How to Create an Online Course in 72 Hours (With Guided Instructions!)
This is Part 1 of 3 of the Creating & Selling Online Courses series.
Part 1. How to Create an Online Course in 72 Hours (With Guided Instructions!)
Part 2. How to Sell Online Courses 101
Part 3. Why I Switched To Teachable To Host And Sell My Online Courses
I love creating and selling online courses!
If you are not creating an online course, you are missing out.
In 2011, $35.6 billion was spent on self-paced e-learning worldwide. In 2014, $56.2 billion was spent. In 2015, it hit $107 billion.
The global e-learning market is expected to grow to $331 billion by 2025.
Online courses are here to stay and people are buying courses online – loads of them.
Are you ready to learn how to create your own course?
Here’s what you will learn
- 4 reasons why you need to start creating courses
- How to decide on a course topic
- How to validate your course idea
- Deciding on your course curriculum and pricing
- What is the best course hosting platform to use
- Step-by-step guide on how to set-up both the front-end and back-end of your course
- How to create your course content (yes, creating videos, and worksheets!)
Online courses contribute to 25% – 40% of my income
As of now, online courses contribute to 25% – 40% of my income, and I love how fuss-free and hands-off it is.
Currently, I have quite a number of courses available – you can learn more about them here. If you are looking to kickstart your blog or want to get more traffic & subscribers, or to get email templates, you probably know what’s your next step for the next breakthrough in your business, right? 😉
Getting into courses and creating my own was one of the best decisions I made in my business. In fact, I aim to spend an increasing amount of effort to focus on courses in my business. Why?
4 reasons why you need to be creating online courses
#1 Online courses are very scalable.
Aside from maintenance and updating my courses, I do not have to spend additional time to sell an additional copy of my course.
Similarly, after creating your course, you can sell it to hundreds or thousands of students again and again. It scales so well!
You are no longer selling your time, you are selling the VALUE you bring to others.
#2 Online courses are extremely profitable.
It does not cost much to create an online course, aside from getting a course hosting software like Teachable and if you like, equipment to get your course content up.
Compare this to providing services, which uses up your most precious resource – your time.
Compare this to affiliate marketing, where the owner of whatever you’re marketing gets the majority of profits from your leads.
Compare this to ads or sponsorships, if you have been around for awhile, you will know that the sales and profits you get from courses far exceed anything you can get from ads and sponsored posts, for the same amount of traffic.
People are willing to pay a premium for courses, provided your course brings value to them. It is not unheard of for courses to go up to thousands of dollars. Yes, you read that right.
#3 Online courses bring immense value to others when done right.
Education brings wisdom and transformation to lives.
I have lost count of the number of times my courses have brought me so much joy because someone’s business and life has been transformed by it.
When you create and sell an online course, you are taking control and choosing to become the change-maker in someone’s life.
You are sharing your expertise and value with the world.
There is also another added benefit of creating courses – bringing transformation directly to others allows you to create loyal students and fans of your brand and business. What a win-win. 🙂
#4 Online courses are highly demanded.
I have said this before, there is too much information online. People are overwhelmed!
Yes, people can search for free stuff online.
But you know what? They don’t.
Instead, they are looking for organized, efficient, and effective solutions that work. Nobody wants to read thousands of articles or videos and waste their time and effort going around in circles.
Needless to say, it is also highly likely that searching for free stuff won’t bring them the results they want anyway.
Online courses are highly demanded because people want organized, efficient, and effective solutions that work.Click To TweetSo, will you be creating your online course?
If the answer is yes, make sure you bookmark or pin this post because this article will be extremely valuable to you.
Make a hard commitment because creating an online course isn’t all butterflies and roses – but this post will help you get past 99% of the obstacles that you will face. 🙂
How to create your online course
1. Decide on a course topic
In the first stage of online course creation, write down 1 – 3 course ideas. If you have already decided on a course topic, you can go right ahead to #2.
- What are you good at?
- Do you have any particular skills?
- What are you passionate about?
- What will sell in your niche?
