How to Create Online Courses WITH NO EXPERIENCE! | Guide and Tools To Get Started
Today we’re going to talk about the income stream of creating courses and online digital courses.
I have created two courses:
I have one on How To Save Money on Groceries, and then an entrepreneurship course on how to launch an online business called Dreamer To Profitable, where I go through creating courses, starting YouTube channel, becoming a virtual assistant, becoming a freelancer, starting a podcast or a blog, and showing behind the scenes of what you need to do to launch that business.
What is the best platform to host online courses?
Where should I host my course videos? I have two recommendations for hosting your courses, ThriveCart and Teachable. These are ones that I’m personally familiar with.
I host my courses on ThriveCart. Thrive Cart is a one-stop shop where you can pay a one-time fee and you can host your course in ThriveCart Learn and have affiliates through ThriveCart as well.
I previously hosted my courses on Teachable. With Teachable, it’s a one-stop shop, you can upload your videos directly to the platform, have a sales page, checkout page, payments go through affiliates, all within Teachable. Now it can get a little pricey. You can start hosting your course for free on Teachable, but after you start getting students, it does get a little pricey.
ThriveCart VS Teachable
The biggest pro for ThriveCart over Teachable is ThriveCart is a one-time payment whereas Teachable is an annual fee and depending on the tier you are on you may have to pay a transaction fee as well.
The biggest con for ThriveCart over Teachable is with ThriveCart you cannot upload your videos directly to the website, you need to either upload them to DropBox, YouTube, or Vimeo and then embed the video into the lessons. It’s not a big deal but it is an extra step.
Resources for creating an online course:
- Hosting platforms:
- Video: How to Create Online Courses WITH NO EXPERIENCE!
- Video: 5 Mistakes I Made With My First Online Course
- My Course: Dreamer To Profitable
- FREE Course: How to Create & Sell Online Courses with ThriveCart
Design, Build, and Launch your own online course with ThriveCart.
How do I choose a topic for my course?
The first thing that you want to do when you’re looking to create a course is figure out, what problem am I solving?
A lot of people think that has to be this huge, big production to create an online course. You don’t have to be an expert to creating courses.
Ask yourself: what problem do I solve? Then take those everyday skills that you have in life and help someone else do that.
It can be as simple as:
- How to get your kids to eat vegetable
- How to do baby led weaning
- How to train a new puppy
- How to start an online business
- How to apply for jobs just out of college
- How to create a resume
- How to be successful a job interviews
Any skill that you have, most likely can be translated into a course.
Think of a traditional dog training business, where you have to have the physical dogs come to you. There is a limit at how many dogs you can train at once, you have to take time out of your schedule to train the dogs.
Imagine turning that into an online course! Taking the skills you already have at training dogs, create a curriculum about the basics of dog training. Film the modules with a puppy model and then sell the courses on repeat whenever someone needs your services.
Creating courses is a great form of passive income.
Film the modules with a puppy model, upload to ThriveCart Learn or Teachable, and then sell the courses on repeat whenever someone needs your services.
But I’m not an expert, am I qualified to sell a course?
This is a big misconception of selling courses, change your mindset and remember that you are using the skills you have. Courses don’t need to have crazy complex information. I personally believe that the biggest benefit of creating a course is having all of that information in one place, which saves the student time from having to scower the internet for the information.
For example, for my How to Save Money on Groceries Course. You can find all the information on the internet for free, learn about meal planning, meal prepping, looking for sales, how to find the best deals, how to budget your money for groceries, all of that stuff.
But the benefits of my course is, it has it all in one concise place so that you don’t have to spend hours and hours and hours researching, watching all these videos with most of the videos have the same information where you find one little nugget here and one little nugget there.
With a course, it’s all in one place so that you can really dig in and get all the information in a lot shorter timeframe. It’s quick, fast information. That’s all. Actual tips.
How do you write the curriculum for the course?
When you’re creating a course, you want to think about the journey that they’re going to go on. You want to think about where they are now?
Pre-course and then where you want them to be after the course is completed. You really want to map out what their transformation is going to be.
Who is your client avatar?
Who are you talking to? Who are you doing this course for? If you’re doing a course on training dogs, but the people that are seeing your course, are all cat people, bird people, or no pets at all people. Then your course isn’t going to sell successfully because they’re not your target client.
You want to niche down and spend a lot of time on who your target client is so that when you’re creating the content, when you’re doing the marketing, you know exactly who you’re talking to.
When speaking to your target client you want them to think “How did they know that is a struggle of mine?!”
For example, my course on Dreamer To Profitable, is aa entrepreneurship course and people that are wanting to start an online business.
Dreamer To Profitable is for people that want to start a YouTube channel, want start a blog. They’re nervous, they’re like, “Hmm, I don’t know if I can, I don’t know if I have the time. I don’t know if I have the skills or resources, and. I don’t know, but I really want to do it” they are my target client. Those people that are eager to learn, they’re eager to grow.
I’m not helping people in Dreamer To Profitable that have had YouTube channels for 10 years and have 200,000 subscribers. That’s not my target client. My target client is people just starting out on YouTube or don’t even have a YouTube channel at all, or just starting out as a freelancer, virtual assistant, and don’t have years of experience in it.
When I was creating the content for my course, I had that in mind and I said, okay, this is the journey that I want them to go on. They’re coming in. A little nervous. They don’t have good time management skills, or they are just like, I don’t know how I’m going to make this work in my schedule. I’m a mom, I’m work. I do this, I do that. I don’t know how I can make this work. By the end of the course, they’re like, I got it. I am pumped up.
Your client avatar is often you ... a couple years ago
Not all the time, but in most cases, your client avatar will be you from a couple years ago.
What struggles did you have? What have you learned along the way?
This is why and how I created Dreamer Profitable, because when I started my YouTube channel 7 years ago, I had no clue what I was doing. I had no clue what I wanted to do, no clue any of the backend stuff, search engine optimization or even how to make money from it. I wish I had this exact course when I started, so that’s why I created it.
Things would be so different if I had this in the beginning. This is the thought process to have when creating your target client. Think about that journey that you want them to go on and use that when you’re creating the content.
How to market an online course
After you create your online course, the next step is getting the word out there.
The main ways to market your course are:
- Social media
- Lead magnets
- Email funnels
- Trip wires
- Ads
I dig in way more detail on how to market and sell your course in Dreamer To Profitable!
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