How to Create & Sell an Online Course in 60 days – A Rookie’s [STEP-BY-STEP]Guide

Here's the truth:

Online business around creating and selling online courses is a serious one that must be done carefully if you want to attract the right type of audience and make sales. 

First of all, you need to find the right course idea that suits your niche.

This is because online courses are aimed at solving a problem. You need to identify a problem and create a solution targeted at people who are in search of answers to such problems. 

Secondly, creating an online course isn’t enough; your major aim of creating the course is to make money.

Therefore you need to create avenues through which you can make money by building a website or a Facebook group etc and creating an email list.

This is the perfect guide for everyone interested in venturing into online course creation in 2020. It also highlights how you can build your audience from scratch, launch your online course and sell your online course in 2020.

Download this Course Creation & Launch Roadmap for a handy guide.

1. Course Hosting Platform

Different course creators prefer different platforms to host their videos, some prefer the WordPress + Vimeo combo to host their online courses, some say a third party tool like Podia, Thinkific or Kajabi suits them because it kind of brings down tech use to a minimum.

All the Course hosting platforms offer similar features (to a large extent), however what differentiates them is their pricing and plans.

I prefer PODIA for it's simplicity and incredible features available at a decent price. Even the Shaker Plan is quite reasonable for the features it offers.

2. Alright, next up is Video editor/Recorder.

I prefer Adobe Premiere pro, some course creators however outsource editing. If you're using a Mac you can try screenflow and Final Cut Pro as well. In case you're using windows Camtasia is a good option.

3. CAMERA?

Depends on budget - Start with iPhone/Smartphone then move to a DSLR. You can also try webcams , best being Logitech HD Pro c920.

4. Mic

Blue Yeti

5. Teleprompters come in varieties, and it depends how and where you wish to use them.

a. For windows users, Easypromter is a great option.

b. For iPhones & iPads best teleprompter is "BIGVU". 

I have a complete reference list on Tools for Course Creators that will give you a fair idea of the tools necessary to create an online course. 

PART B: To SELL AND AUTOMATE your online course you need the following tools:

I have a list of these tools necessary to create and sell an online course that you go through and sign up for. 

Next topic is all about "WEBSITES" 

Why You Need A Website To Sell Your Online Course? (Do You Even Need One?)

One of the tools you will need to sell an online course is a website. Yes, there are platforms where you can directly sell online courses eg: Kajabi. However, the benefits associated with owning a website makes it an essential tool.  

This section highlights some of the top reasons you should have a website dedicated to selling online courses. Let's consider these top reasons.

Brand identity and trust: 

In the online space, it is important to build a solid brand identity and encourage customer trust. A website is an essential tool in achieving these purposes. A website provides ground for establishing formal interactions with clients and prospective clients. Your focus on the website design and content development should be to establish authority in your chosen niche. Through the website, prospective customers and customers will gather professional information and be convinced about the quality of the product they intend to buy. 

Engagement: 

The importance of customer engagement cannot be overemphasized, especially as regards personal and career development. A website is a great way to engage your target audience.

With a website, engagement can be achieved on multiple platforms. For example, social media platforms can be easily integrated into a website and an engagement strategy developed to serve all platforms. 

Comments on a blog post are an indication of good quality content.

Cost-effectiveness: 

A website is a great way to break into the market without incurring a lot of costs. There are numerous cost-effective methods of building websites of good quality. With such websites and a properly planned engagement strategy, it is possible to sell online courses with incurring a lot of extra costs. With a cost-effective website, the major costs you incur are the costs of developing the course. 

Accessibility: 

Accessibility is a major focus of the best online businesses. Organizations at different scales adapt products and services for accessibility. Take a cue from some of the most successful organizations and make your brand accessible to a website.

Advertising:

 There are always opportunities to sell online courses on established online platforms. However, there are limitations to advertising on such platforms. The limitations are completely eliminated with websites dedicated to the brand.

Overall, a website provides grounds for a wider reach and the numerous associated benefits. Having highlighted the immense benefits associated with using websites for selling online courses, let's proceed by going through the process of building a website. 

build a WordPress website by yourself

The goal of this entire guide is for you to make money in 2020 through established paths. This process will involve you acquiring certain skills. One of these essential skills is how to build a website.

You won't have to write codes, so you shouldn't bother about how unequipped you are for the process.As essential as knowing how to build and run a website is, it is a simple skill to acquire. 

Firstly, you have to choose a platform on which your website will be built. These platforms are known as content management systems, and WordPress is one of them. 

