How To make an Online Course in 10 Steps

With just a laptop and access to the internet, your online course can enroll students around the globe, helping them master significant skills for much less money than traditional education.

This piece takes you through a 10-step procedure of how to make a profitable online course, while making money and having an impact on your students in the procedure. 

You’ll walk away with a blueprint on building a recent course that positions you as an specialist in your industry, generates a meaningful amount of money, and sets your students up for achievement.

How to make an online course in 10 steps

1. Choose the topic of your course
2. Conduct customer research
3. Select the format of your course
4. Test if your course has high trade demand
5. Pre-sell your course
6. Outline your course content
7. Set course pricing and sales goals
8. Choose the correct course platform
9. Launch and advertise your course
10. Collect feedback and testimonials

1. Choose the topic of your course

The rise of online education space and the benefits of creating an online course should signal something significant: You’ll have competition when bringing your online course to the trade. There is no shortage of online courses available on topics ranging from digital marketing and video editing to online writing and entrepreneurship. 

When considering how to make an online course, choose a topic that you’re uniquely suited to instruct, where you have industry insight, credibility, expertise, and thrill. Plus, ensure the course topic has high trade demand.

trade gap.

While your course topic doesn’t have to check every single item on this checklist, having some level of industry insight and expertise, credibility, and thrill in your subject area will make all the difference in creating a course that stands out from the competition and has a distinctive worth proposition for prospective students. 

Additionally, it’s also significant to research and test whether your course topic has trade demand. Niche course topics like “making authentic maple syrup” or “producing ska music” might not have enough demand to make creating a course profitable. (We’ll dedicate an entire section of this navigator to how you should validate the trade demand of your course.)

2. Conduct customer research

While choosing the topic of your course is key, you’re still a few steps away from jumping into creating course content and diving into the sales pattern. 

First, it’s significant to comprehend your target spectators before you even commence planning content for them. 

By conducting user research and defining your ideal customer at the commence of your course creation procedure, you:

• Put yourself in a beginner’s shoes. Being an specialist in a field often means succumbing to the curse of knowledge, a cognitive bias where you assume that who you’re communicating with has the same background knowledge as you do. Speaking with prospective users will assist you profitability to a beginner’s mind, and assist you tailor your course accordingly. 
• comprehend your customers’ pain points. Your course should assist a buyer solve a issue they’ve been facing, back them in acquiring knowledge they’ve struggled to discover elsewhere, or assist them in learning something more quickly or efficiently than available alternatives. For your course to accomplish this, you require to recognize precisely what pain points your prospective buyer is facing and how to address them within your course. 
• discover what a learner wants to achieve. The most significant part of your course for students is the transformation: the state they achieve after they’ve completed your course. Speaking to prospective customers will assist you uncover what they desire to achieve. 
• recognize how to sell to them. As the saying goes, “If you sell to everyone, you sell to no one.” It’s significant to construct an “ideal customer” profile so you can tailor your course content and marketing in a way that speaks directly to them. Learning the precise messaging to relay to your ideal customer will inform everything from the headlines you include on your landing page to how you promote your course across social media.

In defining your ideal customer, step beyond assumptions and casual conversations. Instead, way defining your ideal customer like someone conducting methodological user research. Here are a few different ways to conduct user research:

• Research Google Trends. Use Google Trends to search for your topic and view whether it’s increasing or decreasing in profit. You can filter by country and timeframe. 
• Browse Reddit and Quora. On Reddit, navigate to subreddits that are related to your course topic and browse through threads that could assist with course content. On Quora, look for questions related to your topic and identify what challenges people are facing and what they desire to recognize. 
• Scavenge social media and forums. pursue prominent people in your industry across social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn, paying attention to the conversations related to your course topic. 
• Set up phone interviews. Aside from doing secondary research on social media, connect with and contact prospective customers directly to view if they might be available to respond a few questions for a research call. 

Conduct interviews with at least 10 people, sharing that you’re starting a course and would like their answers to a few questions, including the following: 

• What are the problems I can assist you solve?
• What are the challenges I can assist you overcome?
• What would your goals be in taking this course?
• If you were to complete the course, what is the outcome you’d aspiration to get?

