How To Create an Online Course in 10 Steps (2024)

With only a laptop and access to the web, your online course can enroll students around the globe, helping them master essential skills for much less money than traditional education.

This text takes you thru a 10-step strategy of learn how to create an internet course, while making a living and having an impact in your students in the method. 

You’ll walk away with a blueprint on constructing a brand new course that positions you as an authority in your industry, generates a meaningful amount of cash, and sets your students up for achievement.

Tips on how to create an internet course in 10 steps

1. Select the subject of your course
2. Conduct customer research
3. Select the format of your course
4. Test in case your course has high market demand
5. Pre-sell your course
6. Outline your course content
7. Set course pricing and sales goals
8. Select the proper course platform
9. Launch and advertise your course
10. Collect feedback and testimonials

1. Select the subject of your course

The rise of online education space and the advantages of making an internet course should signal something essential: You’ll have competition when bringing your online course to the market. There isn’t any shortage of online courses available on topics starting from digital marketing and video editing to online writing and entrepreneurship. 

When considering learn how to create an internet course, select a subject that you just’re uniquely suited to show, where you will have industry insight, credibility, expertise, and fervour. Plus, make sure the course topic has high market demand.

Industry insight, expertise, and credibility

Novices need to learn from an authority who’s steps ahead of them on the training journey. Learners also must know they’re hearing from someone who is very regarded of their field. Listed here are just a few signs that that is you:

• You’ve worked within the industry for years or a long time and have a high level of familiarity along with your field. 
• You’ve cultivated knowledge or skills as regards to your course over years or a long time. 
• You’ve historical context on the industry. 
• You may make well-informed predictions on the longer term of the industry. 
• You’ve above-average knowledge or skills on the subject material and may communicate this information to others. 
• You’re acquainted with common mistakes or pitfalls and may mentor novices on avoiding them. 
• You may readily answer the questions of a beginner. 
• You’ve credentials or accolades that signal you’re an authority in your field. 
• You’ve a proven track record with individuals who can speak to the standard of your work and the extent of your expertise. 
• You’re seen as a thought leader in your area and recurrently tweet, blog, or share your knowledge to a large audience.
• You’ve appeared on podcasts or been featured in articles and/or books about your area of experience. 

Passion

Putting together a comprehensive and useful course requires a meaningful period of time and energy. Listed here are signs you will have the eagerness to sustain the endeavor:

• You’ve deep enthusiasm in your subject area and may get students enthusiastic about it too. 
• You’ve a real desire to assist people acquire skills and knowledge in your field. 
• You’re willing to place within the work to supply a greater course offering than competitors.
• You’re excited on the prospect of organizing a curriculum around your knowledge and expertise. 
• You’re working toward continuous improvement and mastery in your field.

High market demand

While your expertise and fervour are essential things to contemplate when selecting your course topic, your course might want to have a high market demand to succeed. Listed here are just a few signals your course has enough interest: 

• Your course topic is inside a growing industry fairly than a contracting industry.
• Your course topic has a high search volume on search engines like google and yahoo like Google.
• There are similar courses in your area of interest developed by competitors. 
• Your course teaches a skill set that’s in high demand.
• You’ve identified an underserved audience for the subject and also you’re filling a market gap.

While your course topic doesn’t have to envision each item on this checklist, having some level of industry insight and expertise, credibility, and fervour in your subject area will make all of the difference in making a course that stands out from the competition and has a novel value proposition for prospective students. 

Moreover, it’s also essential to research and test whether your course topic has market demand. Area of interest course topics like “making authentic maple syrup” or “producing ska music” won’t have enough demand to make making a course profitable. (We’ll dedicate a whole section of this guide to how it’s best to validate the market demand of your course.)

2. Conduct customer research

While selecting the subject of your course is vital, you’re still just a few steps away from jumping into creating course content and diving into the sales cycle. 

First, it’s essential to grasp your audience before you even begin planning content for them. 