We are focusing on building a website on WordPress because of numerous features that make it a clear winner over other content management systems. We decided to focus on WordPress because it is open-source, has a variety of tools, and run on a wide range of website, is open source, secure, and fast.

WordPress.org is the form of WordPress that serves as a website software. It requires hosting, is a bit technical, and you can build your website for free. Creating a WordPress.org website involves a number of steps. 

Building a WordPress.org website

Since WordPress.org websites require hosting services, you should start by choosing a web hosting service provider. These service providers offer plans with varying costs. Register with your chosen web host. While registering, you should indicate that you want WordPress installed in your setup by checking the required box. You should then finalize the registration process and log into your dashboard. You can proceed to choose the design of your website.

Choosing a hosting service provider

Siteground is my all time favorite..go for this simple, budget friendly and best website hosting if you wish to keep your website uptime high. They also provide 24/7 chat support.

Create Your Sales Page and Why You Need It

The best sales pages start off with a powerful statement:

The headlines is usually gripping, benefit-driven, and speaks to their target audience by cutting through the noise and get to the heart of what they really want. 

Include testimonials (where possible) because having social proof gives your course credibility and increases your conversions. Ask colleagues to try out your courses too. Use their reviews as testimonials if you are just starting out. 

Have a clear call-to-action that galvanizes. It won't hurt if your CTA is visually attractive too.

You also want to use videos, diagrams, or charts(wherever possible, don' shove them for no reason) because visual representations are extremely influential conversion tools.

Let your sales page show your appreciation of the frustrations, worries, and headaches your target audience has over a particular problem. 

Let it show what the students will get out of the course as clearly as possible. Try to make them understand that your course provides solutions to their problems.

You need to create a sales page for your course because that's the best way to persuade your ideal student about how great your online course is for them. When structured and written correctly, your course sales page should be a learning experience because your visitors know nothing about your program as at the time they started reading.

Your sales page should help them learn more and more until they get to the point where they decide to sign up.

Spend more time on why they should sign up instead of what your course offers.

An engaged audience is a profitable audience. The tips for building an engaged audience highlighted below are based on expert opinions. The tips reflect established principles and trends associated with building an audience for an online business. Without much more ado, here are some expert opinions as regards building an audience.

• Share Content that your audience wants: To build and maintain an audience loyal to your brand or business, you must maintain proper relations with them. You maintain that relationship with the content you release. To create content relatable to your content audience, you have to know your target audience. Every business, brand, or organization has a target audience. 

From the get-go, you should identify your target audience and tailor all engagement activities towards their needs.  You gain insights on how to relate with your target audience through established platforms and forums. Social media also helps with such insights.

• Build a community: You want to build a loyal and engaged audience. You can do this by building a community. This community could be in the form of subscribers. Focus on your subscriber, whether you're engaging your audience through written content or video content.

When you build a subscriber community, you encourage loyalty to your brand. Your audience will then be able to go from just loving your brand to committing to it.

• Offer value: You can offer value to your target audience in a variety of ways. Apart from engaging content, you can focus on other ways of offering value, such as exclusive products.

Exclusive products offered should be dependent on your brand and audience. Before rounding off this section, it is important to reiterate the importance of social media in building and maintaining an engaged audience. 

Social media can serve purposes that range from creating engaging content to getting inspiration for content. 

 Tools you need to build your audience

Building an audience for an online business is a strategic process that involves getting to know the audience and relating to them in the most suitable way. In this section, the focus is on tools you would need to know your audience better and relate with them appropriately. Here are some of the tools that would help you on your quest to know to engage your audience better.

• Email Service Provider: Email marketing is one of the well-established means of engaging your audience. Email marketing remains king because, even with different social media platforms popping up, an email is still a major form of communication.  My personal favs are Active campaign & Get response.

• Google Analytics: Google Analytics is one of the commonest tools applied by individuals and brands for engaging their target audience. This is another tool that provides insights into the interests of the audience of a brand. With Google Analytics, you get specific details about your audience that is interested in a particular product or service. With the data gotten, you can then tailor products and services to serve that audience better.

• Social Media Analytics: The popular social media platforms have tools that allow businesses to know their audience better. Such tools are known as analytical tools and are available for Facebook business pages as well as Instagram business accounts.  On any of these platforms, you can get data on your audience, such as the location, gender, and age range.  You can find these information on the insight tab for both Facebook and Instagram pages and accounts. Although these are basic tools, they are essential for understanding the preferences of your audience on any of these platforms. 

 Why you need to build an email list

Every online business needs a dedicated audience to which its services are offered. Regular communications can be made with this audience through emails. Promotions can also be offered to this dedicated audience through emails. Email marketing is an established means of communicating with your audience. An email list is an essential tool for effective email marketing.

