How to create an online course has been the hottest question everyone is asking in 2021, and in short, all you need to do is proper research, create the solution to a problem people have, sell it and start to scale your online course business via automation. 

The way I teach my students how to create an online course is to follow my HERO method (Helpful, Efficient, Recurring, Ongoing), otherwise known as the 4 step countdown (4,3,2,1), which consist of 10 major steps (and will be broken down into further mini-steps): 

• Have a course idea (helpful)
• Validate your course idea (helpful)
• Survey your audience (helpful)
• Run free challenges or webinars (helpful)
• Run a beta round (efficient)
• Create your course (efficient)
• Refine your course content (efficient)
• Create evergreen content and set everything on autopilot (recurring)
• Repeat launches (recurring)
• Ongoing marketing (ongoing)

But why would you create online courses right now?

The elearning industry is poised to be a $325 billion industry by 2025, according to Forbes, and this prediction has been made prior to COVID19.  

The trend was going upwards anyway, but now more people than ever started to create online courses. The demand is high and is only going to keep rising. Distance education or online learning is the new norm. Everyone wants to access knowledge and video lessons in one mouse click, everyone wants to be able to watch online courses from anywhere. More and more universities offer digital learning as part of their studies. 

Building courses has become a necessity, it’s not a nice to have anymore

Building courses and adding them as a residual income stream to your already existing business model, or creating a brand new online course business is the way to go if you want to have or create a profitable business, which doesn’t get whipped out by any outside force (such as corona). 

Creating online courses (or digital products in general) can quickly turn into an online passive income stream IF you set it up correctly from the beginning. Unfortunately, many course creators skip the most crucial steps at the beginning and therefore fail. 

The secret to creating a successful online course business is to simply care about your students and make sure they get results. You are getting yourself into a results based business, and if people get results, they talk about you and will refer more clients your way. 

It’s one of the best passive income ideas you can have. There are no restrictions, guidelines or any law put on online courses just yet, so what are you waiting for? 

In this article, I will share with you the exact blueprint to follow on how to create an online course that sells, all year round, on autopilot. When you are ready to create an online course, there are a few crucial steps you should follow to make it a wildly successful online course. 

The perfect step by step blueprint on how to create an online course looks like this: 

1. Understand what makes an online course idea a good idea
2. Brainstorm your online course idea and narrow it down to one
3. Validate your online course idea
4. Decide which online course type you want to create
5. Create a rough online course outline
6. Create an online course name and a market proposition that sells
7. Start marketing your online course
8. Soft-launch your online course organically 
9. Sell your online course 
10. Start your first online course beta round 
11. Create a detailed online course outline
12. Create your online course while running the beta round
13. Collect progress reviews for your online course
14. Refine your online course content and make it more understandable
15. Optional: Run one or two more beta rounds 
16. Repeat and refine your content over and over again
17. Collect results reviews for your online course
18. Create one core piece of content for your online course
19. Launch your online course properly 
20. Decide what your evergreen strategy will be, start building it and drive traffic towards your core piece of content 
21. Put everything on autopilot 
22. Track your traffic
23. Book your flight to Bali

So, let’s dive into each component and let’s take apart every single step of this blueprint on how to create an online course, so you can create online courses that are going to be wildly successful. 

1. Understand what makes an idea a profitable online course idea

Sometimes my students have either lots of online course ideas or none at all. For both scenarios brainstorming ideas is the very first exercise you should be doing when learning how to create an online course. 

So first things first. Let’s talk about how a profitable course idea looks like. 

A profitable course idea consists of three components: 

• Passion 
• Demand
• Knowledge

🎓 Passion 

Do you have enough passion for your online course topic which will keep you going when you are facing any battles? Yes, even if it’s “just an online course business”, you will face difficulties, just like in any other business too. Passion is the key factor which will help you to get through these hurdles. 

Do you have enough passion for your online course topic to continuously keep learning about it, so you can better your course content? Will you never feel bored about it? Do you feel like you can continuously educate yourself and grow yourself, so you can keep your students up to date with the “news” happening in your industry? 

