How to Create an Online Course in 10 Steps (2023)

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كاتب ذكاء اصطناعي

By Fadiki Adigboye

Choose Your Course Topic

When thinking about how to create an online course, choose a topic you are uniquely qualified to teach, where you have industry insight, credibility, experience, and passion. Make sure the course topic also has a high demand in the market.

Industry Insight, Experience, and Credibility

Beginners want to learn from an expert who can guide them on their learning journey. Learners also need to know they are listening to someone with credibility and high regard in their field. Here are some signs that indicate you fit this description:

  • You have worked in the industry for years and have a high level of knowledge in your field.
  • You have gained knowledge or skills in the course topic over the years.
  • You have historical context about the industry.
  • You can provide informed predictions about the future of the industry.
  • You have above-average knowledge or skills in the course topic and can convey that information to others.
  • You are familiar with common mistakes or issues and can guide beginners to avoid them.
  • You can easily answer beginner’s questions.
  • You have credentials or accolades that indicate you are an expert in your field.
  • You have a track record with people who can speak about the quality of your work and your level of expertise.
  • You are considered a thought leader in your field and regularly tweet, write, or share knowledge with a large audience.
  • You have appeared on podcasts or have been mentioned in articles or books about your area of expertise.

Passion

Creating a comprehensive and valuable course requires a significant amount of time and energy. Here are some signs that indicate you have the passion needed to persevere in this field:

  • You have a deep passion for your field and can excite students about it as well.
  • You have a genuine desire to help people gain skills and knowledge in your field.
  • You are willing to put in the necessary effort to deliver a course better than your competitors.
  • You are excited about the idea of organizing a curriculum around your knowledge and experience.
  • You are working on continuous improvement and mastery in your field.

High Market Demand

While your expertise and passion are extremely important when choosing your course topic, your course will also need to have high demand in the market to be successful. Here are some signs that indicate there is strong interest in your course:

  • Your course topic falls within an industry that is growing rather than shrinking.
  • Your course topic has high search volume on search engines like Google.
  • There are similar courses in the niche developed by competitors.
  • Learning a skillset that has high demand.
  • You have identified an underserved audience for your course topic and are filling the gap in the market.

Although your course topic does not need to check every item on this list, having some level of industry insight, experience, credibility, and passion in your field will make the difference in creating a course that stands out from the competition and provides unique value to potential students.

Additionally, it is also important to research and test whether your course topic has market demand. There may not be enough demand for narrow course topics like “Making Authentic Maple Syrup” or “Producing Ska Music” to make creating a profitable course viable. (We will dedicate a whole section in this guide on how to check for market demand for your course.)

User Research

When you choose your course topic, you still need to take a few steps before moving on to creating course content and engaging in the sales process.

First, it is important to understand your target audience before you even begin planning your content.

Here are some reasons to take the time to conduct user research and identify ideal customers at the beginning of your online course creation journey:

  • To put yourself in the beginner’s shoes. Being an expert in a field often means you assume the person you are communicating with has the same foundational knowledge you possess. Talking to potential users will help you get back to the beginner’s mindset and assist you in tailoring your course accordingly.
  • To understand
    Customer Problems. Your course should help the buyer solve a problem they face, support them in gaining knowledge that is hard to find elsewhere, or help them learn something faster or more efficiently than available alternatives. To achieve this through your course, you need to know exactly what pain points the potential buyer has and how to address them within your course framework.
  • To know what the student wants to achieve. The most important part of your course for students is the transformation: the state they reach after completing the course. Talking to potential customers will help you discover what they want to achieve.
  • To know how to sell to them. As the saying goes, “If you sell to everyone, you sell to no one.” It’s important to build a profile of the “ideal customer” so you can tailor your course content and market it in a way that speaks directly to them. Knowing the precise message to deliver to the ideal customer will impact everything from the headlines on your landing page to how you promote your course on social media.

