Building an online community is a powerful way to connect with your audience, support your customers, grow your brand, and generate more recurring revenue in your business.

In fact, here at SPI, we’ve changed our entire business model to center around community, and it’s the best decision we’ve ever made. 

Starting a community from scratch, however, can feel overwhelming, especially if you don't know where to begin.

In this comprehensive guide, I'll walk you through the entire process of creating a successful online community, step by step. Along the way, I'll address common concerns and share practical tips and strategies to help you achieve your community-building goals. 

Let’s get to it!

Part 1: Understanding the Value of an Online Community

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of starting your online community, it's essential to understand the value that a well-run community can bring to your business or organization. An online community can:

1. Foster connection and engagement among your audience or customers
2. Establish your authority in your niche
3. Provide valuable insights and feedback to help you improve your products or services
4. Generate additional revenue through membership fees or other monetization methods (optional)

When you realize just how valuable a community can be for your business and brand, you’ll take the extra care necessary to make sure it’s awesome for your people and integrates well into your brand. 

Part 2: Laying the Foundation for an Online Community

Step 1: Determine Your “Why”

Your “why” is the driving force behind your community. It's essential to have a clear understanding of the purpose and value your community will provide, which will help guide your decisions as you build and grow your community.

Consider the following questions:

• What problem are you trying to solve for your audience?
• How will your community support your audience in achieving their goals?
• What unique perspective or expertise do you bring to the table?

Always remember: your earnings are a byproduct of how well you serve your audience. Start with your people in mind first and the revenue will become the reward.

If money is your primary driver, this isn’t going to work.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

To create a thriving community, you need to know who your ideal members are. Think about the characteristics that define your target audience, such as demographics, interests, and needs.

Also think about the struggles and challenges they’re going through, and ultimately what their goals are.

It’s these common things that unite a community together. People on the outside might not really “get it” or understand, but when you’re on the inside, you feel like you’ve found your people.

This kind of critical thinking will help you tailor your community's content, structure, and engagement strategies to attract and retain the right members.

Step 3: Define Your Community's Core Values

Your online community's core values serve as guiding principles for how members interact with one another and what they can expect from your community. Examples of core values might include mutual respect, continuous learning, or collaboration.

Our community’s core values are shared during the onboarding process, as soon as a person joins one of our communities. If you’re curious, or are seeking support for your online business journey, click here to see what we have to offer!

It’s important to clearly communicate your core values to your members: they help set the tone for your online community and encourage positive behavior.

Part 3: Choosing the Right Platform and Technology

When it comes to hosting your online community, there are numerous platforms and technologies to choose from. Some popular options include forums, social media groups, and custom-built platforms.

Facebook Groups used to be the top choice, but Groups (and Facebook in general) has been losing users for a while now.

I highly recommend using Circle, a modern, user-friendly platform designed specifically for building and managing online communities — one that you own and can control (instead of playing in someone else’s sandbox).

Circle offers a wide range of features, including customizable branding, member management tools, and seamless integration with popular tools like Zapier, WordPress, and Slack. It’s the community platform we use for SPI Pro and our All-Access Pass, too.

If you’d like to learn more about Circle, click here.* 

*(Please note that this is an affiliate link and we do earn a small commission if you choose to eventually get on a paid plan — all this at no extra cost to you, we just want to be up front about that.)

Part 4: Designing Your Online Community's Structure and Engagement Strategy

1. Determine the Type of Community

There are three main types of online communities: communities of interest, communities of learning, and communities of support. Each type serves a different purpose and requires a unique approach to engagement and content creation.

Consider your “why” and your target audience when choosing the type of community that's right for you.

2. Start Simple

It's crucial to begin with a simple, sustainable community structure that offers the right amount of value for your goals.

Avoid committing to long-term programming or overly complex schedules before you've launched your community. This is extremely important, especially at the start. Trust us, we know this from our own experience.

Instead of getting too complicated, focus on creating a basic framework that you can build on and adapt based on member feedback and engagement. 

What are the most valuable components of your community? If you could only pick a few, what would they be? Start there.

3. Establish an Engagement Strategy

An effective engagement strategy is key to the success of your online community. Consider offering a mix of asynchronous (e.g. discussion posts, resources) and live (e.g. webinars, group calls) content to cater to different member preferences and schedules. Experiment with various types of programming to see what works best for your community.

Again, while there are a thousand things you can do in your community to encourage engagement, start simple and lean. From there, you can build out complexities in a more controlled and tested manner.

4. Set Expectations and Boundaries

It's essential to set clear expectations for your community members and establish boundaries for your own time and availability. Communicate your community guidelines and moderation policies prominently to ensure a safe, welcoming environment for all members. This should be done as soon as a person joins — right in the onboarding process.

And of course, model the behavior you expect from your community to set the tone and encourage positive interactions.

Part 5: Pricing and Revenue for Online Communities

If you decide to monetize your online community (which we recommend because people value what they pay for) there are several pricing models and strategies to consider.

Some popular options include freemium-tiered memberships, one-time fees, and recurring subscriptions. When determining your pricing, take into account factors like your time investment, overhead costs, and the financial resources of your target audience.

Keep in mind that your pricing structure may evolve over time, and that's okay. Be prepared to make adjustments based on feedback, market trends, and the needs of your community.

Additionally, see what other communities offer and what their price points are. Finally, consider what the overall value of your community is to your members. When the community and your guidance help a person, what does that mean to them? How much time and/or money will they have saved? How much better off will they be because they belong to the group?

Part 6: Launching and Growing Your Online Community

1. Start with a Small, Engaged Group

When it comes to launching your community online, it's better to start with a small, engaged group of members who are genuinely interested in your community's purpose and value. This will help you create a strong foundation for growth and ensure that you can effectively manage member engagement as your community expands.

How many to be exact? Even starting with five motivated members can do wonders. It’ll already feel like those people belong together, and they can help influence what the membership and community becomes and likely grow it through their personal networks as well.

2. Seek Feedback and Iterate

As you launch and grow your community, it's essential to seek feedback from your members regularly. Use a variety of methods, such as one-on-one conversations, anonymous surveys, and open discussions to gather insights and ideas for improvement. Be prepared to iterate and adapt your community's structure, content, and engagement strategies based on the feedback you receive.

3. Embrace Organic Growth

While it's tempting to focus on rapid growth, it's crucial to remember that thriving communities can be small. We can’t stress this enough, especially when you’re likely to find communities with thousands of members when you are researching other spaces within your niche. 

You can be a small but powerful force!

Plus, a smaller community can often provide a more intimate, supportive environment that fosters deeper connections and engagement. Embrace organic growth and prioritize the quality of your community over the quantity of members.

4. Promote Your Online Community

To attract new members to your community, it's essential to promote it across various channels. 

Leverage your existing audience, clients, or network to generate interest, and consider offering incentives for early adopters, such as discounted membership fees or exclusive content. We advise against discounting so that you don’t “cheapen” your community just to get people in; rather, use exclusive bonuses, or language like “beta tester price” or “early bird pricing” to denote value in acting early.

Additionally, share testimonials, success stories, and other social proof to showcase the value of your online community and entice new members to join!

To Finish Off…

Starting an online community can be a rewarding endeavor that brings immense value to your business or organization. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you'll be well on your way to creating a thriving, engaged community that supports your audience's goals and drives growth for your brand.

Remember, building a successful online community takes time, effort, and adaptability. Don't be afraid to iterate, experiment, and learn from your members as you chart your community's path forward. With persistence and a clear vision, you can create a vibrant, thriving community that leaves a lasting impact and even changes lives.

If you want to learn more about the thriving entrepreneurial communities we’ve built at SPI, or if you’re looking for community support in your own entrepreneurial journey, click right here. We have several different memberships for entrepreneurs of all levels and business sizes, and we have an entire team dedicated to creating an exceptional experience. Hope to see you in there soon!

The post How to Start an Online Community That Thrives: A Comprehensive Guide appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

How would you like to make more course sales? And what if I told you that online course platform Teachable has a built-in tool that can make the process I’m about to teach you easy?

If you’re not a Teachable user, don’t click away! There's something here for you, too. This post comes to you in two parts: First, I’ll walk you through an important sales concept that applies to anyone selling products. Then I’ll show you how Teachable makes it easy to put that concept into action.

Table of Contents

• Segmentation for Sales Pages
  • What Is Segmentation?
  • How Does Segmentation Apply to Sales Pages?
• How to Make Segmented Sales Pages in Teachable
  • Beginner: Make a Copy and Tweak the Content
  • Intermediate: Make a Custom Page for Your Best Affiliate
  • Advanced: Make a Hidden Promotion Page for a Temporary Sale
• Want More Teachable Tutorials? We've Got ‘Em!

Segmentation for Sales Pages

To get started, I want to show you a feature inside of Teachable’s course builder. I’m logged into the admin panel and looking at the Pages section for our newest course, Heroic Online Courses.

Look at that—in the section where you build your sales page, you have the option to create more than one sales page for your course.

But why would you need more than one sales page for your course?

Because creating multiple sales pages for a product unlocks the power of segmentation.

What Is Segmentation?

If you’ve been around SPI for a while, you’ve likely heard us talk about email segmentation. It's a topic we’ve covered extensively. With email segmentation, you keep track of the things you know about your audience and adjust some of the email content you send based on that knowledge.

When you first get started with segmentation, that information is usually going to be a simple binary: either they have bought something from you or they haven’t; or they’ve downloaded a specific lead magnet from you or they haven’t.

As you progress, you might start to get more complicated. For example, we ask the question, “Do you have a podcast?” and offer three answers:

• Yes, I have a podcast [our “podcaster” group]
• No, but I want to start a podcast soon [our “interested” group]
• No, and I don’t want to start a podcast [our “not interested” group]

Once you start collecting information on your audience, you can start customizing the emails you send based on that information.

Here’s an example of what that looks like.

Before starting with segmentation, if we wanted to announce an upcoming webinar on the topic of starting a podcast, we would email that announcement to everyone—regardless of their interest in the topic. 

But now, we know to only send that announcement to the interested group (as well as to subscribers who have not answered the question yet). The webinar is too basic for the podcaster group and it’s not of interest (and probably bothersome) to the not interested group.

That’s segmentation.

How Does Segmentation Apply to Sales Pages?

As you get good at using email segmentation, you build up the habit of talking differently about your product to your different segments. You’re selling the same product, but you emphasize the features that are most relevant to each specific group.

For example, we just launched our Heroic Online Courses course. This course would be great for both:

• people who have never created a course, and 
• people who have created courses but found the process difficult.

