 Ever wonder how to create an online course that sells? Absolutely. Well, we're talking about it here on the journey. During the last year or so, online courses have become the hot new thing everywhere from coaches to consultants. They're all putting their best work online and creating an online course. Yeah, they're all the rage now. You know, nowadays we're seeing online courses on every conceivable topic you could think of. Literally everything. And it's just a great way to create a passive income where you create it once and then you're constantly money it from it from then on out. So we're going to talk about what it's going to take to get that online course and some ways to actually make it sell. So let's start off with what do you need to get started? I think that's three things, right? That's a domain name, that's hosting, and then the course itself. We have a pretty cool video on what it takes to have a good domain name right up here if you haven't had one yet. Then hosting is just kind of that online storage for your website. It's where all your content's going to go. Then I'm going to show you guys a little tutorial here in a little bit of probably my favorite plug-in to create an online course. So first things first, we need to create a plan. Think about it, if you were a teacher, you would need a lesson plan, right? So this is really creating an outline of what you're going to talk about, what's going to go into that, what lessons you actually want to teach. Yeah, that's super important. You don't want to just jump headfirst into it, and then it's going to be super unorganized and just chaotic in a word, right? So with your online course, whether it's like a Word doc or OneNote or whatever you're doing, just list out your main subjects you're going to be talking about with a couple of bullets here on out. You can expand on that later on, but at least you have the high-level overview of the type of content you want to talk about and the structure itself. Yeah, no one's going to want to watch a online course that is just some general topic and has no direction. Yeah, just here and there. No one has time for that. Create some direction so that people know what they're actually going to watch. Yeah, and I think it's important to understand the type of course you want to actually create, whether it's text only, so you're just writing out content and text, whether you want videos, whether you want quizzes, some type of interaction. You want to make sure that you have that figured out so you know where your direction is. You'll also want to determine some of the course restrictions, whether this course is going to be a free course you're going to use as just a lead generator, or if you're going to put a dollar amount behind it. I think it's important to have that defined early, because it's going to set the stage for your entire course and then your marketing plan afterwards. Also make sure that you're protecting you and your content with some policy and procedures. So if you don't want your content recorded or redistributed, make sure you have those rules in place to protect you as well. Yeah, and then next you want to figure out how do you want to present the content? Do you want them to have it all at once for them to use, or do you want to drip it to where it's more like classroom oriented? So you have week one, you do this content, and then week two it'll release and they can jump in. Understanding that helps out a lot with how you market it and then how you just distribute it to your audience. And that's a great way to keep people coming back. Next week you're going to get this, next week you're going to get this. Yeah, and I think too, sometimes we need to better understand our audience and what content do they actually want? I know we have our own perceptions of they need to learn this, but a great way to better understand even just the modules that you're going to be creating is by doing an Ask Campaign. So I actually learned this from Russell Brunson. He's the founder of ClickFunnels, but whenever he creates an online course, he starts with an Ask Campaign. So if my topic is social media, right? I'm going to send out an email to my newsletter subscribers and say, hey, what is your number one question about social media? And then he collects those answers and gets the top usually six common answers that essentially makes that the course. He knows exactly what his audience wants. He knows the content that they're going to actually need. And then that's his course. He has those six topics, those six modules in his course. So if you're kind of stuck on the exact content to put in there and that outline too, do an Ask Campaign, figure out what your audience actually wants so that way it's relevant and important to them. Exactly, that's going to help you create that guideline and then you can use that to create your content. And then at the end, you're not having people ask a lot of questions that you should have covered and having to create a different video. So now that we know what our so-called students want in our content and the guideline that we're going to be following, how do we actually implement this and create the online course? Yeah, great question. There are so many different ways to go out and create an online course. There are tons of WordPress plugins that make it super easy and there's even other providers that that's their whole thing. I know Teachable.com is a great resource for those that aren't really tech savvy but want something pretty easy. But we're actually going to do a demo of using some couple free solutions. We're going to use WordPress as our platform to host it on. We're going to use a plugin called Tudor LMS. I'm actually going to show you all a demo of how to use it and how to set it up for success. So what does LMS stand for in Tudor LMS? Yeah, LMS is learning management system. Basically it's an application or program you use to basically house your course in a sense. So all you need is a hosting account with WordPress set up and installed. Most hosting providers make it super easy to install WordPress on. And then once you're in here, we're going to go ahead and just add and install a new plugin. So on the left hand side here, we'll mouse over plugins and go to add new. And then we're going to search for Tudor LMS. It is a free plugin at this base. Most of the core functions are going to be free. Like most plugin providers, there are some extra paid options if you want to kind of go above and beyond. LearnPress is also a pretty phenomenal LMS plugin as well. So once we search that, we go ahead and just click install. Now it just takes a moment to install. And then it's going to go through kind of an onboarding experience. Now the course we're going to create, we're going to really just kind of repurpose some of the journey content we have. So we're going to create a course on how to up your social