- Ever wonder how to create an online course that sells?
- Absolutely.
- Well, we're talking about it here on The Journey.
During the last year or so, online courses have become
the hot new thing.
Everywhere from coaches to consultants,
they're all putting their best work online
and creating an online course.
- Yeah, they're all the rage now.
You know, nowadays we're seeing online courses
on every conceivable topic you could think of.
- Literally everything.
And it's just a great way to create a passive income
where you create it once
and then you're constantly making money from it
from then on out.
So we're gonna talk about what it's gonna take
to get that online course and some ways
to actually make it sell.
So let's start off with, what do you need to get started?
And I think that's three things, right?
That's a domain name, that's hosting,
and then the course itself.
We have a pretty cool video on what it takes
to have a good domain name right up here.
If you haven't had one yet,
then hosting is just kind of that online storage
for your website.
It's where all your content is gonna go.
And then I'm gonna show you guys a little tutorial here
in a little bit of probably my favorite plugin
to create an online course.
- So first things first,
we need to create a plan.
Think about it, if you were a teacher,
you would need a lesson plan, right?
So this is really creating an outline
of what you're gonna talk about,
what's gonna go into that,
what lessons you actually wanna teach.
- Yeah, that's super important.
You don't wanna just jump head first into it
and then it's gonna be super unorganized
and just chaotic in a word, right?
So with your online course, whether it's like a Word Doc
or OneNote or wherever you're doing,
just list out your main subjects
you're gonna be talking about
with a couple of bullets here on out.
And you can expand on that later on,
but at least you have the high level overview
of the type of content you wanna talk about
and then the structure itself.
- Yeah, no one's gonna wanna watch a online course
that is just some general topic and has no direction.
No one has time for that.
Create some direction so that people know
what they're actually gonna watch.
- Yeah, and I think it's important too,
to understand the type of course you wanna actually create.
Whether it's text only,
so you're just writing out a content in texts.
Whether you want videos, whether you want quizzes,
some type of interaction.
You wanna make sure that you have that figured out,
so you know where your direction is.
You'll also want to determine
some of the course restrictions.
Whether this course is going to be a free course,
you're gonna use that as just a lead generator
or if you're gonna put a dollar amount behind it.
I think it's important to have that defined early
because it's going to set the stage for your entire course
and then your marketing plan afterwards.
- Also make sure that you're protecting you and your content
with some policy and procedures.
So if you don't want your content recorded or redistributed,
make sure you have those rules in place
to protect you as well.
- Yeah, and then next you wanna figure out
how do you want to present the content?
Do you want them to have it all at once for them to use,
or do you want to drip it
to where it's more like classroom oriented?
So yeah, week one, you do this content
and then week two it'll release and they can jump in.
Understanding that helps out a lot with how you market it
and then how you just distribute it to your audience.
- And that's a great way to keep people coming back.
Next week you're gonna get this,
next week you're gonna get this.
- Yeah, and I think too, like as sometimes
we need to better understand our audience
and what content do they actually want.
I know we have our own perceptions of,
they need to learn this,
but a great way to better understand
even just the modules that you're gonna be creating
is by doing an ask campaign.
So I actually learned this from Russell Brunson.
He's the founder of ClickFunnels.
Whenever he creates an online course,
he starts with an ask campaign.
So if my topic is social media, right?
I'm going to send out an email to my newsletter subscribers
and say, "hey, what is your number one question
about social media?"
And then he collects those answers
and gets the top, usually six common answers,
essentially makes that the course.
He knows exactly what his audience wants.
He knows the content
that they're gonna actually need, right?
And then that's his course.
He has those six topics, those six modules in his course.
So if you're kind of stuck on the exact content
to put in there, and that outline too,
do an ask campaign,
figure out what your audience actually wants,
that way it's relevant and important to them.
- Exactly, that's gonna help you create that guideline
and then you can use that to create your content.
And then at the end,
you're not having people ask a lot of questions
that you should have covered
and having to create a different video.
So now that we know
what our so-called students want in our content
and the guideline that we're gonna be following,
how do we actually implement this
and create the online course?
- Yeah, great question.
There are so many different ways
to go out and create an online course.