We want to sell the same product, but we could use different email copy when we’re promoting the course to these two groups.

For the group that has never created a course, we may first need to spend a significant portion of the email convincing them why a course is a good business asset. Then we can talk about how our product makes the process easy.

For the group that has struggled with course creation, we’ll want to focus the email copy on how our product addresses those struggles and makes the process easier.

And at the bottom of both emails, we’ll link to a sales page. Wouldn’t it be great if the sales page the reader landed on matched the focus of the emails?

Enter custom sales pages.

When you can create multiple sales pages for a single product, you unlock the ability to speak directly to the needs your sub-audiences have.

Why bother? Because people are more likely to buy when a sales page speaks directly to their experiences and struggles. You’ll convert more sales than if you just sent everyone to a general sales page.

With segmentation, you can customize anything you want. You can swap out videos and testimonials to better fit your sub-audience. You can even throw in bonuses or adjust pricing, adding coupon codes or changing to a different pricing plan to give discounts to valued customers, or to people who are sitting on the fence.

Here’s a walkthrough of this explanation (first 5:50 of the video below):

Okay, but this sounds like a lot of work.

It all depends on your sales platform. Some, like Teachable, make it easy to create custom sales pages. Other platforms can be more restrictive and require you to get creative.

How to Make Segmented Sales Pages in Teachable

Now that we’ve covered the concept, I’ll walk you through three ways you can use custom sales pages in Teachable specifically. I’ll give you beginner, intermediate, and advanced examples, with screenshots and a video walkthrough for each one.

Beginner: Make a Copy and Tweak the Content

This process is incredibly simple, once you’ve created your primary sales page. First, we’ll make a copy of your primary sales page.

1. Log into your Teachable admin panel and find your course.
2. In the left-hand sidebar, click on Pages.
3. In the Sales section, find your primary sales page. Click on the […] button on the right.
4. Select Duplicate Page.

Teachable will make a copy of your existing sales page. Click the Edit button.

Now you have a second copy of your sales page that you can edit. Before you start tweaking the copy, ask yourself a few questions about this segment of your audience:

• How are they different from your audience as a whole? What makes them special?
• What specific needs or desires do they have, or what do they understand better than the larger audience?
• What specific goals are they hoping to accomplish by buying this product?
• Do you want to offer them a different pricing plan or include a coupon on the page?

Let’s go back to the example of selling Heroic Online Courses. Here are my answers for the segment of audience members who have already created an online course before:

• They have already taken action on the idea to create an online course before. They should be applauded for this! They understand that courses are a great way to serve the audience.
• They understand that creating a course can be tough, especially the process of staying on track. We may want to emphasize the third and fourth modules of the course, more than the first and second.
• They are looking to make the process easier than it was the first time they created a course.
• No special pricing plan for this occasion.

With this list in mind, now you can go through your sales page and start tweaking the copy to address your segment’s specific needs. Maybe you’ll swap out a few testimonials or adjust the headline copy.

In this video segment, I walk you through this entire process (from 5:50 to 11:26 in the video):

Here’s an example from the video (with a made-up statistic) of editing a sales page headline to speak to SPI Pro members:

Once you’re done, you’ll publish the page with a slightly edited URL. This page is not linked to the main page of your Teachable site the way your primary sales page is. It’s essentially a hidden secret page, and the only people who will find it are those you link directly to it.

Use the hidden page URL for emails sent to that segment. Or, if you made the page for a specific community within your audience (as I did in the video example), you can share that link in your community.

Intermediate: Make a Page for Your Best Affiliate

If you're using Teachable’s affiliate program, chances are you've got a couple of affiliates who are way outperforming the others. With affiliate programs, it always seems to be the case that a few people dedicate themselves—so let’s do something special for those affiliates.

Let’s make them a custom sales page of their own. Read below, or watch this clip from the video (11:27 to 15:33):

Initially, the steps are exactly the same as our beginner example. Make a copy of the page, and then start tweaking the copy and examples. In this case, you might want to have a short conversation with your affiliate to gather the following information:

• Do they use a name for their audience? For example, Pat often refers to the SPI audience as Team Flynn and uses the hashtag #TeamFlynnForTheWin.
• Can they offer a testimonial for the product? A video testimonial in particular is a great asset to have, because you can use the video directly, or write out quotes from inside the video.
• Is there a particular benefit to the course that they promote directly?

Once you have this feedback, you can start incorporating these elements into your sales page. Greet the visitors to the page using either the audience name or some variation of “Welcome, friends of [affiliate]!” “Welcome, [affiliate’s podcast] listeners!” Here’s an example for the fictional Mindycast podcast:

When you’re done editing, publish the page, and then we’ll move on to the one technical portion of this level: adding the affiliate link to the URL. Here’s what to do:

1. Now that the sales page has been published, click to open that page.
2. In a separate browser tab, go to the Users section of Teachable and click on Affiliates.
3. Search for and find that affiliate. Click to open their record.
4. In the left-hand sidebar, click on Affiliate.
5. At the top, you’ll see their affiliate code and their general affiliate link. Click to load the affiliate link.
6. This will take you to the main landing page for your affiliate.
7. Look at the URL, which should look something like this:
   https://courses.smartpassiveincome.com/?affcode=30425_obxkbt5j
   Copy everything from the ? onward: ?affcode=30425_obxkbt5j
8. Paste that at the end of your new sales page URL.

Your new sales page now includes affiliate tracking for your affiliate. Send them this new URL (including the affcode= on the end of the URL) and instruct them to use that for promoting your product. Any purchases made through this URL will get credited to this specific affiliate.

Advanced: Make a Hidden Promotion Page for a Temporary Sale

Custom pages can also be used for secret promotions that you share only with select audiences. I’m rating this as an advanced strategy because the way that I’ll show you how to do it requires an additional tool: Deadline Funnel. 

Deadline Funnel will allow you to set up the parameters around your sale, and then when the sale ends, automatically redirect traffic back to your main sales page. Essentially, it closes the sale for you automatically.

At SPI, we use this feature for two types of sales; holiday sales, where everyone has the same deadline; and evergreen sales, where each person gets a separate deadline.

For these purposes, I’ll show you how to set up a holiday sale. We use this most often to run a course promotion for one week following a webinar.

Read below, or watch this clip from the video (starting at 15:34 in the video):

With a holiday sale, during the promotional period, you send everyone to a custom sales page, such as:

https://courses.smartpassiveincome.com/p/123-affiliate-marketing-short

Note the “-short” added to the end of the URL. When the promotion ends, you set up Deadline Funnel to send all traffic back to your main sales page:

https://courses.smartpassiveincome.com/p/123-affiliate-marketing

After the sale has ended, anyone who tries to go directly to the promotional page gets set automatically to your main sales page.

In brief, this is the process:

1. Make a copy of your sales page.
2. Customize the page with your promotional pricing plan or add in a coupon code, and to speak about the expiring promotion.
3. Set up the Deadline Funnel promotion.
4. Add Deadline Funnel code to your sales page.

Here is a full walkthrough of the process, showing you how to configure Deadline Funnel:

Deadline Funnel also makes it easy to put countdown timers on your sales page, so that visitors to the page have a sense of urgency around the sale.

Now, you could do this without Deadline Funnel, and just unpublish your hidden custom page when the sale ends, but when you do that, you’re not able to control where visitors end up. Teachable’s default, if someone looks for a page that doesn’t exist, is to send them to your main landing page.

So for the example above, when the sale ends, instead of landing on this page:

https://courses.smartpassiveincome.com/p/123-affiliate-marketing

They’ll land on this page:

https://courses.smartpassiveincome.com/

Also, if you’re doing this without a tool like Deadline Funnel, you’ll need to manually unpublish the promotional page at the end of your Deadline. You absolutely can do this—for years, I woke up at 2 AM to close out our sales—but after a while (and a few times oversleeping), it gets tedious.

Want More Teachable Tutorials? We've Got ‘Em!

I hope this gives you inspiration for how you can use segmentation to increase your course sales! You’ll find more tutorials like this over on the Smart Passive Income Team YouTube channel.

And if you want to give Teachable a try to host your next online course, use our affiliate link to get a premium course creation bundle worth $866.

The post How to Use Segmentation to Improve Your Teachable Course Sales appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Online courses can help you make more money, save more time, and help more people. In 2017, I hit one million dollars in revenue from online courses alone! And I’ve made lots of money serving as an affiliate for other people's courses too.

Today, I want to share the keys—the three crucial psychological principles, plus the ten practical steps—that will help you do the same.

This post has been crafted to be the ultimate guide (it’s there in the title!) to creating and selling your own online course, so it’s a bit of a long one. But if you’re looking for a one-stop shop on what it takes to create and sell a great online course, stick around, because you’re in for a treat!

Why You Shouldn’t Create Your Own Online Course

Before we get into it, though, we need to talk a little bit about why online courses are great—as well as who they’re not for and why you shouldn’t do them. The truth is, courses really aren’t for all people and all businesses. I think the most important thing is to first realize: what are the problems and the pains and the needs of your audience? And then ask yourself, “Does it make sense for me to build an online course, and to sell it in order to help them through those problems?”

I hesitated for so long to build online courses because I was too afraid to sell to my audience. Here’s the big realization: you can sell and serve at the same time. The other part of this is, I realized that by creating courses for people who just wanted to go deeper with me, I wasn’t taking anything away from that segment of my audience who is more keen to take advantage of my free and lower-cost material.

That realization was huge for me. It pushed me past my fear of selling my online courses to other people, which was a huge relief, and allowed me to create better courses to better help and serve my audience. Now I see that I’m able to serve even more people, especially those who are willing to invest in themselves to achieve their goals. And for each course I create, my newfound confidence shows through in my sales pages, emails, and in the course material itself.

Okay! Now that’s out of the way, let’s cover the three psychological principles behind why people buy online courses. These are the things you have to know about the psychology that motivates people’s purchase decisions, before you try to sell any online course of your own.

The 3 Must-Know Principles of Selling Online Courses

So, you want to learn how to sell online courses? Maybe they're your own courses or you're an affiliate for somebody else's courses. I'm really excited for you, because there's an incredible amount of opportunity with online courses!

Over the years of building and selling my own courses, as well as promoting other people’s courses, I've learned a ton by experimenting with different ways to promote online courses. There are lots of tactics to choose from when it comes to promoting an online course, from emails to funnels to Facebook ads to podcasts, blogging, videos, and more—but the tactics don't matter unless you get three things right. These are the three psychological principles you need to bake into everything you do, or you're not going to be selling anything.

