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I've spoken with so many creators who want to make an online course,
but they're struggling to come up with an idea. They'll say things like,
"What can I teach that people will actually pay for?" In this video,
I'm going to show you three tested and proven ways to come up with a profitable
idea for your online course. The first thing that you should do when
you're trying to come up with a course idea is to think about,
"What are you already helping people do? Are you a consultant that's already being
paid for your expertise in something?" That's a fantastic idea because it's
already validated. People are already paying to have that problem solved
for them. Or are you the go-to-person at work for solving a particular problem?
For example, we had one creator that I met last year who, for years,
had been the go-to-person at work for Excel questions. Any time anybody had a
question about Macros or formulas or templates, they'd always come to her.
Until finally, one of her co-workers said, "Why don't you just build a course
about this stuff? I'd be the first person to buy." And now, she sells a course
about spreadsheets to thousands of people. Third, do your friends or neighbors ask
you to help them with something in your free time? Courses don't have
to be work-related. Do your friends or neighbors ask you for help
with travel planning, or finding great flight deals,
organization, or rooftop gardening? All of those are examples of profitable
course ideas. And finally, have you done something hard that you had
to learn how to do? Now, that might sound really simple,
but it's actually really, really helpful for a lot of creators
to think about this because if you've learned how to do something difficult,
you probably learned how to do it the hard way through lots of trial and error,
lots of research. You probably sifted through tons of information online and
in books trying to sort the good from the bad. Chances are somebody else wants
to learn how to do that too. And by creating an online course,
you're just creating a shortcut for them to learn that faster.
The second way to come up with a course idea is to survey your audience.
If you have an email list, or a social media following,
or even a group of friends that you think might represent that market that you might
be selling your course to, you can start with them.
Think about the broad topic your course might fall under. It might be design,
or programming, or marketing, or business, or productivity, or one of a
million things, but just think about that broad topic. And then,
ask some open-ended questions about how people approach that topic. For example,
"Tell me about your experiences with blank. Tell me about your experiences
with design, programming, marketing. What is your biggest challenge
with blank?" Now, we're getting into the problems that we can solve for people
with the course. And finally, "How are you currently dealing
with those challenges?" Now this is a really important question
because we all have challenges that we kind of think, "Eh, I'm not going to do
anything about that. It's a bummer but I'm not going to act
on it." Those are not good ideas to build courses about because people aren't
motivated to solve those problems. But if you find that people are already
buying and reading books, or looking for articles,
or paying consultants or even buying courses on a topic, that's a great course
idea because it's already validated. You know people want a solution and
they're willing to pay and to work to get it. Now you can do these surveys
via email or with a form, but the best way to do it is live,
either in person, or on the phone, or on a video call. The answers that you
get will be so much more open and honest. And remember, when you hear
something interesting, dig deeper. Ask the person why they feel a certain way
about something or say, "Hmm. That's interesting. Can you explain that
to me a little bit?" The deeper you go, the more you'll understand the true
challenges that someone is facing that you'll need to solve for in your
online course. Let's say you're trying to find out why somebody dislikes a
particular thing. Let's use cooking as an example. You're trying to create an online
course about cooking and you've talked to somebody who says they find cooking hard
or intimidating. Now, that's good but that's not really deep
enough for us to be able to create an online course about.
We don't know what specific challenges to solve. And so you push on.
"Hmm. Interesting," you say, "What is it that you find so intimidating
about cooking?" That's when you start getting into the real insights.
And it may be things that seem simple to you like, they're afraid of complicated
recipes that require a bunch of ingredients, or tools that they
don't have, or they hate washing dishes, or maybe they're afraid to cut themselves
chopping an onion because they heard about it happening to their grandma's mailman's
friend one time. See how much deeper these responses go? When you really understand
your students' fears at this level, you can actually help them overcome those
fears and find success in your course. But if all you know is that they find
something hard or intimidating, where do you even begin to help them?
The third way to find a profitable course idea is to go out and to find a gap
in the market. I'll show you what I mean by that. First of all,
think of that broad topic again. That broad umbrella topic that you think
your course topic might fall under. Second, we're going to go to reddit.com.
And why reddit? Because reddit is the sixth largest site on the planet.
Statistically, there'ss a very good chance you've been on reddit today.
Reddit has millions of active users, hundreds of thousands of comments posted
every month. And if there's a conversation going on about the problem
you're going to end up solving, it's probably going on on reddit.
So, we're going to go to reddit and mine it for great course topics.
But we're not going to go straight to reddit. The first thing that we're going
to do is start with Google. We're going to type in reddit.com plus our
umbrella topic. Now, for this example, I'm using "cooking," but use whatever
you're thinking here. And what Google is going to return is a
bunch of subreddits. That's what reddit calls its communities
that are relevant to your topic. All we're doing at this point is taking
those subreddits and throwing them into a spreadsheet. Don't worry about starting
the spreadsheet from scratch. You can download a template right
below this video. So, we're taking these subreddits,
we're throwing them all into a spreadsheet,
and then we're going to go to reddit
itself, and do the same thing. We're going to search.
Search for our topic and see what subreddits reddit recommends.
Click on Next. Try to build a list of 10 or 15 of these subreddits that we can mine
for ideas. Next, we're going to go into each of these subreddits and do
some searching. We're going to use some search terms that indicate that somebody
might be struggling with something, that indicate that there might be a
problem that we can help solve. Here are some examples: Suggestions.
"How do you, How can I, I can't stand, I'm struggling with, Can someone help,
Please help me, Any tips?" Now remember, when you use these search terms,
especially the ones that have multiple words, search in quotes because that's
going to give you an exact phrase match. Now, here's an example of what happens
when I search for "Suggestions" on the Ask Culinary subreddit.
This is one of the subreddits that Google returned as a popular cooking subreddit.
I get some really interesting course ideas. There's suggestion for somebody
with dietary restrictions, getting more protein from beans in a way
that's not bland and boring, looking for tips to improve
food presentation. These are all potentially excellent course ideas.
Now, look at how many comments are in some of these threads, 89 comments,
973 comments. That's a topic that people get fired up about. And the more fired
up people get about a topic, the more emotional they get about it,
the more likely that there's a course idea waiting in there that people would
get excited about buying. This strategy is really simple but it's
really powerful. Just repeat this process with all of the subreddits you found and
in no time, you're going to have a list of 10, 15, 20, 25, or even more possible
ideas for your next online course. Just grab that idea generation template
below this video, and you'll be ready to get started. As you can see,
there are many ways to come up with both impactful and profitable course ideas.
I hope you give these a try.
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