There are tons of WordPress plugins that make it super easy
and there's even other providers, that's their whole thing.
I know teachable.com is a great resource
for those that aren't really tech savvy,
but want something pretty easy.
But we're actually gonna do a demo
using some couple of free solutions.
We're gonna use WordPress as our platform to host it on.
We gonna use a plugin called Tutor LMS.
I'm actually gonna show you all a demo of how to use it,
how to set it up for success.
- So what does LMS stand for and Tutor LMS?
- Yeah, LMS is learning management system.
Basically it's an application or program you use,
to basically house your course in a sense.
So all you need is a hosting account with WordPress set up
and installed.
Most hosting providers make it super easy
to install WordPress on.
And then once you're in here, we're gonna go ahead
and just add and install a new plugin.
So on the left hand side here, we'll mouse over plugins
and go to add new.
And then we're going to search for Tutor LMS.
It is a free plugin at its base.
Most of the core functions are going to be free.
Like most plugin providers,
there are some extra paid options.
If you wanna kind of go above and beyond.
LearnPress is also a pretty phenomenal LMS plugin as well.
So once we search that, we go ahead and just click install.
Now it just takes a moment to install.
And then it's gonna go through
kind of an onboarding experience.
Now, the course we're gonna create,
we're gonna really just kind of repurpose
some of The Journey content we have.
So we're gonna create a course on
how to up your social media game.
And that's gonna be the basis of our course
for this demo purpose.
But you can use it for almost anything you're wanting to do
related to your industry.
So after Tutor LMS is installed,
we're gonna go ahead and go over to it.
We click Tutor LMS, and now we don't have any courses,
we're gonna go ahead and click add new.
We're gonna give it a title.
So, up your social media game,
that's gonna be our title.
But you want your title to be kind of descriptive
of what they're actually going to get out of it.
I know I've created a course in the past
and I named it the road to your first thousand followers
on social media,
something super specific.
But we're gonna keep it simple for the course of this demo,
just up your social media game.
And then here we have a description.
So we're gonna add as much content as we like.
Remember when creating your description
for your online course, you wanna make it about them
and what they're getting out of it.
Try not to just info dump and say,
"we're gonna teach social media,
we're gonna teach Instagram,
we're gonna teach how to create captions."
Those are all great features for your course itself,
but it's hard for someone to actually imagine
what that does for them.
- Right, let people know why they should care,
why these things actually affect their business.
And that's gonna be a lot more effective
than just saying, "here's what this is, this is this."
When they haven't even learned it yet.
- Yep, focus on benefits versus features.
I'm gonna be lazy and just put some generic text
for the demo here itself.
All right, and then going through Tutor LMS,
it's gonna ask you,
what do you want your maximum students to be?
If you want it to be unlimited, great,
put it as unlimited.
Obviously I want as many people to do it,
but you can set a little bit of urgency,
especially for higher dollar courses itself.
So if your courses are like two, three, four, $5,000,
even maybe more,
sometimes it's good
to have a maximum number of students there
to create that urgency.
So now people will say,
"cool, now there are only four spots left."
- Yeah you make it a little more prestigious.
It's like, "hey, the first a hundred people to sign up
for this course they get in, no one else does."
- Exactly, kind of that bit of a perception if you will.
Cool, next up is an excerpt.
Excerpts are optional handcrafted summaries.
You can add whatever you're want in there really,
just a quick description.
For the sake of your time and our time,
we're gonna go ahead and put just in generic info here.
But make it just a quick, extra excerpt,
maybe one or two sentences
of what they're gonna get out of this.
And then right below that is gonna be a course builder.
We're gonna actually gonna get back to that
here in a second.
I wanna show you the rest of the information here.
So you'll have some additional data
and it's gonna go over a total duration.
You really want to tell your audience
how long is this course going to take them.
Then you have some benefits of the course.
So you can go ahead and add some information here,
some requirements or additional instructions
that you may want,
your target audience, like who's this course for?
Like who would benefit the most from this?
I think it's important to really niche down
when you're creating your courses.
Try not to make something that applies to everyone
because it'll apply it to no one.
- Yeah, so for The Journey,
ours would be entrepreneurs or small local business owners,
anything along those lines.