An email list holds the names and email address of persons that have agreed to receive communications and promotions from a brand, person, or organization. An email list can be described as a compilation as the best asset of an online business.

You need an email list to carry out proper email marketing. Here are the specific reasons why you need an email list. 

• You own the list: This point reiterates the fact that an email list is owned by online businesses. Apart from your website and your products, an email list is your best asset as an online business owner. Even if you have a large following on different social media platforms, your access to that audience is dependent on the policies of the company. An email list is is a person and allows unlimited access to your target audience.
• You can send personal messages: An email gets to the personal inbox of the receiver and allows you to relate personally with them. Personal communications generate the most engagement because it inspires better relations between brands and their audience.  Email marketing may be your only chance to get trusted and loyal followers of your brand. You need an email list to begin sending those personal messages.
• You easily reach your audience: With an email list, your audience is just one email away. Research has shown that there are about 3 billion email users. Over 90% of the active email users check their email at least once a day. People check their emails more frequently than the different social media platforms. These figures indicate the potential of email marketing. Since emails enter directly into the inbox of the customer, they are less likely to miss anything.

Chapter 5: Steps to launching and selling your online course

STEP #1: Pick up your LAUNCH STRATEGY out of the following:

a. Webinar Launch

b. Facebook Page Lives

c. Facebook Group

d. Email Sequences

ADD -ONS:

Instagram , Youtube, Podcast, Website.

To make a good income from an online business, you need to understand the entire process, from developing the right products to the actual process of selling the products. 

In different sections of this chapter, we walk through the essential processes involved in launching and selling an online course. 

 create your sales funnel

As an online business owner, it is especially important for you to grasp the idea of a sales funnel for your business and create a proper one. A sales funnel, in the simplest terms, is the pathway that leads to sales. The path from the moment the customer encounters the product to when they buy it is the sales funnel of that product.

Sales funnels are important for offline as well as online businesses. For bricks-and-mortars businesses, sales funnels involve sales personnel. For online businesses, these paths are created on the website where the product is offered.

You need a great sales funnel to attract a sizeable volume of sales for your business to be profitable. A great sales funnel should achieve 4 major purposes: awareness, interest, decision, and action. At the action phase of a great sales funnel, the customer should have decided to buy the product.

Here are clear steps you should take to create a great sales funnel. 

Step 1: Know your audience

You want to start out by identifying your target audience for every product. You need to know your target audience to be able to engage them appropriately. This step involves identifying the actual audience from a much wider pool.

Step 2: Engage your audience

This is the step where you draw the attention of your target audience. Online businesses achieve this engagement with different forms of content, from blogs to videos and infographics. You will be able to attract your target audience when you apply the most suitable mode of engagement. You should decide on this based on research. You should also diversify. You could apply three of the most suitable modes of engagement and adjust them based on the outcomes.

Step 3: Set up a destination

Whatever content you put out should lead to a destination. This destination could be a landing page that tells them more about the product or the next step to take. In this step, you want to focus on capturing the details of prospects. The call-to-action should also be very clear.

Step 4: Continue communications

You want to maintain steady communications with prospects even if they are not yet customers. You can achieve this with an email drip campaign to provide more details on the product you're pushing. You could also offer coupons to customers. This step is aimed at encouraging repeat patronage. You should be fully focused on inspiring the trust of your customers.

convert leads to loyal customers

One of the hardest tasks before any business is the conversion of leads to loyal customers. The average person is wary of change and would not easily trust anything new. Thus, converting leads to loyal customers is a challenging process. Efforts towards converting leads to loyal customers should be focused and strategic.

Converting leads to loyal customers successfully is a process that focuses on attending to the needs of leads. You want to earn the loyalty of leads by attending to their pressing needs and showing that your business can be trusted.

Here are some of the ways to go about converting leads to customers.

Prioritize attending to leads:

You want to show prospects that your business can be trusted by attending to them in the shortest time possible. Research has shown if leads are left unattended to for one hour, they will consider competitors. To ensure that leads are attended to in the shortest time possible, you can adapt your communication systems to identify leads and send them through a special route.

Adapt activities for speed:

Apart from prioritizing attending to leads, you also want to adapt sales activities for speed. Sales activities can be adapted for speed by dedicating a team to existing customers and another to leads. If you do not have the capacity to dedicate teams, you could simply focus on creating an established process for engaging leads and existing customers. 

