7 WORST Beginner Online Course Mistakes to Avoid

Why are some online courses able to generate tens of thousands of dollars a month while others are seemingly left picking up the scraps? Or worse, they're not making any sales at all. After 5 years of growing my own 6-figure online education business, I can confidently tell you that actually hitting $10K a month consistently isn't as hard as you might think if you follow these 7 steps so you don't end up like the other 99%. These are 7 tactics that will take you from being one of many to one of few without having to outwork everyone or burn out in the process. So let's start with mistake number 1, which is that you have no idea where or how to start. Analysis paralysis and information overload is probably the number one reason that people don't reach any sort of success. And let's face it, it's incredibly difficult when you are being told that this strategy is the best or that strategy is the best and you don't know really where to start. So you figure there, it's too much work, there's too many things being thrown at me, I probably just shouldn't even do it anyway. And it's a shame that I even have to say this, but it really is crazy how many people don't start because they're intimidated by the process or they're just overloaded with information. I love the quote by Zig Ziglar where he said, you don't have to be great to get started, but you have to start to be great. And to make your life easier, I put together a full masterclass that shows you how to earn your first $2,000 per month from digital products without complicated tech. It's gonna walk you through every single piece of this process. I'll show you what to focus on and when from the beginning to the end so that you know what steps you need to take. To watch the masterclass, there's a link in the description, or you can always go to profityourknowledge.com/masterclass. Now, this second mistake is super common when it comes to building online courses, and that is thinking that the market is saturated. Imagine going into a busy marketplace looking to sell your products, but the marketplace is filled with other vendors selling pretty similar products. Even in a crowded marketplace, there are always gaps and unmet needs. So by offering a unique value proposition like a different teaching style, more support, better support, better trainings, more up-to-date trainings, things like this, you can cause your online course to really stand out from the pack, even if it's under a topic that has been covered so many times. By finding these gaps in the market, you can attract clients who are looking for something more specific. Think about what makes your approach unique and how you can address pain points that others might overlook. A great example of this is masterclass.com. Why not learn entrepreneurship from a great entrepreneur like Richard Branson, or learning how to invest not just from some random person, but from Warren Buffett, or learning how to cook from Gordon Ramsay. The unique value proposition of learning from celebrities and industry experts is what makes MasterClass be as successful of a company as it is today selling online courses. So you thinking that the market is too saturated for you to fit in is one of the biggest mistakes that's gonna cause you not to be successful at selling online courses, because where there is competition, there is demand. We want to find high-demand online courses and then fill in the gaps with a unique twist. But what if I told you earning thousands of dollars each month from your online courses simply boils down to this next piece, and that's not giving up too soon? I love this picture from the Three Feet from Gold story where you give up when you're almost there. So the key is just to not give up and keep moving forward until you succeed. When I started building online courses, I built 6 online courses over the course of about a year and a half that didn't make me any money. I was building these programs. I spent all this time building them, trying to market and sell them through funnels, et cetera, paid ads, all that kind of stuff, and I didn't make any money. And it wasn't until I finally decided to make another online course, but I did things differently. I did the customer research, I built the course strategically, and that's when I woke up to $200 in my sleep from a passive sale. I'd never met this person in my life. Now, a question that I get all the time when I share that story is, why did you keep making courses? It's because I knew the potential that there was to selling online courses. So I just didn't give up because I knew that the juice was worth the squeeze. And because I stuck with it long enough, I was able to not just sell that one course, but sell that course over and over again and then start making other programs that has allowed me to build a six-figure online business. So in the end, all you can do is learn and try. That's what I did and it ended up paying off, but you have to stick with it long enough to succeed. Because the truth is that the people who fail are the people who quit before they reach success. The difference between the 99% of people that do fail and the 1% that succeed is twofold. Number one, they don't give up until they figure it out. And number two, which is arguably the biggest thing that prevents them from succeeding, is spending too much time building your course. It is incredibly painful to spend months of your time building something that doesn't get the results that you wanted. What most people do is they find a course topic that they want to create and then they spend all this time building out this massive 30, 40 lesson online course. But the real key to building smart digital products is to start with MVPs or minimum viable products. Basically an MVP is the simplest bare bones version