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📋 Course Creators Weekly #39 🗓 March 22nd, 2021 - How to Create Your Online Course

This week, I'm sharing 3 videos from Janelle Allen on how to validate your online course idea, how to create your content, and how to package your offering.

How to Validate Your Online Course Idea with Your Target Audience How to Validate Your Online Course Idea with Your Target Audience
📹 Video ✔️ Idea Validation

How to Validate Your Online Course Idea with Your Target Audience

  • 🦿
    Make sure your course idea has legs before investing time, energy and money into it
  • 💰
    Remember that the only true validation is sales—everything else is pre-validation
  • 📋
    Surveys: ask your audience about their challenges and solutions they've already tried
  • 🗣
    Customer discovery interviews: talk to people—pay attention to the language they use
  • 👁
    e-Stalking: become a part of your target audience's community and listen intently
  • 🤥
    Be wary of people "lying" to please you or avoid discomfort—we're only human
  • 🔀
    Combine these ideas—e.g. interview survey respondents or e-stalk to verify answers
🔗 Janelle Allen via janelleallen.com

P.S. If you're interested in learning more about customer discovery interviews, especially the "lying" part, you should absolutely check out The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

How to Create Your Online Course How to Create Your Online Course
📹 Video 🧩 Structure & Design

How to Create Your Online Course

  • 💳
    Create ~30% of your content and pre-sell a live pilot to truly validate your course idea
  • 🕵🏾‍♀️
    Use the live pilot to discover and fill gaps in your content—better find these early!

7 steps to running a live pilot:

  • 1️⃣
    Validate your course idea
  • 2️⃣
    Identify your course goal/desired transformation
  • 3️⃣
    Outline your content
  • 4️⃣
    Create your sales page
  • 5️⃣
    Pre-sell the course
  • 6️⃣
    Create the starter content
  • 7️⃣
    Run the live pilot

At this point, I highly recommend that you actually watch the video. Janelle walks through a worked example, demonstrating how she goes about outlining one of her own courses.

I'll share some of my key takeaways below:

On creating your content

  • 🏁
    Break down your course goal into a few key outcomes that contribute to it
  • 💡
    Break down the key outcomes into modules + further learning objectives per module
  • ☑️
    Design lessons and assignments around those objectives
  • 🥳
    Define some "wins" for each module—things to celebrate

On creating your sales page

  • 🗣
    Use your audience's language
  • 🎭
    Tell stories of transformation
  • 📋
    Show the modules and the lessons
  • 🥰
    Share testimonials
  • 💵
    Share packages and pricing info (see the next video summary)

Again, check out the video—you'll love it! 👇🏼

🔗 Janelle Allen via janelleallen.com
How to Package Your Online Course How to Package Your Online Course
📹 Video 🎁 Positioning

How to Package Your Online Course

  • 🎁
    Increase revenue by providing extra value in premium packages
  • 🔘
    Change the decision from 'yes' or 'no' to 'which package'
  • 🆔
    Allow your audience to self-identify by picking the right package for them
  • 3️⃣
    Start simple by offering 2 packages, or up to 3, with a middle option perfect for most
  • 📋
    Take inventory of everything you have to offer + what students need to succeed
  • 🤙🏽
    Don't have existing assets to offer yet? Give access to you as an extra

Janelle's next video is on pricing your packages! I might summarise this later, but if you're interested, you should definitely check it out: 3 Simple Ways to Price Your Online Course

🔗 Janelle Allen via janelleallen.com

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Hey, I'm Merott 👋🏻

I'm an indie maker and freelance web developer from London.

I'm building my own business, because I'm terrible at following other people, and because I want my work to matter. I hope it will, to you and to your students.

Making progress, slowly and steadily, I'm also documenting and tweeting my journey every Monday @merott .

Thanks for visiting!

Merott