Hey everyone, Jason here, digital marketing consultant, and in this online course creation
guide, you’re going to see exactly how to generate a ton of great online course ideas,
and how to ensure how all of your ideas are actually going to sell.
You see online courses are great way to generate some part time income, but it can sometimes
be really hard to put them altogether, and so what we’re going to do is go through
five simple steps to generate some ideas, outline your course, make sure that it’s
a saleable and marketable idea.
And when you stick around to the end I’ll be sharing with you some awesome software
you can use, both free and paid to deliver your online courses.
Make sure you check out the time stamp table of contents in the description, along with
some other videos that will help you generate ideas and actually build your membership site.
I’ll talk more about those later in this tutorial video.
So let’s go ahead jump in, the very first step is deciding what kind of online course
you want to make.
Now there are two main categories, the first is just a stand-alone course.
They pay a flat fee and then you deliver the content and that’s it.
Then there’s the ongoing online course where you provide some sort of ongoing support in
terms of answering your clients, and customers, and student’s questions.
So this can be in the form of having a facebook group, it could be a monthly mastermind.
But typically, there’s the course plus the facebook group or plus the mastermind, or
you can just have the course.
Now obviously, if you do anything monthly, you’re going to be able to charge a nominal
monthly fee.
What’s important with this step, and this is the only step that this is where it’s
a hundred percent based upon you and what you actually want to do.
If going into a facebook group and replying to comments doesn’t sound like fun, then
don’t put together an online course where you’re going to have to do that.
If you don’t want to jump on a webinar once or twice a month, then don’t include that
in your online course.
You don’t have to do those things in order to be successful.
Now if you’re not quite sure what type of membership site or what type of online course
you want to put together, link in the description to a video that goes over six different types
of membership site and online courses that you could put together so it can help you
generate some ideas for yourself.
So once you know the type of course you’re going to put together, step number two is
focusing on the customer.
If you don’t know exactly who your customer is or approximately who your customer is,
then stop right now.
Before you do anything else with your online course, it’s vital that you know who the
course is for.
So I’ve also linked up another video in the description that is a detailed guide to
creating your customer avatar.
You can continue to watch this tutorial but if you don’t have a clear picture of who
you’re serving, you definitely don’t wanna dive into outlining and especially not recording
until you know exactly who the courses for.
This is how you ensure you never put together a course that isn’t saleable or marketable.
And the first step to ensuring that our online course is marketable, is focusing on our customer.
The first question we want to ask is: what is their big dream?
And the second question we need to ask is: what do they need to do to get there?
So simply put with your big dream it’s how is their life going to be different as a result
of achieving their goals.
So your online course is going to be designed to help them get from where they are to where
they need to be.
So we need to ask these two questions to ensure that all of our content includes exactly what’s
needed in order to help our customers and clients and students be successful.
But let’s go through a quick example here if we were putting together a youtube channel
growth course.
So first we would start with: what is the big dream of someone who is a youtube channel?
Well typical big dream is being a full time on youtube, they wake up, they can make vidoes
on their own schedule and then just kinda own their time and all they have to do is
make videos.
And everything is great, right?
Okay, cool!
So that’s what their big dream is, what do we need to deliver in our course in order
to help them get there?
Well, we probably need to drive more views to their videos.
We need to help them accelerate the growth of their channel so they can get to their
dream quicker.
We need to help improve the quality of their videos, and help them improve the ranking
of their videos so they can drive more views and eventually get more subscribers.
And really this is as complicated as this part of the process has to be.
We just wanna make sure that we understand where they are and where they want to go.
So this will actually help us with the third step of our online course creation process
which is the outline.
So we have an idea of what type of membership site we’re going to do, we know who we’re
going to talk to, and we’ve gone through the process of answering those two questions
of: what their big dreams are?
And what they need to do in order to get there?
And you can go through this process for multiple different ideas and multiple different products
and each one of the dreams or each one of the potential things that someone has to accomplish
to get to that dream is a potential course.
So we could have actually done a course on just how to rank youtube videos, or we could
have done a course on how to get more subscribers, or just how to get views or just how to improve
your video quality.
