All steps to create online courses that sell successfully
What are the benefits for you if you create online courses?
We should start with the most important question: Why is creating an online course profitable and useful in the first place? And could those benefits be your personal reasons to create an online course soon? Here you find some of the best reasons why going this path is truly worth it.
If you already have all the knowledge to create your own online course and you are just looking for the best online course platform as a hub to host and sell your content, with all relevant features for your needs, then look no further: After testing many of the platforms and collecting feedback from many online coaches and teachers, our current recommendation is memberspot.de. They were able to provide all relevant features within a high-speed application, with great UI and UX, for a relatively low price.
NOWADAYS, KNOWLEDGE IS TAUGHT ONLINE
The digital world offers us endless possibilities to educate ourselves, whether we are a private person or an entrepreneur. Creating online courses is an amazing way to monetize your knowledge and create an extra stream of income—or even make a full-time living from it! In order to meet the demand for knowledge, you can offer your online course and do not have to rent an expensive seminar room, but simply support your customers virtually. One of the fastest and most powerful ways to take your knowledge into a global market, have more impact, and earn more money is by using that knowledge lying dormant in your brain, updating and enriching it with more research and transforming it into an impact-generating, cash-generating, and influence-creating, powerful online course.
THE HERO’S JOURNEY WHERE YOU ARE THE MENTOR
All great stories in books, movies, and films have a certain structure with a hero going on adventures. It all starts always with a call to adventure, then trials, quests and of course a mentor. For your audience, you are the mentor to help them reach their goals, master their trials and quests and reap the rewards. And for you I want to be your “mentor” with this guide, to help you achieve your goals to create an awesome online course.
CREATE AN ONLINE COURSE, PROFIT AND SCALE
A seminar room, no matter how big it is, will eventually be full. But digital courses don’t have an upper limit. Theoretically, you can serve an infinite number of customers and increase your traffic accordingly. If the topics and brands fit you can also always add an online course to your existing business. You don’t have to throw your existing business overboard, but take advantage of this opportunity and become a digital trendsetter in your field as well by offering an attractive online course. When you create an online course there is also a good potential to attract new leads who can be converted into paying customers for your business. And your course can help you to build deeper relationships with your existing clients and create raving fans. It will also help to establish yourself as an expert in your field.
LOCATION INDEPENDENCE, 24/7 AVAILABILITY WITH LESS DIRECT CONTACT
This is where your customers as well as you benefit: You can continue your courses at any time, 24/7, no matter where providers and customers are located. Everyone involved can schedule their time much more flexibly and act independently of one another as a result of this.
How do you create an online course that sells successfully?
Get all the knowledge to create online courses
After reading the benefits: Do you want to create online courses that sell? If so, you’re in the right place. In this blog post, we will discuss how to create online courses that are both high quality and profitable. We will go over the steps you need to take to create a course that people will love, as well as some tips on how to market it. Creating your own online course is fun, sharpens your personality and knowledge, and hopefully adds real value to the world. And with all the digital platforms with which you can create online courses it’s easier than ever.
There are many ways to reach the goal: do you already have a successful learning offering and are just looking to digitize it? Are you desperate to create online courses but don’t know why and how? Is your boss or clients asking you to develop online courses? –If you’re ready to start making money from your expertise, keep reading! The following guide will help you get there, no matter where you are.
Before you start creating your own online courses, ask yourself questions in these five areas:
Start with you: What do you know about your field? You need to decide what your niche is before you can create an online course. What do you have experience with? Which area of expertise would you like to improve on? What topics or skills would you like to teach others? Creating an online course allows you to be a mentor for thousands of people, improve their lives, and assist them in achieving their goals. Take a moment to think about your skills, talents, and life experiences. If you sell courses, you don’t have to teach a university-level subject. The key is to find a topic you love, are good at, have experience (formal or life-long) in, and satisfy a need for someone so your expertise can be monetized.
Your deeper motivation: Your course topic should be something that you really love, or enjoy at least. If you don’t, you’ll present your training in a boring way. If it’s not something that you’re passionate about, find passion for it or pick parts that you are passionate about. With an online course offering, what do you hope to achieve in society? What part of society would you like to see advance? What transformation would you like to see?