This is important because you will need to keep creating promotional and educational content about your topic to drive traffic in the long term towards your core piece of content, which we will discuss at the end of this article. 

🎓​ Demand

Is there a demand in the marketplace for your online course idea? Are people actively looking for a solution you are providing through your digital product? Are people googling questions around your online course topic? Are there communities out there which discuss your topic frequently? 

This can sometimes be a tough cookie to swallow when you find out that actually not many people are looking for the solution your online course provides. The majority of my students when they enrol into my online course, they pivot within the first week because they realised that their online course idea doesn’t have high enough demand to create a truly profitable and scalable business. 

🎓 ​Knowledge 

Do you want to sell your own knowledge, or do you want to sell other people’s knowledge? Both options are totally different, and possible. 

Check-in with yourself if you have enough knowledge in the field you are looking to provide a transformation for your customer. Now, of course, you will never just know everything and there is always something new to learn, but is your knowledge enough to get your students the desired results they are looking for? 

If you are looking to sell other experts’ knowledge, will the content be so good that it will bring your students to the finish line? Will this knowledge be packaged up in a way that the desired transformation is achievable with your course content? 

2. Brainstorm your online course idea and narrow it down to one

Since you have now discovered what makes or breaks a profitable online course idea, we can now move on to step number two of my blueprint on how to create an online course. 

Start brainstorming all your ideas. Write down as many course ideas which pop to mind and narrow it down to only one. Then check back, look at step one of this blueprint and nail down the one course idea which ticks all the boxes above (passion, demand & knowledge). 

If it doesn’t tick all the boxes, go back to your list and choose another one. It’s important to only choose one course idea because you want to be focused on one transformation only which you are providing to your dream student. 

Many course creators make the mistake and try to solve many different problems in just one course, however, real conversion, as well as true transformation, happens when you address one major problem, and when your content can solve this one major problem. Confused people don’t buy, so stay focused. 

3. Validate your online course idea

The next step in our blueprint on how to create an online course is to validate your online course idea. This is the most vital step in the entire process. As we discussed in step one of this guide, we want to have an idea which has market demand. You want to have a community talking about your subject, you want to have people looking for the answer to their problem. 

If people don’t have a problem, they are not looking for a solution (your online course), which means you won’t sell many copies, if any. 

Researching your course idea properly and really spending some time on it will pay off in the long run so much. You will learn whether or not you should pursue your idea, or if you should just let it go. 

It also depends on your vision of how far you want to go. How much money do you want to make with your course? Well I am assuming as much as possible, right? So, if you are here for the long term game plan, and I hope you are, you better find an idea which has high market demand so your online course business will actually be scalable. 

This is the key factor you want to pay attention to at the very beginning. You want to be able to scale your business further down the line, and the only way to do that is if you take the right decision at the very beginning, right now. 

If your course idea research doesn’t bring you the results you were hoping for, don’t feel sad about it- it happens to most of the course creators who do it right from the start. See it as a good thing, because now you have eliminated months and months of hard work for nothing, spending countless time and money on a project building a product which nobody wants to buy anyway. Congratulations!

4. Decide which online course type you want to create

Some of my challenge participants have asked me which type of online course they should create and how “long” it should be. There are a few different course types out there, let’s look at the three most popular ones: ⁣

⁣

⁣1) Introductory Courses: Teach the foundation of something (average 1-5 days)⁣

Just like my 5-day mini-course “Get your online course idea kick-started” would fall under the category of “introductory courses”. It teaches you the foundation only of a much bigger topic (how to create a full online course, not just the foundation). 

The purpose of this course is to get your students started working on something and to teach them the basics. It can also serve as a “taster” to show your students how it would be like working with you, or if they really want to keep learning about this particular topic. 