By conducting user research and defining your ideal customer at the beginning of your online course creation journey, you:

• Put yourself in a beginner’s shoes. Being an authority in a field often means succumbing to the curse of data, a cognitive bias where you assume that who you’re communicating with has the identical background knowledge as you do. Speaking with prospective users will provide help to return to a beginner’s mind, and provide help to tailor your course accordingly. 
• Understand your customers’ pain points. Your course should help a buyer solve an issue they’ve been facing, support them in acquiring knowledge they’ve struggled to search out elsewhere, or assist them in learning something more quickly or efficiently than available alternatives. On your course to perform this, you have to know precisely what pain points your prospective buyer is facing and learn how to address them inside your course. 
• Learn what a student wants to realize. A very powerful a part of your course for college students is the transformation: the state they achieve after they’ve accomplished your course. Chatting with prospective customers will provide help to uncover what they need to realize. 
• Know learn how to sell to them. Because the saying goes, “For those who sell to everyone, you sell to nobody.” It’s essential to construct an “ideal customer” profile so you may tailor your course content and marketing in a way that speaks on to them. Learning the precise messaging to relay to your ideal customer will inform every little thing from the headlines you include in your landing page to the way you promote your course across social media.

In defining your ideal customer, step beyond assumptions and casual conversations. As an alternative, approach defining your ideal customer like someone conducting methodological user research. Listed here are just a few other ways to conduct user research:

• Research Google Trends. Use Google Trends to go looking in your topic and see whether it’s increasing or decreasing in interest. You may filter by country and timeframe. 
• Browse Reddit and Quora. On Reddit, navigate to subreddits which are related to your course topic and flick thru threads that might help with course content. On Quora, search for questions related to your topic and discover what challenges individuals are facing and what they need to know. 
• Scavenge social media and forums. Follow distinguished people in your industry across social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn, listening to the conversations related to your course topic. 
• Arrange phone interviews. Except for doing secondary research on social media, connect with and get in touch with prospective customers on to see in the event that they could be available to reply just a few questions for a research call. 

Conduct interviews with at the least 10 people, sharing that you just’re starting a course and would really like their answers to just a few questions, including the next: 

• What are the issues I can provide help to solve?
• What are the challenges I can provide help to overcome?
• What would your goals be in taking this course?
• For those who were to finish the course, what’s the consequence you’d hope to get?

Keep user research interviews short and use them as a chance to inquire about preferred course format and pricing, too. Consider incentivizing interviewees by offering them the course without spending a dime once it’s complete. 

Use the next script to ask prospective customers in the event that they could be willing to take a seat down with you for a user research interview: 

Taking the time to conduct user research will make all of the difference in crafting a high-quality course that may be promoted to a perfect buyer and that gives a change for college students.

3. Select the format of your course

Courses can are available a spread of various formats and mediums. The way you structure and deliver your course will determine the way you market your course to buyers, how much content to incorporate in your curriculum, and the way much money you may reasonably sell your course for. There are three principal varieties of course:

• Mini-course
• Multi-day course
• Masterclass

Mini-course

A mini-course generally requires an hour or two to finish. It may well tackle different mediums—as an example, a series of emails or a playlist of 10 short videos. 

Mini-courses are generally offered at a low price point (e.g., under $100), or may even be free, to function a marketing tool or lead magnet for a more in-depth and pricer course offering. A mini-course is an important approach to start as a course creator to check the market and learn learn how to create a bigger course.

Multi-day course

Multi-day courses are intermediate digital educational products that generally take students several days to finish. 

They may include pre-recorded videos that break down the course into different levels or modules and include supplementary materials like worksheets and checklists. They may have quizzes to check learners along the way in which.

These courses often fall into the worth range of $250 to $2,000. A multi-day course is right should you’ve already validated your idea through a mini-course. 

Masterclass

Masterclasses may be anywhere from weeks to months long and aim to supply buyers with a whole system for achievement. A lot of these courses are generally sold to professionals and have a price point starting from $300 to $5,000. If it’s your first time making a course, you generally shouldn’t start with a masterclass. As an alternative, construct up your experience creating mini-courses and multi-day courses first. 

Jean-Martin Former and Suleyka Montpetit, the founders behind The Market Gardener Institute, offer a spread of courses, including The Market Gardener Masterclass.

The course takes 40 to 60 hours to finish and includes greater than 40 modules, over 50 videos, greater than 45 technical sheets, and more. A community component is an element of the offering. The course is priced at $1,997 and features a downloadable syllabus you may review before buying, which provides information on every little thing the course covers.

Select the variety of course you create based in your experience with creating courses, the breadth and depth of the content you’ll create, and your goal buyer’s willingness to pay. 

4. Test in case your course has high market demand

In business, it’s helpful to validate your idea before you launch your product to the world. Before spending time and cash constructing a digital product that individuals may not buy, test whether there’s truly a market demand before going full steam ahead along with your idea. 