media game. And that's going to be the basis of our course for this demo purpose, but you can use it for almost anything you're wanting to do related to your industry. So after Tudor LMS is installed, we're going to go ahead and go over to it. We click Tudor LMS and now we don't have any courses. So we're going to go ahead and click add new. And we're going to give it a title. So up your social media game. It's going to be our title, but you want your title to be kind of descriptive of what they're actually going to get out of it. I know I've created a course in the past and I named it The Road Your First Thousand Followers on social media. Something super specific, but we're going to keep it at simple for the course of this demo, just up your social media game. And then here we have a description. So we're going to add as much content as we like. Remember when creating your description for your online course, you want to make it about them and what they're getting out of it. Try not to just info dump and say, we're going to teach social media, we're going to teach Instagram, we're going to teach how to create captions. Those are all great features for your course itself, but they don't really, it's hard for someone to actually imagine what that does for them. Right, let people know why they should care, why these things actually affect their business. And that's going to be a lot more effective than just saying, here's what this is, this is, this is when they haven't even learned it yet. Yep, focus on benefits versus features. I'm going to be lazy and just put some generic text for the demo here itself. All right, and then going through tutor LMS, it's going to ask you, what do you want your maximum students to be? If you want it to be unlimited, great, put it as unlimited. Obviously I want as many people to do it, but you can set a little bit of urgency, especially for a higher dollar courses itself. So if your courses are like two, three, four, $5,000, even maybe more, sometimes it's good to have a maximum number of students there to create that urgency. So now people will say, cool, now there are only four spots left. Yeah, you make it a little more prestigious. It's like, hey, the first 100 people to sign up for this course, they get in, no one else does. Exactly, kind of that bit of a perception, if you will. Cool, next up is an expert. Experts are optional handcrafted summaries. You can add whatever you're wanting there, really just a quick description for the sake of your time and our time. We're going to go ahead and put just some generic info here. But cool, make it just a quick excerpt, maybe one or two sentence of what they're going to get out of this. And then right below that is going to be a course builder. We're actually going to get back to that here in a second. I want to show you the rest of the information here. So you'll have some additional data and this is going to go over total course duration. You really want to tell your audience, how long is this course going to take them? Then you have some benefits of the course. So you can go ahead and add some information here, some requirements or additional instructions that you may want. Your target audience, like who is this, who's this course for? Like who would benefit the most from this? I think it's important to really niche down when you're creating your courses. Try not to make something that applies to everyone because it'll apply to no one. Yeah, so for the journey, ours would be entrepreneurs or small, local business owners, anything along those lines. Exactly. Now going down the list here on the Tudor LMS homepage here. And now you're going to have a course intro video. It does help to have a quick little summary again. Visual video is engaging. So have something here. I'm going to go ahead and pull in from YouTube and grab our just journey intro video here. Yeah, you have to give people a reason to actually watch. You need to hook them and that video, the intro video can be a huge asset for that. Absolutely. So let me go ahead and add this in here. Cool. And that'll be our video. You can add it in an announcement if you'd like. We're going to leave that blank for now. And then the other thing you want to do is a couple of things, right? So you want to have category. So if you do plan on creating a ton of different courses, on your website, categorize them so it makes it easy to identify and understand what this is. So I'm going to create an easy category of social to make all of our lives easy. I can't type. All right, I'll fix it in post. Social, there we go. And then tags, tags are just things like keywords that describe your content. So you can really put anything like Instagram, Facebook, followers, SEO, love it. And then a featured image. This image needs to be visually stunning and appealing to an audience. So if they're looking at it, it grabs their attention. So basically a picture of the journey are cast, right? All right, so I chose the journey as my featured image. And I'm going to go ahead and save draft for now because I want to see what this might look like on my website. So if I click preview here in the upper right, it's going to show me what it looks like. Cool, so I've upped your social media game. The category of social shows me how many enrolled. One last time it was updated, I have my trailer here. So it's nice and easy to see. Materials include we have videos, we have quizzes, an easy option to enroll now, our tags, target audience, what we'll learn, that description. Then it shows about the instructor. To update that, you have to go to users and then your profile and you can update your information there. Really just kind of describe who you are and let people into your world. And then this is basically going to be the landing page for your online course. And that took us just a few minutes to create. WordPress and this plugin make it super easy to actually create your course. So now let's get into actually building the course. What do we do for that? Yeah, so we're going to use the course builder. It's right on that page here. So we're going to add topics. So we have topics and then we have the actual lessons themselves. That way it helps you really break up the content that you're going to be talking about. So topics could be an intro. I usually start my courses with some type of introduction, some things to get them kind of up to speed. And then maybe since we're talking about social, I might make each topic like Instagram or followers or marketing or something high level that really describes the next couple of sections. So I'm just going to do intro here. I'm just going to add that topic. You can give it a summary if you'd like. And then we're going to add new lessons. And like I said, we're pulling it from our YouTube channel, some of the videos and making that the course. If you just want it to be text, you just update the text here