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CREATE ONLINE COURSES AND EARN MONEY

Creating and selling online courses can be quite lucrative. According to *Teachable, their average active instructor earns $5426 a month per each online course they offer, making online course creation the most profitable means of earning money online. Some of these instructors have built seven figure businesses with their online courses.

*Teachable is an LMS or Learning management system. It is an online platform for creating and teaching courses. Content creators can create online courses and upload them to Teachable. It is similar to an online classroom.

What to Teach

Use your own wisdom, knowledge and experience to create content for your online course and begin to earn an income with it. Don’t let the technical aspect keep you from pursuing this because it’s easy and affordable to offer courses with resources such as Teachable to host your course. There’s no reason why you can’t become an online instructor. It does require an investment of your time, but done correctly, it can be grown into a business with great passive income potential.

Getting Started

Setup a Business Blog/Website

You’ll need a place to send your people to transform them into buyers! Consider it your “storefront”. It’s also necessary to have blog/website so you can set up your Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and other social media accounts as a business. By setting these up as business accounts, you will have access to the analytics. These are important tools to help you learn about your audience and how to target them and meet their needs. If you don’t have one already, Click here to start your blog/website

Emails are important! Sign up with an email service provider and start collecting emails. I use ConvertKit. It allows you to have multiple lists and landing pages. You can customize your templates or just use the ones they provide. It also allows to you to set up multiple email sequences and you can include downloads, such as ebooks, printables and other lead magnets that will entice your audience to signup. 

Choose a Course Topic

Test your Ideas and don’t be afraid to “fail’… because this will just made your plan clearer!

Topics to consider are, but not limited to:

• How to set up a blog
• Mastering social media
• Cooking
• Drawing and Painting
• Crafts
• Gardening
• Room makeovers
• Music
• Personal development
• How you overcame a difficult time in your life
• You get the idea…You have ideas

Do Market Research

Know your targeted audience. Before you invest a lot of time developing a course, take time to find out who your students might be and whether they are willing to (or able to) purchase your course. Also, this information will give insight as to where to market your course.

Outline Your Course

Gather your information. Unlike a blog post, which just touches the surface of a topic, you need to go into depth and cover EVERYTHING important that is related to the topic. Look at it from a student’s perspective. What would you like to learn from a course you are paying for?

Next, start to organize the layout of the course. Break it down into modules, which are all the subtopics, and then into lessons, which provide the information. Also, writing an outline helps you stay focused and able to provide more relevant content for your students.

Choose the Best Style/Format to Present Your Courses 

This can be determined by how your students prefer to receive information.

Some formats include:

• video
• audio
• digital book form (such as an eBook)
• worksheets
• checklists
• webinars
• infographics

If you are using your computer screen to create your course, a good screen & webcam recorder such as Screencast-o-matic is recommended.

Create Your Lessons

This is where you start to tie it all together. It is a time consuming part of the process, but don’t hurry this along. It will reflect in the quality of your course and it could cost you in the long run if your course is full of errors or you have omitted valuable content. Edit and Proofread it a couple times. If you’re offering your course via video, watch it to make sure that it runs together smoothly and you haven’t left anything out. Check to make sure there are no broken links and that your worksheets, resources, etc, are in the right order.

You should also consider branding your course, using a nice color scheme (that you will use in future courses) and a logo.

How To Deliver Your Course

If you’re tech savvy, it is possible to sell right from your website. WordPress has plugins to enable this.

The other option is to upload your course to Teachable, an online platform used for creating and teaching courses. This is a powerful yet simple all-in-one plateform with over 7 million students.

Upload Your Course Online

Once you’ve chosen your method of delivery, follow the platforms instruction for uploading your course.

Promote Your Course 

In steps Social Media, your online advertising. You’re going to set up business accounts in the social media platforms that you choose so you that can track your analytics (this information is an important tool for tracking engagement of your followers and it isn’t available for private accounts). Using your knowledge of your targeted audience, you’ll know where they are hanging out, and this will determine where you will focus and develop your posting schedule.

Every business needs to advertise.

Create an advertising budget for Facebook and Instagram ads and Pinterest Promotions. It’s best to start with a small amount of money and just a few posts. Wait to see if the post is getting a lot of attention before you boost it. If it’s not, save your money to boost one that is.

Utilize Pinterest!!!

Many consider this to be another social media site. It is not. Instead, it a very powerful and effective search engine. It's best to design long, vertical, eye catching pins. Add a few pins for each item you are promoting.

The key to success on social media and Pinterest is consistency. To achieve this, use a tool, such as Tailwind. You can set up your posting schedule for a month in advance. Set it and forget it.

Update Your Course

Make sure your keep your content up to date and relevant. Outdated content can lead to bad reviews. Add more content if you feel it would improve the course and inform all your students of the updates.

Create Your Next Course

You can offer another course related to your previous topic and create a series, then offer each of these separately and/or bundle them together and offer a price break for the purchase of the bundle.

You can also branch out into new topics and create more courses and other series. Keep growing.

Start your online courses with Teachable. Click here.