2) Laser-Focused Courses: Teach one thing only (average 6-8 weeks) ⁣

This type of online course is also sometimes called a “flagship” course and is normally a so-called “mid-tier” product. It’s sitting in the middle of your value ladder. It’s “more expensive” than the mini-course, but cheaper than your higher ticket offers, for example a 1:1 session with you. 

Its purpose is to serve more people who potentially “can’t afford” to work with you directly. (Little side note here: in reality, 99% of the people you will talk to can afford to work with you, but they have a mindset problem which is holding them back, e.g. they won’t show up 100% for themselves so they can achieve the results they are looking for, or they just want to “get to know you” better…)

A laser-focused course, as the name already suggests, focuses on teaching one thing only. All marketing and messaging efforts are tailored around the one thing, around the one problem you are going to solve for your dream student. 

For example, my laser-focused course is called “From Idea to Course”, which focuses on creating an online course which sells and is scalable. So the one transformation here is to have a profitable and scalable online course sold and up and running by the end of my programme. 

3) Signature Courses: Provide one huge transformation (up to 12 weeks) ⁣

⁣A signature course is a course which everyone will know you for. It’s kind of like your signature… The duration can be up to 12 weeks. It helps people to gain a bigger transformation than a flagship (or laser-focused) course provides. A bigger transformation takes more time, and that’s what a signature course is there for. 

There are a few different ways on how you can put your signature course to use. It could potentially be the only way how someone can get to work with you. 

Sometimes people make their signature courses available for students who sign up with them for a yearly mastermind, so they don’t need to talk about “the basics” in their valuable live sessions and the student can consume the content in their own time. 

⁣

Pro tip: The amazing thing about online courses is that you can repurpose them and use them over and over again for different scenarios. You can place them into your membership site if you have one, or partner up with someone else in the industry and place parts of your course into their membership site. Adding your course to their content library is a great way to get some traction and ongoing leads. 

5. Create a rough online course outline

Creating a rough online course outline is the next step in our “how to create an online course” guide and is one of the most important components to pay attention to. You can compare your course outline to a “scaffold” of a house. It’s the one thing that holds everything together. 

This is the part where you probably will spend the most time on. Finalising your perfect online course outline will take more time than just creating a rough outline. For now, we are at the very beginning, and we only want to create a rough outline as your “final” outline will only be perfectly ready after you ran your beta round a few times and you got to teach your topic to other students. 

The reason for this is that you are already very advanced and knowledgeable on your course topic and you will most likely skip explaining a few “basic” things in your online course because you simply don’t have this ‘problem’ anymore. 

This is completely normal. It’s called the curse of knowledge. It’s simply when we are so well equipped within one area, we automatically assume others know what we talk about- it’s a cognitive bias which you can only “fix” once your students go through your content and will ask you questions. 

When it comes to creating an outline for your online course, in general, you can think of it like climbing a mountain. 

Imagine climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. It takes 7 days to get to the top. “Getting to the top” in this case is the transformation. 7 days is the duration of the “course”. In order to get to the top (to achieve the transformation), we will stop in a few base camps. You can see the base camps as your online course modules. 

We must pass through the base camps chronologically in order to reach the top. And that’s exactly the same way how you build your online course outline. Think about the milestones people need to achieve in order to get to the desired end result. 

6. Create an online course name and a market proposition that sells

All right, so the next step in our “how to create an online course” guide is to really think about a name and a market proposition that sticks to people’s minds, catches their attention and is understandable within the first few seconds.  

You want to pay close attention to the name of your online course and how you position it in the market. You will have only a few seconds to bring across your message to someone and make them realise that your online course is the solution to their problem. 

The attention span of a visitor is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish these days (this is not a joke), so you want to make sure your name expresses exactly what your course is all about. 

And the same counts for your market proposition. It needs to be crystal clear within the first few seconds someone looks at both. 

Ideally, you want to choose a name which contains three words or less. 

When it comes to positioning your online course on the market, you want to be able to explain in maximum one sentence what exactly your course does, who your target audience is and, if you can, in what time frame your student will achieve the desired result. 

