people who, you know, know they have a problem but they're not ready to buy, okay? There's also people who don't know how that they're not ready to buy. They don't know how they have a problem, okay? So there's that. So there's all these different buyers who are in your funnel. So not only do you need a website with a landing page and all this organic traffic coming in so that you can grow an audience, you need follow up. And this is the biggest thing where people fail. Even a brick and mortar business. You know, people are like, why was your brick and mortar so successful? I would follow up with people as soon as possible. Like they would fill out a form on my website and within like five seconds I was called them, they're like, holy crap, you're fast. And it's like, well, if this is the kind of service you get now, imagine what the service you're going to get when you come through my business. And that's how I grew my business really quick. It was just trying to have like really super fast customer service for people. And we still do that online. You know, it's through email. But like someone sends an email, we try to respond as quickly as possible and be polite and be nice and help people. So you know, you need to make sure you have follow up systems. And that's why I really like Kajabi. As you know, people ask me all the time, Lauren, where do you host your course? I hosted through to Kajabi. So if you guys are interested, I'll put an affiliate link in the description below. But the reason I like Kajabi is because it's all in one. You can have your website, you can have your courses there. They have great landing pages. I started with Teachable and I switched over to Kajabi because it just looks so much cleaner. It was so much easier to use. And the website, the landing page is actually converted much better than they did on Teachable. It's a little more expensive than teachable but it's well worth switching over to because the other thing is within my course. I can have emails automatically follow up with people or I could create a mailing list I didn't need, like mailchimp or to be paying for something else. I have my mailing list within Kajabi and I can put people on segment people on different things. So depending on what form they filled out, we'll follow up with them. Okay, I have a free crash course and I recommend this. This is a great way to get people in your funnel. Get a free course, give them something for free, and then we follow up with them. Be like, hey, if you, you know, if you like the free course, imagine, imagine what would happen if you took the full course if you found this helpful. Those are only like 8 videos. The full course is 70 videos. Like imagine where you're gonna go in and we keep following up with them. Follow up with them for about 30 days and then we put them onto a different list and we follow up with them in a different way. Because some people aren't ready to buy right now. Some people are gonna buy a year from now. I've had people who've sat on my mailing list for two years and then it's like, oh my God, they just bought something. They weren't, they weren't ready two years ago. Took them two years to figure out that they had a problem. It took them two years to figure out that there was a solution to their problem. And then they're like, okay, they thought about it some more and then they're like, okay, great, I'm ready to solve my problem right now, finally. Because life happens, stuff gets in the way. So you want to make sure you have a website. This way you can get that audience. You need to get in front of people. Use social media. It's free. It's free. Advertise. You can do paid advertising. You know, you could jump the gun. If you got extra money and you want to do paid advertising, go for it. But I've lost a lot of money on paid advertising when my funnel wasn't set up correctly. Alright, so just be aware of that. That's why I like the organic route. It definitely takes much longer. But you know, if you do have some extra money, I don't know too many business owners or too many startups that just have some random extra money laying around. But if you do and you can throw like two or three thousand dollars a month ads to figure them out, because it takes money to figure out if these ads are working. Go for it. Maybe you can run a YouTube ad to a webinar funnel. Those work great. All right, but if you want to have a successful course, the bottom line is you got to find your audience. You got to get in front of them. You got to tell them they have a problem, that you have the solution, and if they want the answer, they got to go sign up right over there. Now, if you guys are interested in using YouTube to grow your audience and sell more courses, then I highly recommend that you go check out my YouTube course, or I'm going to show you the ins and outs of using YouTub as a lead funnel for your courses. This is how I make most of my money right now is using YouTube and my website to funnel people into my online courses. If you guys are interested in that, go check out the link in the description below.