Act on customer feedback:

You want to know how to serve your customers better. This is because when existing customers are satisfied, leads are bound to be satisfied too. Schedule customer feedback sessions and act on the feedback you get from customers. Since you're selling online courses, you could ask for feedback on all aspects of the business, from the course content to the payment method.

Customers are your best critics, and you should listen to their views. You should also attach incentives to the surveys to encourage participation.

craft email campaigns to sell an online course

The importance of high-quality content for online businesses cannot be overemphasized. In other chapters, we have established the importance of email marketing for online as well as offline businesses. The sole purpose of email campaigns is to convert leads. Although these leads may take numerous forms and not always seem sales, they are ultimately targeted at sales.

 Your email campaigns should be able to sell your online courses and brand in general. Crafting email campaigns that convert is an art, one that can be developed with proper practice. The following tips will guide you in creating effective email campaigns.

Develop a tone and stick to it: 

Successful email campaigns are created to connect with the audience. The best way to begin creating these campaigns is by writing developing a tone of your brand, and sticking to it. That way, the tone will be representative of the image of the brand.  With email campaigns, you should aim to establish a relationship with your audience. When you develop a tone and stick to it, it is easier for your audience to relate to the communications. 

Focus on the subject: 

The subject of every email that is part of any campaign should stand out. You want to grab the attention of your audience as early as possible. The subject line is a great point to grab the attention of your audience. While trying to grab the attention of your audience, you should avoid making outlandish claims or promises you can't fulfill. Focus on getting the attention of the audience as well as earning their trust.

Personalize communications: 

You want to establish a relationship with your target audience. Your audience will connect better with you when you personalize the content of the email. Personalizing email communications is much beyond adding the name of the recipient in the salutations. You can refer to previous communications and even purchases.

Since our focus is on the online course business, you could refer to previous courses bought in personalizing the email.  Any successful email campaign interacts effectively and personally with the audience. These campaigns are also kept at the barest minimum.

  use someone else's audience to launch & Sell your online course

You need an audience for your online business. That audience includes your prospective customers. With an audience, your business will not be profitable. 

One of the daunting facts about online course businesses is that you could not have an audience to sell to. Building your audience from scratch may not pick up as expected. An established way of navigating the lack of audience hurdle is to use someone else's audience.

You want to collaborate with other persons, brands, and organizations in developing your audience. Since the people you're collaborating with already have an audience, you can follow proven paths in attracting part of that audience.

Here are some of the established paths for utilizing someone else's audience in building yours.

Guest posting: 

You can guest post on blogs and other platforms to reach the audience of that platform in building your audience. Firstly, you should confirm that the audience of that platform possesses the demographics of your target audience. Afterward, seek guest posting opportunities. Some organizations have established standards for guest posting.

If you're not sure whether an organization allows guest posting, you can reach out to confirm. You can make guest posts work for you by including your brand or product subtly into the post. It is important that your style and tone are relatable to your target audience to build a connection.

Speaking at conferences: 

Speaking at conferences is another great way to reach out to an established audience. To maximize speaking opportunities, introduce yourself and brand, and establish a proper rapport with the audience.

Being a guest at podcasts: 

Podcasts work just like guest posts conferences. Find a podcast with your desired audience. Seek opportunities to become a guest and, in the process, share your brand and product with the audience. Launching and selling online courses is a series of activities that are aimed at reaching the desired audience and establishing a long-term relationship.

Conclusion 

Online businesses are viable sources of income in 2020 and beyond. This book was especially dedicated to helping you start and grow an online business in a sustainable manner. The different chapters were dedicated to the essential steps, ideas, and processes required for successfully starting and running an online business.

In summary, here are the major ideas considered all through the chapter. You should have takeaways as regards these ideas and processes. 

• Chapter 1: How to find the right course idea that suits your niche: When you find the right course, you solve a problem and attract customers based on the value to offer.
• Chapter 2: Creating a successful online course: the online course business sector is worth billions of dollars. You can successfully create a course that makes you money as an online business.
• Chapter 3: Selling your online course: creating the course is important, but it is more important to sell it.
• Chapter 4: Building a loyal audience: your audience is the bane of your business. The best audience is a loyal audience.
• Chapter 5: How to launch and sell your online course: the process from creating to launching and selling your online course should be strategic. 

Every part of this guide is designed to ensure that, at this point, you have a proper idea of what you need to successfully start and run an online business. At this point, all that is left is to wish you immense success as you proceed. You can now go forth and succeed. Once you have successfully created and launched your online course you'd want to scale your online business, in this blog post I mention some strategies to double your revenue by selling online courses.                 

Sign up for Course That Works to learn how to create and sell an online course so you can avoid rookie mistakes & do it the right way the first time.