Here is an example of my course: 

Name: From Idea to Course (it’s very clear that I will take my clients from course idea to finished course, which I have just expressed in 3 words). 

Market Proposition: Find Your Profitable Online Course Idea, Sell and Launch It Before Creating It in 8 Weeks! (Because Wasting Months of Creating a Product Which Nobody Wants To Buy Is So 2019.)

If I would have 6 seconds time to explain to someone in one sentence what I do, I would say this: I help people to create and scale profitable online courses without wasting time and money on creating a product nobody wants to buy in 6 weeks only by following my HERO method.

7. Start marketing your online course

Step seven in my “how to create an online course” blueprint is to start marketing your online course. You can market your online course in many different ways. 

There are two main ways on how to sell an online course and I would recommend doing both: 

1. Live launch it 
2. Sell it on autopilot

Obviously, step number two is the end goal here as we are aiming to create a passive income stream and we want to do the least work possible, once everything is set up and running. So step one is essential at the beginning and optional by the end once you are done creating your online course. 

We can not reach step two without going through a live launch at least once or twice. 

Start to market your online course on all the platforms where your target audience hangs out and drive them towards one sign-up page. Take them off all platforms which you don’t own and collect their data so you can actually start “owning” that traffic. If you are very active on Instagram and Facebook, change the links in your bios and start posting quality content around your course topic. 

Content is key when it comes to marketing your online course properly. You are most likely speaking to a “cold” audience, so they probably don’t know you yet and you want to post educational and inspirational content which creates a desire within the reader. 

You can follow this 7 Pillar Content System and get access to over 1000+ content prompts which will help you achieve exactly this.  

Basically, you want to lead with posting valuable and educational content without blasting your sign-up links all over. You need to gain people’s trust first, so they will later pay attention to your sign-up link. 

If you have an already existing email list, this is awesome and you can share your upcoming launch via email a few times. If you haven’t emailed your list in a while, make sure to warm them up before you announce the sign-up link for your upcoming launch. 

8. Soft-launch your online course organically 

Next up in your “create online courses” journey is to actually launch your online course. 

When you launch your course live, you will learn so much about messaging, targeting the right people, writing the correct copy and so on. Before setting your online course on full automation, and before you drive ads towards your one core piece of content, you want to be sure you nail down your messaging 100% and know who you are talking to, what their pain points are, how you must talk to them and what makes them respond to you. 

You can live launch your course via a free masterclass, a webinar or a free 5-day challenge on Facebook for example. Facebook is a goldmine to find your dream student fast and to present to them. 

Check out my 5-day Launch your course challenge course here. 

If you are very new to marketing and the online world, I would recommend a masterclass or a webinar first. If you are well equipped in the online world and you know how to market properly, you can go for the 5-day challenge. 

9. Sell your online course 

The next step in our “how to create an online course” blueprint is to actually sell your online course. That’s the reason why we run the soft-launch in the first place. This will be your ultimate validation. Once someone pays you money for your online course, you know you have chosen a good idea. At this stage, we haven’t created any course content yet, which is the entire point of my HERO method. 

Now it all comes down to your presentation skills and how well you are addressing your dream students pain points. The number of courses you sell doesn’t matter so much, what really matters here is that you sell at all. 

But of course, you want to aim for the highest conversion rate possible. I would suggest you start launching when you have about 500 subscribers on your email list. Of course, the more the better. 

Set yourself a financial goal, know exactly how much you want to make from your launch and start taking daily action towards this goal. 

Tony Robbins once said, without a clear action plan, a goal just remains a dream. And you want to make your dream a reality, so write down your financial goal. 

10. Start your first online course beta round

Next up, once you have sold your online course, you are going to run your first (or second or third) so-called “beat round”. A beta round is basically a test group or students who will give you feedback on your course material. 

A great intensive on how to get people in as beta students is offering a bigger discount (50% or more), so you will get the house filled. 

Your beta students are going to be the most valuable students you will ever have, as they will indicate to you whether or not you have created “understandable” course material. 

