Gini Dietrich explained the process of creating an online course this year at Content Marketing World. This information is incredibly valuable for organizations that are looking to become experts on certain topics.
The purpose of an online course is to free up your time, instead of constantly providing repetitive trainings. If you feel like you’re explaining things multiple times to people, an online course will establish a way to eliminate repeating instruction to make your life easier.
Then you can leverage your course to help you generate leads and create additional revenue. You’ll be teaching or training people that are interested in becoming experts at a particular topic. So let’s discuss the process of making this happen.
The Process of Building an Online Course
1. What is your expertise?
What does your company or organization offer that’s different? Where within your industry would you consider yourselves to be an expert?
The first step to creating an online course, is knowing something that no one else knows. By being an expert, people with a desire to learn will be drawn to your subject matter. For example, you could build a course about how to become a content marketer. Or how to establish an effective communication system within an organization. The possibilities are endless.
Keep in mind there are FIVE types of experts:
Educator – if you are constantly giving office trainings or instructions
Professional – motivational speaker, sports coach, consultant, etc
Journeyman – beginning of a new career, methodology or system you can teach people about
Expert – these could be software developers, CEOs, or anyone else with a lot of experience
Insider – this could be if you wanted to explain weird hobbies or talents others can develop
2. Find an applicable topic
This could be as simple as asking your target audience what they’d like to learn more about. You could develop a survey and ask very basic questions, such as:
If the two of us sat down to discuss [business, life, the universe, etc.], what would you want to learn about?
If I have additional questions for you, can I follow up?
This is a great way to discover what people really want to learn. When people fill out this questionnaire, you can determine the most valuable feedback by the character count of the responses. If there are more characters, it usually means there’s more information, which means it gets bumped up as the most important.
If they choose to give their contact info for us to follow up, that means they are even more valuable. Essentially, you can filter out the people that won’t attend your online course through this survey. And you can determine how many people would be likely to pay to learn from your course. Anyone that lands in the bottom 20 percent of the survey usually doesn’t matter and shouldn’t even be considered.
3. Develop an Outline
What do you want to include in the course and how do you want to deliver it?
As you’re developing an outline, it’s important to remember that if you tell someone something, they’ll forget. Teach someone something, and they might remember. But involve someone in something and they’ll learn.
Make it an interactive experience instead of a presentation. Ask questions, learn from feedback, and adapt based on your audience’s needs.
Also remember to keep your course simple. You should only teach the basic points because your audience will feel overwhelmed with anything more. You’re the expert, don’t expect your audience to be. They are attending your course so they can learn.
Once you’ve developed your online course, dumb it down, then dumb it down some more. The reason your audience wanted to take your course is because they want to learn and we can’t expect them to be at our level, including with certain lingo we may use.
4. Build the Online Course
If you’ve done good planning, this will be the easy part. You can create a course on Learn Dash, webinar, recorded video, or whatever you have available. Any platform will work, as long as you make sure you have a feedback mechanism in place. Deliver a pilot at a discounted price to test it out and work out all the kinks.
5. Market the Online Course
If you’ve done good planning, this will be the easy part. You can create a course on Learn Dash, webinar, recorded video, or whatever you have available. Any platform will work, as long as you make sure you have a feedback mechanism in place. Deliver a pilot at a discounted price to test it out and work out all the kinks.
This may be the most critical step in your process. It doesn’t matter how great your online course is if nobody knows about it or wants to attend. Make sure you have a landing page, blog posts, email marketing, Facebook ads, and any other creative marketing effort.
6. Learn, Tweak, Repeat
Don’t expect to have a perfect online course right off the bat. Sometimes no matter how much you prepare, you’ll be surprised by mistakes, issues or other crises during this process. Just keep at it!
About inWhatLanguage
inWhatLanguage is a translation services company dedicated to breaking down language and cultural barriers. Using their centralized, real-time TMS UNIFY, they utilize a network of professional linguists to provide high quality translations at a price you can afford. Access new markets and expand your global presence. Get a quote today or request a demo of UNIFY to see how you can benefit with inWhatLanguage.
Recent Comments