And they are . . .

#1: Sell Outcomes, Not Courses

People don't want to buy online courses. Wait, what? It's true, though. Nobody wakes up and says “You know, I think I'm gonna buy an online course today.” What people really want are the outcomes and the results that an online course can potentially give them. And so, the secret to selling anything, is to convey the results, the outcome, the way someone’s life will be different after taking your course. If those outcomes are not clear, then your work promoting that course is going to be much harder.

For your sales page, don’t focus on the features of the course, but the outcome. For example, with my Power-Up Podcasting course, I promise students they will have a podcast up and running with subscribed listeners on the day they publish their podcast. It’s a very specific and achievable outcome.

#2: Trust and Proof Are Key

Selling an online course is not easy. When it comes to selling online courses, trust and proof are going to be your best friends. Let's take in contrast, for example, something like a software application that does a specific job in a very convenient way. If a potential customer has the problem that software can solve, that customer will be able to easily imagine using that software to get the result they’re looking for right out of the box. But with online courses, which is usually information, you can't really demonstrate that and the results aren't clear and people aren't necessarily going to get results the moment they buy. They have to actually take action to see the results.

Now, when you're selling an online course, you need to build trust before selling your course. You can do it over a long period of time, through content marketing, for example. You can also do it in a shorter period of time, perhaps through ads or webinars. Whichever option you choose, the proof is really important. You need to demonstrate real-life evidence that this course actually works, and the best way to do that is typically by sharing testimonials and success stories of previous students who’ve taken the course.

A special note for establishing trust with affiliate courses: The most important thing to do is to convince your audience that the person creating the course is the right person to teach them that material, and that your audience can trust them. There are a few ways I like to do that it. Most of the time, I promote courses that I've used myself, so I can talk about my own experience and what I loved about it. I’ve also interviewed the founders or creators of courses on my podcast, which is a great relationship-building tool. And again, proof and testimonials from other people too, specifically those in your audience, is valuable here.

#3: It’s Not About the Information

When it comes to most online courses out there, the information in those courses can be already found elsewhere on the internet. So why would people ever buy these courses? I learned this important lesson back in 2008 when I sold my first online product, which was an ebook study guide to help people pass the LEED exam, a specific exam in the architecture space. That e-book was comprised of 95 percent of the same material that could be found for free on my blog. In fact, right before I sold that product, I remember being scared to death thinking that every person who bought it would ask for a refund and complain about that very fact. Not one did. Not one person out of tens of thousands ever complained about it.

So does this mean people are just too lazy to complain and ask for a refund? Not at all. Trust me: if people are unhappy with their purchase, they're going to be quick to ask you for a refund. A big reason people buy online courses is because they’re convenient. You're saving people time by having all that information they need, and only the information they need, collected and compressed in one place for them to take action and get results.

Also, people often want their hand held, and they want accountability through the process, whether it's through things like weekly office hours, or just structurally through the framework of the course. When a purchase is made and dollars are spent, it's that person saying, “Yes, I want to do this. I've put skin in the game, and I'm going to make it happen.” And it’s your responsibility, as a course creator or as the person who's promoting another person's course, to make sure that they achieve that result.

The 10 Steps to Build an Amazing Online Course

Now that we’ve covered the psychology, let’s get into the nuts and bolts of creating your course! Here are the ten steps you need to follow to create an online course from scratch that people will love.

Step #1: Define the Transformation

In the beginning, you might not know exactly what to do. The best thing you can do is start to have conversations with your audience, to understand exactly what they’re going through and where they could use your help. This will help you understand what you can potentially create a course about.

The key here is to know and define the transformation that your customers are going to experience when they take your course. What will your course help them achieve? Once you know that, you’ll have your selling point. You can draw a clear picture in the mind of the customer of, “Wow, if I get this, then I get that.”

For example, here’s the transformation I promise people when they take my 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing course. I promise they will earn their first dollars through affiliate marketing, which is generating an income and a commission by selling and recommending other people’s products rather than products of your own. The people who take the course will see a direct impact in their earnings and income as a result of promoting specific products in specific ways. If you do the work, you follow directions, you’re going to earn your first dollars through affiliate marketing. If it does not do that, the course will have failed.

Whatever the course, it doesn’t matter how great the information is; if it doesn’t provide that transformation, then what is the point and why would people buy it? If you’re having a hard time defining the transformation for yourself, well then, there’s a problem, because guess what? Your customers are having a hard time understanding it too. I think of Ramit Sethi’s courses, such as Earn Your First Thousand Dollars, or Land Your Dream Job. Those are very clear promises about what will happen if you follow the course correctly—and they’re baked right into the name.

Step #2: Brainstorm the Content

We started at a higher level, identifying our audience’s pains and problems and figuring out the transformation we want to help them achieve. Now we have to figure out the steps they need to take to get to that transformation. Once you’ve defined the transformation your course will provide, you can start to define the pieces that lead to that transformation. What stories do you need to tell? What facts and case studies do you need to share? What exercises does the student need to do to get on the path toward that transformation?

To do that—to reverse-engineer that transformation and figure out exactly what needs to happen for them to achieve that transformation—we first have to do some brainstorming.

You may have some ideas in your head about what should go into your course, but unless you do this brainstorming stage the right way, you’re either going to miss a lot of things, or you’re going to go out of order. The way I would recommend doing this is with my favorite tool in the world: Post-it notes. Post-it notes are my favorite tool for brainstorming, because they’re great for getting what’s in your brain out onto paper, and they’re small (so you can only include one idea per note).

Our brains do a great job of coming up with new ideas, but a terrible job at organizing and prioritizing them. Writing down those ideas on Post-it notes lets you bring them out into the world, where you can see them and start to organize them. Just remember, in this step, you’re basically “throwing up” the contents of your brain onto these notes—you’re not organizing yet!

Cool things happen when you are in that kind of creative mindset—you can just let your creative brain get into the flow. I like to structure my brainstorming according to what I call the “triple 10” exercise. In this exercise, you spend ten minutes brainstorming as much as you can, then you rest for ten minutes. Then after that rest period, you come back to where you were, and brainstorm for another ten minutes.

I’ve found that the final ten minutes in that total thirty minutes is often when the best ideas come out. Why’s this? What happens during that break? Yes, you are resting, but your brain is also absorbing and processing everything it’s just done. When you come back from that break, your brain has just processed it in a way that you couldn’t have if you hadn’t taken the break.

So Step 2 is to brainstorm, using Post-it notes, by letting anything in your brain come out then posting those ideas onto your table or wall. Just let it happen.

Step #3: Organize Your Thoughts

Now, you need to take all those Post-it notes and put them into some kind of order. The key in this next step is to organize the notes into different clusters or hierarchies related to your core topic.

Eventually, you might find that these clusters essentially become modules in your course, and each of these Post-it notes will become your lessons. That’s the magic of this process. This process also makes it easy to find the right order of all the pieces. You can ask, “Would it make sense to put this before that, in the eyes of my customer?” That’s the beauty of Post-it notes again: you can simply move them around on the desk or whiteboard to reorder things.

As you go through this process, you’re going to have a few Post-it notes that will make you say, “Why did I even write that?” Just throw them out. You’re also going to find where there might be some holes, some things missing. In that case, just create more Post-it notes to cover those missing topics and add them to the appropriate clusters.

Step #4: Make the Outline

Now you’ve gone through the brainstorming and organization phases, you can create an outline for your course. The work is mostly done; you just need to review the re-ordered Post-it notes and “extract” the details of how you’ve organized them to create your outline.

The key here is what you do with that outline. And what’s that? You’re go to share it with others to get their feedback. Perhaps you have superfans, people in your audience who would benefit and feel great with you trusting them with this, and could provide some amazing feedback. Maybe it’s people in your mastermind group, or other colleagues or friends who might be looking for the kind of transformation you’re offering with your course. Whoever it is, share your outline with them and say something like, “Hey guys, here’s the tentative outline for this course that’s going to help you [transformation]. Look over it, and let me know what you think. Does it make sense? What else would you include? What would you remove?”

Now, you’re going to get feedback, and some of it you might not want to hear. Your team might suggest cutting things you really like. That’s a hard thing to do. This is what in the book writing space is called “killing your darlings.” And you have to be willing to do the same thing with your courses. You’re going to have to kill the lessons that aren’t necessary in order for that transformation to happen.

So it’s super important to ask your reviewers, “What lessons in here are not necessary to achieve this goal?” That allows you to make sure you only have what you need in your course. Doing the sometimes painful work of identifying and cutting unnecessary material helps in several ways. It’ll save you valuable production time, and it’ll help the course participants by reducing the amount of unnecessary fluff they have to wade through in the course.

Step #5: Pre-Sell the Course

You have an outline, and you’ve collected feedback to validate the concept and the outline. Now, you’re going to pre-sell this bad boy to a limited number of people in your audience, if you have one already. If you don’t, it’s going to be a little bit harder, but you can still do things like run ads for webinars to promote your course.

I talk about validation a lot in my book Will It Fly? (link leads to Amazon). [Full disclosure: I receive affiliate revenue if you purchase through the Amazon link.] If you want an in-depth treatment of validation, check out the book. But today I’m going to keep it higher-level, so you know the steps. If you have an audience already, you can simply let them know, “Hey, I’m coming out with this course. I haven’t made it yet, but I want to share a little bit about the course and how it might be helpful for you.”

Then you can go on to pre-sell it, explaining, “I haven’t made this yet, but I’m going to give access to twenty people who are willing to work with me as I build this course, so I can make sure it meets your needs exactly. I’m also going to give you some extra time with me to help you through this content. If we get twenty people, I’m going to create it. If not, don’t worry. I’ll refund your money.”

Pre-selling in this way lets you validate what you’re trying to do with your course. If people are willing to buy at this early stage, this information helps solidify that you are going in the right direction. It allows your audience and your potential customers to vote with their dollars that it’s something they want, and something you need to do.

What do you need to do to pre-sell? A number of people I’ve interviewed on the podcast have simply pre-sold their courses by saying, “Hey, if this is something you want, shoot this much money over to my PayPal, and I’ll put you in a Facebook group to communicate next steps.” That’s one way to do it. You don’t even need a landing page or anything like that.

Step #6: Communicate

Step 6 builds on what we just talked about in the pre-selling step. The last thing you want to do when you sell anything is to have a person buy it and then not know what happens next. No matter what, always make sure you have a great onboarding process. You want to make sure your customers know you didn’t just take their money and leave.

