Watch This Before Creating an Online Course in 2026

I've been selling online courses and coaching for over 6 years and built a 6-figure business doing it. I wasted years building courses that nobody bought because I didn't understand the real game behind selling online courses. So in this video, I'm going to give you the exact roadmap that I wish I had when I got started so you can save some money and skip the years of guesswork that I had to go through. I'll show you how to create a course that people actually want to buy before you even build it, how to make your launch as profitable as possible even with a tiny audience, and how to automate your course so it sells while you sleep. And if you're serious about turning your online course into a predictable and consistent passive income stream, I have a full masterclass on how to do it linked right below this video. So before anything, we need to address the biggest mistake that most course creators make. And to do this, I want to tell you a story about a woman named Susie. Susie has 100 amazing ideas for an online course, and she gets so overwhelmed by it that she decides to just pick one of her course ideas and then immediately starts spending months outlining the modules, filming the lessons, buying expensive equipment, and hunting for the perfect course hosting platform. And then when launch day comes, she goes from not posting anything to all of a sudden talking about her online course and posting about it everywhere. And she only gets a few likes, maybe some compliments, and maybe one pity sale. But there's no real demand for her. So she is left upset, feeling overwhelmed, feeling defeated that she spent so much time and realizing this one painful truth. She spent months of her life building a course that nobody actually cared about. And that's exactly what I don't want to have happen to you because I've had to live through that more times than I would like to admit. But that all changed when I learned this. The way you actually make money from selling online courses is by, I ironically not selling courses. Instead, you have to sell a transformation and an outcome that people care about. The course is just a vehicle to get that outcome. And we only do that by first validating your course idea before you build anything. Before ever building an online course, we have to first start with a painful, urgent, and expensive problem. And I'm not saying expensive in the sense that, you know, you have to charge $2,000 for your online course or anything, I'm just saying it's expensive in the sense that people would pay money to figure out how to do that thing. You know, if you're a fitness coach, you could hear from people saying like, please help me lose 20 pounds before my wedding day without having to only eat chicken and broccoli. Or if we're talking to business owners, it's like, I need clients now because my income is inconsistent and I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills. These are real and legitimate problems that people value enough to take their hard-earned money and give it to you so they can learn how to do it. To build a profitable course, you have to stop meditating and journaling or manifesting the perfect course idea and just start talking to some real humans. You will learn more about your audience in one 30-minute call than you will from 6 months of writing and guessing. So get on some calls or some meetings with people that you would love to build a course for and you would love to truly help and ask what they've tried, what hasn't worked, what has worked, what do they actually wanna learn how to do, what problem do they wanna solve most, And would a course even make sense for that? If they say they want to get this outcome, think, okay, if I built a course on that, is that something that you think would be a good vehicle to get you that outcome? And if so, what would you want from an online course like that? This literally gives you the roadmap on what to build for them, and you haven't built anything yet. When you're talking to people, you want to look for patterns in their problems, the language, the way they're explaining things, because that becomes your headlines and your email copy and your sales page copy, even what you say inside of the course. And boil down everything to the top 1 to 3 core problems. If you've done a lot of sales calls or strategy sessions in the past and gotten people into a coaching program with you, go through the notes or drop them into ChatGPT and have it pull out the 3 biggest pain points that you could turn into a course. Once you have 1 to 3 course ideas, just pick one of them. And then what we're going to do is validate the idea before we even build the course. Instead of building a course, take that idea or that outcome and create something really simple and easy to create. It could be like a $27 workshop, an ebook, or a PDF guide, but charge money for this. Or it could even be a high-end coaching package. If people would pay you $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 or more to solve this problem, that's a really good sign that they would probably buy a lower-cost do-it-yourself version as an online course. And if nobody buys the lower-ticket option or the private coaching that you offer, then don't build the course. You either have to refine the messaging or you can move on to another idea and do the process again. The key is to start with something easy and small that sells the idea and the outcome of your course without you putting months into filming videos and buying equipment and doing all that kind of stuff. Validation only happens when people pay. I personally love to do this with one-on-one coaching. If people will pay me to get an outcome like helping them build an online course or do content marketing for their business or start a YouTube channel that actually makes them money, then what I'll do is build the course as I'm coaching somebody through this so they get the extra modules and the lessons. And at the same time, I've also validated my course idea. Once