Anatomy of an Online Course Launch
Social media has changed the face of marketing.
And the pandemic changed the face of learning.
It's Not Optional
Any business knows they must have an online presence if they want to capture their slice of the 70% of the world’s population who use the internet.
And any business owner who works with clients one-on-one — coaches, healing professionals, educators, consultants — knows they have to reach more than one person at one time if they want to grow their reach (and income).
Thus, the explosion of online courses that shows up in your social feeds.
Thinking about jumping on the bandwagon?
As an online course creator, business coach, and marketing consultant, let me give it to you straight:
You’re in for a world of surprises if you don’t go in fully informed.
Therefore, I present to you...
The Anatomy of an Online Course Launch
Maybe you're thinking of transforming a course you’ve been offering in person into a passive producer (an on-demand course that people can buy and watch anytime while you rake in the money as you sleep)...
Or you have an idea for a series of short courses that provide bite-size chunks of your premium course to tire-kickers...
Or the pandemic finally vanquished any doubts about what could be taught online and you’re ready to share your intricate whatever method with the world.
All of these are great ideas that have their unique benefits, challenges, and pitfalls. Ready to learn how to take them from conception to birth? Let’s go...
An Idea Is Born
Okay, you have an idea for a course. The next step is to turn it into a curriculum. Don’t know what that word means? That’s your first homework assignment. (Download my free Curriculum Template here to get you started.)
Why is a curriculum important? Because, no matter how intimately you know your subject matter, when you are delivering content online you have to follow a few important rules. Rules designed to get people to start your course and to keep going.
Outlining your content in a curriculum forces you to organize what you know in a way that keeps online learners engaged. (If you don’t know much about adult learning theory or learning styles, now would be a good time to learn about it before you get too deep into your curriculum design and create a course that doesn’t work for a lot of people.)
Your curriculum will also get you thinking about how you’ll deliver your content (talking head presentation, video demonstration, narrated slides, etc.) and how you might structure any interactive components (Q&A session, breakout rooms, live demo, return demonstration, etc.)
Also, if you intend to get Continuing Education hours for your course, your curriculum will be a start to the information professional organizations will require from you.
Now that you have your course outlined, the next steps follow, but not in any particular order:
Create the Course
Since your course is online, it must be delivered either live or via a recording form some technology platform. Zoom is the easiest, more familiar option for most people and it will do the trick when you are starting out. You will make your life easier if you get a paid account with all the professional options you need to deliver and record your course.
If/when you want to upgrade the professionalism of your online courses, you can hire a professional videographer and go into a slick-looking studio to have your teaching sessions recorded and edited, with branded slides and music added to enhance the quality.
Your online course will either be delivered live online to a group of people, or pre-recorded. You can also mix and match with some pre-recorded content (typically called ‘modules’) and some live sessions.
Regardless of which format you choose to offer your content, you will need a platform to house it. Even if your course is all live, and you email students from your gmail account, you’re going to need some place where your content “lives” so students can access recordings, handouts, articles, etc. at any time. Yes, you can do that with Google Drive, but it’s not the most efficient or professional platform so I recommend you research online course platforms (Thrivecart, Kajabi, and Thinkific are some options with a wide range of price points).
The Marketing Plan
Where (and how) will you market your course? For an online course to be successful, you likely want to sell it. Lots of it.
(If you don't have plans to sell lots of your course, and are creating it for some other reason, you can skip the rest of this section. Lucky you.)
If your current email list is a few dozen or a few hundred people (likely people who met you through your in-person work), they aren’t likely to buy from you. Why? They already got your goodies.
So you need to reach more people, and once those people buy your course (you can plan on that being about 1-2% of them according to industry standards), you have to reach even more people. It’s an endless cycle.
Are you starting to see one of the big pitfalls of online courses? Yes, you make the course once. But you market it forever.
Online courses are a great addition to your array of products, but you have to keep finding people who might be interested to show them what you got. And that, my friend, is the #1 Challenge of creating online courses: Marketing.
Your People-Attracting Funnel
If you’re still on board, your marketing plan is going to need a strategy for attracting new people continually. Most marketing strategies for online courses consist of a funnel.
A funnel is designed to get many people’s attention (with a free offer that shows off your skills) and then continue communicating with them (usually via a series of emails) so they get to know you, like you, trust you, and ultimately buy from you.
I know you’ve seen funnels in action. You’ve likely been a part of one or many. So I recommend that — right now — you make a list of funnel traits that you like (do you like free training webinars, 5-day email challenges, training videos, checklists, Top 10 guides, etc,) and think about which ones a) you’d most like to create and deliver, and b) which ones would work best for your audience.
That, my friend, is your lead generator.which you use to attract potential new clients. Now you need to create it. And then decide where it lives and how to deliver it.
This is kind of like a snowball turning into an avalanche, huh?
And we haven’t even got to the emails part...
Wooing Your Audience
Now that you’ve got your lead generator created, you’re going to release it to the world.
But you’re not just going to post it as a download on your Facebook account (and you can’t even do that from Instagram), so you have to come up with a way to get people’s email addresses so you can send it to them. Say ‘Hello’ to a new pop-up form.
Why go through that extra step?
Because you want to keep emailing those folks who just became your potential clients.
You’ll hear this over and over again in marketing: You own your email list. Social media accounts are just rented space. In other words, you can get kicked off social in a heartbeat and lose everything that’s there. It’s happened to the best of us.