One approach to do that is constructing a minimum viable product (MVP), an idea coined in Eric Reis’s The Lean Startup. An MVP is a product you release to the general public with barely enough features to validate your assumptions. When considering learn how to create an internet course, create a minimum viable product version of your course, comparable to a mini-course or a free webinar to validate your idea. 

Create a mini-course

Mini-courses generally take lower than two hours to finish and narrow in on a selected topic fairly than attempting to cover a broad range of ideas. A mini-course could eventually be a module or lesson in a multi-day course. Listed here are examples of taking a broad course topic and narrowing it right into a mini-course MVP:

A mini-course permits you to select a subject you already know well and package your expertise or repackage your existing material (e.g., blog posts, threads on X, email newsletter) right into a format like an email course. An email course also helps you to capture the emails of people that you’ll eventually market your larger course to. Someone signing up and taking your mini-course is validation of market demand for a bigger course on a broader topic. 

Create a free webinar

One other MVP strategy for validating the market demand of your course is making a webinar with an upsell. The common conversion rate of a webinar may be around 20%. 

Seeing a conversion rate like that is validation that there’s market demand in your larger course. Spend nearly all of the webinar providing beneficial information in your course topic, but make certain to assemble feedback from participants on what they found beneficial and what else they need to learn. 

These methods of validating your course idea will prevent the experience of making a course that no person actually buys. 

5. Pre-sell your course

Pre-selling a course means selling your course before you’ve actually created it. That is one other mitigation technique to avoid making a course that no person wants. 

Other benefits include stress-testing your concept, tailoring your content to early feedback from buyers, and raising money through pre-sales to truly fund the creation of your course. Plus, having just a few early student sign-ups will likely function a motivator for ending and launching your course to the world. 

Getting your very first cohort of consumers to join a pre-sale (or pre-order) may be done by making a pre-sale landing page and incentivizing buyers with a reduction. 

For instance, use Shopify to create a pre-sale page and collect payments in your course. So as to add pre-order functionality to your store, download an app from the Shopify App Store like Pre-order Now, Pre-order Manager, and Crowdfunder. Shopify also integrates with a lot of course platforms, like Thinkific and Teachable.

To pre-sell your course:

• On the very least have a title, topic, and course outline that provides early buyers an idea of the curriculum they’ll learn down the road
• Have a goal in mind of what a successful pre-sale might appear like 

For example, your aim could be to make 25 pre-sales of your course. For those who make lower than this in a given time-frame, it’s price fastidiously fascinated with whether you desire to proceed with creating the course or opt to refund customers what they’ve paid and return to the drafting board.

6. Outline your course content

Outlining your course content, coming up with the contents of your course and logically dividing it into lessons requires you to place yourself within the shoes of a student. Start from the specified end state of a student and work backward from there. 

Break down content into modules and lessons

The quantity of content in your course and what number of lessons you include will probably be determined partly by the variety of course you create (e.g., mini-course, multi-day course, masterclass) in addition to the associated completion time and price. 

When you’ve sorted that out, break down the course into distinct modules and lessons or sections and subsections. 

For example, should you created a course on content marketing, here’s what breaking down that course into five modules might appear like:

From there, you may break down your modules right into a series of specific lessons that go into detail a couple of given subject material and set your students up for achievement. Here’s how you would possibly break down the above modules for a similar course: 

Once you will have a transparent outline that details the topics for every module and lesson, it’s best to have a transparent direction to begin constructing your course content, one lesson at a time. Each lesson must have detailed steps, information, and exercises for college students to work through. Inside each lesson, aim to have clear learning objectives that students who buy the course will walk away with. 

Determine the course formats of your lessons

Depending on the variety of course you choose to create, the medium of your course could take many alternative forms. For a mini-course that’s free or low-priced, you would possibly go for an email format where you limit the formats you utilize to text and a few illustrative images or screenshots. 

Nonetheless, for more intensive and higher-priced courses, it’s best to make use of multiple formats to maintain your students engaged throughout the course. For instance, fairly than using only text or exclusively video, use a combination of formats to maintain your students engaged. Listed here are just a few popular course formats and their advantages:

• Video content: great for portraying ideas simply and time effectively
• Screencasts and walkthroughs: ideal for processes where students must see the precise steps
• Text content: best for explaining concepts in additional detail, giving step-by-step information, and linking to other resources around the online
• Downloadable content: excellent for cheat sheets, glossaries templates, and other tools that set learners up for achievement
• Workbooks: beneficial for helping learners internalize concepts

As a best practice, keep videos under 10 minutes long and aim to create content that’s focused and actionable. During your research phase, take a look at what formats your competitors are using and consider asking prospective students about what course medium they find most engaging. 