Your target group and their needs: When do people leave the learning process with what new state and competencies? The target group’s motivation for learning this topic? What is your original motivation for learning the topic? Is it popular? What is the need for it? What problems will this course solve? Our goal is to understand the learning and buying motivations of the future participants of our course. A potential customer will not buy your course merely because he or she likes you. A participant takes an online course because they want to change from their current reality to their desired future.
Reaching your target audience: How are you able to reach your audience, how do you want to sell your course? Do you have an existing community that needs your course? Are the target group employees of your company? Did you find SEO keywords that you can rank easily? Do you know how to do online marketing? Are you able to promote your course in social media? Do you have a budget for ads? You need to know how you want to reach your target group.
Your will to show your face on the internet: When you are creating an online course you are allowing a potentially huge audience to watch or hear you teach them. This is not for everyone and you need to be aware of that before starting. But most, even when being introverted, are often growing into their role as a successful online teacher.
You need to be an expert: This is probably the most important part. You can not create an online course if you are not an expert in the topic. The reason people take online courses is because they want to learn from someone who knows what they are doing. So if you are not an expert or willing to become one, then find one and collaborate or just don’t create the course. You will also create a lot of work for yourself as you will have to create the course, record it, edit it and then promote it. If you are not willing to put in the work then this might not be the right thing for you.
The market demand: If you have thus found a will and a direction for your own online course, I will now guide you through the art and science of creating it. Once you know what topic you want to create a course on, and you know that you really want to do it, it’s time to start planning. You’ll need to determine the length of your course and create an outline of the topics you want to cover. If you already have existing content, such as blog posts or videos, that would be great to include in your course. If not, don’t worry! You can always create new content specifically for your course.
No need to be fancy: The topics of your course do not need to be something exotic, special or highly complicated. A lot of people are just looking for courses to learn microsoft excel, playing the piano, learning photography, sewing, or skateboarding. Yes, there are free options out there, but often they are missing relevant content and learnings that you could provide. It’s a lot about market demand and market supply which will determine the success of your course.
Find out about the market demand for your online course
Are you willing to spend weeks of your life creating an online course that no one will buy? No, of course not.
In order to determine if your online course topic is in demand, you need solid market research first. Often course creators make the mistake of thinking that their course idea won’t work out if there is much competition in their topic area. In reality, the evidence of a lot of successful courses in this area indicates that that topic has a high chance of being well received by the market. So if you notice that the topic finds great attention and many are buying courses on it, try to find a niche that isn’t occupied yet. Or approach the topic for your course differently, so it adds value to your audience. To evaluate a market you could start with the following method:
Create an excel table where you make four rows. One is “Demand”, the other is “Competition covering it”, the other is “matching my skills”, then another one with “Payments for problem solving (through your course)”
- Demand: For a start to get your first insights, you could check the traffic in Google. You can use Google Trends, or SEO-Tools like Unbounce, or even the Google Ad Manager itself (with a few tricks, described later) to find out the monthly searches for keywords that are relevant to your topic.
- Investigate which aspects are important in solving the problems of the audience but are not covered by the competition’s courses. As a starting point you could read the comments of online course videos on youtube, that are covering your selected topics. If you find upvoted questions to the author, collect them, analyze them and maybe you find areas of missing content you could focus on providing.
- Concerning the match of your skills to your content, we already covered that you need to find out which areas give you the feeling of joy, where you are ready to accumulate more knowledge and where you offer practical experience. But concerning the market demand you should be able to pay close attention to what your target audience really wants and needs. Often you will need to research more to find out the pain points where your audience truly struggles and then acquire the relevant information that solves those problems.
- Most importantly, for a real testimony of market demand, you need to make sure if your target audience is actually paying their hard earned money for solving their problems – buying your course or the course from others. So before you create your course, make sure to check for already paying customers that pay for solutions for their problems. And be aware, that it doesn’t have to be an online course that works as a solution. E.g. could someone hire another person to solve a programming problem, that you could help them solve themselves with your future online course.