you've gotten your idea validated and you know that people are willing to pay for this outcome, even on a small scale, that's when we can start building your first online course. Your course will become 10 times easier to build once you've coached people through the process because the questions that they ask literally shape your modules. When you coach people through the process first and you work with some people, then you're gonna learn that the way you articulate things, the specific stories you share or examples you use really click for multiple people. And those stories and examples are what you're gonna use inside of your course to better teach someone when you're not right in front of them. Something interesting about online courses that I've learned over the years is that shorter courses actually outperform longer ones. For example, let's say that you were teaching people how to master the game of golf. Instead of making a single course that's like $997 on how to master the entire game of golf, just pick one aspect of golf, like mastering the golf swing, or it could be mastering putting. This is so valuable because with the golf swing alone, there are so many frustrations and technical little aspects that go into to that, that you can totally build an entire course around that. And when you're marketing it, you can speak directly to the frustrations and challenges that people have with the golf swing. Also, if they get the golf swing down, they master a lot of the game. With a short course, you can teach this transformation in the shortest path possible. And just so you know, production value does not matter as much as clarity. You can sell a course on how to garden and just use your cell phone to record the course. You do not need to buy expensive equipment or gear. As long as people can clearly see you and hear you and get the idea and feel inspired to actually do it, that is all that matters. Also, when you're creating this course, if it's your first course, you're probably gonna end up redoing this course or updating it in the future, so you might as well just keep it simple in the beginning if you're gonna have to come back and update it anyway. People waste so much time trying to get the perfect video and like the super polished look to their courses when all people care about is, can you get me the result? If you can get them a result with some screen shares, Google Slides, and a cheap tool like Loom to record your videos, that's all you need. And when you're building out your course, you want to structure the course for momentum. So get quick wins early on in the course so people feel, I'm actually doing something right now, this is great. And then they want to keep going, and every lesson progresses off of the last. This is a course that I'm working on right now about how to use YouTube to actually make money from the platform. I've been making thousands of dollars from YouTube every month since I had like 200 subscribers. And it's been able to grow now that I'm approaching 6,000 at the time of this recording. So if that is the goal and the idea, which I know and I have validated and tested, which is why I'm building the course, the way that I've structured this is like I have the YouTube strategy, talk about how the algorithm works and how to actually make money with YouTube in the strategy I'm going to show them. And what this is doing is giving them clarity and understanding how this stuff works. And what we're going to be building. That way they're excited about moving on to the next section, which is setting up your YouTube channel. Now this is great because it's a quick win for them. They can literally in the first day set up their YouTube channel. That is a massive win for them of actually getting serious about this. So inside of setting up their channel, I show them how to create the new YouTube channel, how to position their channel so it attracts buyers, naming the channel, creating a YouTube banner. I'm gonna have something in here about camera gear and going over some gear stuff, and then how to create a pro-looking YouTube studio even on a budget. That's pretty much everything they need, all the meat and potatoes for setting up their YouTube channel. And once they've got the channel set up, then we go into finding some content ideas. It's always the first step. When you have content ideas, I'll give them some different strategies. Then we have to package the idea into a video with a good thumbnail and title. This is what's going to get people to click on the video. From there, when we have good packaging, good idea, we can do some scripting and filming. And then after that, we go into editing, post-production, and scheduling. So that's really all they need to know, at least for now. I'm gonna add to this and update it in the future, but this is what I have so far for this kind of course, and it's not gonna take me very long to build. Another course I have is Convos to Clients, which is all about how to turn casual conversations at your kid's soccer game, in the airport, or if you're waiting at the DMV or whatever it is, and turn those conversations into high-paying coaching clients. So I have creating your coaching offer, finding clients, enrolling clients, and then coaching your actual clients. These are short, simple, impactful courses, but people have literally made tens of thousands of dollars by going through this process. And when you're building out your course, only add templates, worksheets, scripts, anything like that simply just to reduce friction and help people get the result faster. For example, inside of another course I have, which is my Kajabi Kickstart course, teaches you my entire backend on how I use Kajabi to run my six-figure online business. I give people legitimate templates on the exact pages that I'm using so that they can just plug these into their own Kajabi account. And I give them even the pre-made Canva templates I have as well, which are the designs I've created, and they just plug in their numbers, the audience, photos of their subscribers or