Do you have a passion that you want to share with the world? If so, why not create an online course?
More and more people are turning to online courses these days because they offer convenience, affordability, and flexibility — three things that are really hard to find in traditional education models.
In this article we’ll discuss how to create an online course that can generate consistent monthly cash flow for you.
Disclosure: Although I receive affiliate compensation at no additional cost to you to support this site that compensation in no way influences my recommendations, which are strictly informed by my 10+ years of online business experience consulting for clients large and small. My aim is to always recommend tools that offer the best return for your investment (for more details, read my Affiliate Disclosure).
What Are Online Courses?
Online courses are classes that allow students to learn remotely at their own time and pace.
While many of the top rated colleges and universities today offer online learning programs, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and so on, the bulk of the sales generated by online courses comes from single operators like you.
Why Create an Online Course?
Online courses offer a great way for instructors to monetize their knowledge in a way that can scale without limits, unlike traditional classroom settings.
The Internet is the great education equalizer, allowing anyone anywhere to learn at their own pace and for a reasonable cost.
This paradigm shift has turned the entire world into a prospective student body that in the aggregate can generate vast amounts of revenue for enterprising instructors.
Ways You Can Monetize Your Course
There are many ways to turn your course into revenue. Here are just a few of the most popular ways successful online instructors are making money with their courses today:
- Selling seats on several standalone courses through a hosting platform
- Creating a course plan with six training levels and then selling a membership to access a new level every month (this is akin to offering a payment plan)
- Selling tools that are required in order to practice what you teach on your course (e.g. pottery equipment, gardening equipment, etc). You could either sell direct, via drop-shipping or as an affiliate on sales commissions
- Creating a hierarchy of course proficiency levels with pre-requisites (e.g. beginner, intermediate and advanced courses)
- Offering one-on-one coaching or consulting sessions
How To Create an Online Course in 5 Easy Steps
So, is it hard to get started? Not if you follow these five steps:
Step 1. Find a niche you're passionate about
The first step is to choose a topic you know something about. If you consider yourself to be an expert in some area of life — from gardening to finance — then that’s probably what you'll want to focus on first.
For instance, if you've experienced financial hardship and eventually became debt-free, then create a course to teach people strategies to overcome their debt problems.
Or, if you’ve developed a special technique over the years for growing the most gorgeous peonies, then you might want to consider teaching others what they need to do in order to achieve similar results.
The trick is for you to create content about an area that you’re truly passionate about — there's nothing worse than listening to someone talking dispassionately about a subject they don't particularly enjoy simply because it has value for others.
Step 2. Create your course outline
Next, it’s time to outline your course modules. A fast and easy way to create your outline is to use a mind map.
Mind maps are a graphical representation of sub-topics stemming from a main idea, and work extremely well for outlining courses.
Your goal here is to deconstruct your main topic into two sub-levels. The first one will become your list of modules and the second one will become your table of contents for each module.
Step 3. Fill out the outline
Now that you have a completed outline, it's time to start writing out the content for each module.
The best way to go about this process is to set a daily writing goal — a good-size block would be two hours of content creation per day.
The key here is consistency, you don’t want to write for hours on end one day until you’re creatively spent and then skip the next two days to recover.
Also, try to minimize any interruptions to your creative process. Protect your daily content creation hours by turning off beeps and notifications from your devices and letting people know that you’ll be unreachable during this time.
Make sure to intersperse teaching "hooks" throughout your course content to help connect students with your material, such as asking them engaging questions and polling them as a way to check their retention.
Also, you'll want to add a mechanism for testing their knowledge from time to time, such as quizzes and multiple-choice questionnaires.
Step 4. Choose a platform to host your online course
Once you've drafted the content for your online course, the next step is to choose where it’ll live.
Now, there are a number of excellent hosting platforms to choose from and each has different features that you’ll have to consider based on your particular needs.
Some run entirely on the cloud, which is great if you don’t have a website as an anchor for your online teaching career, and some run directly on your WordPress installation.
Some excel at marketing but don’t have a great course editor, while others have great editing features but don’t offer as many marketing options.
The best thing to do to get started is to check this comprehensive list of platforms to get the lay of the land. Then, make a short list with your top three choices and visit the sites to drill down on individual features.
For your reference, here are some of the top-ranking online course hosting platforms on the market:
Step 5. Plan your marketing strategy
Finally, it's time to plan out the strategy that will help you get your course in front of students.
Now, while 4 and 5 figure monthly course sales are possible — in fact there are large numbers of instructors who’ve left their jobs to teach online full time — this doesn’t happen overnight.
You first need to plan and then execute on a proper marketing strategy.
Your goal is to build a large audience of potential students over time through a variety of marketing outreach activities and then allow word of mouth to do the rest of the work.
Now, if you don’t already have a track record as an instructor (i.e. no former students to spread the word) you may want to first consider creating a website and starting a blog to drive traffic through organic search.
Then, you can grow an email list from your website traffic and market your courses to your subscribers.
You can also create social media accounts as an instructor and build a large audience of followers by regularly posting useful information of interest to your target audience.
Or, if your expertise is visual in nature, like teaching how to play an instrument or how to create pottery pieces, then starting a YouTube channel and building an audience of subscribers would be a fantastic idea.
Next Steps
You now have the basics necessary to create online courses and share your knowledge with a global audience. Your next step is to take the plunge!
If you're new to the world of online teaching, you might want to start out by creating a free introductory course on a platform that hosts free courses (they usually get capped in length, but this should be fine for this exercise.)
If you’re more experienced, then choose a platform with a generous suite of sales and marketing tools that can easily integrate to your email marketing platform and payment gateway and leverage their marketplace to drive sales.