So, once you pre-sell the course, you have to make sure that you keep your customers up-to-date. Communication is crucial. For instance, if you’ve promised entry to a Facebook group to communicate with people as you are building the course, then set that up.

With 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing, because I have a team and a lot of resources in place, we created a landing page with a video that explained the transformation, what people are going to get, the fact that it was a beta launch, that it was going to be pre-sold, and that there was nothing to get access to yet. We had a button on there that connected to a shopping cart through Teachable, where the course was hosted. Once they got access to the course, they saw one lesson in there, a welcome video thanking them for being in the course and telling them what would happen next.

Follow through, stay in touch, and most importantly, be honest. Simple, but crucial.

Step #7: Build the Course

Finally, we’re on to product creation! You’ve validated the course through pre-selling. Hopefully you still have your Post-it notes, because they’re going to be your guides for the next step here. This stage—production—is a difficult one, because it takes the most work.

My first recommendation is to plan ahead in terms of how and when you’re going to create your course content. Whether you decide to use video, audio, text, or a combination to create the content for your course, you need to plan what needs to be created, and when. Then, make sure to really honor that time.

Even if it’s just one lesson per day because you’re strapped for time, really honor that time you’re blocking out to create those course videos and lessons.

The best tip I can offer you related to the production of these lessons is to take things one lesson at a time, and plan out how many you’re going to record or create in a given time period. Depending on the length of your course, the amount of time to produce all the course material could range significantly. We recorded the videos for 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing over the course of two days that we blocked out just for creating the course. It was great to batch-process it that way, because I’d wake up each day and know exactly what that day would be about.

Now, let’s talk production. Quality-wise, video is generally the form of media for most of your course material. But if video is out of your budget, you can create audio versions of the lessons, or simply written ones. In terms of other things that can go into your lessons, you may want to add worksheets to certain lessons to help reinforce the material. Another thing I like to do in all of my courses is have a list of action items at the end of each video the participant should complete before moving on to the next one.

Next, you should also consider what needs to go into the creation of the beta version of your course—the one you share with the early adopters, the ones you pre-sold the course to—compared to the final version that most people will be experiencing. Thankfully, you can get away with a “lighter” version of your course for the beta, which you can then enhance later on to create the final version.

There are a few ways you can get away with going “lighter” in the beta, particularly when it comes to video. If you’re going to create videos, you don’t need the highest production values in the beta. When I create final versions of videos for my courses, I do them in my video studio with a high-end camera. But for the beta versions, I typically record in my home office, just using a basic DSLR camera. You can even use a video camera from your phone, as long as the audio quality is good. You could also use a portable recorder such as a Zoom H4n or a Zoom H6 to record audio separately could benefit you. You could also run a wired mic to your phone using a Rode smartLav or something like that.

In the beta, I also don’t include a lot of elements in the videos other than just me talking and what’s on my Screenflow on the computer. In the final version, though, I might add things to the videos like layovers (text that pops up when you say certain things) and B-roll (camera footage that demonstrates things you’re talking about). But these things take time and effort to create, so it doesn’t make sense to create them until you have all the inputs and feedback you need to make them perfect. So, in the beta, as long as the videos and the lessons do what they need to do to help a person achieve that transformation, then you’ll be okay.

Finally, although Step 7 is all about content creation for your course, you also want to make sure during this whole time that you’re keeping your pre-paid students updated. You can share tidbits and little hints of the course content. You can even give them a little “homework” to help them prepare for the first lesson. I actually did that for 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing, and a lot of the students appreciated being able to get a head start on the course.

Step #8: Collect Feedback

Once the course is up and running, you want to have a way to collect feedback from your students to improve the course. Email and surveys are two good ways to do this you wanted to do that, but honestly, the best feedback has come from one-on-one conversations and group conversations, like those that take place during group office hours.

It’s important to collect both positive and constructive feedback. This lets you identify what’s working well, what’s not so great and needs to be fixed, and what could be added to make things even better. Something I’ve gotten better with over time, thanks to student feedback. is not including too much information in my courses. I got a lot of great feedback from my students saying, “You know what? I didn’t feel like I needed this to help me get there.”

Your students are the perfect ones to provide this feedback, because they are your target audience, so listen to them more than anybody. They are the ones who need you to make this great, but your audience out there who wants this course, you’re going to get that greatness coming from the voices of your current students. Collect that feedback.

In addition, some of the best feedback I’ve gotten is simply from direct messages on Facebook. Sometimes I’ll just direct message somebody and say, “Hey, I saw that comment you made on Facebook earlier, and I just want to make sure you’re good. What else could I do to improve your experience with this course?” A lot of great feedback can come from a simple action like that.

Finally, as you’re collecting feedback, be sure to ask for testimonials too, because those are going to come in handy in the next step. The best way to collect testimonials, in my experience, is to just approach someone individually and say, “Hey, if you enjoyed this, and you’ve gotten some great results from it, I would love it so much if you’d take a few moments to leave me a testimonial.”

The more testimonials you can get, the better. The more diverse those groups of people who are leaving testimonials, the better, because they’re going to be able to help relate to more people. And people are not likely to give you testimonials out of the blue. Some may, but most people will only give you testimonials if you ask, and it is 100 percent okay to do that.

Step #9: Refine the Course

This one might seem obvious, but once you’ve collected all that great feedback, the next step is to refine the course. Redo the videos that need to be redone. Add worksheets where they’d be helpful. Remove anything that need to be removed. Add text, animations, and B-roll to your videos to spice them up. Refine the course and make it great so that when you go public with it, it’s going to rock.

This step also that includes refining the sales page. You’ve already gone through one round of sales, and you’ve likely helped some of your early students achieve those transformations. Hopefully you’ve also collected some great testimonials by now, and you can use them to adjust the messaging on the sales page. You can even include a new section with some of the best testimonials. Remember what we talked about in the first part of this post? When it comes to selling an online course, trust and proof are key, and testimonials are a great way to demonstrate that proof and cement that trust.

Step #10: Be Confident

The tenth and final step is a small one, but a very important one. It’s a tiny phrase you’ll take with you moving forward, and it’s a big, big deal. What’s that phrase? It’s this: be confident. Through this whole process, you’ve created a lot. You’ve brainstormed and organized and outlined. You’ve done a ton of research. You’ve collected feedback. You’ve created a huge amount of content. You’ve done a lot of work to make sure that this course is something that can truly help people, that it’s a great solution for the problem you’re trying to help them solve, and that it can help them achieve the transformation you’ve identified.

That transformation you promised them is now your responsibility, and you need to have the confidence that you can deliver that transformation for them. If you had a cure for a disease, wouldn’t you want to make sure that you get it in front of as many people who have that disease as possible? Obviously, you haven’t created a cure for a disease, but you’ve still come up with a way to solve a specific problem through your course. So you should approach it in the same way, in terms of your certainty that it can help, your drive to make sure that as many people as possible can find it, and your confidence in the messaging you use to sell it.

And guess what? Some people are not going to be a good fit, or be ready for your course. And that’s great. When you can confidently say, “This is what my course will do for you,” you make it easier to weed out those who won’t benefit from it. You won’t be wasting anyone’s time, or upset anyone when they realize they’re getting something different from what they initially thought.

But when you mess around with the messaging, and try to please everybody, the result is that nobody will understand if the course for them. They either won’t buy because they’re confused, or they’ll buy and say, “This is not what I signed up for.” You have to make it crystal clear for them, and that requires confidence in what you have to offer.

So go out there, and be confident. Make some sales, and then serve. Remember, you can sell and serve at the same time!

Now, go forth and create some amazing courses!

The post How to Create and Sell an Online Course: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Last year, when I was setting goals for 2017, I knew that a primary strategy for my business was going to be creating and launching effective and in-depth online courses for the SPI audience. One of the motivating factors for this was to significantly transform the way I generate income.

You see, for the past eight or so years of running Smart Passive Income, I’ve generated the majority of my income from affiliate marketing. I wanted to change that in 2017. I needed to add some nuance and diversity into my income portfolio. I needed to add different, and significant, pockets of value.

Now, I still think affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to generate income, and every business owner who has an audience online should participate in affiliate marketing. I mean, it’s exactly why I created my latest online course, an affiliate marketing course, at 123AffiliateMarketing.com.

But there should be a balance. I knew I couldn’t rely on affiliate marketing alone. If you build your business entirely from recommending the products or services of others, you’re putting your business at risk. At any moment, the relationships you have with those product owners and services owners can go away. I’ve had that happen before. It wasn’t fun.

By creating my own products (online courses in particular), I can better serve my audience because I have full control over the product; I can better craft the product for my target audience. It’s a better experience with the Smart Passive Income brand as a whole. It allows me to keep the SPI community within my ecosystem, and continue to foster that relationships by sharing new products I think they can benefit from.

So, that’s when it hit me. After all of these thought experiments in my 2017 goal planning, I decided that I was going to break through my fear and just create it.

I was going to create online courses.

Giving my audience opportunity

Here’s the thing: Change is hard.

Even though I knew I needed to diversify and create my own products, it took time to let that thought settle in. I was making “enough” money after all, through affiliate marketing. Why would I need to change?!

That’s a rhetorical question.

Adding to my hesitation to create online courses (or any product) was the fear that I’d be doing it for the wrong reasons, and that’s how my audience would see it too. I didn’t want to just make something in order to make more money. That’s never the way to go, and that’s not who I am.

I heard from a number of smart people who told me I was actually letting my audience down by not creating online courses. One person, in particular, told me that they’d heard me talk about an online course I took once that had had a deep impact on me and my business. And so, by not creating online courses for my audience, I wasn’t paying it forward. I wasn’t giving my audience the same opportunity to discover that deep impact for themselves.

So, in October 2016, I beta launched my first online course, Smart From Scratch. We had over 200 students in the beta launch, and I was able to get feedback and adjust the course for the public launch in March, 2017.

From there, I created more courses, including Power-Up Podcasting, Build Your Own Brand, and 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing.

Here’s a brief timeline:

1. October 2016: Beta launch of Smart From Scratch
2. March 2017: Public launch of Smart From Scratch
3. March 2017: Beta Launch of Power-Up Podcasting
   I beta tested this in front of a live audience at Chalene Johnson's Marketing Impact Academy. If you want to take a deeper dive, I spoke about it at length with Chalene on the SPI Podcast, Session 274.
4. June 2017: Public Launch of Power-Up Podcasting
5. September 2017: Public Launch #2 of Power-Up Podcasting
6. October 2017: Public Launch of Build Your Own Brand
7. November 2017: Cyber-Week Relaunch of Smart From Scratch (I relaunched Smart From Scratch with a discounted price starting on Cyber Monday for the week.)
8. November 2017: Pre-sales of 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing.