clients and that kind of stuff. And I even give you access to my custom irresistible copy ChatGPT that I use in my own business and I've programmed to help you in writing the copy. So all this is doing is reducing friction for you to get a better result without me having to keep repeating myself and doing the same thing for everybody. Creating a great course isn't about having more content and more resources because a lot of people think that that means more value, but it's not true. If I can buy a course that promises me a big outcome that I would pay money to learn, and it can get me there even faster with less content and fewer resources, I'm happy. Now, once you've built your online course, then we want to launch this thing. When you're launching an online course, your job is to make it a big deal because it is, and build some buzz. Imagine if Avengers: Endgame just dropped the movie in theaters without ever doing a trailer or creating a ton of different movies that built up the anticipation leading up to it. If they did that, it would not have become one of the highest highest-grossing films in history. Your launch works the same way. So the first thing that we want to do is create a deadline and use one of these three scarcity elements. By the end of the deadline or your launch, you're either going to close the doors so people cannot pick up this offer anymore. You can add an extra bonus that you only get during the launch week, or the price is going to go up at the end of this deadline. I'd say to pick at least one of these. You can totally couple two or all three together at the same time. But part of what's going to make your launch very successful is by building some buzz and having a reason for you to buy it now. As you're creating content leading up to your launch, focus on the transformation that your course is providing, not just the features of what's included in the course, like modules and lessons and all that kind of stuff. People don't care about that. What they care about is the outcome and the transformation they're going to get. But talk about the problem more than the product itself and share student stories or address common FAQs leading up to it. You know, if you took that example of creating the course on how to master the golf swing. You can make a piece of content that says, hey, have you ever gone golfing and gone to swing and every time you hit the ball it always hooks to the right or to the left? In this video I'm going to show you how to solve that problem. And then you can say, we go way deeper into this and many other challenges to help you master your golf swing inside of my new program. The deadline's on Friday, so if you want to pick this up, now's the time to do it. By signing up during launch week, you're going to get the cheapest price possible and you're going to get a one-on-one session with me where I'll take a look at your actual golf swing and give you some private pointers. You know, something like that is gonna make it more valuable and more enticing and make people actually wanna buy now instead of just waiting. Now, if you have an email list, this is what I would recommend that you do for your launch week. First off, plan out when your launch week is going to be, and then the week before, you're gonna do a pre-launch to start building some buzz and anticipation for launch week. The week before your launch, you're gonna email them for 3 days on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, teasing that you're dropping something big and giving them some content that's related to your course. And then on launch week, you're going to send 7 emails, 1 email every single day, Monday through Thursday, and then 3 emails on Friday, 1 in the morning, 1 in the afternoon, and then 1 in the evening. I know that sounds like a lot, but again, you're making this a big deal. And after this, you can just go back to your normal routine. But in every single email during your launch week, keep reminding them of that scarcity element that you chose. Either the price is going up, they're losing out on a bonus or the doors are closing and they're not going to be able to get this until you launch it again in the future. Now, if you don't have an email list, go live every single day or use stories on Facebook or Instagram if that's where your audience is. In my experience, stories tend to get a lot more views and it gets you some more traction. You can make them interactive. It's a way better way to start helping you build that buzz. But as you're building buzz during your launch week, you want to keep addressing the core problems that your course solves and follow that same flow that we talked about with the email list just on social media or wherever your audience is. Big thing to know is that your first launch is for learning. It is not for making as much money as possible unless you already have a really big audience. You're probably not going to make a whole lot of money from your launch. But by doing these things that I recommend, you will have the most profitable launch that you possibly can. I guarantee that. To launch your course messy, learn from it, and then improve later. So once you've launched your online course and ideally made some sales from this and proven that your emails are working, the sales page, all that kind of stuff, then we can go into automating your online course. I cannot emphasize this enough. You should only prerecord and write emails and automate your program once you know that your process is working, that people are buying the course, there's interest in it. And that's the whole point of the launch week, coaching people beforehand and really building an asset that you know is actually going to sell for you. If you use a tool like Kajabi, it looks like this where you can host your course, you can get all the marketing assets that you want. This is the tool that I love to use. And if you go over to funnels, you can literally build out the core aspects of your funnel with one click. So you get an opt-in page, your sales page, and then you also get