If you can make a checkmark on all four aspects, you’ve got a course idea that’s likely to become a bestseller. But before we get to the guide on how to create an online course that sells successfully, we do a little deep dive into how you can evaluate the market demand. There are many methods on evaluating market demand for certain course topics. Here you find some reliable ones:
Google Trends Will Show You the Popularity of an Online Course Topic
Google Trends gives you results in terms of search popularity, which helps you come up with ideas for content, ideas for subtopics, and also data about current trends. In a nutshell, Google Trends shows you relative search popularity for search queries, not overall search volume of a query (which Googles Keyword Planner tool shows you with the right settings, e.g. putting your ad budget, without actually spending it, on maximum). Google Trends is a powerful tool, providing you with crucial insights into Googles search volume for a particular subject or search query, and also what geographical locations are the most popular for those search queries. Google Trends pulls data from Google searches, and allows users to compare search terms frequencies against other similar keywords, across geographical regions, or over language barriers.
You can use Google Trends to see if anyone is searching for a topic and how popular it has become over time. For example, since the start of the covid-19 pandemic we saw a sharp rise in popularity of “online courses” keywords in the trends and a lot of familiar keywords like “online language class”.
If you are early on discovering such a trending topic and you are able to provide an online course to help those looking for solutions, then you can position yourself as an expert early. With a first mover advantage you will be able to rank faster in search engines and also on any social media site where you use the relevant keywords.
Example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126652/e-learning-search-terms-during-covid-19-in-the-uk/
With the Google keyword planner, you can also get suggestions on keyword ideas related to topics where you are an expert in. (Or want to become one) So both Google Trends and the Google Keyword Planner are great tools for you to get insights into the market demand of certain topics. With social listening you will then do a deeper dive into communities and find out what potential customers are actually talking about, what problems they face and what kind of solutions they crave.
Also, do not forget to check on the competition. One method is checking the average CPC for your keywords. If it’s high it’s strong evidence, that many companies are competing for this keyword. Also do some searches yourself in Google (without adblockers) to find out what the ads are actually about. Often the ads are unrelated to course offerings and are just ads for different kinds of product categories, which you do not need to worry about. But even if you find ads for competing online courses on the topics you aim for – do not worry, it is actually a good sign. Someone, somewhere is already tapping into a market and validated it for you. Find out how much users are buying the courses of your competitors, what the price is and try to get insights into the revenue of those courses. Also find out if the competition is missing out on good marketing, course presentation and important content, that you could do better. After you finished your competitive analysis, you have way more realistic expectations on the market, the value and the potential content for your course.
If you are planning to use SEO to rank higher in search results for your online course, then check the competition for the topic as well for the organic search results. You can do this through most SEO tools. I for myself used Ubersuggest, because it has all needed features and they give you a lifetime license for a cheap price.
Social listening: Find out what questions and problems are burning within a community
Analyzing the content of competitors and the comments to it helps you uncover the user pain points that are not being addressed, or are not being addressed well, and guides your social listening strategy to figure out how your online course could potentially become the solution to their problems. Effective social listening strategies call for a monitoring of social media platforms, like Facebook Groups, Quora and Youtube, as doing so allows you to continually learn and discover new insights, as well as keep improving your courses according to what users are saying.
Ideally you “embed” yourself into communities that discuss topics related to your course. Depending on your subject you first should create a list with related topics. E.g. for digital marketing you could have subtopics like SEO, search engine marketing, social media marketing, or landing page optimization. For such a business topic Linkedin groups could be a good place to find your target audience, also forums, or facebook groups with those topics. Also think about joining groups of your competitors. Note down all questions asked where the community could need some solutions or guidance. If you want to know more about how you can “embed” yourself into communities and learn about their issues for creating your own online course, then I can recommend you the book “Embedded Entrepreneur” from Arvid Kahl. He did a great job in providing you a solid methodology to create fitting products and courses for certain target groups.
Paying customers speak louder than a thousand questionnaires: Presell your course
Now that you have more information of what your audience wants, and have chosen a subject, it is time to test the waters for your online course. If you are able to brainstorm an outline, outline your content, and create a video pitch for what is coming, then you will be able to test-sell your online course pre-sales to potential customers before you have even created it. If you actually generate sales of the course in your pre-sale, then you are already assured that the market has asked for what you are trying to build, as they literally have already committed their own money for your product — as opposed to simply telling you that they wanted it back then, but not buying it when it was actually a good time.