Learn more about how to run a successful beta round here. 

11. Create a detailed online course outline

Now it’s the time to build out your online course outline fully. So far you have only created a rough outline so you could launch and sell your online course. As we have learned in point five, the rough outline consists of the major milestones your students have to reach in order to get the desired transformation (or to reach the top of the mountain). 

Narrow it down even further and fill the gaps. Add lessons to each milestone. Break down the major milestones into smaller steps. Think about which baby steps your students need to take in order to reach each milestone. 

For example, to get to the top of the mountain (the transformation), your students have to stop in different “base camps” right? Now think about which steps they need to go through to reach each base camp? 

E.g. to reach base camp #1 (module 1), they need to jump over a river (lesson #1), cross a bridge (lesson #2) and kill a lion along the way (lesson #3). 

Then “module 2” starts when they continue to hike up that mountain from base camp 1 to basecamp 2. 

12. Create your online course while you are running the beta round

There are two different ways on how you can go about and create your online course. You can either pre-record module by module every week or you record and teach as you go along. 

The latter is more effective as you can immediately pay attention to what isn’t clear right off the bat. When your students are asking questions and don’t understand what you are saying the first time, take a note of that and explain it again in a different way. You can then go back later to the recording and edit out the part which wasn’t explained well, or re-record the entire lesson. 

13. Collect progress reviews for your online course

While you are running your first beta group, make sure you are collecting “progress reviews” as your students are going through the material. This will allow you to keep promoting your course to your audience and warm them up for beta round number two (if you choose to have a second one).

This will also keep you current students motivated. If you announce that you will ask them for a video testimonial in two weeks time, they feel very motivated and inspired to get some progress and results by then.  

14. Refine your online course and make it more understandable

After you run your first beta round, go back to your course content and refine the lessons which aren’t clear enough. Edit out the bits and pieces which are confusing, or, if necessary, re-record those lessons. 

The point here is that the course content is crystal clear. You want to eliminate questions as much as possible. The clearer you can articulate yourself, the more stories you tell in your material, the less work you will have later down the line. 

If your students don’t ask questions anymore- you have done a good job. 

15. Optional: Run one or two more beta rounds 

I always advise my students to run at least a second, if not a third beta round. You will see that questions may pop up, which you didn’t hear about running your first beta round. And this is a good thing. Because remember, the fewer questions your students have for you, the better. 

This also means you don’t need to ‘waste’ time in the future on answering questions and you can fully focus on proper coaching which will help your students to get to the desired transformation faster. 

16. Repeat and refine your content over and over 

This is a process which you always want to keep in the back of your mind. You don’t only want to better your content after you have finished however many beta rounds, you also want to keep improving your content on a consistent basis, if applicable. 

For example, if your course topic is in an ever evolving industry, such as marketing, you do want to make sure you always have up to date information and teach the right content to your dream students. This is so crucial, yet so many course creators fail at doing this. 

If you don’t do this, you waste your students valuable time, they get into your course, follow your steps for god knows how many hours to only find out in the end that the tactics are long outdated. It will leave your student behind feeling very frustrated and you will get a bad review, that’s for sure. 

17. Collect results reviews for your online course

Now is the time to collect “result reviews”, if your students have already achieved great outcomes, definitely make sure you document this, preferably on video. 

Results reviews take a little longer to get compared to the progress reviews we talked about in point 12. The reason for that is that people themselves need to work a lot harder on getting results, then “just making progress”. 

This depends also on your choice of students. Did you let the right people in your programme who will actually do the work and get results? 

If you see some students not doing the work, you need to work on your dream student profile and make sure you only work with dedicated people who are “ready” to attack the day and work towards their goal without needing a kick in the butt every single day. You want to be working with coachable people who take action. 

These reviews are worth gold to you and your company as they will bring back new clients into your programme. Social proof is the best marketing you can have, if other people see that other people talk about getting results through you, you will have no problems being booked. 

