9 Steps to Creating A Wildly Successful Online Course
The ability to deliver high-quality education to anyone with an internet connection has never been better. With college tuitions and student loan debts accelerating, alternative learning paths are becoming more prominent.
Even years before, eLearning was lucrative, and now with COVID-19 turning things upside down, it has become a necessity. In 2017, over 77% of US corporations leveraged eLearning, but by 2020, over 98% planned to incorporate it in their program. If you go through the statistics, you will recognize that the time to make an online course is right now.
But the thought of creating an online course can feel overwhelming. And the truth is that most would-be course creators will find it challenging. In this post, let’s look at effective ways on how to create an online course and set up a successful eLearning business.
9 Steps to create an online course; a successful one
1) Choosing a best-selling topic
The first step to creating an online course is to select a topic. Ensure that the topic you choose meets these three criteria.
Matches your expertise
The topic you select for your online course must be that you are an expert in. It can be a hobby of yours or something that is linked to your profession. You don’t need to have a professional degree in the subject, but having unique knowledge of the field is necessary.
Make sure you can offer your learners something of genuine value through your online courses.
Something that you are passionate about
Creating an online course is a commitment, and running it successfully takes more effort. And your passion for the topic is what will motivate you to keep going through the challenging times. If you are brainstorming about how to design an effective online course, make sure you choose a topic that you are passionate about.
The topic that is in high demand
It must be in high demand, and to be precise, the course topic you select must be validated by data. Consider asking your close circle of friends and family if your course idea is good. The risk that the course creators face is building something that is not in demand.
2) Understanding your audience
While you might be tempted to move on to course creation after choosing a topic, that’s not the right approach.
Before heading into creating content for your course, there are a couple of things you should do first to pave your way to success. And the first is to conduct market research.
The goal of conducting market research is twofold.
● Get to know your ideal audience and their pain points.
● Gaining insights about what results they are expecting.
To begin, search your course topic on Google trends. This will give you insights into whether the demand increases or declines.
Next, head over to Google Keywords and type in your topic to see how many users are searching for the term. This will help you understand the competition that exists in the space.
You can also check Quora and look for a question that is related to your topic. In this way, you can have a clear idea of what people are searching for in a course, why they need it, and the problems they are trying to solve by enrolling for a course.
Check for a few hashtags in your niche on Facebook or Instagram to find people who might be your ideal learners. You can consider reaching out to them to know whether they would be willing to participate in a user research survey.
Here are some of the questions you can ask your target audience to have an idea about their expectations when creating online courses.
● What are the problems you are looking to solve?
● What are the challenges that the course can help you overcome?
● What are your goals in taking this online course?
● After completing the courses, what is that you expect?
3) Create course outline
Most course creators who struggle with organizing their course content make the mistake of not creating a course outline. Even if you know the course materials in and out when creating online courses, having a course outline in place is beneficial. A course outline is a road map to your online course that will help you deliver content to your learners systematically.
Here is a quick guide if you aren’t sure where to start when creating online courses.
Put your destination in front
The best place when creating an online course is to start is at the end. To build a good course outline, choose your end goals and start working backwards.
Find out the objective of your course. What will your students gain at the end of the course? What skills must you focus on to get your learners to their final destination?
Determine your steps
When creating an online course, start with an orientation section where you introduce everyone to the baseline content that you will use for the rest of the course. Then, divide your course content into chapters or modules and organize them sequentially, with each module building on the next. For every module, back up your learning content with the following things.
● Learning resources
Add extra learning materials like textual content, videos, infographics, etc., to your regular content. This helps to create opportunities for your learners to grasp information in a different formation to retain knowledge.
● Practice sessions
Allow your learners to put their newly mastered skills to the test before moving on to the next module. Include practice sessions after every module or assign a group conversation exercise on your online group.
4) Gauge the market demand of your online course
As you get an understanding of the problems, challenges and goals of your target learners, the next thing you need to ensure when creating online courses is that your course has high market demand.
One way to do this is to create a minimum viable product with a few features that you would release to learners to validate your assumptions.
Here are two viable product ideas which can help you establish your authority and make a profit when creating online courses.
Create a mini-course on a specific topic: The topic must be narrower than the comprehensive courses you would make later. For example, if you want to create an online course on “How to speak English fluently”, Vocabulary for a professional office meeting would make a great mini-course idea.
When creating online courses, you can either offer the course for a fee to see whether your audience is willing to invest in your course. Or you can also offer your mini-courses for free to capture the email addresses of potential learners you will sell your online course to.
Create free webinars: The second method is to create a free webinar with an upsell. Stats says that the average conversion rates of webinars are around 20%. You can live stream a digital event to test your course topic, get feedback, learn about your audience, and make sales.
5) Presell your online course
Preselling your online course when creating an online course is a great idea to know the scope of your online course and the acceptance of your audience. Of course, you have to complete the course to present it to your learners finally, but preselling allows you to test your concept, and it also helps with the cash flow. You also receive feedback from your potential learners and can validate market demand faster. Begin by building a landing page that sells online courses based on the curriculum and your course’s impact.
6) Consider the best way to deliver your course content
One size fits all approach doesn’t work great when creating content for your course. In most cases, microlearning is going to be more effective than lengthy course content. When creating an online course, create short and more compelling learning modules so that learners can engage with small-sized easy to grasp content.
To make your online course more interesting, integrate cohort-based learning. Lack of social interaction is one of the major challenges with self-paced online courses.
7) Setting up your online course platform
To host your online courses, you must choose a professional platform that can offer you powerful features. While building your tutoring platform can be a challenging task, it becomes easy if you follow the right approach. The ideal way to host your online courses is to build a customized online course platform.
You can leverage a professional online tutoring marketplace software like Pinlearn to build your course platform. Pinlearn comes with both basic and advanced capabilities to host both live classes and self-paced courses. The readymade script uses modern technology for edTech business to create interactive online courses and deliver a great online course selling experience.
8) Getting the pricing models right
Knowing how to price your online course is as important as how to make an online course. Before launching your online course, make sure you have an idea about how your course will fit into your business model.
-Are you planning to offer your course for free and use it as a lead magnet?
-Are online courses your primary income stream?
-Are you selling subscriptions to your audience?
There is no right or wrong way to price your courses, just make sure it appropriately matches the interest of your target audience and your business goals.
As a starting point, look at what other services similar to that of yours are charging to create a benchmark of what you can charge. Never underprice your courses as this will make an impression that your courses are of less value.
9) Invest in ongoing marketing techniques
You might already know that you need to market your online courses even before launching them to enjoy great sales. However, ongoing marketing is also important if you want to keep bringing learners to your courses.
Many course creators make the mistake of stopping working on marketing strategies once they start getting income.
Here is what you can do:
Collect emails often
Your emails are one of the most valuable assets in your online tutoring business as it helps to market your course to leads. Hence, make sure you collect emails of your potential learners early and often.
Collect customer testimonials
Gathering customer testimonials is important to build trust and create a sustainable growth engine.
Work on social media marketing
Find out social platforms where your audience hangs out often. Make sure you promote your courses on social platforms where our audience engages the most.
Run paid ads
Paid advertisements are another great way to attract new learners. Consider running ads on popular platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram.
Conclusion
The eLearning market is booming right now, making it an interesting time for creators with the right skills to enter the market. Selling an online course can be lucrative considering the impact you can make in someone else’s life. We hope with the help of this blog, you should be well on your way to building online courses with solid fundamentals that can help you deliver great knowledge to your learners.