Assuming that you already know how your course will look, the first step is to create a preview launch page on your online course platform (also called pre-sale pages) and an extra landing page for it. One of the most crucial tools that you will need for pre-selling your course is an online course platform, where you can post your course, set the discounted price, and build discount coupons that you can send out to your students. Pre-selling gives you plenty of time to build up your content and share it before you start building out your actual courses, which, again, gives you an increased understanding of the interest and demand from your audience for buying your programs.
The landing page will handle pre-sales for you. From here, you can tweak the landing page to fit your brand, add some persuasive content, and make the audience excited for your next course. You can use the services of saleswise.io to build the sales landing page for your course and collect payments.
Simultaneously to craft your highly optimized landing page, creating a video in which you present your course and the main benefits of the course. Such a teaser video will help your customers to easily understand what you are selling. Explain your course’s benefits and the value visitors will receive from it, as well as adding in a few details about your lessons that may be interesting for your target audience. No matter which marketing channels (More on those later) you are using, inform your audience about your courses opening for pre-orders, use a web plugin for the countdown for the launch date, and let your audience see inside the creation process for your course.
The idea of pre-selling your online course, or any type of program that you are creating, is that you do not want to put the cart before the horse. You do not want to spend your time creating a course or any type of program that is ultimately a bad idea and will not sell. It is far better to pitch your online course idea to your target audience and discover they are not interested than it is to invest a considerable amount of time and money creating an online course that nobody is buying. The earlier you get your target audience involved in validating and creating your online course, the earlier you will be able to build the course around their actual wants and needs (rather than building something that you think they would want). Involving your audience in the process of designing an online course is also a great way to generate buzz about your course prior to its launch, and validate the demand for the subject matter of your course before investing any resources in it.
Set up an email list
Setting up an email list, where the visitors of your landing page can subscribe to, is essential, not only if you presell your course but also if you are already running one. You want to be able to send emails to your audience, as a direct channel, that is controlled only through you, your users and maybe some spam-blockers. Especially if you are presenting your course before you created it then an email list is an ideal instrument to already warm up your audience to buying your course and collect feedback on the structure and content. If you’re starting conversations with your audience, you’re not missing out on a lot of the insights they could provide you. Ask them about their struggle, their challenges, and also directly whether or not they would pay for an online course that would help them to overcome those challenges.
After you validated your market, found a topic that is fun and interesting for you, where you are or could become an expert, then it’s time to plan creating your course, so your audience loves it and doesn’t regret paying for.
The architecture of an online course
When creating your online course, you are presented with many challenges at once. You want a great course, that your viewers love, where they learn a lot, have a deeper understanding of the subject and can apply their newly learned information to their own lives and successfully solve their challenges. Also, ideally you presented your content in a high-quality way, with good design, structure, great didactics, provide also some entertainment and fun moments, kept the attention of your viewers high and met their expectations. Learning to build an online course may sound daunting, but if you break down the process into smaller parts, every part becomes a bit easier to grasp and digest. In the following texts you find all relevant success factors to create an awesome online course that sells wildly.
USER EXPERIENCE AND COURSE DESIGN
Creating a great user experience is important for you, because it answers the question on how do you want the learner to feel? A great user experience creates positive emotions in your viewers. About you and about your course. All the other factors listed here are paying into the user experience. But also, the needs and wants, the current knowledge level and skills of your target group are relevant for their user experience. Your course has to be specifically designed for them, not under- or overwhelm them and answer their most burning questions, the ones they know about and the ones they didn’t know about before your course.
So, some of the questions you yourself should be able to answer for a great user experience are:
– Who is your target audience?
– What are their needs and wants?
– What learning style do they prefer? (i.e. visual, auditory, kinesthetic)
– What is the level of difficulty of your course content? Does it fit to the skills, knowledge and educational level of your users?
– How long would they expect it to take
You do not know everything about your learners, their level of experience with your topic, how fast they are able to learn or if they are bored, or overwhelmed by the speed of your topic. But the more you know about them, their level, expectations, the easier it is for you to create a course that has the right pace, tonality and satisfies or exceeds expectations. Your end goal should be to create an online course that sells and you achieve this also through an awesome user experience so your participants will forward and share a link to your course with their social network, friends and family.