a series of emails that are going to point people to the sales page, and you get your checkout page as well. Kajabi is hands down my favorite tool for running my online business, and it literally does everything you could ever need to sell online courses on the internet. If you're not really sure what platform to use and you want to try out Kajabi yourself, you can get a 30-day free trial using my affiliate link. But on top of that, I'm going to give you a course that shows you how to build the entire backend that I have built screen by screen. And you also get a one-on-one coaching call with me. I'm also going to link this right down below in the description so you can learn all the details about what this looks like. But this is pretty much everything you need to turn your course into an evergreen offer. You have your opt-in page, and this is where you're going to add a lead magnet that solves one specific problem related to your course. And this is what people are going to pick up for free. So for example, if we're selling the golf swing course, you can have a simple PDF or video that stops people from slicing or hooking every time they swing the golf club. That is what people are going to opt in for. And then it's going to send them to an email sequence. And this can be a 5 to 7 day email sequence. So once they opt in over the next 5 days, they're going to get these emails. The first email, you're going to teach them something. So I said the simple secret to landing high ticket clients without paid ads, complicated funnels, or content creation. The second day I talk about the number one reason coaches struggle to get clients and how to fix it. And then day 3, we want to teach but transition into your offer. So I did a case study about how my client Wendy got booked out in 24 hours. Now anybody can do this. And then I point them over to my sales page where they can sign up for the course. Day 4, we want to do a straight offer and start crushing some objections too. So I said, want high-ticket clients this week? Open this because it can't happen that fast. And then the last day, we're going to do an offer and really hit home the urgency. So I said, how much longer do you want to keep guessing? So when people opt in, they already want to learn how to do this. You're solving one specific problem related to whatever it is you help them do. So when people opt in, they're coming into your funnel wanting to solve a problem like not hooking every time they hit a golf club. But that's also revealing more problems, which is what we're going to address in the emails over the coming days. And these emails are going to keep pointing people over to a simple sales page where these people can learn all the details about your course and see some social proof and things like that. And then they can go to the checkout page and buy. These are the nuts and bolts that go into creating an automated passive income stream. And then for driving traffic to this, you can use YouTube, podcasts, social media, or advertisements and start guiding people through this funnel. As people get into your funnel, you really only need to track 3 major metrics, and it's traffic— how many monthly views are you getting over to your opt-in page? How many of those views are opting in? What is that percentage? And then how many of the people who opted in bought the product. Those are the only 3 metrics that you really need to pay attention to if you want to assess the health of your funnel. But once your funnel's converting, then it's time just to double down on SEO, on YouTube, or if you have the money, paid ads. I always recommend to leverage as much organic traffic as you can before you start throwing money into ads. Ads can be expensive and they really just reveal problems which could be a benefit, but unless you have the money to keep testing, you're probably going to run out. Look, automations and passive income is awesome, but it's not magic. It's really just a system. And And once that system's working, you get leverage that feels like freedom and passive income. You can wake up to sales and notifications coming in when you were literally sleeping. Or the other day I was sitting down with my family and I looked at my phone real quick and checked my email and I had students enrolling in my course paying $300 or $150. That is leverage. And that's what this whole thing's about. But whether you're running ads, you still have to create multiple advertisements and create new advertisements. It's very rare that an advertisement will live on for years and years. Usually it's like a couple of months, if you're lucky, a year with a good advertisement. If you're driving traffic with YouTube like I like to do, you are watching this video right now, but I could be doing any number of things as you're watching this. You could be in a different country and I'm asleep right now, but you're building a relationship with me and then you could go through my own funnel And if you decide to buy the product and it makes sense, it's totally up to you. But I still have to make fresh new content every single week. So even though I get this passive income leverage, I still have to work and create content. So I just want you to know that passive income is not some magic pill. It is possible to make sales while you sleep with an online course, but it does take work. And I don't know where you're at with your online course right now, if you've built it or if you're trying to build it. But if you're still shopping around for the best online course platform for yourself, watch this video next and I'll give you my top 5 picks because the platform you choose really does make or break your success. If this video is helpful, please give it a like and share it with someone that you think it would also help. It really does help the channel grow. If you have any questions about this or want some more details on anything, leave a comment below and I'm happy to help you out. And as always, take what you learn here, get out there, make something happen. I'll see you in the next one.