- [Nealey] Exactly, now going down the list
here on the Tutor LMS, homepage here,
and now you're gonna have a course intro video.
It does help to have a quick little summary.
Again, visual video is engaging.
So have something here.
I'm gonna go ahead and pull in from YouTube
and grab just Journey intro video here.
- [Alex] Yeah you have to give people a reason
to actually watch, you need to hook them, and that video,
the intro video can be a huge asset for that.
- [Nealey] Absolutely, so let me go ahead
and add this in here.
Cool, and that'll be our video.
And you can add it in an announcement
if you'd like, we're gonna leave that blank for now.
And then the other thing you wanna do
is a couple of things, right?
So you wanna have categories.
So if you do plan on creating a ton of different courses
on your website,
categorize them so that it makes it easy to identify
and understand what this is.
So I'm gonna create easy category of social
to make all of our lives easy.
I can't type, all right, I'll fix it and post.
Social, there we go.
And then tags,
tags are just things like keywords
that describe your content.
So you can really put anything like Instagram,
Facebook, followers,
- [Alex] SEO.
- [Nealey] SEO, love it.
And then a featured image.
This image needs to be visually stunning
and appealing to an audience.
So if they're looking at it, it grabs their attention.
- [Alex] So basically a picture of The Journey,
our cast, right?
- [Nealey] All right, I chose
The Journey as my featured image.
I'm gonna go ahead and save draft for now,
'cause I wanna see what this might look like on my website.
So if I click preview here in the upper right,
it's going to show me what it looks like.
Cool, so I have up your social media game,
categories social shows me how many enrolled,
when was the last time it was updated.
I have my trailer here,
so it's nice and easy to see.
Materials included, we have videos,
we have quizzes and easy option to enroll.
Now our tags, target audience,
what we will learn, that description,
then it shows about the instructor.
To update that you have to go to users
and then your profile,
and you can update your information there.
Really, just to kind of describe who you are,
let people into your world.
And then this is basically going to be the landing page
for your online course.
And that took us just a few minutes to create,
WordPress and this plugin make it super easy
to actually create your course.
- So now let's get into actually building the course.
What do we do for that?
- Yeah, so we're gonna use the course builder
it's right on that page here.
So we're gonna add topics.
So we have topics,
and then we have the actual lessons themselves.
That way it helps you really break up the content
that you're gonna be talking about.
So topics could be an intro,
I usually start my courses with some type of introduction,
some things to get them kind of up to speed.
And then maybe since we're talking about social,
I might make each topic like Instagram
or followers or marketing or something of high level
that really describes the next couple of sections.
So I'm just gonna do intro here,
I'm just gonna add that topic.
You can give it a summary if you'd like,
and then we're gonna add new lessons.
And like I said, we're pulling it from our YouTube channel,
some of the videos and making that the course.
If you just want it to be texts,
you just update the text here and add your text
as well as your title.
Let me go ahead and find something social media related
how to use Twitter for your online business.
- [Alex] Perfect.
- Perfect, so let me grab this URL here.
Let me update the title,
how to use Twitter for your online business.
And then you can add a featured image if you'd like,
but I'm just gonna choose YouTube as the video source.
You could throw that in there.
And then it has the video playback time,
so you can tell people how long
this lesson is going to take them.
'Cause maybe they may not be doing this all in one chunk,
they might have 15 minutes right now,
and then 30 minutes for another time.
And letting them know upfront how long each course will last
really helps them set aside the right time
to follow your course.
So this video was nine minutes and 10 seconds.
Nine, 10, then update lesson.
And now that lesson is done.
We're gonna kind of add a couple more
and then we'll jump back into some other stuff here.
So I added a bit of content into this.
Now let me show you
how the actual learning management system works
if I was an everyday user coming to the website.
So I land on this landing page,
I can go to enroll now,
but it shows me the topics for this course,
it has the intro and then advanced.
I can see the content here.
Now, I can't get to it unless I enroll.
So I'm gonna go ahead and choose enroll now.
And then now I have an option to start this course
and complete the course.
You can set up different options
if you wanna add quizzes or certain passing metrics,
if they wanna get a completed course.
So let's go ahead and start course and check this out.