18. Create one core piece of content for your online course

We are now starting to prepare for long term strategies and we want to choose one “core” piece of content which we constantly drive traffic to. This is usually a webinar, a masterclass or it can also be a mini-course, a challenge or a sales letter. 

Decide which one you want to go for and perfect it until it converts like crazy. Do not choose more than one, do not start working on the next one until your first piece of content really is perfected. This can take up to a year, maybe even longer. 

Webinars are a very popular piece of “core” content as they convert very very well, IF you know what you are doing. 

19. Launch your online course properly 

After a few soft launches and beta rounds, it’s time to launch your online course properly. Now it’s a good time to run paid ads as well. You don’t want to be spending ads in the earlier stages of soft launching as you don’t know your messaging just yet and you don’t know how your audience responds and to which keywords, trigger words etc. 

Since you have tested everything multiple times the organic way, your chances to succeed with paid advertising is much higher. If you can not sell your course organically, there is almost no chance you will succeed in selling it via paid advertising. 

Make sure that you have everything ready way before your “big” launch as a lot of unexpected things will happen during your launch. You want to have all the materials ready, you want to have all the content written for your emails and social media. You want to have your live video topics planned and you want to be ready to attack the big launch as enthusiastic as possible. 

This phase can be a very exhausting one as that’s just how launches are. Launching is almost an art and almost never will things go 100% as planned. Be prepared to pivot and be flexible. 

See if you can include other people who can help you promote your online course and start building your affiliate army.

20. Decide what your evergreen strategy will be, start building it and drive traffic towards your core piece of content

It’s time to decide on your long term and evergreen strategy. You need a consistent stream of leads which are coming in to consume your core piece of content constantly. (You decided on your core piece of content in section 18). 

But how do you want to drive consistent traffic towards this piece of content? I would suggest you to only start with one platform and to focus on this one platform for at least a year. This could be a blog, a Youtube channel, a podcast, you name it. All those mediums which I have just named are evergreen and long term solutions to drive traffic to your webinar or mini-course. 

Social media platforms are “interruption” marketing platforms and Google, Youtube and Pinterest are search engines. 

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are not. Don’t confuse those. It’s a short term game on those social platforms, you can make quick cash with a successful launch for example and build an audience quickly. But also your content disappears quickly. It doesn’t “live” long on those platforms and gets pushed down by the algorithm fast. 

Whereas if you write a blog, it gets picked up by Google, Youtube and you could drive traffic from Pinterest or ads towards it too. In those “search engines” the content doesn’t disappear and stays on forever, which means it’s “evergreen”.  This is what a long term strategy looks like. 

It’s your time to pick one medium now. Choose the one which you enjoy the most as you will be hanging out here for some years (unless you want to only drive paid ads, which is also possible, but I would recommend doing both, organic and paid marketing). 

Once you made the decision which platform you want to focus on, you will keep creating content around your course topic which will lead your visitors to your opt-in page to consume your one core piece of content which will then hopefully eventually convert them into a paying customer. 

21. Automate your online course sales, build your own TFT machine

That’s the moment we all have been waiting for!!! Automation wohoooo! You have already partially been working towards your automation over the last few weeks, but now it’s the time to really have everything “ready”, put the final touches together so everything can run smoothly and on autopilot.

My 3 step formula (TFT) to “The Perfect Automation” (after you have fully mastered all steps of the “How to create an online course blueprint”) looks like this: 

Traffic coming from anywhere (Google, Youtube, podcast, ads etc.) > 

Freebie (webinar, mini-course, masterclass etc.) > 

Trigger Email Sequences (either they bought or you nurture until they do) 

Every single step in this formula is simple but it takes a lot of work and refining until you reach the maximum conversion. At the beginning, you will make so many mistakes (depending on your marketing skills) in all of those steps, but don’t worry and be patient. Go back and refine. Test. Refine again.  

Do not focus on building another course or another funnel for this course until you have “perfected” this one. 

Read that last sentence again. 

Want to learn the basics of how to create an online course? Check out this 5-day training below and get your course idea kick-started!!

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