Most course creators are being super excited about their course topic and they dive right into creating it, without building a strong foundation. 

Everyone seems to be super convinced about their topic and many build a product based on their own assumptions…

But why?

Every successful company in the world out there does their due diligence before they create any new product or even establish a new company. They research and validate their product idea, they know exactly who their target customers are and they know exactly how to market their product to their dream audience. 

So why would you not follow these crucial steps too when it comes to online course creation? 

If you have failed to create a successful online course that sells in the past, maybe you have sold a few copies and you now have problems with scaling, you most likely haven’t put in enough effort into building a strong foundation. 

So let’s find out what building a strong foundation for your online education business actually means. 

1. Brainstorm Your Ideas & Find THE ONE Which Will Sell

Most course creators want to provide a lot of solutions to a lot of problems, all at the same time. While it’s amazing to want to help many people with their problems, it’s not so amazing when it comes to providing proper results. Simply you won’t reach as many people as you could if you choose the wrong idea. 

If you want to help as many people as possible and get them proper results, you need to choose ONE idea, and the one idea which will sell the most. 

There are three things you need to consider when deciding on your online course idea, or any other online educational product (masterclasses, membership sites, masterminds, ebook, etc.)

And those three things are:

*Passion

*​Demand

*​Knowledge

You must nail all those three components when looking for a profitable idea for your next educational digital product. You will not be able to create a profitable product if one of these components is missing.

2. Validate Your Idea 

After you have nailed down your course idea, you do want to make sure that you validate it further. You do want to create a product which people would want to buy, right? Otherwise, where is the point? 

So you want to go ahead and research your topic properly, everywhere. You want to find out what the internet is saying about your topic, for example, check the data on Google trends. If the trend of your topic is steadily increasing, or it stays the same, it’s probably an idea worth pursuing. If the trend is going down, you probably want to move away from it and revert back to the first step and pick another idea. 

3. Who Is Your Dream Student 

I can’t stress this enough. You really want to spend some time nailing down your ideal student. Who do YOU really want to work with? Who do you really want to serve? Knowing your ideal customer inside out will make all of your other jobs so much easier. You will know exactly what their objections are, you will know exactly where you need to meet them in their journey and where you want to guide them to. 

All your marketing efforts, your messaging in your emails, social media posts, on your sales pages and even in your phone calls will become so super easy and clear to you, once you have figure out who your dream student really is. 

4. Crafting a Rough Outline To Ensure You Provide Valuable Content 

The outline plays a huge role, just as all the other parts when it comes to building your strong online course foundation. 

You could say that the outline serves the same roles as really strong walls in your house. The walls are needed to create all the other components which are needed to finish off a house. The walls are the strong pillars which need to hold the roof. The walls are there to protect you from the storm, in the same way as it protects your students from failure. 

A strong outline will assure your students to arrive at the final destination, the ultimate transformation, the one thing you are promising them. 

5. Creating Your Course Name and a Market Proposition That Converts 

Your name and your market proposition are worth gold to you. We all have an attention span shorter than a goldfish, and you need to adjust your marketing to the human behaviour. 

You need to make the reader understand withing the first few seconds, what your course is all about and what it will do for them. It must be crystal clear, instantly. 

And the best way to do this is to express this via your course name in three words or less, and via your market proposition in once sentence or less. 

Remember, people are interested in learning about the benefits and what your product can do for them, and not so much in the features. If you master this skill, and it will take some time, losing sales on your opt-in page is history from now on!