7. Set course pricing and sales goals

The value of your course will vary based on the variety of course you create: a mini-course is free or low-cost, a multi-day course is mid-cost, while a masterclass is frequently high cost. Nonetheless, the pricing of your course will rely on a wide range of aspects it’s best to consider:

• Area of interest and course topic. Consider the industry your course falls in and the way price sensitive your customers could be. Customers buying a course on investing likely have a better willingness to pay than customers purchasing a digital course on social media marketing. 
• Marketing. How much do you propose to spend on marketing campaigns? Be certain that the associated fee of spreading the word about your course is reflected in your pricing. 
• Authority of the course creator. Buyers can pay more for a course created by someone who is taken into account a proven industry leader. Take your perceived authority into consideration while pricing your course. 

To get a good higher idea of how it’s best to price your course, conduct competitor pricing research to see how other digital course creators in your area of interest are pricing their very own digital offerings. Make sure you’re not selling yourself short by pricing too low. Then again, remain realistic and avoid pricing too high. Don’t be afraid to check what competitors are offering, add more value to your individual course offering, and price your course accordingly. 

Alongside doing dedicated pricing research around your course, set a sales goal that will even inform the way you price and market your course. 

For instance, in case your sales goal is $50,000, there are several ways to cost your course:

Scenario one:

• Goal: $50,000 in course sales
• Course price: $20
• Buyers needed: 2,500

Scenario two:

• Goal: $50,000 in course sales
• Course price: $250
• Buyers needed: 200

In scenario one, you price your course lower and want a better volume of consumers. In scenario two, you price your course higher and want a lower volume of consumers. So, which scenario is healthier? 

Generally, pricing your course too low isn’t an excellent strategy. For one, you’ll must spend money and time marketing your course to drive traffic to your course page. 

Assuming 1% of the shoppers who land in your page buy the course, you’ll must drive 250,000 visitors to your page in scenario one and 20,000 visitors to your page in scenario two. Secondly, it’s often favorable to have customers who’re less price sensitive. 

Consider these aspects when pricing your course, and avoid pricing that’s too low and forces you to market more aggressively. Put the time and energy into making a course that you just’re proud to value at what it’s price. 

8. Select the proper online course platform

Next, settle on exactly where you desire to host your course content online. There are a number of various course platforms with unique features, but there are three basic varieties of online course platforms: standalone, all-in-one, and online course marketplaces. 

Standalone

Standalone platforms offer you quite a lot of control over your content and data. Examples of standalone platforms include Thinkific and Teachable, each of which integrate easily with Shopify. 

Here’s a listing of standalone course platforms:

All in One

All-in-one solutions put your marketing tools, website builder, and content delivery platform in a single single place. Generally, all-in-one course platforms are the most costly, but may be worthwhile because they allow you to sidestep using multiple tools to perform the identical thing. 

Here’s a listing of all-in-one course platforms:

Online course marketplace

Online course marketplaces offer a platform that comes with a built-in audience that may also help surface your course more easily than you could possibly on your individual. Nonetheless, you generally have less control over your pricing and data. 

Listed here are a few online course marketplaces:

Don’t succumb to evaluation paralysis in relation to selecting your course platform. The actual content of your course is more essential than where it’s hosted online. If the course platform you choose lacks the features you would like, you may at all times switch. 

9. Launch and advertise your course

Creating your course is one a part of the equation; launching it to the world and marketing it to buyers is the opposite. 

After putting within the work to make your course pretty much as good as possible for potential customers, it’s essential to get it into their hands through marketing. Listed here are just a few ways to sell your course and earn money:

• Run a weekly webinar. Webinars are generally low price and an excellent approach to generate leads in your course. If someone sits through a 30- to 60-minute webinar, there’s a greater likelihood they’ll purchase your course, too. Learn learn how to host a webinar that pulls clients. 
• Prioritize email marketing. Constructing an email list of prospective buyers is a strong approach to share updates, information, and discounts related to your course. While someone won’t buy your course once they first arrive in your landing page, asking for his or her email and establishing an email marketing funnel may persuade them to purchase down the road. Moreover, you should utilize email to create a mini-course that promotes your principal course. Learn more about using email marketing to spice up your small business. 
• Appear on a podcast. Appearances on podcasts are an important approach to increase your authority and naturally reveal your expertise through conversation. Pitch yourself to podcasters in your area of interest, explaining how your expertise matches with their show and might be beneficial for his or her listeners. Most hosts will permit you to pitch what you’re working on to their audience near the tip of the conversation, and even offer a reduction to listeners. 
• Use social media marketing. Discover one of the best channels to talk to your prospective followers, hone in on them, and construct a social media strategy that prioritizes adding value consistently. Avoid the trap of using every social media platform—it’s unlikely you have to have a presence on TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat—and as an alternative, give attention to just a few. Learn more about making a social media marketing strategy. 
• Run paid ads. Running paid ads, like Google Ads or Facebook ads, to your sales page generally is a powerful technique to goal your ideal buyer and get them to convert to a customer after seeing an ad. With a paid channel like internet advertising, make certain you’re making a return on investment—your cost of acquiring a customer ought to be lower than the worth of the course. Learn learn how to grow your small business with Facebook ads and Google Ads. 
• Adopt search engine optimisation tactics. Optimizing your website so it’s surfaced in search engine results is beneficial for having customers discover your course. Learn learn how to rank your site with this search engine optimisation checklist. 
• Construct a content marketing strategy. Creating free educational content about your course area of interest can construct your authority, help your course and content get surfaced through search results, and get free readers to convert to paid customers. Learn learn how to drive more customers with content marketing. 

Successfully selling your course through marketing takes some experimentation. Start with just a few marketing channels to see what works. Double down on the strategies which are effective at bringing in customers and ditch the tactics which are more time, effort, or money than they’re price. 

10. Collect feedback and testimonials 

While customers may take your word for it, having real customers singing the praises of your course is even higher. Collect feedback and testimonials from pleased customers who’ve seen results out of your course. Having positive anecdotes about transformations in your landing page and throughout your marketing is a strong approach to persuade prospective customers of the worth of your course and the outcomes it might help them achieve. 

To gather customer reviews and testimonials, ask for feedback from buyers who’ve taken your course. Ask customers who provide glowing feedback whether or not they could be willing to supply a testimonial to feature in your marketing material. 

Be specific in providing direction to customers about what you wish of their testimonial. Somewhat than simply asking for a blurb about their positive experience with the course, ask more targeted questions like, “How much latest revenue have you ever seen through taking my course?” or “How prepared did you’re feeling for taking the true estate licensing course before my course versus afterward?” Specific details on how your course was helpful are more powerful than vague generalizations. If possible, ask for a video testimonial fairly than a text one. 

After all, asking for feedback mustn’t be about only testimonials. Use positive feedback to tell what parts of the course are resonating with students and use critical feedback to revise course material that’s under-performing. Taking feedback to heart with each cohort of scholars that buys your course will permit you to regularly improve it over time and provides your students one of the best learning experience possible. 

The advantages of making an internet course

With no inventory issues or supply chain problems to unravel, selling online courses is an online business idea with advantages price considering:

• Online courses are scalable. It takes quite a lot of effort and time to create an internet course. Nonetheless, with digital products, you may create a single resource and sell it to lots of, hundreds, and even thousands and thousands of individuals around the globe. This process may be entirely automated so anyone can purchase your course with just a few clicks. 
• Online courses are low price. Depending on the variety of course you create, it’s possible you’ll just need just a few software subscriptions for hosting your course to send emails to prospective buyers and construct a community of learners. 
• Online courses have high margins. After the prices that go into production and marketing, the remaining revenue from a course may be profit. While many traditional entrepreneurs selling physical products have slim margins, digital products like courses can have margins as high as 85%—as an example, selling a course for $100 and keeping $85. 
• Online courses generate passive income. While passive income is rarely truly passive—there’s upfront time, money, and energy—successful online courses are close. When you’ve created an internet learning course, you may generate income from it constantly. This is particularly the case in case your course is download-only and isn’t a cohort-based course with a live or community component. 

Start selling online courses today

Reflect on the unique insights, beneficial knowledge, and marketable skills that you may share with the world through your first online course. 

• For those who’ve taught yourself learn how to create inspiring illustrations on an iPad, there’s a probability you may teach others to do it too. 
• For those who’ve helped firms grow an engaged social media across brands, there are likely buyers inquisitive about learning how you probably did it. 
• For those who’re a product management leader and mentor who has helped others enter the sphere, it’s best to consider doing the identical on a wider scale through a course. 

Creating a fascinating and successful online course means packaging your passion right into a digital product. Starting in your journey as an internet course creator will set you as much as earn money through your enthusiasm and expertise, while helping others learn what you already know in the method.