Keep user research interviews short and use them as an chance to inquire about preferred course format and pricing, too. Consider incentivizing interviewees by offering them the course for free once it’s complete. 

Use the following script to inquire prospective customers if they would be willing to sit down with you for a user research interview: 

Taking the period to conduct user research will make all the difference in crafting a high-standard course that can be promoted to an ideal buyer and that provides a transformation for students.

3. Select the format of your course

Courses can arrive in a range of different formats and mediums. How you structure and deliver your course will determine how you trade your course to buyers, how much content to include in your curriculum, and how much money you can reasonably sell your course for.

When selecting the format for your course, it’s also significant to consider different delivery methods. For example, will students access course materials and complete assignments on their own schedule, without real-period interaction? Or will they discover together via live webinars or scheduled online classes. 

Self-paced courses provide students the flexibility to advancement through the material at their own speed. While cohort-based courses bring groups of students through the material together, often with set commence and complete dates.

Consider your delivery methods when deciding on the overall format of your course. There are three main types of course:

• Mini-course
• Multi-day course
• Masterclass

Mini-course

A mini-course generally requires an hour or two to complete. It can receive on different mediums—for instance, a series of emails or a playlist of 10 short videos. 

Mini-courses are generally offered at a low worth point (e.g., under $100), or may even be free, to serve as a marketing tool or navigator magnet for a more in-depth and pricer course offering. A mini-course is a great way to get started as a course creator to test the trade and discover how to make a larger course.

Multi-day course

Multi-day courses are intermediate digital educational products that generally receive students several days to complete. 

They might include pre-recorded videos that shatter down the course into different levels or modules and include supplementary materials like worksheets and checklists. They may also have quizzes to test learners along the way.

These courses often fall into the worth range of $250 to $2,000. A multi-day course is ideal if you’ve already validated your concept through a mini-course. 

Masterclass

Masterclasses can be anywhere from weeks to months long and aim to provide buyers with a complete structure for achievement. These types of courses are generally sold to professionals and have a worth point ranging from $300 to $5,000. If it’s your first period creating a course, you generally shouldn’t commence with a masterclass. Instead, construct up your encounter creating mini-courses and multi-day courses first. 

Jean-Martin Former and Suleyka Montpetit, the founders behind The trade Gardener Institute, propose a range of courses, including The trade Gardener Masterclass.

The course takes 40 to 60 hours to complete and includes more than 40 modules, over 50 videos, more than 45 technical sheets, and more. A throng component is part of the offering. The course is priced at $1,997 and includes a downloadable syllabus you can review before buying, which provides information on everything the course covers.

Select the type of course you make based on your encounter with creating courses, the breadth and depth of the content you’ll make, and your target buyer’s willingness to pay. 

4. Test if your course has high trade demand

In business, it’s helpful to validate your concept before you launch your product to the globe. Before spending money and period building a digital product that people may not buy, test whether there’s truly a trade demand before going packed steam ahead with your concept. 

One way to do this is building a minimum viable product (MVP), a concept coined in Eric Reis’s The Lean recent business. An MVP is a product you release to the community with just enough features to validate your assumptions. When considering how to make an online course, make a minimum viable product version of your course, such as a mini-course or a free webinar to validate your concept. 

make a mini-course

Mini-courses generally receive less than two hours to complete and narrow in on a specific topic rather than attempting to cover a broad range of ideas. A mini-course could eventually be a module or lesson in a multi-day course. Here are examples of taking a broad course topic and narrowing it into a mini-course MVP:

A mini-course allows you to choose a topic you recognize well and package your expertise or repackage your existing material (e.g., blog posts, threads on X, email newsletter) into a format like an email course. An email course also lets you capture the emails of people who you’ll eventually trade your bigger course to. Someone signing up and taking your mini-course is validation of trade demand for a larger course on a broader topic. 

make a free webinar

Another MVP way for validating the trade demand of your course is creating a webinar with an upsell. The average conversion rate of a webinar can be around 20%. 

Seeing a conversion rate like this is validation that there’s trade demand for your bigger course. Spend the majority of the webinar providing valuable information on your course topic, but make sure to gather feedback from participants on what they found valuable and what else they desire to discover. 