January 2018 and beyond

On January 2, 2018, 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing will go live for the limited beta group of students who took advantage of a small presale that I ran on Cyber Monday in November. We’ll walk through the course together, and the students will provide feedback along the way like previous beta releases.

That’s four online courses created and announced in 2017. When I initially told my team and a few other people this plan, they thought I was maybe biting off more than I could chew. And they’re right; four courses in a year is kind of bonkers.

Not only is it just a ton of effort to put out four in-depth courses, there’s also the risk that you’d be overloading your email list. A number of people expressed that concern when I told them I was going to create four courses. I knew I had the team in place to make it happen. And I told them, as I am telling you now, that I had planned for this scenario.

For a few years, I’ve been collecting specific data from my audience, and separating my list into specific interests, and what levels they are at in their business. So, for example, I knew going into it that specific people on my list wouldn’t see my emails about Power-Up Podcasting because they had been tagged as not interested in podcasts. Those who already had a business or something up and running would never see the promotions for Smart From Scratch, for instance—or at least that was the idea.

Did it all happen the way I wanted it to? Well, keep reading this post because I'm going to outline what went well, what could have been improved, and what I plan to do moving forward.

The results. The good. The not so good.

My plan was to launch four online courses in 2017. Did it all go according to plan? How well did it succeed? To start, I just want to say that overall it went extremely well.

Our goal for the year was to generate about $400,000 in sales from online courses, which would be a solid increase in my diversification of earnings related to what it was the previous year with affiliate marketing. Again, my goal was to add more balance to where my income was coming from.

Did we meet our goal of $400,000?

Well, there are still sales coming in for some of these courses because I'm testing certain things and some of them are ongoing. But the number we’re at, as I am writing this is . . .

. . . Over $900,000 in course sales for 2017!

This blows my mind! But it also shows you that my audience has been hungry for this. There was a need, and I was able to meet that need. In addition to the value created for the students of the courses, we’ve created quality assets and information that will generate income for SPI and my businesses for years to come.

That’s a good feeling.

(Looking ahead, there will be more courses created, but I don’t plan on creating four courses in 2018. Phew!)

The good

In the Year of Online Courses, here are some of the things that went well.

Crash course in . . . course building

Obviously the strategizing, building, and launching of the courses was a big win. The team and I are also enjoying a good rhythm as we provide updates and upgrades to the courses. Caleb, my videographer from DIY Video Guy, and I are also in a good rhythm, efficiently and strategically setting recording dates for any video assets that are needed for the courses. We had a crash course, so to speak, in launching courses. And I think we’ve done an amazing job, from creating all of the assets to building the course curriculum to setting up the landing pages. We did it efficiently and with quality in mind.

For example, Power-Up Podcasting was sold on stage to 165 people out of 700 in the room. That’s a high percentage for basically pitching an online course to a crowd. I was incredibly thankful for that opportunity (thank you, Chalene!).

From the time that was announced, my team and I had about two weeks to put the course together before the new students arrived. When we were building Smart From Scratch, the first online course, we learned a lot about what it takes to do it right. We applied what we learned to create Power-Up Podcasting and it became a much more efficient process, from creating outlines to filming videos to getting the course into Teachable (Teachable has been an incredible partner in our success; thanks, Teachable!). [Full Disclosure: I’m a compensated advisor and an affiliate for Teachable.]

In the end, we were able to create what I feel is the best podcasting course out there that walks people through the entire podcasting process, step by step. Not only that, it helps them market their podcast too! The results I’m seeing from students is amazing. I’m so proud!

Promoting through email

Another thing that went well are the email promotions for each of these courses. As I mentioned before, I’ve spent a lot of time and energy segmenting my email list, doing my best to share the content people actually want to see—based on interests and where they’re at in their entrepreneurial journey. Having those assurances in place was comforting, knowing that I’d be sending out emails throughout the year promoting and selling the courses.

Plus, the more positive results and testimonials I heard from students of the courses, I felt validated and more comfortable in promoting the course through email. It made me want to get the course into even more hands, help even more people launch a podcast or business.

Nitty gritty numbers

More good things! The numbers. I'm very proud of the fact that for those who have taken action in my courses, many of them have seen great results. From what I understand about the online course completion rates industry wide, the completion rates for my courses are trending a little bit higher.

One of the worries that people have in creating online courses these days is the lack of people who actually complete the courses. When we launched Smart From Scratch, our first course of 2017, we learned that students needed a little bit more hand holding through the process. So we adjusted, and helped them through it by sending out an email when they completed a lesson that shared tips and frequently asked questions.

In doing this, we’re providing the solutions they need before they even ask, which makes the process for them (and us) much more efficient

An amazing community

It warms my heart to see how helpful and supportive the community of students has been for each other as they work their way through the courses.

For Power-Up Podcasting and Smart From Scratch, we created private Facebook groups for the students to share and engage with each other. I pop in here and there to provide updates, answer any questions, and have my office hours. Each time I do, I’m always so happy to see how much of the time I am not even needed—the students are answering each other’s questions, inspiring each other, getting value from each other. It’s awesome!

Office hours

Even though the students have been amazingly self-sufficient at times, the regular office hours I hold have been of great help. What I love about that is it helps control the emails and questions that are coming in. It allows questions to come in, but on my time, and the students seem to like having direct access to me to answer more specific questions.

When I was taking courses back in the day, having that little bit of attention from the course creator to get a question answered here or there was very integral in pushing me over those hurdles. Thankfully, that’s been true for my students too.

Typically I'll have anywhere between six and eight sets of office hours per course launch. And a number of students have said that they’re getting more value from the office hours alone than the courses they’ve taken from other course creators—where, in a lot of cases, there aren’t any office hours. I think people love knowing that I'm there for them and they could see me and talk to me. And this won’t change as I continue to create courses for my students.

Testimonials

Collecting testimonials has been a joyful and successful process. Whenever I ask for them, students have been more than happy to share their thoughts about the courses. I think one of the things I know I can improve on, is simply asking for more. But I definitely have plenty in hand for the courses that I currently offer, which is a great way to help convince those who maybe are on the fence about signing up.

The not so good

In the Year of Online Courses, what could we have done better?

Facebook ads

Mid-year, I started trying out Facebook Ads to promote the courses. I utilized a separate team to help set those up. So far, it’s just been so-so.

To be honest, I don't know much about Facebook Ads, and by utilizing a different team, you never know exactly what to expect. I'm not sure if I should spend more time learning about Facebook Ads before hiring a team or what. I just don’t know yet. What I do know is that I’m learning as I go, and the next time we do this, it will be better—and so on and so forth!

The bonus: We’re seeing a profit. We've spent probably around $30,000 on Facebook Ads and have seen 3-4x profit as a result of just those ads alone. As my Facebook Ads team tells me, because the promotions are only open for a short period of time, it's difficult to hone in on the most effective copy and specific offer to the right audiences in that short period of time.

Ideally you want these things to be ongoing and continually tweaked to decrease the number of dollars you're paying per lead and potentially increase the number of conversions. Going forward, we’ll continue to explore Facebook Ads, and I’ll learn more about Facebook Ads so I can share that knowledge with you later!

Different ways to promote

For 2018, I’d like to explore different ways to promote my courses. I think there was a lack of attention in promotion, aside from email (and the small amount in Facebook Ads). I think that limited the number of sales.

One area that could be improved is to utilize the content that I’m already producing (podcast, blog, video) to cross-promote the courses; to create a better cross-pollination among all of the content I’m creating. It’s a good lesson for any content creators out there. If you are creating value on other platforms, make sure those platforms are connecting in some way, promoting each other in some way.

There was one instance where it did work well though. I had a Smart Passive Income Podcast episode where I interviewed three students from Power-Up Podcasting. They talked about their experience as new podcasters and about their experience with the course. After that episode came out, I saw a significant bump in sales that week. I also received a bunch of messages from people who told me specifically that the episode inspired them to sign up for Power-Up Podcasting.

Next time, I plan to try more of that type of promotion.

Course pricing

Pricing is another thing that's hard to figure out. I feel like I did an okay job pricing the courses, but there’s always room for tinkering and testing.

At $197 for a beginner course, it’s not an insignificant amount, so it feels like an investment, especially for beginners. It’s also high enough to potentially weed out the people who are just looking for a magic button.

For some of the higher premium courses, like $697 for Power-Up Podcasting, it seems like that’s a solid price point, as I’ve heard from a number of students who have taken the course, have seen great results, and have told me that I could probably charge double. For now, I'm quite happy with the $697 number, especially as it compares to some of the other courses and offerings that are available in that space right now.

For 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing, we went with $497 for the limited Cyber Week run. Although that course has not yet been distributed to those who purchased the presale, I know that people who take action will likely get that money back in a relatively short period of time if they implement what I’ll be teaching within the course.

The thing that I know I could improve on is helping people understand why those are the price points before they buy. This involves price juxtaposition and really being confident in sharing those price points on the sales page. If I want to adjust the price, I need to have clear reasons, and explain those reasons well. For Smart From Scratch, I did actually increase the price point from $197 to $247, due to feedback from the students who thought we were underselling the course, and because I wanted to offer a higher perceived value of everything that was offered.

Too much customization

At the beginning of the year, we attempted to customize the sales page on Teachable a little bit too much. That really didn’t work out in our favor. We tried to make the sales page look like what you’d find on SmartPassiveIncome.com, with the same stylings and fonts. Through that process, we ended up breaking a number of things that were really important.

For example, one of the things in Teachable that people loved is the fact that it tracks your progress. Every time you complete a lesson, it shows that you've increased in progress. But, because of our sales page tinkerings, that function was broken for the first three launches, including the beta launch.

So we decided to scrap everything and revert back to the standard Teachable code base, and take advantage of their built-in customization options. It’s a bit more limited but it's working out much better. I think we got a little bit too ambitious and wasted a lot of time on things that actually didn't really matter in the beginning. Maybe down the road, more customization can be done, but to start it’s best to stick with the foundational elements.

And, if you’re ever going to create a course, there’s no better platform than Teachable. It works perfectly, their team is amazing, and, if you have multiple courses, you just need one login for all of them! I love being an advisor for Teachable.

If you’d like to create your own online course, go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/teachable.