of a product that gets the result that it promises. The key is to release a product to the market that is good enough to test the idea and start the learning process. It includes just enough features to attract early buyers and really test that the product idea is actually good because at the end of the day, it's not about how many people say that they will pay for your program, it comes down to how many people will pull out their wallets and actually pay for the program. Dropbox is a prime example of starting with a minimum viable product. They created a simple video demonstrating the product's functionality and this video attracted early adopters and validated the demand for a seamless file sharing service. The feedback from these users helped Dropbox refine its product before investing heavily into the development of the product. Airbnb is another prime example. The founders of Airbnb initially rented out air beds to college students in their apartment, hence why it's called Air Bed and Breakfast. This MVP allowed them to validate the concept and gather crucial insights from early users, which they used to improve the platform into what it is today. So the key with building an online course is to find the demand with a certain transformation that the market wants, and then start by creating a mini-course. Make something that is very bare bones, the meat and potatoes that gets the market that transformation that they want. Once your idea is validated from people actually paying for it, then we can start putting in more time to developing it into something bigger over time. The next reason that 99% of people don't reach their goals with online courses is that when their motivation fails and they're feeling discouraged, they don't have a system to fall back on. Marketing is essential, but you're not always in the mood or excited about doing it, which is why we need to have a really good sales system when we're selling an online course. What if you had an automated sales system that was promoting and selling your online course every day without your constant engagement? And this doesn't need to be a crazy complicated system. It starts with great content that leads to an opt-in, so we build our email list, and then that triggers a series of emails that points people to a sales page. The sales page is where we finally make the sale, and after they've purchased, they get the product. And by the way, I break down each one of these components inside of my free masterclass. There's a link again in the description. Now, after building a six-figure online education business, I can tell you that this next step isn't always obvious, but it is very necessary, and that's to focus on one course at a time. When I started building online courses, I just thought that I needed more courses, and if I had more things to offer, more people would buy them, which wasn't the case. What I really needed was to focus on one really good product and getting really good at marketing and selling that one product before I moved on to another. So if you wanna save yourself a ton of time, focus on one product and sales funnel at a time until it's working, and then you can start building other things. I hear a lot of people that think that, oh, I just need to build more courses because more courses is better, or it looks more professional, or whatever their reason is. But in the end, more courses actually equals more work and more problems. Think about it, if you have a comment section inside of each one of your courses and you have all these students joining, if you're able to make those sales, then you have to respond to all these different comments. You have to update the course material on multiple different platforms because you should update your courses. There's more things to monitor, and in the end, it's just a lot more work. So it's better to have one really good program that you can point people to and making that program the best that you possibly can. The next reason that people fail to reach their goals with online courses is that 99% of them don't even believe it's possible, or they believe that it is possible, but not for them. And this pains me because I look at clients like Constance, who was making $2,000 per month and we hadn't even finished her sales page. And she had no idea how online business worked or selling programs or anything, and she was still able to make it work. Or Steve, who came to me struggling to make any sales with his courses to finally waking up $300 in his sleep over and over again, getting random emails of courses being sold because he had a good system. Maybe you haven't even tried to sell an online course because you've been watching videos like this and you're just kind of in that analysis paralysis stage. Or maybe you have tried to sell online courses, but you just didn't get the results that you wanted. I can tell you that you just can't give up because in the end, if you do give up before you even make the sales, you you're never gonna end up making any sales. The key is to apply what you learned from this video into your business and continue to learn and try new things. Because in the end, that is all that we can do is learn and try. But even by fixing these 7 mistakes, you can still not make any sales without knowing this next piece. To fix this and start making sales consistently, you need to learn how to market and position your course effectively. So watch this video and I'll show you how to build online courses the smart way. Hey, if you got value from this, please like this video and leave a comment below letting me know what your thoughts were or if you have any questions. I will do my best to respond to you. It really helps boost the video engagement. Regardless, take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen, and I'll see you in the next one.