If you're here on my website, chances are you've taken (or considered taking) one of my many courses! So, here's a question: have you ever thought about creating your own course??
If so, this is the perfect blog post for you!
Creating your own course is an amazing (and often really fun) way to share your expertise with your audience, flaunt some bad-ass thought leadership, and build an incredible community of people who are passionate about improving themselves and their businesses.
I have met some really amazing people through teaching mine!
For example: Jenna Soard of youcanbrand.com is a super-talented design and branding expert who spends many of her days teaching her students how to create awesome courses! I was stoked that she agreed to be one of our experts in the 2017 Planathon – and I'm very happy to share some of her advice in this blog post!
If you've been thinking about creating your own course and wondering how the heck to get started, check out Jenna's tips below!
1. Find people suffering from the problem your course would solve. If you don't already have an audience, you're going to have to figure out where these people are, and reach them there. Look for them in Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, MeetUp groups, etc. Put together a survey to figure out exactly what their biggest problems are – and their biggest goals.
2. Be precise with your course. Be really clear with yourself about which problem you're aiming to solve and then stick to that framework in order to offer a really clear deliverable. “The best courses out there are courses that promise something very specific,” explains Jenna. If you're not really specific about the problem you're going to solve, then people aren't going to be sure about what you're trying to sell – so they'll be far less likely to buy! Once you have a clear end goal, come up with a series of clear mini-deliverables – these will be the modules of your course that will help your students progress to that final result!
3. Beta-test your course before launch. While a lot of people say that you should pre-sell a course or fully create one before trying to sell it, Jenna disagrees: “I'm really big into being an ethical person, and I firmly believe that you should test a course before you actually take money for it,” she says. If you run some test students through a course before launching it, that gives you the chance to get feedback from them and make any necessary tweaks to the content or presentation. “By the end of the testing period, you'll have a tried and true and tested course that you've created with real people, instead of just guessing what will work,” Jenna advises.
Jenna is a total genius when it comes to course creation – I took a lot of notes during her Planathon segment! Have you been considering launching a course? What problem would your course aim to solve? Let me know in the comments!