[Full Disclosure: I’m a compensated advisor and an affiliate for Teachable.]

Online courses in 2018

In 2018, one of my goals is to work on the funnels, and better integrate course content with other content I’m creating, especially the videos I’m creating more of on YouTube. Video is a big part of the SPI strategy moving forward, so please be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/smartpassiveincome.

I love the community aspect of the courses, and will continue to emphasize that. There have been so many amazing students who’ve completed a course, and have stuck around in the community as alumni to help, encourage, and inspire the students that came after. It’s so cool to see! I didn’t expect that, and I am so grateful for it. So, I want to continue to focus on that and encourage that. One way I’ve done that is by sharing custom-made pins created for that specific course with the students.

A little token of appreciation, but those types of gestures can go a long way toward keeping student morale up, encouraging, and inspiring them to finish the course.

Then, finally, one thing that we tested last year was a live workshop. I actually had fifteen people pay extra to come to San Diego for some in-person podcast training for two days in my hometown. It was a remarkable experience!

And, guess what? We’ll be launching a new Power-Up Podcasting live workshop in May 2018!

Power-Up Podcasting Workshop

Yes, that’s right . . . in May 2018, I am holding my second ever live workshop. Here are a few ways you can benefit from signing up:

• Get immediate feedback on your podcast topic from me and your classmates. Many students at the first workshop made significant changes to their ideas or their audiences based on class discussion.
• Watch me record a sample podcast and ask lots of questions as I record and edit.
• Meet with a graphic designer to create your podcast logo.
• Build a support network with your classmates. This has been so valuable for the first group of students! They continue to support each other with launches and feedback after the event, through the workshop's private Facebook group.

[Editor's Note: We no longer offer the in-person workshop. Instead, we offer a multi-week accelerator in the All-Access Pass community.]

The year of online courses — final thoughts

So, for your reference, here are the four online courses we created this year:

• Smart From Scratch
• Power-Up Podcasting
• Build Your Own Brand
• 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing

I'm excited about where things are headed, into 2018 and beyond. I'm going to try and get a little bit more advanced in how my courses are pushed out there, with funnels and webinars and exciting things like that.

As always, I’ll keep you updated on what's working and what's not—sharing the tools and strategies along the way that I figure out because this is all new for me too. A lot of you who are reading this probably have had courses for much longer than me. I'm learning a lot as I go. Thank you so much for an amazing year. I'm looking forward to serving you again next year!

Learn how to create your own online courses with our how-to guide

Online Courses

Monetization

How to Create an Online Course: The SPI Essential Guide

Learn how online courses work, how to create them, and how to sell them. This guide is packed with creation and marketing advice to start you out right.

Learn to Create a Course

The post The Year of Online Courses (The Results. The Good. The Not so Good.) appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

This was my first year experiencing what it was like to create and sell online courses. With one public course launched (Smart From Scratch^®) launched earlier in the year, and another one that just launched last month (Power-Up Podcasting^®), I’m already experiencing the benefits I always heard other course creators talk about:

Increased income, yes. But, more importantly, increased amounts of success stories.

Truly, there’s no better way to package up information you have to solve a problem, and provide a win for your customer while also getting paid at the same time.

As an advisor now to Teachable, the online platform I use to host and sell my online courses, I knew there were tons of other course creators out there—many more and different experiences than my own—who could offer tips to those who are just starting out. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for Teachable.]

So here they are

31 course creators with their #1 tip for creating and selling online courses:

1. Do not prepare an online course for selling. Create an online course for what you love to do and then sell it. You will earn a lot if you tell a topic that you love to do.

– Resit, Master of Project Academy

2. Stop worrying all the time about how you will sell your course and start worrying about how you will create such a good course that will provoke a real change in your students' lives. Then, I promise you the money will come. Great content means good reviews, and good reviews mean more money.

– David Perálvarez, Club SiliCODE Valley

3. Build content that people can't find anywhere else in the world for the same price or at the same level of quality. If you do both at the same time, sales will roll in like crazy.

– Dakota Wixom, QuantCourse

4. Stop making excuses as to why you aren't qualified to teach, set a deadline, and commit to that deadline. Do not let yourself get distracted by trying to make everything perfect. It will never be perfect. Strive for professionalism, but don't derail yourself in the chase of perfection. You can't fix what you don't launch. So launch it, learn, tweak, and repeat.

More advice from Sarah on her experience getting started: I lurked around the SPI and Teachable communities for 14 months. I listened to all the course-related podcasts Pat did. And I got stuck in a cycle of trying to gather all this intelligence. I wish I had stopped going into “research” mode and just committed that time to DOING IT. Finally, in January I committed to launching my course by the first week of March. I did it, and got 52 students. I was actually literally sitting in the audience at a conference Pat was speaking at and I was getting student after student and refreshing my app to see how much money had come in!

It was an amazing feeling and I only wish I had done it SOONER :).

– Sarah, User Research Mastery

5. For a fast and profitable launch, plan a launch on Instagram. We flipped $2k in ad spend into $60k worth of sales on our Teachable course. Micro-influencers are the way to go!

– Julie Cabezas, Social Brand School

6. Each one of us has a secret passion. Maybe you know more about Star Trek than anyone on this (or any) planet. Maybe you can recite the relative strengths and weaknesses of every car on the market. Maybe you have all your grandmother's recipes for your family's special foods. You think you're the only one who cares about these things. You are not. Use your secret passion as material for an online course and people will respond. Because people respond to passion.

– Eric Goldman, Profit Leader Academy

7. Test your idea first. Don't waste any time creating a course unless you have a solid list ready to buy it. Start small with blog posts and expand as the traffic steadily increases. Launch your course when your audience starts asking for it.

– Sarah Crosley, The Creative Boss: Create the Ultimate Opt-In Offer

8. Don't wait . . . set a date and get out there and pre-sell (better yet, create your webinar date to launch your yet-to-be-created course). Nothing will light a fire fast enough knowing that you have to get it done.

– Susie Parker, Family Success Academy: Baby Naps Made Easy

9. Don't try to be perfect.

– Cassie Zeider, Mommy & Me Wellness & Nutrition

10. No course is ever perfect when it launches. If you try to make your course perfect before you launch, you will NEVER launch. It's okay to start with an initial version of your course that you improve on after receiving feedback from your students.

SPI is the primary reason I was able to launch my course. Without the SPI podcast, I would likely still be tweaking my course trying to get it to be perfect before I launched. Regardless of whether I'm chosen or not to be featured, I just want to say thanks for all the GREAT content your team gives away as it helped me tremendously.

– Daniel Milner, Make TV Easy

11. The number one thing people need to know is to sell something that people actually need. And then know a thing or two about marketing to sell it. Love Pat Flynn. Love Teachable. Love helpful people and making a living doing it!

– Jen Kamel, VBACfacts Academy: The Truth About VBAC for Professionals

12. Teach MORE THAN your competitors for FREE. Selling is nothing but teaching genuinely. If you just teach without holding anything back, genuinely, and help people, everything becomes very easy. Why I am saying this? Because it's not something I had planned before my course launch. It's something I realised last month. My “Aha!” moment. After looking at last 4 months' stats.

I did $20,000 in sales in the last 4 months without running a single Facebook ad or any kind of promotion. I have just 11 videos on my YouTube channel. But those 11 videos teach more than other paid courses. Somehow people are finding those videos, getting amazing value, and subscribing to my paid course.

– Mubaid Syed, T-Shirt Profit Academy

13. Roadmap actual deliverables and stick to a schedule that's conducive to producing the outcomes you need to meet your plan. Too many entrepreneurs spend three years “making” a course, and not a single buyer will ever be exposed or even hear about it!

Our current course is doing well over $25k/month in recurring and we're moving all of the outside stuff into Teachable as we speak!

– Scot Smith, Automated Inbound: Rainmaker University

14. Plan out your marketing and promotion strategy even before you build your course.

– Amir West, Online Entrepreneur Life: Amazon Phenomenon

15. Business success is not dependent on the size of your email list, nor what you're passionate about. A large unresponsive list is a massive cost centre and your passions don't mean a thing if people don't want to pay for it.

Find a deep unmet need or hidden desire waiting to be addressed. Address that in your course, and then make THAT your passion. If you can do that, even a small list can be very responsive and profitable; and you'll have a thriving business. You guys are doing such a stellar job towards making it possible for solopreneurs to be successful. Just a BIG thank you!

– Vikram Anand, Get Ahead Fast

16. It's all about creating a detailed, powerful outline. Armed with that, you'll know how much of your course you can give away for free to attract the right audience, which parts of your course to promote or add to your blog/podcast, and how to build a sales page that highlights what you'll share with people.

– Regina Anaejionu, Business School for Humans: Monetize and Market Your Mind

17. Whatever topic you have in mind right now, make it 5 times smaller. The biggest mistake is to think you have to cover everything in one step.

– Kerstin, Fluent Language School

18. Stop reading about it. Taking action is the best teacher! For years I have been studying marketing strategies, read articles, listened to podcasts (SPI rocks!). The more I studied, the more overwhelmed I became. I finally stopped worrying about it, moved my business to Teachable and simply took action. My business income quintupled (literally!) after doing those things. This is after 10 years of struggling with the business. Pat and Teachable, thank you!

– David Wallimann, Guitar Playback

19. Start right now even if you don't have everything figured out. If you believe in yourself and the online course you want to create to help others, you'll find your way to get there no matter what.

– Arantxa Mateo, 32 Mondays: What to Eat to Lose Weight

20. Just do it! Perfection kills progress. Like Pat, I live in San Diego. I'm a huge fan of the show. I literally shot my class in my living room. I duct-taped together my first sales funnel and I was trying and failing at Facebook ads on Black Friday (my launch day, which now I hear is the WORST day to launch anything, LOL). Now a few short months later it has made about $50,000 and enrollment has been closed much of that time. Testing deadline funnel now. Yes I will be adding more courses ASAP!

P.S. Did I mention I love Pat's podcast, Smart Passive Income? It is likely one of the stories on there that got me to try a course. My first business is ecommerce.

– Gina Downey, Academy for Dance

21. VALIDATE, then create. Before pouring time and money into an online course, make sure that people will buy it by actually ASKING people to buy it! You may be able to get 100 people to sign up to be beta testers for your course, but if no one is willing to pay you for the course, then it's not worth creating.