THE MAIN LEARNING PARTS
The learning core is the main challenge when creating an online course. It’s also the most important one, because if learners don’t understand or don’t learn what they should from your course, then it doesn’t matter how great the user experience is. To create a strong learning core, there are three questions you need to answer:
Of course the same one like for the user experience: Who is your target audience?
But also why would they want to take your course?
What are the main learning objectives of your course?
Answering these questions will help you create content with a learning core that is interesting and useful for your target audience, which leads to better engagement and improved learning outcomes. You need to be able to motivate your audience to stay with you and be motivated so far. You achieve this through a great introduction, outstanding user experience, didactics, presentation and the other factors mentioned in this guide. If you are also able to give your audience a strong “reason why” they want to learn what you teach or strengthen their existing “reason why” for that, you will definitely have their full attention when they listen to your main learning parts. Motivate them by connecting their needs and wants with the content of your course.
DIDACTICS & EXPERIMENTIAL LEARNING
Your content is ideally engaging and easy to follow. You also want to create an environment that feels safe for learners to take risks, make mistakes, and experiment and try things himself. This means providing clear instructions, using consistent terminology, and offering helpful feedback along the way. It also means creating opportunities for learner autonomy by giving your audience choices in how they learn and interact and explore their newly learned skills themselves in real life situations.
Experiential learning is focused less on meeting predetermined learning goals than it is on using students’ personal experiences for the purpose of producing knowledge. Unlike a one-way, rote, or instructional education, an experience-based, experimental education is all about engagement and a two-way teaching and learning process where students and other stakeholders are active participants in the learning process
Taking an active role in the learning process leads students to feel more satisfaction with their learning. Students must be actively engaged with their environment and interacting to validate what they have learned, that is, students are allowed to experiment more in order to assimilate (respond) given instructions (stimulus). This multidisciplinary approach allows students to apply the classroom knowledge in self-directed ways, which leads to lifelong learning. While most styles of teaching (even rote learning and teaching, you might say) involve teacher-student interactions, experiential teaching stresses other interactions too–student-student, student-environment, and student-outsiders (clients, civic leaders, community members, and so on).
TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF YOUR COURSE
Hosting your course videos to give access to paid members
Whereas, with the course marketplaces, there is no such thing as your own course member area, where you have full control, like you have with your own website or a paid course system, and you are limited in terms of selling courses. When it comes to an online business, your content and videos is your most important asset. You want full control. The videos that you create for your course, the IP, the texts, the groups and the email lists – if you host it on a marketplace instead of a course system or your own website, it’s not in your hands, but in the hands of the marketplace. Of course, you don’t have to build your own course system from scratch. There are plenty of great WordPress website templates out there that work as a course system. Those you could get e.g. from Themeforest for a cheap price, if you follow this Link. (THEMEFOREST AFFILIATE LINK)
But if you have some Budget for your online course, we would recommend you, to choose an application provider that is specialized in hosting courses, with a system that provides you all relevant features to serve you’re your audience best.
Not necessary but recommended:
- Great community features to organize your content and members.
Our current favorite provider in 2022 is memberspot.de, since their speed, uptime guarantee, availability, features and service give you all the relevant assets you and your course members need.
Technical aspects of course creation
Unless you are also outsourcing elements of the work, creating your own online course is quite technical, more than many people think. If your course should offer a decent quality it is requiring a mastery of recording video and audio, lighting, slide decks, video editing, and some online tools to deliver courses. A quick list of technical equipment for different budgets to create your own Online course. Once you got the structure and plan to create your own course, however, the following equipment list gives you everything you need to develop, create, and market an online course — and not just any online course — profitable online courses; online courses that work.:
On a Budget:
- Camera
- Microphone
- Software for Video Editing
- Software for Recording
- A PC / Laptop
- Online Course Software / Own Website with Hosting
- Channels to market your online course
Higher Budget:
- Camera
- Microphone
- Software for Video Editing
- Software for Recording
- A PC / Laptop
- Online Course Software / Own Website with Hosting
- Channels to market your online course
Concerning hosting your online course, you can choose between many course platform providers, or build it on your own website. Here you can find an evaluation of the pros and cons of building your own site, with a WordPress template in comparison with the pros and cons of using an online course platform provider:
Pros of hosting your course on your own website with a template:
- Lower monthly fees, only for hosting, depending on your traffic
- Full Control, if you don’t pay for a while, you can set up the website again with all your courses saved in the system
- If you have programming know how you could add special features, if needed
Cons of hosting your course on your own website with a template:
- Slow Website: WordPress is comparingly slow when it comes to more complex applications like online course templates
- Security issues, you have the full responsibility and you have to fully trust the template providers to close all security gaps
- Slow with setup: You will need to take a lot of factors into consideration when it comes to setting up your own hosting system for online courses and invest quiet an amount of time until you are ready.