When identifying the ideal customer, go beyond assumptions and casual conversations. Instead, approach identifying the ideal customer as conducting systematic user research. Here are some different ways to conduct user research:

  • Research Google Trends. Use Google Trends to search for your topic and see if interest is increasing or decreasing. You can filter the search by country and time period.
  • Research on Ubersuggest. When you enter your course’s keyword into Ubersuggest, you will gain insights into how many people are searching for this term. For example, if you’re thinking of creating a course on cooking, the keyword phrase “learn to cook” will also contain suggested and related queries such as “learn cooking for beginners” and “learn how to cook healthy,” which can help you tailor your course offering based on what people really care about.
  • Browse Reddit and Quora. On Reddit, go to subreddits related to your course topic and browse the topics that could help with course content. On Quora, look for questions related to your course topic and identify the challenges people are facing and what they want to know.
  • Browse social media and forums. Follow reputable people in your industry through social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn, and pay attention to conversations related to your course topic.
  • Conduct phone interviews. In addition to conducting secondary research on social media, reach out to potential customers directly to see if they are available to answer some questions in a research interview.

Conduct interviews with at least 10 people, and tell them that you’re starting to create a course and would like to get their answers to some questions, including the following:

  • What problems can I help you solve?
  • What challenges can I help you overcome?
  • What are your goals in taking this course?
  • If you complete the course, what outcome do you hope to achieve?

Keep user research interviews short and use them as an opportunity to inquire about the course format and pricing as well. You might consider incentivizing interviewees by offering them the course for free once it’s completed.

Use the following text to ask potential customers to sit down with you for a user research interview:

“Hi. I’m creating a course on _____ and I want to make sure it’s highly valuable for learners. I’m wondering if you would be willing to give me 15 minutes of your time for a short video call, where I can learn how my course can help people like you achieve their goals. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to give you the course for free once it’s finished, to show my appreciation.”

This will make
Time spent conducting user research makes all the difference in crafting a high-quality course that can be marketed to the ideal buyer and provide transformation for students.

Choosing a Course Format

Courses can come in a variety of formats and different media. How you structure and deliver your course will determine how you market it to buyers, how much content to include in the curriculum, and how much money you can reasonably sell the course for.

There are three main types of courses: mini-courses, multi-day courses, and masterclasses.

Mini-Course

A mini-course typically takes one to two hours to complete. It can take various forms – for example, a series of email lessons or a playlist of 10 short videos.

Mini-courses are usually offered at a low price (such as under $100), or they might even be free, serving as a marketing tool or lead magnet to draw potential customers into a deeper, more expensive course. The mini-course is a great way to start as a course creator to test the market and see how to create a larger course.

Multi-Day Course

Multi-day courses are considered medium digital educational products that take several days to complete.

They may include recorded videos that break down the course into different levels or modules, as well as supplemental materials like worksheets and checklists. They may also contain quizzes to test learners along the way.

These courses generally range in price from $250 to $2000. A multi-day course is ideal if you have already validated your idea through a mini-course.

Masterclasses

Masterclasses can last several weeks or months and aim to provide buyers with a complete system for success. This type of course is typically sold to professionals and ranges in price from $300 to $5000. If this is your first time creating a course, it’s best not to start with a masterclass. Instead, build your experience by starting with mini-courses and multi-day courses first.

Jean-Martin Fortier and Soline Montpetit, founders of The Market Gardener Institute, offer a variety of courses, including The Market Gardener Masterclass.

The course takes 40 to 60 hours to complete and includes over 40 modules, more than 50 videos, over 45 technical sheets, and more. The offering also includes a community component. The course is priced at $1997 and includes a downloadable syllabus you can review before purchase, which provides information about everything covered in the course.

Testing Market Demand

In the business world, it’s beneficial to validate your idea before launching your product to the world. Before spending money and time building a digital product that people may not buy, test whether there is real demand in the market before fully launching your idea.

You can do this by building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a concept coined by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. An MVP is a product you launch to the public with enough features to validate your assumptions. When considering how to create an online course, create an MVP version of your course, such as a mini-course or a free webinar, to validate your idea.

Creating a Mini-Course

Mini-courses take less than two hours to complete and focus on a specific topic rather than trying to cover a wide range of ideas. A mini-course can eventually be a unit or lesson in a multi-day course. Here are some examples of turning a broad course topic into an MVP mini-course:

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