These methods of validating your online course concept will save you the encounter of creating a course that nobody actually buys. 

5. Pre-sell your course

Pre-selling a course means selling your course before you’ve actually created it. This is another mitigation way to avoid creating a course that nobody wants. 

Other advantages include stress-testing your concept, tailoring your content to early feedback from buyers, and raising money through pre-sales to actually capital distribution the creation of your course. Plus, having a few early learner sign-ups will likely serve as a motivator for finishing and launching your course to the globe. 

Getting your very first cohort of customers to sign up for a pre-sale (or pre-order) can be done by creating a pre-sale landing page and incentivizing buyers with a discount. 

For example, use Shopify to make a pre-sale page and collect payments for your course. To add pre-order functionality to your store, download an app from the Shopify App Store like Pre-order Now, Pre-order Manager, and Crowdfunder. Shopify also integrates with a number of course platforms, like Thinkific and Teachable.

To pre-sell your course:

• At the very least have a title, topic, and course outline that gives early buyers an concept of the curriculum they’ll discover down the line
• Have a objective in mind of what a successful pre-sale might look like 

For instance, your aim might be to make 25 pre-sales of your course. If you make less than this in a given period frame, it’s worth carefully thinking about whether you desire to continue with creating the course or opt to refund customers what they’ve paid and leave back to the drawing board.

6. Outline your course content

Outlining your course content, coming up with the contents of your course and logically dividing it into lessons requires you to put yourself in the shoes of a learner. commence from the desired complete state of a learner and work backward from there. 

shatter down content into modules and lessons

The amount of content in your course and how many lessons you include will be determined in part by the type of course you make (e.g., mini-course, multi-day course, masterclass) as well as the associated completion period and expense. 

Once you’ve sorted that out, shatter down the course into distinct modules and lessons or sections and subsections. 

For instance, if you created a course on content marketing, here’s what breaking down that course into five modules might look like:

From there, you can shatter down your modules into a series of specific lessons that leave into specific about a given subject matter and set your students up for achievement. Here’s how you might shatter down the above modules for the same course: 

Once you have a obvious outline that details the topics for each module and lesson, you should have a obvious path to commence building your course content, one lesson at a period. Each lesson should have detailed steps, information, and exercises for students to work through. Within each lesson, aim to have obvious learning objectives that students who buy the course will walk away with. 

Determine the course formats of your lessons

Depending on the type of course you decide to make, the medium of your course could receive many different forms. For a mini-course that’s free or low-priced, you might opt for an email format where you limit the formats you use to text and some illustrative images or screenshots. 

However, for more intensive and higher-priced courses, it’s best to use multiple formats to keep your students engaged throughout the course. For example, rather than using only text or exclusively video, use a mix of formats to keep your students engaged. Here are a few popular course formats and their benefits:

• Video content: great for portraying ideas simply and period effectively
• Screencasts and walkthroughs: ideal for processes where students require to view the exact steps
• Text content: best for explaining concepts in more specific, giving step-by-step information, and linking to other resources around the web
• Downloadable content: excellent for cheat sheets, glossaries templates, and other tools that set learners up for achievement
• Workbooks: valuable for helping learners internalize concepts

As a best habit, keep videos under 10 minutes long and aim to make content that’s concentrated and actionable. During your research phase, look at what formats your competitors are using and consider asking prospective students about what course medium they discover most engaging. 

7. Set course pricing and sales goals

The worth of your course will vary based on the type of course you make: a mini-course is free or low-expense, a multi-day course is mid-expense, while a masterclass is usually high expense. However, the pricing of your course will depend on a variety of factors you should consider:

• Niche and course topic. Consider the industry your course falls in and how worth sensitive your customers might be. Customers buying a course on investing likely have a higher willingness to pay than customers purchasing a digital course on social media marketing. 
• Marketing. How much do you schedule to spend on marketing campaigns? Ensure that the expense of spreading the word about your course is reflected in your pricing. 
• Authority of the course creator. Buyers will pay more for a course created by someone who is considered a proven industry chief. receive your perceived authority into account while pricing your course. 