Cool, so this is how it looks,
it shows your lesson list on the left-hand side,
we have our intro in advanced.
It shows our videos, you can have your text below it.
It can only be text only, which is completely fine.
Or you can add video
or you can kind of have a little bit of both.
Really whatever works best for you and your audience.
Obviously text is going to be easier to create,
you don't have to create video, you don't have to edit it
and things like that.
But it might be more engaging to go with videos.
And as they go through it, they can see each lesson
and as it go, they can click complete lesson,
so it mark their progress.
The next, the next, the next.
And it makes it super organized and super neat
for an everyday user to actually take your content.
And then this is responsive,
so it works great on mobile, on tablet or on desktop.
- Okay, so you've made your course now,
but how do you actually get people to watch it
or even buy it?
- Yeah, there are tons of ways.
And we're gonna go through a couple here.
But really before your class goes live,
it's, it's good to make little essentially teasers,
if you will.
Post about the upcoming course.
So tell your audience that,
"hey, there's something here that works,
it's gonna be awesome."
And then as it goes on, like,
"hey, I'm creating this course,
it's gonna be on this topic, who would be interested?"
And then keep creating content around that
to kind of build up the hype and anticipation.
So when it does go live,
your audience actually knows about it.
- Yeah, you have to build up that hype.
And that's a really good opportunity
to add in that ask question of,
"hey, what some content that you guys wanna see
in this course?"
- Yep, and then as you have your outline going,
you can kind of share that with your audience that,
this is the stuff I'm going to cover.
And I know what a lot of people do too,
is they'll actually create mini courses as lead generators.
Like, "hey, here's a taste of some of the work that I teach
and that's super valuable."
And they give it out for free.
And then that way they have that person's email,
that person takes their course
goes, "well this is a ton of value, this is awesome."
Then when you release your paid course, they're like,
"all right, cool I've already got a ton of value from this,
I know this person is an expert, what they teach."
I'm more inclined to actually to buy
and kind of continue with that.
- Absolutely, if you're expecting people
to spend money on this course,
you have to give them a reason why.
And why they should trust
that they're actually gonna get benefit from this,
so that's a give and take situation.
- Yeah, and with the plugin Tutor LMS,
and many of the other plugins with WordPress,
there's an option to make certain ones free
for anybody to watch.
So I know a pretty popular option is
to make like the first lesson for free.
And if they wanna continue, then they pay.
'Cause if you got them hooked on that first lesson,
you've got them hooked for the rest of it.
- And another way to make this even more profitable for you
is to add some additional materials or tools
that people can use to help them out
even after the online course.
So for instance, if you created a course
on, here's how to edit an Instagram photo.
and then you add an additional materials
of like lightroom presets or things along those lines
that people can purchase
to actually continue that education.
- Yeah and it's all about kind of that perceived value.
I know what a lot of people will do too,
is they'll have their course for X price,
and then they'll talk about
all of the extras that come with it.
So whether it's a checklist,
whether it's a one on one consultation,
whether it's access to a Facebook group,
they add a perceived value for all these freebie extras.
So if I had an ebook that I paired with it,
I could say at a value of 49.99,
but you're getting it free.
And then if I had a content calendar at a value of 89.99,
but you're getting for free,
now it feels like I'm getting a lot more.
Basically more bang for my buck
with just buying this course.
So adding that perceived value can help out a ton.
Then there's really going through
and doing traditional advertising, right?
You can go on Facebook ads or Instagram ads or Twitter
or wherever your target audience is,
and start just testing out different things
you can do to get your course in front of them.
Now, I would say you'll find a lot more success
if you market your free course, right?
To get that lead generator.
I know you're spending money
to get someone into a free course,
it seems backwards, right?
But really wanna like think of it as a funnel.
So when you're marketing your content,
you're getting into the free course,
they'll like that,
then you can use your email marketing
to talk to them about your paid course
and some of your other offerings.
And it kind of goes down and down and down.
So start big, start broad, go the free option,
and then go down to your paid option
once they trust you and see you as an authoritative source.
- So now you know how to do it,
go out and create your own online course that sells.
Thanks for watching.
Be sure to like, and comment down below.
- Yeah, and subscribe to our channel
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This is The Journey.
We'll see you next time.