When I created my first online course, I sent a few people in my audience a personalized email where I gave them a description of what the course was and what it would include. If they were interested, I asked them if they wanted to pre-purchase the course at a special rate (yes, before it was built!). I made $8,000 off of the pre-sale, which validated that people wanted my course. I spent the next few months creating the course, and launched to my list of only 2,000 at the time. My first launch did $41k in sales. Validate the idea, then create the product.

– Abbey Ashley, The Virtual Savvy: VA Bootcamp

22. The number one tip I would give to course creators is start building your list immediately. Always be growing your audience and remember to nurture it as you grow. If you have a great audience who wants to hear what you have to say, you will be successful in your online course creation and sales!

– Fleur Ottaway, Venture Digital: Get Results from Your Facebook Ads

23. Jump and then figure out how to open the parachute. I started my course live before I had all the content developed. Each week I had 15 people who were showing up to my office to learn, so I needed to make sure it was ready for them. Eight weeks later my course was developed, recorded, and uploaded to Teachable. Over $70k in 6 months later and I'm happy I didn't wait until it was “ready.”

I teach mindfulness from the Christian perspective as it differs from the Buddhist perspective (in a respectful way).

– Gregory Bottaro, Catholic Psych Academy: Take Control of Your Life Today

24. Don't pressure yourself to create one module or even one PDF of the course BEFORE you've pre-launched and pre-sold the idea. That pressure can be a major mental block, and you'll never take action to get it out of your brain and into Teachable (#speakingfromexperience).

So instead, craft your pre-sales campaign, do that, and then once the dollars are in and there's PROOF that your people are willing to put their money into your idea . . . then your mental blocks will magically turn into action.

– Elise Darma, InstaGrowth Boss

25. Overcome any hesitations, any procrastination, any fear but writing a list about how fabulous you are, how helpful your course will be, what benefits you'll be bringing to their lives. Jump up and down, get super excited, and GO! You're now in the right buzzing mindset and vibrational vantage point to pour the right energy into your work. YOU'RE GOING TO NAIL IT!

– Heather, The Brain Trainer

26. Differentiate yourself and your course. Don't be one of a thousand teaching HTML, or healthy lifestyles. Find something that makes you different. Find a way to be different. It's the only way you can stand out and build a real business. If you're the same as everyone else, no one has a reason to enroll in YOUR course. Differentiate yourself and make that differentiator your competitive advantage.

– Mark Lassoff, LearnToProgram: Become a Professional Developer

27. Start. Like, now. No, really. Like, do it. You'll never learn or have success with course building if you never get started! Love the blog! Thanks for all you do

– Sarah, The Writing Room: Living an Inspired Life

28. Grab that camera (or phone as I did) and start recording. It will not be the best course, for sure. The market will decide if it's good or not.

– Frici, Digital Lifestyle: Online T-Shirt Business in 3 Easy Steps—The Crash Course

29. Find one person and walk them through your exact process of the course you're considering creating. Each step of the way becomes your working outline for the course and helps identify any steps you might overlook. As an added bonus, this person becomes your true raving fan and an amazing testimonial. Teachable rocks!

– Jeff Rose, The Online Advisor Growth Formula

30. Engage with your audience. Focus on helping people, money will follow.

– Sam (Sanjay) J, TIBCO Learning

31. Sell as you create! By sharing what you are working on, your fans feel like they are part of the process and they will be rooting for your success. Plus they will be thinking about getting the class when it comes out. I think it is enticing to know about a product that you can't have yet and by the time it comes out they have convinced themselves that they need it and they jump at the chance to buy. Offering a special price for early buyers also removes a consideration and makes the purchase a no-brainier. Just make sure you deliver the good so they will come back for the next class

My first class literally launched 5 days ago and I already have 246 sales. I am not sure if that is awesome by other's standards but I am beyond thrilled! I have created class content as a guest instructor for other companies like Craftsy, Lifebook (Willowing.org), and Wanderlust (Everything Art) to learn the ropes but there is nothing as satisfying as creating your own course from soup to nuts on your own platform. I just wanted to make sure you knew I am a newbie at creating courses on Teachable, so if you want that perspective, call me!

– Lindsay Weirich, Essential Tools and Techniques for Watercolor Painting

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this post! If you're thinking of starting an online course of your own, now's definitely the time. It can be a massive game-changer in your business income generation, but more importantly, it's the ultimate way to serve those who are looking to you for advice.

For an online course platform that works and is easy to setup, check out Teachable!

[Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for Teachable.]

The post 31 Tips from 31 Course Creators on How to Build and Launch a Successful Online Course appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Update, August 2018: This post was published just as I was going public with my first online course. Right before that, I had launched it “in beta”, which means early and to a limited number of students to test and validate the strategy.

Since this post was published, I've learned a TON about online courses, and there is some excellent beginner insight here that, as I was editing this post, was really fun to look back on, but also extremely important to remind myself about.

If you're just starting out with online courses, this is a great place to start.

In October 2016, I opened my first online course to a limited group of founding students. You see, just as you need to validate your business idea, a concept I unpack in my book, Will It Fly?, I needed to validate the idea for my online course. After all, it was my first and I had no idea how people would respond.

In early October I launched Smart From Scratch^® to 100 students. Less than a day later, every spot was filled, with the waitlist growing rapidly. I was amazed by the response! From October through today, the feedback and constructive criticism I’ve received about the course has been so invaluable. At each stage, my team and I took that feedback and applied it directly to the course, making further improvements along the way so that by the time we launched it publicly, it would be as good as possible.

And that’s thanks to our founding students. Thank you so much for that!

Now, as I write this, Smart From Scratch is about to launch for the first time to the public. Exciting!

What Is Smart From Scratch?

Smart from Scratch is my online course designed specifically for aspiring business owners who are starting from the beginning. They either have no clue where to start because they have no ideas at all, or they have too many ideas and they need help filtering down to one. The course then helps students test the idea and validate it before actively pursuing it.

If you’ve read my book, Will It Fly?, you will find that Smart From Scratch is very similar. Both enable and inspire you to test and validate your business idea so you know for sure it’s worth pursuing. The difference is that, with the book, you don’t have the hands-on guidance you get from the course. So, if you want a bit more guidance and a built-in community of folks like you aspiring to create your own business, Smart From Scratch is for you.

If that sounds like your jam, you can join the waitlist now or sign up when we launch Smart From Scratch publicly on February 27, 2017!

Why Smart From Scratch?

I’ve both failed and succeeded in building products and businesses. I’ve poured these experiences into the Smart From Scratch course to give you insight into the business strategies that truly work from start to finish.

Before I jump into the seven lessons I learned while testing and creating Smart From Scratch, I wanted to share another lesson I learned before I created the course, but a lesson that has proven essential to the course’s integrity.

That lesson came when I launched Breakthrough Blogging back in 2013. I launched Breakthrough Blogging with the intent of helping people stick to blogging. At the time, I found that a lot of people were dropping out of blogging after doing it a while, so I thought I could try to help.

I started to notice that there were a lot of commonalities between people who were stopping the blogging process. Many of them seemed to have stopped right before I felt that they would've become successful. There's a lot of hurdles and walls that people run into, and I built Breakthrough Blogging to help people break through those walls.

I built it as a membership site reminiscent of YouPreneur, Fizzle, and Internet Business Mastery. After seeing how successful those sites had been, I wanted to create something similar, to be as helpful or more.

But I soon discovered that it wasn’t the right approach. During its launch, it did very well, but in trying to keep up with the content demands each month for paying members, I just felt like I was stretched thin and became less effective over time. Even though the first set of paying members paid a one-time fee, my thought was that people were going to pay a monthly fee after I reopened it.

That wasn’t the case.

I just realized it wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I didn’t realized it until after I started it, which isn’t an ideal place to be. It’s not fair to your community. But I also didn't want to feel forced to come up with new content all the time. When I started, I had all the content I needed, but then that started to wear out. With the model I created, I needed to charge people monthly, but I also needed to create new things each month to make it worth it for those subscribers. And I didn’t have the time or energy to keep that up.

To attempt keeping up the pace, we came up with random ideas to keep people excited throughout the months, but that ultimately proved a failure. The content slowly died down. The community and the forum I created slowly went away. People started to complain that it wasn’t what they had expected, and they were absolutely right. It wasn’t what they had expected or what I had expected.

I felt terrible about it. I let people down.

Then, three years after I launched Breakthrough Blogging, I offered a full refund to those members because I didn't meet their expectations.

People reacted in different ways to that. Some people were shocked that I offered a refund three years after the fact. Some said that it was completely unnecessary. But many were very thankful for that I did it and took me up on the offer.

But you know what? Most people didn't take me up on the offer to accept the refund. I suppose they understood I tried a thing but failed at it, and that’s as human as anything. They were empathetic. Even so, I still felt like I needed to create a clean slate. I needed to reset, pivot, and tackle courses the right way.

That’s where Smart From Scratch comes into play. I am now doing it the right way. Before we created Smart From Scratch, we had established very specific goals for the course. We launched a beta course to a limited group of students so we could get honest feedback that we can then use to further enhance the course for future students. We were honest with what we wanted to accomplish.

Smart From Scratch is a course created to help people solve a very specific problem. It has a very clear objective in mind.

And, unlike Breakthrough Blogging, it is only a one-time fee and not a monthly membership model. Students of Smart From Scratch know exactly what they are getting into, and know what the expected outcome will be. For me, because of my previous experience with Breakthrough Blogging, everything needed to be as clear as possible—for both us, and for my students.

For me, in the way that I teach, the way that I've taught online for a while, creating courses to solve specific problems was going to be the best way that I could serve my audience.

And that’s the genesis of Smart From Scratch!

Want help to test and validate your own business idea? Join the waitlist today.

Now let’s get into it!

Here are the 7 Lessons I Learned While Testing and Launching My First Online Course

Lesson 1: It’s Not Easy

Believe it or not, creating a comprehensive course with clear objectives isn’t easy. I didn’t want to make the same mistakes twice, so we put a ton of effort into the prep and beta periods for Smart From Scratch.

Using Will It Fly? as a base definitely helped make the process a little easier. As did using Teachable as a platform. But each of the videos within the course required outlines, and they needed to be done well. The course design mattered. The structure of the course needed to make sense for the students. The material needed to truly inspire.

There are two things that really helped me through this:

1. Inspiration from my peers. People like Amy Porterfield, David Siteman Garland, and Michael Hyatt all helped me immensely. I took their courses to help get me into the mindset of a student. Taking their courses also allowed me to see how truly helpful I could be with my own course. I realized that Smart From Scratch was something my audience was asking for. If I had let the fear or uncertainty get in my way, it wouldn’t have been possible. But thanks to my peers, I was able to see through that.
2. Founders group. As I had mentioned before, the founding members for Smart From Scratch were so integral to creating what the course has become. I would recommend that anyone who launches a single course or product in the future to have a founders group to help you validate and “beta test” your course before launching it publicly. I kept the price as it is today ($197) and still those founding members signed up because they saw a value in it. That was awesome validation.