- Hosting can get very expensive with the high traffic that video hosting is causing
- Many relevant features not included like with some of the better course software providers
- Technical knowledge required: Not only setting up your website can be a problem, but especially payment integration requires technical knowledge
Pros of using an online course system provider:
- You still have full control over your courses, members, email lists etc.. – as long as you pay for your usage
- Setup Speed: You create your account upload your course videos easily, add titles and descriptions, training material etc.. and you are ready to go.
- You pay only for your individual usage and you can start with a cheap monthly fee until you scale up with your members/traffic/features/users
- High security: The professional platforms manage everything for you, not only the hosting, but the security as well. If your customers data got leaked through their software, then they are responsible – not you.
- Fast: The providers we recommend here have a lightning fast performance of their website and apps. Your users therefore enjoy a way better user experience than with a self-hosted website
- Features: From thousands of great online course creators, their feedback, the course system providers that we recommend offer features that enrich your course system massively and give your users the best experience currently possible
Cons of using an online course system
- If you stop your payment most course system providers will just delete all your courses and the content. Luckily there are some exceptions that we are recommending you preventing this from happening.
- You have to do a lot of research to find the right system for your needs. With our guide we want to help you with that.
- If the company behind your chosen course system goes bankrupt you have to start anew. It’s unlikely but in 2022 you never know.
My recommendation since June 2022 is memberspot.de (I run all of my courses on that platform), but if you are still in the process of choosing a platform, here is a list of everything you need to look for in an LMS (Learning Management System). In my case, I am going to stick with foundational topics, as I can safely assume most of my target audience is not going to have much prior knowledge (official training theory terminology) of online course platforms, and will only get confused or distracted if I go into more advanced topics, such as learning analytics or psychometric tests. Oftentimes instructors have lots of information to cram into the online training environment, which could make for an uninviting experience for the users. After years — decades, even — of on-site instruction, many instructors are capable of delivering a traditional, lecture-based class, without having outlined a traditional syllabus beforehand.
ENTERTAINMENT & FUN
Depending on the topic you can spice up your course with some humor. Of course, if you course is about “How to handle the death of loved ones” then you may skip this section, but for everyone else a bit of humor can really help you to not only keep the attention of your audience, but also could serve your marketing. If you look at the Internet and the videos going viral: Most of them are the funny ones. And people love to forward funny videos to make their friends laugh. So little cuts of your course could go viral and get people talk about it. Behind everything is a system. So, there is a system behind humor. And the great comedians know about it. If you want to learn how to become more fun and entertaining we can safely recommend you the following books:
TENSION CURVE
The biggest challenges facing creators who teach classes online is the shortening attention span of today’s generations. Most people are so used to fast cuts, emotion-spiking content and other attention triggers that a course on a “dry” topic, is often bought, but then not watched. 90% of online courses are not getting watched to the end according to (LINK). But your course now will be different, because now you are aware of the challenge. Mmaintaining the attention of your audience can be achieved through some smart factos:
- Keep it interesting through practical references and examples
- Ask rhetoric questions to make your audience think
- Use humor and create an expectation of your course continuing to be fun
- Offer tasks to your audience and engage them to achieve goals
- Start by opening “loops” where you start to tell a story, but then, just after a cliffhanger, switch the topic, connect it to the topic and use the next topic to explain the solution of your story
- There are way more things you can do to keep the attention of your audience. This book offers a lot of ideas and practical methods.
MOTIVATION & COMMUNITY
With a home setting that is full of potential distractions, keeping students engaged, motivated, and excited about the lessons they are taking could be one of the biggest challenges that online teachers, online coaches and course creators have to deal with. The best way that online teachers can help alleviate this is to ensure that their students feel valued in their classroom. The truth is that students feeling isolated while learning online can be a massive factor that makes them feel unmotivated. So if you create a community where your students can discuss your course and related topics, then, together with previous sections, you already did relevant measures to make sure your students are staying motivated to stick with you – and buy more courses from you.