We have four separate courses right there or in this example, we’re just gonna do
one big mastercourse and talk about all of them.
So when you’re doing your outline you wanna think about where your customers right now
and then you wanna think about that dream you identified where they want to be.
And that gap is what your course is going to accomplish.
So you want to break it down into baby steps or think about it as a ladder.
Like what are, what’s step one, two, three, four and five, four or five modules is typically
standard what’d you see in most online courses.
So you could break it down into four or five steps, and then just make sure that all of
the information that you know you need to communicate to your customer in order for
them to be successful is contained in one of those steps.
And the best way to do this is to just make a large laundry list of everything that you
want to include in the course, or you think is important that your students know in order
to achieve that big dream.
And then you can go ahead and start breaking it down into steps.
Just think of it as a ladder.
What’s the first part of the ladder, what’s the second part, what’s the third part?
So there’s a sequential build up to eventually achieving their dream.
Now once you have your outline that’s gonna probably take you a few hours.
That’s completely normal.
You’re ready to actually start creating the course content.
And so this is where some software and equipments going to come in to help you be successful.
So when it comes to equipment, there really only two pieces of equipment you use.
Well, three.
I’m assuming you already have a computer or laptop.
So the first one is your mic, the Blue Yeti mic at a hundred and nineteen dollars is a
awesome, fantastic tool to record screen captures.
And then if you want to do any sort of video with your course, but you don’t already
have a camera, then the Logitech C920 is going to be your best friend.
You can record in 1080P.
And as long as your computer has at least six gigs of ram, you’re going to be okay.
You’ll definitely want to watch out for that fan noise though if you try and record
in 1080P using that webcam.
Now we have the software so when we’re putting together an online course, chances are you’re
going to have some PDFs, you’re going to have some diagrams and downloads, Canva is
going to be your best friend for creating those.
And making sure that your downloads don’t just look like plain old PDFs or plain old
word documents.
For creating your actual videos, we’ll use google slides for your, any of your presentations
because google slides if free and super easy to use and then we can use camtasia to record
your screen.
Now Camtasia is a bit pricey at a few hundred dollars but it’s well worth it and it’s
going to be something that you can use for years to come.
Now when it comes to hosting your videos, you have two options: you can do YouTube unlisted,
don’t use youtube private though cause no one going to be able to see it, or you can
use Vimeo.
So both of them are a great option, there is a lot of debate over whether Vimeo is actually
worth it.
Personally, I think if someone is paying you, you should use Vimeo because the pro plan
of Vimeo allows you to lockdown your video so people can embed them on other places.
Whereas, even if you do a Youtube unlisted video, people are still going to be able to
find it on youtube and easily share it with other people outside of your membership site.
And speaking of your membership site, that’s the last step of this process, step number
five.
There’s a link in the description to a playlist that walks you through how to build your entire
membership funnel using optimizepress.
So if you’re on a really tight budget, you can actually put together a fully functioning
membership website and be accepting payment with OptimizePress for just ninety seven dollars.
There are some other options though, if you have a little bit more of a budget, you can
go ahead and use something called thrive apprentice from thrive themes.
They charge about two hundred and fifty a year, and you actually get access to all themes
and plugins that they have.
And then you can use something like Ultimate Membership Pro that’s only forty dollars
and that will allow you to accept payments and protect all of your content.
And if you’re on a super tight budget, you can go ahead and check out Simple Membership,
it is a free wordpress membership plugin that allows you to protect your content.
And make sure you check out a link in the description to a video where I actually go
through how to set up a membership site using a hundred percent free software.
Although, I only recommend doing that if you absolutely don’t have a few hundred dollars
to spend on Thrive Themes and Ultimate Membership Pro.
So thank you so much for watching, I hope you got some value out of this video.
If you did, go ahead and hit that like button and subscribe for more marketing tutorials
and strategy videos just like this one.
Over on my channel I’m documenting the entire process of what it takes to be successful
building a digital course business from scratch.
And of course figuring out how to put together your first membership website is just one
small piece of the bigger of being successful with your digital business.
So comment down below if you have any questions, hit that like button, subscribe, and as always,
keep building the business you love.