To get an even better concept of how you should worth your course, conduct competitor pricing research to view how other digital course creators in your niche are pricing their own digital offerings. Ensure you’re not selling yourself short by pricing too low. On the other hand, remain realistic and avoid pricing too high. Don’t be afraid to study what competitors are offering, add more worth to your own course offering, and worth your course accordingly. 

Alongside doing dedicated pricing research around your course, set a sales objective that will also inform how you worth and trade your course. 

For example, if your sales objective is $50,000, there are several ways to worth your course:

Scenario one:

• objective: $50,000 in course sales
• Course worth: $20
• Buyers needed: 2,500

Scenario two:

• objective: $50,000 in course sales
• Course worth: $250
• Buyers needed: 200

In scenario one, you worth your course lower and require a higher volume of customers. In scenario two, you worth your course higher and require a lower volume of customers. So, which scenario is better? 

Generally, pricing your course too low is not a excellent way. For one, you’ll require to spend period and money marketing your course to drive traffic to your course page. 

Assuming 1% of the customers who land on your page buy the course, you’ll require to drive 250,000 visitors to your page in scenario one and 20,000 visitors to your page in scenario two. Secondly, it’s often favorable to have customers who are less worth sensitive. 

Consider these factors when pricing your course, and avoid pricing that’s too low and forces you to trade more aggressively. Put the period and vigor into creating a course that you’re proud to worth at what it’s worth. 

8. Choose the correct online course platform

Next, decide on exactly where you desire to host your course content online. There are a range of different course platforms with distinctive features, but there are three basic types of online course platforms: standalone, all-in-one, and online course marketplaces. 

Standalone

Standalone platforms provide you a lot of control over your content and data. Examples of standalone platforms include Thinkific and Teachable, both of which integrate easily with Shopify. 

Here’s a list of standalone course platforms:

• Thinkific
• Teachable
• LearnWorlds
• Teachery

All in One

All-in-one solutions put your marketing tools, website builder, and content delivery platform in one single place. Generally, all-in-one course platforms are the most expensive, but can be worthwhile because they let you sidestep using multiple tools to accomplish the same thing. 

Here’s a list of all-in-one course platforms:

• Kajabi
• Podia
• Kartra

Online course marketplace

Online course marketplaces propose a platform that comes with a built-in spectators that can assist surface your course more easily than you could on your own. However, you generally have less control over your pricing and data. 

Here are a couple of online course marketplaces:

• Skillshare
• Udemy

To choose the best platform, assess each one based on the following criteria:

• How intuitive is the platform for both you as a course creator and for your students?
• Does it back the types of content you desire to make (video, audio, text, quizzes, etc.)?
• Are there features for learner engagement like talk forums or live sessions?
• Can you customize the look and feel to match your brand?
• What are the costs involved? (Setup fees, monthly fees, trade fees)
• Does it propose built-in marketing tools like email marketing or affiliate programs?
• Can the platform handle your growth as you add more courses and students?
• Is there a mobile app for students to access courses on-the-leave?
• What level of back does the platform propose to you as a course creator?

Don’t succumb to analysis paralysis when it comes to choosing your course platform. The actual content of your course is more significant than where it’s hosted online. If the course platform you select lacks the features you require, you can always switch. 

9. Launch and advertise your course

Creating your course is one part of the equation; launching it to the globe and marketing it to buyers is the other. 

After putting in the work to make your course as excellent as feasible for potential customers, it’s significant to get it into their hands through marketing. Here are a few ways to sell your course and earn money:

