The Basics Of Online Course Creation
I’ve been working on an online course recently.
There’s a lot of terrible information out there and there are a lot of good articles.
I’ve broken down the success of an online course into two constituent parts, with a third little addendum to those two as well.
Read below to find out what they are.
Two Key Things To Accomplish With An Online Course
There are two things that you need to create a successful online course.
- A market that actually wants your course
- The information, knowledge and skill to produce a great course
Those two things seem really simple, but failing to achieve one or both of these is why there are a million Udemy courses that nobody buys.
If you create a course that nobody wants – or in a format that nobody wants – it’s not going to sell even if it’s the most comprehensive course you can imagine.
If you create a course that’s not very good, or is only as good as everything else on the market, then you’ve got a chance of selling a few copies, but it’s hardly going to give you retirement money. On the other hand, if you create something comprehensive, useful and better than the rest of the courses out there, then you’ll find that you can rise above the sea of competitors and build a really successful course.
(At least, that’s what I’d wager, having done the research on it. You want to completely dominate the market if you can. You can’t do this with a bad product.)
Another Key Thing: Pricing
I’d say the biggest mistake I made initially when I was planning this course was that I wasn’t pricing it like a course.
A course is not the same as an ebook. If you’re writing material on an ongoing basis, or you’re creating videos or something else that’s a premium time-sink, then you need to price your course completely differently to a book.
Also, if you spend six weeks or six months on a project, you’re going to want to make money back from it. You’re going to want to build a marketing budget and sink money into that so you can get your six-month investment back.
You can’t do that if you price your twelve-week course at $12. You’re not going to be able to market it at all, let alone make a profit on any marketing.
Now, I’m not going to give a ballpoint figure here because if you’re teaching people to trade stocks it’s going to be completely different to teaching them how to sew or how to write their own exercise program… and the pricing will be different accordingly.
However, think like a professional business. Don’t undercharge, and look around. What would a college teach for a weekend class? How much would a private tutor cost for an hour?
If you’re thinking about creating a course for teaching French for instance, you might think, “Nobody would spend more than $47 on a six hour video course!” But a private tutor might cost $30 an hour.
Remember, you’re going for the market that would pay for the course and not the online bottom-feeding torrenters who want everything for $7 and even then they’ll wait until someone uploads it to the Pirate Bay.
Other Thoughts
Elsewhere on this site, I’ve written that the secret to freelance success is:
- Finding a target market that needs a problem solving
- Working out a way to solve that problem
- Doing so to a high standard, on time and with no excuses
Creating an online course is exactly the same. You need to find a target market. You need to provide them a solution to their problems (with a course, it’s usually that they need schedule programming or all the information organised into a syllabus) and you need to wrap that up in a professional package.
Providing you can do those things, you’re probably going to create courses which are helpful and high-quality.
I’ll leave it there as I’ve got other articles planned for the week on the subject. Check back tomorrow for working out how to find if there’s a target market for your product … without spending a ton of money on testing.