and add your text as well as your title. Let me go ahead and find something social media related. How to use Twitter for your online business. Perfect. Perfect. So let me grab this URL here. Let me update the title. How to use Twitter for your online business. And then you can add a featured image if you'd like. But I'm just going to choose a YouTube as the video source. You can throw that in there. And then it has the video playback time. So you can tell people how long this lesson is going to take them. Because maybe they may not be doing this all in one chunk. They might have 15 minutes right now and then 30 minutes for another time. And letting them know upfront how long each course will last really helps them set aside the right time to follow your course. So this video was nine minutes and 10 seconds. Nine, 10. And then update lesson. And now that lesson is done. We're going to kind of add a couple more and then we'll jump back into some other stuff here. So I added a bit of content into this. And now let me show you how the actual learning management system works. If I was an everyday user coming to the website. So I land on this landing page. I can go to enroll now. But it shows me the topics for this course. It has the intro and then advanced. I can see the content here. Now I can't get to it unless I enroll. So I'm going to go ahead and choose enroll now. And then now I have an option to start this course and complete the course. You can set up different options if you want to add quizzes or certain passing metrics if they want to get a completed course. So let's go ahead and start course and check this out. Cool. So this is how it looks. It shows your lesson list on the left-hand side. We have our intro and advanced. It shows our videos. You can have your text below it. It can only be text only, which is completely fine. Or you can add video. Or you can kind of have a little bit of both. Really whatever works best for you and your audience. Obviously text is going to be easier to create. You don't have to create video. You don't have to edit it and things like that. But it might be more engaging to go with videos. And as they go through it, they can see each lesson. And as they go, they can click complete lesson to mark their progress. Then next and next and next. And it makes it super organized and super neat for an everyday user to actually take your content. And then this is responsive. So it works great on mobile, on tablet, or on desktop. Okay, so you've made your course now. But how do you actually get people to watch it or even buy it? Yeah, there are tons of ways. And we're going to go through a couple here. But really before your class goes live, it's good to make little essentially teasers, if you will, post about the upcoming course. So tell your audience that, hey, there's something in the works. It's going to be awesome. Then as it goes on, like, hey, I'm creating this course. It's going to be on this topic. Who would be interested? And then keep creating content around that to kind of build up the hype and anticipation. So when it does go live, your audience actually knows about it. Yeah, you have to build up that hype. And that's a really good opportunity to add in that ask question of, hey, what's some content that you guys want to see in this course? Yep. And then as you have your outline going, you can kind of share that with the audience. If this is the stuff I'm going to cover. And I know what a lot of people do too, is they'll actually create many courses as lead generators. Like, hey, here's a taste of some of the work that I do that I teach and that's super valuable. And they give it out for free. And then that way they have that person's email, that person takes their course, goes, well, this is a ton of value. This is awesome. Then when you release your paid course, they're like, all right, cool. I've already got a ton of value from this. I know this person is an expert with what they teach. I'm more inclined to actually buy and kind of continue with that. Absolutely. So expecting people to spend money on this course, you have to give them a reason why and why they should trust that they're actually going to get benefit from this. So that's a give and take situation. Yeah. And with the Plugin Tutor LMS and many of the other plugins with WordPress, there's an option to make certain ones free for anybody to watch. So I know a pretty popular option is to make your first course, like the first lesson for free. And if they want to continue, then they pay. So if you got them hooked on that first lesson, you've got them hooked for the rest of it. And another way to make this even more profitable for you is to add some additional materials or tools that people can use to help them out even after the online course. So for instance, if you created a course on here's how to edit an Instagram photo, and then you added additional materials of like Lightroom presets or things along those lines that people can purchase to actually continue that education. Yeah. And it's all about kind of that perceived value. I know what a lot of people will do too is they'll have their course for X price and then they'll talk about all of the extras that come with it. So whether it's a checklist, whether it's a one-on-one consultation, whether it's access to a Facebook group, they add a perceived value for all these freebie extras. So if I had an ebook that I paired with it, I could say an added value of $49.99 but you're getting it for free. Then if I had a content calendar added value of $89.99 but you're getting for free, now it feels like I'm getting a lot more, basically more bang for my buck which just buying this course. So adding that perceived value can help out a ton. Then there's really going through and doing traditional advertising, right? You can go on Facebook ads or Instagram ads or Twitter or wherever your target audience is and start just testing out different things you can do to get your course in front of them. Now I would say you'll find a lot more success if you market your free course, right? To get that lead generator. I know you're spending money to get someone into a free course. It seems backwards, right? We really wanna like think of it as a funnel. So when you're marketing your content, you're getting into the free course, they like that, then you start, then you can use your email marketing to talk to them about your paid course and some of your other offerings and it kind of goes down and down and down. So start big, start broad, go the free option and then go down to your paid option once they trust you and see you as an authoritative source. So now you know how to do it, go out and create your own online course that sells. Thanks for watching. Be sure to like and comment down below. And subscribe to our channel and ring that bell to get these episodes first. This is The Journey, we'll see you next time.