MARKETING
For marketing your course, you could use a third party, like an agency running ad campaigns for you, building your landing pages, or do it yourself. A marketing agency which is specialized on helping course creators to massively sell their courses is saleswise.io. They provide you with all you need:
- Positioning and branding strategy
- Marketing Strategy
- Copywriting for your ads and websites
- Landing page with AI optimization (Optimized on sales)
- Guided Selling Applications to provide website visitors with a guide to the right course
- Ad Campaigns for Facebook, Instagram and Google
- SEO – Search Engine Optimization
- Cooperations that bring you leads
Of course, you also can do all this for yourself, it will take more time and energy from you, that you should better invest in creating a great course and giving support to any requests from your customers. If you are planning to do everything yourself, then you find some helpful literature here:
INTERACTIVE PARTS
It’s known among researches and experienced teachers, that students learn best, if they have to solve a problem themselves. Meanwhile the teacher’s role is to assist and help the student when he is stuck. One option to create a learning environment online, that offers this didactic method is a course system software that provides interactive features like quizzes or mini games. Those features offer students the possibility to apply what they learned. Another option are tasks: You could give your students a task that fits to their own learning goals or overall goals and they have to enter the results into a software feature that provides them either your feedback, or an automatic feedback, based on their results. An automation of this process can be done via a Chatbot that you pretrained. But for most scenarios using the course system software for a quiz should work as well.
USER FEEDBACK AND TESTING
Feedback is essential for you to improve the quality of your course and to adapt it further on the wants and needs of your target group. The good thing about using a course System like MEMBERSPOT (LINK) is that it allows you to easily exchange chapters of your course with an updated version. But to really know what you should change and where your students need additional information you need to ask them. Most course systems have feedback features that you simply have to activate to collect feedback from your students. They will then be able to enter valuables ratings, comments and feedback to your course and you can then react accordingly, thank them for their feedback and change the content for an even better user experience.
PRACTICAL RELEVANCE AND APPLICATION BY USERS
As mentioned already in the interactive parts: Your participants took your course because they want to get value from it for their real live. They want to improve their live, solve their own personal or business challenges and your course should help them with it ideally. As another success factor to create an online course that sells massively you need to make sure that the things you teach can be applied. Even when the subject you teach is theoretical, having at least some interesting real live examples will improve the value of your course a lot. If you are unsure how you find out the necessary real live application scenarios of your target group, just ask your potential or actual audience beforehand. Find out what they struggle with daily, what their hurdles and issues are and then find out the right methods how they can overcome them.
SUPPORT
When you created your own online course and it is running successfully you will inevitably be confronted with a lot of questions from your participants. Either some students don’t understand some parts and have to ask you what you meant in a certain chapter, or need more details on a topic. Therefore, you need to reserve some time accordingly for answering those requests, or get additional manpower, like employees, or interns to answer questions for you. After you know which questions you are confronted with, it’s time to either adapt your course content accordingly, build an FAQ page, or train a chatbot, or other interactive system to automate answering the questions of your course participants. A smart and automated way to help your students effectively is using a so-called guided selling solution, that works similar to a chatbot, but faster and can be designed more easily and quicker. An example would be the guided selling application of saleswise.io. It can be easily integrated on any website and will then ask your users relevant questions. The questions can be designed in a “tree branch” configuration, to get more details from the user. In the end of the conversation the user gets his desired answer and is satisfied, while you, as the course creator, didn’t have to spend more time. To really know how you “feed” this automatic Q&A machine, you first should answer most questions of your audience yourself. Only then do you know which of the questions are the repetitive ones.
AUTHORITY
Make sure to tell your audience the reasons why you are an authority on the topic early. It helps you not only to increase the sales of your online course, but also increases the attention of your participants. This is due to their expectation to actually learn valuable knowledge from you, that you created through giving them a strong “why” you are the right person to listen to.
Now, after you got all the knowledge you need to start to create your own online course, take a look at the 9 best platforms to create and sell online courses in July 2022.