Additionally, here are a few pointers to help you brainstorm more ideas.
You don’t have to be the ultimate expert to be able to teach something.
A common mistake to commit is thinking that you don’t have anything to teach. That’s not true.
Everyone has something that they can teach. You need to brainstorm and get those creative juices going!
Be open to different possibilities and stop with the self-doubt. You don’t need to be a legend – often, people will purchase courses from people who are a few steps ahead because they seem more relatable and can understand their struggles.
For instance, if you’re into investing in stocks, you most likely don’t need Warren Buffet to teach you that. Rather, someone who is a few steps ahead of you can teach you and will probably do a better job than Warren Buffet.
If you have an audience, ask them.
If you have been building an email list, send them a quick email and ask them what their biggest obstacle/ frustration/ struggle they face when trying to build a successful business/ lose weight/ eat healthy/ etc.
You get the idea. You will be surprised at what comes out. Asking your audience will give you plenty of profitable ideas!
If you don’t have an audience, find the pain and solve it.
Go to forums, go to Facebook groups, basically look for places where your people hang out at.
Start recording questions that people are asking and brainstorm your course idea from there.
Find the pain and solve it.
What are others selling?
Go stalk your competitors. If your competitors are selling something, it is highly likely that it is making them money. This is especially if these competitors have been in business for awhile/ are popular.
What are they selling?
Alternatively, you can also go check out udemy.com or lynda.com for ideas.
Of course, you will add your own twist to things later on, have a different positioning, etc. However, the main problem that you are solving will be the same.
Are you seeing some kind of trend? Do you see any patterns?
The more people are selling something, the better – you know that there is demand.
Validate your course idea
I highly recommend that you do this quick validation check of your course idea – make sure someone else is selling the course.
Looking at what your competitors are selling will give you a fantastic inside scoop of what your target audience needs and will purchase.
In fact, if you have a course idea and nobody is selling a course about it, you’d better be careful!
It does not have to be your EXACT idea, but it has to solve the same big-picture problem.
If you have a course idea and nobody is selling a course about it, you'd better be careful!Click To Tweet2. Decide on the details of your course
Once you have decided on what your course will be about, it’s time to get into the details!
I recommend that for your first course, you start with a smaller course. This is because it is much easier to create, manage, and sell a smaller course. You can go from zero to launch in a very short amount of time.
As a rule of thumb, I will keep it below 6 modules. Anyway, it is important to remember that it is not about the quantity of information, but the transformation your course content brings.
Coming up with a huge course takes a lot of resources and time. By then, you may already have given up! When it is your first course, you want to adopt a lean start-up mentality and go from zero to having money in as soon as possible.
Once you are more experienced, you can then upgrade that course or create another more comprehensive course.
Some details that you will need to figure out:
How long will the course be? Is it a 4-week course? Or a 6-week course?
What’s the price of your course? Decide on how much the price of your course will be. Start with a price that is an accurate representation of the value your course will bring. You should feel good about your price.
What are the modules in the course? Come up with a rough course outline.
Don’t get stuck on the small details. The price, duration, and structure of your course can always be changed very easily in the future.
For your first course, start with a smaller course. Click To Tweet3. Set-up your course infrastructure
(There are affiliate links in this post, this means I get a commission at no extra cost to you. However, please be assured that I personally love and use everything I mention here and would never recommend something I don’t believe in personally.
If you go through my link please feel free to email me if you run any issues setting up your course because I really appreciate your support. :))
Aside from your course content, your course needs a front-end sales page to sell your course and collect payments, and a back-end to host your content and for students to log in.
You will need an online course hosting platform to host and sell your online courses.
I have used multiple course hosting softwares in the past, and the course hosting software I recommend and use is Teachable.
The great thing about Teachable is that it is an all-in-one platform: It handles your sales pages, your customer payments, has a built-in affiliate system, hosts your course videos and PDFs, gives you the necessary analytics, etc.
Basically, if you want to create and sell an online course, all you need is Teachable and your materials, and voila! You are in business. Easy and fuss-free.
