How to Use E-Courses to Grow Your Business
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How to Find a Topic for Your Course
Personal Experience and Education
Have you overcome an obstacle or discovered a way to solve a problem? Do you have skills that you can share through a course? Maybe you already have people requesting your help with projects. Although something may be easy for you, it’s new for someone else.
Research Online
Take a look at your statistics for your blog and social media pages. What content is driving the most traffic? Does your audience ask questions or mention complaints on your blog or social media pages? You can also take a look at what eBooks and online courses have already been published. Browse through reviews to get an idea of what questions or complaints people had. What information can you give and improve when designing your own course material?
Determine Your Audience
You may think a course will have more value if it’s crammed with information and broad. Rather than design your course for everyone, focus on a specific person. Where does this ideal person hangout online and what problems are they likely trying to solve? Design your course just for them. Be ready for concerns or questions they may have about purchasing your course. Know your audience before you launch your course so that you can address these concerns and questions on your sales page and anywhere you’ll promote your course.
How Passionate Are You?
Ask yourself if you’re passionate about your course topic. Although you can expect passive income from your course, you can continue developing more courses and services to expand what you offer. If you’re not excited about the topic you’ve chosen, you’ll likely not want to put in the effort to do more with it. Marketing your course will likely be difficult if you don’t have much interest in the course material.
Design Your Course
What to Expect from Your Course
Do not be vague when describing what to expect from your course. Outline specific things that a person will learn. Create a course outline that moves quickly and is easy to follow.
Pick a Format
You can use written materials, video, and audio for your course. You can increase the price of your course if you use videos as part of our course instruction. If you do not have the equipment to create videos, don’t let this stop you from releasing your course. You can also add it in the future or offer it as part of a more in-depth course.
Pick a Teaching Platform
With Skillshare, your course will be posted in a marketplace for members to browse. Students pay a monthly or annual fee that gives them access to an entire marketplace of classes. Teachers are paid for the number of minutes watched by students per month. Teachers are also paid for students that sign up for a premium membership through your referral link.
Udemy pays teachers for each course that a student purchases through the marketplace. However, Udemy is known for providing discounts on courses, so you should expect that your income will fluctuate based on their sales.
Teachable has a drag-and-drop page builder so you can create custom pages to promote your course. You can also use your existing site. Your course is not listed in a marketplace, so you will be responsible for driving traffic to your sales pages. You can create an affiliate program to reward others for sharing your course. There’s also an option to manually enroll students. If your course will have multiple authors, you can arrange their monthly payout.
With both Skillshare and Udemy, you cannot collect email addresses of your students. However, having your course listed in a marketplace means you will have help promoting your courses. Teachable gives you the most flexibility with course management, pricing, and integration with your existing website. By collecting email addresses during course registration, you can continue to communicate with students after a course ends.
It’s recommended that you have an established blog prior to creating your first course. You can get started for $3.95/month with SiteGround or Bluehost.