Instead, you must get interested people on your email list and start the nurture process. This is where you woo a potential client from a ‘first date’ to a second date and on to a committed relationship.
The easiest way to do this is with a series of interesting, informative, personality-filled, content-rich emails that move your readers from ‘I just wanted the free thing’ to ‘Hmmm, this person has some really good ideas’ to ‘I can’t wait to learn more from them’ and pulling out their credit card.
If the thought of writing a bunch of emails that are “interesting, informative, personality-filled, and content-rich” makes you break out in a sweat, you’ve just arrived at Online Course Creation Challenge #2: Copywriting.
But Wait, There’s More
Now that you have your charming emails going out to woo your audience (and hopefully you’ve automated those emails, which is another project in and of itself), you have to send folks somewhere to sign up for your course.
That could be as simple as sending them a link to your PayPal account, but a wiser, more professional approach would be to send them to a sales page to seal the deal.
A sales page is a single web page (aka ‘landing page’) that provides more information — and many more reasons — why someone should buy your course. It talks about the problem your course solves, your unique solution to their problem, the benefits your students will receive from the course, how their lives will be improved after they take your course, why you are the one and only person to teach them this, and why they should buy now.
You can also add bonuses to increase the value of your course and make it irresistible for people to buy it. Bonuses can include additional training videos, handouts, interviews with experts in a related field, access to another course of yours, you get the idea...
Your sales page will include the big BUY NOW button to register, which will either take them to an order form on your course platform, your PayPal account, or some other magical technology that will collect their payment and add them to your student list.
The Order of Things
You may wonder why I said you could do the above steps in any order. Because it’s true. You can start marketing a course before it’s created. You can create the course and market it later.
You can create your sales page first, your emails second, your lead generator last and reverse-engineer your funnel.
Whatever works for you, your interests, and your energy. You might do what you think are the hardest things first to get it done with. Or you might start with the easier, more enjoyable parts first to get your momentum going.
However you do it, you should absolutely have a plan in place that accounts for all the details. We call this a launch plan and it shows each step of your marketing funnel and course creation process with associated action items and any deadlines.
It might look something like this:
On With the Show
Finally, now that you’ve got your students enrolled, you have to deliver your course.
If it’s an evergreen or on-demand course that requires no involvement from you, you just give them a way to access it.
But if it’s a course that has a live component, you’re going to need more emails to remind them of the live calls, provide Zoom links, add to calendar links, and generally keep them engaged.
Why on Earth Would Anyone Do This?
After reading through all this, you may be wondering why anybody wants to create an online course, once they’re fully informed.
Because it’s the best way to serve more people than you can one-on-one.
When you can teach to a group, you get paid more per hour of teaching. When you expand that group to include people around your state, country, or the world, you can reach a huge audience with your gifts (and get paid way more per hour).
An important consideration that I haven’t mentioned yet is the cost of producing an online course. There’s a saying in business: You can either have time or money, but not both. Or put another way, You’re either going to spend time or money in your business, but not neither.
For most people creating their first online course, they’re going to invest a LOT of time and a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
If you are in a position to pay top dollar for all the things to create your course (pro videographer, Kajabi, launch strategist, marketing consultant, web designer, copywriter, VA to set it all up for you), it will take some of the time burden off you, but there is still a lot you will have to put into your project. It will just be a lot easier.
Whether you are in the time or money camp, you can hire me to guide you through the entire process and do much of the work for you.
Many professionals were forced to move their work online during the pandemic. Some found they liked it. Some found their customers demanded it. So whether they want to or not, it’s where they need to be.
For most people, the appeal of not commuting, renting space, or hauling work supplies around is enough to get them to consider the investment in creating an online course.
In the birth world (my niche), the temptation of reaching more expecting families and not being on call is a biggie. Way more convenient. Way less disruptive to one’s life. But also maybe a bit premature.
Be Choosy
The influx of courses on any and every topic is overwhelming. People looking for a quick course on how to bake the perfect birthday cake don’t know if they’re learning from Jo down the street who just finished taking their own birthday-cake-baking online course, or the inventor of the cronut (Dominique Ansel if you’re wondering).
So here’s my caveat: If you are just starting out in your field and don’t have the chops yet, spend your time developing the nuanced skills that come only from working in person. Earn your place in your field before crashing the online world (even if you have the money or the social media following to do it). My motto is: Always be ethical in what you’re offering.
People who are truly skilled at what they do (massage therapists, doulas, yoga instructors, personal trainers) can teach inside a box. They honed their skills over years — if not decades — to be that good.
They have the language, the embodied knowledge, the stories, and the charisma to communicate what they know in any format. You feel their energy from across the airwaves. They can describe, explain, and demonstrate a technique for any style of learner.
If you’re looking for a course, do your homework and find out about the trainer’s background. How long have they been in the field? What’s their special sauce? Do they have lots of training under their belt or did they skip that part and go right to being a ‘pro?’ Have they taught anywhere else before (or worked with many people individually)?
Virtual learning can be a boon to the teacher and student alike. Just make sure — if you’re the trainer — you have the goods to deliver a quality product to your audience and — if you’re the student — you’re getting the best trainer possible.
There you have it. The Anatomy of an Online Course Launch all laid out for you to pore over. It’s a lot and you probably have lots of questions. Schedule a free 30-minute call with me if you’re contemplating the leap and I can answer all of them.
I also have many free tools so let me know what you need help with and I’ll send it over. Leave your request in the comments or see my email address in the Junk Drawer : )
