Hi, I'm Aaron from Thinkific.
I'm the Lead Product Educator and here are the top 5 ways to validate your course topic.
Alright so let’s say we’re thinking about making an online course.
We have a few topics that we we’re considering expanding into a course and now we’re not
quite sure which one is going to give us the best chance of being successful after putting
in all our hard work and time into building a full course.
My suggestion is, don’t leave it up to chance in the first place.
What we want to do before making a course is find out which of our course topics are
overdone - meaning there is an oversupply of material on the subject already - or underdone
- which means not many have found it valuable to spend time producing products around it.
To do that, you’ll have to play the role of your ideal customer, and then go searching
for the topic that you want to one day cover with an online course.
“But where am I going to do that,” you might ask…
Well here are the Top 5 Places to Validate a Course Topic
Coming in at #5, Reddit.com.
If you’re going to teach a hobby, a career specific skill-set, or coach a particular
group of people, there’s probably a subreddit out there dedicated to it.
Reddit is, for some people, the go to place when you’re looking for advice.
For example, the popular fitness subreddit, r/fitness, holds a bi-weekly question thread
on Mondays and Fridays where redditors get help from more experienced fitness instructors.
It’s in threads like these that you can find common pain points that people are looking
for help with.
At #4 it’s Facebook!
You’re likely on it right now, and you’re likely in our group on Facebook, Thinkific
Studio.
If not, you can join us at facebook.com/groups/thinkific.
We see hundreds of questions and answers every week in our group
and there are several others for other services, programs, hobby’s, professions, you name it.
I would recommend joining the groups your ideal student would be a part of on Facebook
and gauge whether or not people there would be interested in your topic.
You could even ask them straight up!
And at #3, you definitely need to be, on Quora.
Quora is the world’s most popular general question and answer website, and has a steady
following when it comes to advice on entrepreneurship, technology, health, and more.
Quora is an awesome place for course creators to do market research because you can gauge
whether or not the pain point you’re going to solve with your course is common enough,
and warrants an online course as the right answer.
Let’s move on to #2, the ever popular buying and selling site, Amazon.com.
Not all of market research is considering if your topic is in demand by your target audience.
You also need to look into supply and whether or not people buy stuff related to your course topic
There are plenty of problems out there that people won’t ever pay to fix.
So sort them out of your consideration by finding out if there are any books, ebooks,
or other products for sale that seek to accomplish the same goal as your potential online course.
And finally, coming in at #1, who else, but Google.
Now I’m not trying to be sarcastic about this at all, we’re not interested in doing
a regular google search here.
I suggest you drop into an incognito or private tab in your browser so Google doesn’t know
it’s you doing the searching, and then ask a question your ideal student might.
For example, you could try searching for How to Make Money Online.
Then you’ll see all the ads that other people have paid for to sell their solutions.
And don’t find it discouraging that people are spending money on this if you aren’t
or don’t plan to.
You just want to make sure that other people are finding it profitable to put time and
money into promoting a product to the same people you’re going to be making an online course for.
It shows your target audience likes to spend money on fixing the problem you have a solution for.