That leads me into the second lesson I learned while testing and launching Smart From Scratch.

Lesson 2: Be Open to Feedback

If you’re not open to feedback—in anything—you’re not going to have room to grow and improve.

This needs to be said again and again: the feedback that I've received from the founding members of the course has been so incredibly vital. From the positive feedback to the eye-opening criticism. All of it has been so helpful. It’s afforded me the opportunity to hold back from selling the course publicly so I may collect feedback early, so that I may tweak it, refine it, and make the course better to sell later. From a business perspective, that’s such a huge deal, and for that I’ll be forever grateful for their amazing insight throughout the process.

I want to give a huge shoutout and thank you to all the founding members who have helped me make Smart From Scratch possible. You folks rock.

Lesson 3: People Like Structure

During the course creation process, one of many things I validated was this: people like structure. With Smart From Scratch, they benefit from a structured, hands-on, step-by-step process toward testing and validating their business idea. But all of the base information could be accessed by reading Will It Fly? and content on SmartPassiveIncome.com. With YouTube and the wide and wonderful Internet, so much information is out there.

But the difference is the structure. Sometimes it’s easier to consume and learn information if it’s structured, like in a course with built-in accountability and community.

In 2008, when I created the LEED guide, 98 percent of that information was available on the GreenExamAcademy.com website I created shortly thereafter. People didn’t need to pay for the guide, but they did. I added a few bonus things, and other charts, and worksheets, and exercises at the end, but most of the content was the same. Only two people out of tens of thousands of book sales have ever complained about that. Of course, for those people I just refunded their purchase. For the rest of them, the structure of the learning process is what they seemed to want.

With structure, I found, through surveys, that people liked:

1. Convenience. They wanted to pay because of the convenience of the tangible, hands-on physical product. It’s easier for some.
2. Paying it forward. I was so pleasantly surprised by this, but it’s true (direct feedback proves it!): folks who benefited from the LEED guide wanted to pay me back for the free information that I provided. Some people had already passed the exam, yet they still purchased my book because I finally gave them a chance to pay me back. That just shows you the value in providing over the top free information to not only get yourself in front of people, but to really build a relationship with them and have them understand that you're there to help.

If whatever you’re trying to sell, whether it’s a course or physical product, if it’s structured in a way that makes people’s lives easier, you’ll win.

Lesson 4: Embracing the Community

The fourth lesson that I learned while testing and launching Smart From Scratch was really just how amazing a community can be. The SPI community is so great, so it really shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Going through the course and working with the students, hearing feedback in multiple ways from surveys within the course, reading the messages in the groups and in emails—really inspired me. It really showed me how lovely and supportive our community of entrepreneurs can be. And it proved to me why Smart From Scratch needed to exist.

All of your feedback and stated wins along the way really fired me up and motivated me. It makes me want to continue creating courses so we can continue engaging with each other on that level. It is, without a doubt, one of the more enlightening and rewarding experiences I’ve had.

I would encourage everybody to visualize, before you come out with your course, before you launch your founding program, to think about the students. What is it going to be like for them? What kind of messages would you receive from people who are benefiting from your content? How are you actually changing their lives and how can you use that as motivation going forward into the launch of your new course?

Lesson 5: Creating Ways for the Students to Interact

One thing I wanted to be sure we did for the Smart From Scratch experience was to give students a means to interact with one another. I wanted for them to be able to ask questions, get feedback, and talk to me throughout their learning journey.

So we created a Facebook group for the founding students, and that’s something that will be offered for future students of the course as well. The Facebook group—which is something you can create on Facebook for free—has been amazing for helping people to get through it together, for asking questions, getting feedback, and staying encouraged to go through the course. Creating a forum is something I did in the past, but having it on Facebook has been very effective and easy to maintain.

I was worried that there were people who were going to say that they couldn't get access to Facebook. And that may be the case sometimes, but it’s not the norm. Giving people a safe place to communicate with one another is essential. And Facebook makes it easy because you can set up notifications that go straight to your email.

So, if you create a course, remember to create an easy way for your students to interact and communicate with each other—whether that’s on Facebook, in a forum, or elsewhere. It’ll make a huge difference.

Lesson 6: Office Hours

Having office hours throughout the course to answer questions for students is a super high-value proposition. For Smart From Scratch, the office hours were key because we were able to get the founding students together to answer specific questions, whether they asked them through chat or directly on camera (via Zoom), which I tried to encourage people to do. I found that only a very small percentage of people would often attend these office hours, so I'd try to mix up the hours, having them early in the morning, sometimes later in the evening, and mid-afternoon because there were some people internationally who don’t often get a chance to participate. Offering different times for your students is a way to ensure you give as many people as possible an opportunity to talk.

Even doing it twice a month can be a huge win for your students. In the beginning, I did it a little bit more often because it was the founding group, but moving forward I will be doing it at least once a month.

Getting people together so that they can ask questions and interact with the group is highly encouraging. Even people who are sitting on the sideline listening to these questions and listening to my answers are still getting a lot of benefit because a lot of them have the same questions.

Like I said, I try to encourage people to visit for office hours, chat with others, and ask questions because it's part of the practice of building a business. You have to get uncomfortable in order to succeed, so it was a good arena to have people safely do that without being criticized.

Now onto the seventh and final lesson I learned while testing and launching my first online course!

Lesson 7: People Are Busy

Finally, the seventh lesson I learned while testing and launching Smart From Scratch, is the realization that people lead busy lives. I mean really busy. With that in mind, it's hard to expect everybody to go through all the videos when you want.

There are still people the Smart from Scratch founding students who have yet to get through all the videos in the course and it's simply because life gets in the way. All I can do is my best to encourage them. I am able to do that through all of the lessons I mentioned here, including community, Facebook group, and office hours.

One thing that I didn't do for the founding group, but plan to do for the public launch, is to send emails to students while they take the course. Through taking courses myself, I’ve learned that this can be really rewarding and motivating. Especially if the email can answer questions your students may have, or feature a success story that may motivate them. I plan on doing that for the public launch, and I can’t wait to encourage you! I want to be a cheerleader, and I feel like I need to do that more the next time around.

I hope those lessons give you some insight into the creation of your own online course. And, as always, I am here if you have any questions.

Please click here to register and join me for my upcoming live training to help you learn more about creating your first profitable online course!

The post 7 Lessons I Learned While Testing & Launching My First Online Course appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

You have the ability to create the perfect online course for your audience.

The real question is, what makes the perfect course? How do you create a product that your readers would just die to have access to?

Obviously, it would have to have information that your readers want, not what you think they want. But how do you know exactly what that is?

It should also present the information in a way that is best suited for their taste. But again, how do you know?

If only your audience could tell you exactly what they wanted. It would be as if they created the product for you. How awesome would that be?

Well, that's exactly what you should do.

Here's What I Would Do

I typically don't like to blog about online business and marketing techniques that I've never tried before (since I have yet to release any online courses of my own), however this particular “technique” has been proven by other internet marketers, and there's no reason why it shouldn't work. One day, when I do launch my own courses, I will most likely take a similar route.

The first step is to sell a coaching course to a limited number of people even before you have details about exactly what you're going to teach. You work directly with your students to create course material as you go along that is perfectly tailored to the kinds of things they are looking for. At the end of it all, you'll have the perfect product ready to launch.

Here's why this model is so genius:

• You get paid upfront before you even create any material. You then have an incentive to really produce great work for your new students to make sure they get their money's worth, and you may also want to use some of that money for equipment or software to help with your presentations and lessons.
• The curriculum is tailored to your students. You'll know if you're going too fast, too slow, or missing any key components, since your students will be there to tell you right away.
• After the “coaching program” is finished, you'll have a number of recordings, lessons, worksheets, courses, etc. already completed that you can easily turn into it's own online course or product.
• If your program was well received, you'll have a number of people who would be happy to give you an awesome testimonial for your online course.
• Your students who have their own websites or email lists may end up becoming an affiliate for your product, helping to boost sales (and buzz) when you end up launching the product.
• If your program has helped your students, then there is no doubt that your online course will help the rest of your audience as well.

Yes, the coaching program will take a lot of your time. You'll be writing lessons on the fly and possibly doing things like weekly webinars, videos, etc. Hopefully, the interaction you have with your students will inspire you to get things done and hopefully keep things fun for you.

But imagine what it would be like after that coaching program is over. You'll have these wonderful, fine-tuned lessons that are just waiting to be sold online for whatever price you see fit. You've already put in the hard work, so now you can sell on auto pilot and add to your passive income portfolio.

So which would you rather do?

Spend a couple of months creating an online course by yourself which may or may not be what people are looking for?

Or…

Spend a couple of months creating an online course with your audience that you know will be information that they want, and get paid for it?

Hmm…seems like a no-brainer to me. What do you think?

A Limited Number of Students

As I mentioned earlier, the coaching part of the process should be limited to a small number of students. I would say no more than 10 to 12 people at most. Here's why:

1. Although feedback from your students is vital, you don't want to get flooded with hundreds of different opinions about what you've done and what to do next. Yes—you want different views and opinions, but too many can stress you out and confuse you on what actions to take next.
2. The smaller the number of students, the better chance there is of you developing a real relationship with them, which will in turn help with the quality of the end product.
3. Limiting the number of students will create buzz for your future online course. Those who don't get “accepted” into your coaching program will be anxious to purchase the online course that is created as a result.

I know it might seem like a mistake to limit the number of students because you're also limiting the amount of money you make up front. However, at this point in the process, you should be worry more about the quality of your lessons. The real money will come later once you begin to sell your online course.

“Should I offer my coaching program for free?”

My answer is no.

Not because you won't get paid, but because people who throw down money to learn from you will be more vested into your program and more likely to participate than someone who just joins for free.

A Good Idea, or Bad?

I have not yet put this to the test, but I may in the distant future. As I continue to research how other internet marketers have done something similar, I'm curious to know what you think about it?

Are there any flaws in this product creation model that should be brought to our attention?

I look forward to reading your responses. Have a wonderful week, and congrats to any New Orleans Saints fans out there. What a season!

Cheers!

The post How to Create the Perfect Online Course for Your Audience appeared first on Smart Passive Income.