• Run a weekly webinar. Webinars are generally low expense and a excellent way to generate leads for your course. If someone sits through a 30- to 60-minute webinar, there’s a greater likelihood they’ll purchase your course, too. discover how to host a webinar that attracts clients. 
• Prioritize email marketing. Building an email list of prospective buyers is a powerful way to distribute updates, information, and discounts related to your course. While someone might not buy your course when they first arrive on your landing page, asking for their email and setting up an email marketing funnel may convince them to buy down the line. Additionally, you can use email to make a mini-course that promotes your main course. discover more about using email marketing to boost your business. 
• Appear on a podcast. Appearances on podcasts are a great way to boost your authority and naturally demonstrate your expertise through exchange. Pitch yourself to podcasters in your niche, explaining how your expertise fits with their display and could be valuable for their listeners. Most hosts will allow you to pitch what you’re working on to their spectators near the complete of the exchange, or even propose a discount to listeners. 
• Use social media marketing. Identify the best channels to talk to your prospective followers, hone in on them, and construct a social media way that prioritizes adding worth consistently. Avoid the trap of using every social media platform—it’s unlikely you require to have a presence on TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat—and instead, focus on a few. discover more about creating a social media marketing way. 
• Run paid ads. Running paid ads, like Google Ads or Facebook ads, to your sales page can be a powerful way to target your ideal buyer and get them to convert to a customer after seeing an ad. With a paid channel like online advertising, make sure you’re making a profitability on capital distribution—your expense of acquiring a customer should be less than the worth of the course. discover how to develop your business with Facebook ads and Google Ads. 
• Adopt SEO tactics. Optimizing your website so it’s surfaced in search engine results is valuable for having customers discover your course. discover how to rank your site with this SEO checklist. 
• construct a content marketing way. Creating free educational content about your course niche can construct your authority, assist your course and content get surfaced through search results, and get free readers to convert to paid customers. discover how to drive more customers with content marketing. 

Successfully selling your course through marketing takes some experimentation. commence with a few marketing channels to view what works. Double down on the strategies that are effective at bringing in customers and ditch the tactics that are more period, attempt, or money than they’re worth. 

10. Collect feedback and testimonials 

While customers may receive your word for it, having real customers singing the praises of your course is even better. Collect feedback and testimonials from joyful customers who have seen results from your course. Having positive anecdotes about transformations on your landing page and throughout your marketing is a powerful way to convince prospective customers of the worth of your course and the results it can assist them achieve. 

To collect customer reviews and testimonials, inquire for feedback from buyers who have taken your course. inquire customers who provide glowing feedback whether they would be willing to provide a testimonial to characteristic in your marketing material. 

Be specific in providing path to customers about what you desire in their testimonial. Rather than simply asking for a blurb about their positive encounter with the course, inquire more targeted questions like, “How much recent returns have you seen through taking my course?” or “How prepared did you feel for taking the real estate licensing course before my course versus afterward?” Specific details on how your course was helpful are more powerful than vague generalizations. If feasible, inquire for a video testimonial rather than a text one. 

Of course, asking for feedback should not be about only testimonials. Use positive feedback to inform what parts of the course are resonating with students and use critical feedback to revise course material that is under-performing. Taking feedback to heart with each cohort of students that buys your course will allow you to gradually enhance it over period and provide your students the best learning encounter feasible. 

The benefits of creating an online course

With no inventory issues or supply chain problems to solve, selling online courses is an online business concept with benefits worth considering:

• Online courses are scalable. It takes a lot of period and attempt to make an online course. However, with digital products, you can make a single resource and sell it to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people around the globe. This procedure can be entirely automated so anyone can buy your course with a few clicks. 
• Online courses are low expense. Depending on the type of course you make, you may just require a few software subscriptions for hosting your course to send emails to prospective buyers and construct a throng of learners. 
• Online courses have high margins. After the costs that leave into production and marketing, the remaining returns from a course can be boost. While many traditional entrepreneurs selling physical products have slim margins, digital products like courses can have margins as high as 85%—for instance, selling a course for $100 and keeping $85. 
• Online courses generate inactive returns. While inactive returns is never truly inactive—there’s upfront period, money, and attempt—successful online courses are close. Once you’ve created an online learning course, you can generate returns from it continuously. This is especially the case if your course is download-only and isn’t a cohort-based course with a live or throng component. 

commence selling online courses today

Reflect on the distinctive insights, valuable knowledge, and marketable skills that you can distribute with the globe through your first online course. 

• If you’ve taught yourself how to make inspiring illustrations on an iPad, there’s a chance you can instruct others to do it too. 
• If you’ve helped companies develop an engaged social media across brands, there are likely buyers interested in learning how you did it. 
• If you’re a product management chief and mentor who has helped others enter the field, you should consider doing the same on a wider scale through a course. 

Creating an engaging and successful online course means packaging your thrill into a digital product. Starting on your trip as an online course creator will set you up to earn money through your thrill and expertise, while helping others discover what you recognize in the procedure.