Click here to check out Teachable and sign up to start creating your first online course today.
I love and use Teachable because it:
- Provides an all-in-one course hosting solution
- Has a ton of useful functions I love – for instance they have coupon codes so that you can offer a discount to your readers whenever you feel like it
- Regularly updates itself – hurray to your students not encountering random annoying bugs or have your course platform crash at the slightest problem!
- Is extremely easy to set-up and use
- Has an inbuilt affiliate system – you can get affiliates to promote your courses for you
- Allows me to create beautiful sales pages – don’t need to find another solution to get a sales page up
- Gives me the necessary analytics to see how sales are
- Has a readily available live chat and email support – get help when you need it when it comes to setting up your courses
- Unlimited courses and users – Teachable is a software that grows with me.
- Integrates and collects payments for you – You can use Stripe, Paypal (I use both) or the built-in Teachable payments processor.
- Creates a superior course experience that makes my students happy!
If you are still on the fence about going with Teachable, I go into detail about why I use and love Teachable here: Why I Switched To Teachable To Host And Sell My Online Courses
There are many reasons why I like Teachable, but I feel compelled to point out the biggest one:
If you have ever logged into a Teachable course, you would realize that Teachable’s user experience is really unparalleled…… And quality is something I really pride myself on.
User experience is something that is difficult for people to replicate, unlike functionality. Things are just really smooth and professionally designed in every step of the Teachable course experience.
The biggest reason why I switched to Teachable was because I wanted to create the best product experience for my students. I want my course students to enjoy consuming my course and be motivated to learn, which would, in turn, bring more people to join us ?
And true enough, I have received a ton of compliments from my students about how much they loved the new course platform, especially when I transferred over several months ago.
Happy students make me happy and reflects well on me. And also, from a business POV, happy customers are the cornerstone of a successful business.
Without further ado, let’s get started and create your first online course with Teachable.
Click here to head over to Teachable. Over there, click on “Get Started”. Teachable has a free plan to start with, although down the line you probably would want to upgrade to a paid plan. This is an unavoidable essential investment if you want to sell courses.
Create your account.
Create and name your new course school! Within one school, you will be able to create and sell multiple courses.
You will arrive at your back-end course dashboard! They have instructions for how to create a course and customize your school right there.
Teachable has really great documentation for anything so you’ll probably get your course up in no time. Just click on the tutorial links in your main course dashboard to read them.
Here are some of the things you would want to do once you are in Teachable:
- Customize the look and feel of your school (On the left sidebar in your Teachable dashboard, go to Site -> Theme)
You can customize the fonts, colors, homepage background image, and more.
- Add your homepage heading and description (Settings > General)
Once you are done with customizing the fonts and colors you can change your heading and description. You can check out my course homepage here.
- Create a new course (Courses > Click on the orange “New Course” button)
- Add your course curriculum and pricing (Under Courses, after you create a new course)
You should already have this from step 2 of this article! I would create “empty” modules inside Teachable first so that you have the overall skeleton of your course up first.
- Create your sales page (Under Courses, after you create a new course)
Create your sales page using Teachable! They use a drag and drop editor – depending on how OCD you are, you should be able to quickly create a sales page even if you don’t have any coding skills.
- Connect your own domain (aka URL) for your school if you like (Site > Domains)
You can configure the domain of your course school. What this means is that your course school will not be called http://xyz.teachable.com but rather, http://courses.yoururl.com or http://yoururl.com.
This helps a lot with the credibility of your courses and being professional.
- Set up how you will collect payments. (Settings > Payouts)
I recommend having both Stripe and Paypal to give your customers more options. Some people are “hardcore” Paypal fans. Others refuse to use Paypal.
Which Teachable plan to choose?
Teachable has various pricing tiers. They have the free, basic, professional and business (high volume) plan.
Currently, I am on the professional plan. Most of my readers are either on basic or professional and they are extremely happy.
I am going to share with you the key differences between free and paid plans that matter to me, and you can make the decision yourself.
For me, here were the factors that I felt made the paid plans worth investing in:
- You can connect your own domain to your teachable school. Hence, your course school will not be called http://xyz.teachable.com but rather, http://courses.yoururl.com or http://yoururl.com – this helps a lot with the credibility of your courses and being professional.
- Transaction fees. On the free plan, Teachable takes $1 + 10% of any sales you make. If you intend to be making sales in the future it may be good to have a paid plan and be able to enjoy the lower the transaction fees. On the basic plan its 5% and on the professional plan, 0%.
- Connect to your email service provider. With the paid plan you will be able to connect an email service provider of your choice so that when someone enrolls, they are automatically sent a welcome email + onboarding emails to accompany them as they complete the course. To me this is quite important as I want my students to be engaged!
- Use of payment custom gateways. Being able to use Stripe and Paypal instead of the built-in Teachable payments system to collect payments allows you to be paid immediately. And who doesn’t like that?
- Use of coupon codes.
- Use of affiliate system.
You can decide for yourself, but I recommend either the Basic or Professional plan.
4. Creating your course content
Next, you will want to create your course content. If you followed my advice to create a smaller course first, this will be a lot more manageable for you.
For a smaller course, it is possible to just have text.
In fact, I personally don’t really care if a video is text or video, as long as there is value in the course. But that’s my personal opinion.
Just type your course content directly into Teachable if you choose to do this.
Creating videos for your courses
Most courses comprise of videos and worksheets.
If you want videos, you can easily record your screen with Screenflow.
There are a bunch of stuff that you can get but to keep things simple, these are the 2 things you would want to get:
- Blue Yeti Microphone: For quality audio in your videos. You can plug it in directly into your computer as it is a USB Microphone. I have had mine for 2 years and it is still working as good as new.
- Camtasia (PC) or Screenflow (Mac): Record your screen and edit your videos to get rid of all the “erms”, clean up your audio, and more.
If you need more help with creating videos, you will like my online video creation series:
Part 1. A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating & Recording Awesome Videos Online
Part 2. How I Got Over My Fears, Recorded My First Video Online & Made Video Creation a Regular Affair
Part 3. The 5 Best Microphones Used By Entrepreneurs (For Online Video Creation)
Part 4. Blue Yeti Tutorial: How To Use The Blue Yeti Microphone To Get Clear Audio For Your Videos
Part 5. The 7 Techniques I Use to Edit My Videos With Screenflow
To create worksheets
There are several options to create worksheets. Please note that it is not compulsory to have worksheets for your courses.
- Canva: Free and good when you are starting out. Use Canva to create your worksheets!
- Photoshop: If you are good at it, photoshop is obviously a good choice.
- Microsoft Word or Apple Pages: Create your worksheet and then “save as PDF”
Recommend post: How to Make Your Own Printables (Step-by-Step!)
Things do not have to be perfect for your first course. I have lost count of the number of people who aim to create “perfect” courses but never get to it, taking months to launch. Nah-ah!
Create something that is decent, and you can always work on what you have in the future.
Great step-by-step post about how you can create a course in 72 hours! Click To TweetSummary
In this post we’ve talked about:
- 4 reasons why you need to start creating courses
- How to decide on a course topic
- How to validate your course idea
- Deciding on your course curriculum and pricing
- What is the best course hosting platform to use
- Step-by-step guide on how to set-up both the front-end and back-end of your course
- How to create your course content (yes, creating videos, and worksheets!)
In the next post, I will be talking more about how you can sell your online course. Now, go forth and start creating that online course of yours. This is so exciting!
Think about how much you knew about creating an online course 20 minutes ago, compared to now! The change is amazing, right?
If you’re ready for more in-depth help please check out my courses or how to work with me. I would love to help you grow your blog + business.
Download your copy of the FREE online course roadmap. It contains the step-by-step guidance you need to create your online course:
If you enjoyed this post, I would really appreciate if you pin it too!
Let me know how your course goes!
Continue on to Part 2 of 3 of the Creating & Selling Online Courses series: How to Sell Online Courses 101
xx Raelyn
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