📝 How to Create and Launch an Online Course in 2024: A Step-by-Step Guide
Are you looking to create and launch an online course in 2024? If so, you're in luck! In this article, we'll go over a number of different steps that have the potential to make you thousands of dollars. We'll talk about identifying demand, making sure that there's a market for your online course, figuring out what type of product you might want to sell, and then also looking at potential format. Do you want to launch a video formatted course or a monthly membership? We'll look at different pricing strategies, go with low price high price, talk about the differences between those two, and then also highlight things like the best platforms to launch a course on and really everything that you need to know about creating an online course that's going to make you the most amount of money possible and have happy customers.
📈 Identifying Demand and Market
The first step in creating an online course is to identify demand and market. You need to make sure that there's a big enough market for you to launch this course. There are two ways of identifying this. The first and the easiest way to identify what type of online course or product you want to sell is if you already have an audience. If you're already an influencer, you probably already have a gauge of what your followers want and what they follow you for. For a lot of other people watching this video, maybe you're not an influencer, that's totally okay. How do we find if there's still that potential market out there for us to sell a course? The other option there is to look at the current skills that you already have. People are willing to spend money for anything that you have a high skill on, and I can almost guarantee you that pretty much everyone watching this video, there's something that you're better than most people at. Analyze your skills, analyze the things that you know you can sit around the dinner table and rant about for hours. What's that one thing that you're very well versed in, and then see if there is a market for that.
📚 Course Curriculum and Format
Once you've identified demand and market, the next step is to figure out your course curriculum and format. What is going to be the best strategy for creating your course? Do you want something that is more of like a set and forget course where you film a bunch of videos, or do you want to do something like a membership group where you have like weekly live streams or monthly live streams or like a Discord or other features within there? You have to decide also if you want like a PL fee upfront price or if you want to do like a monthly subscription. Both can work, but I kind of lean towards that one-time fee where you might sell a course for like a couple of hundred dollars and kind of lean away from the memberships. Also, how long should it be? This really depends on the topic, but I would say for online courses, if you're going video format, you probably want them to be at least 6 to 10 hours at a minimum, but really the longer, the better.
🤑 Pricing Strategies
Now let's talk about pricing strategies. This is something a lot of people get wrong when they are creating an online course. Don't undersell yourself, don't undercharge because if you end up charging like 20 or 30 dollars, you really could have made a lot more. As long as you're making a high-quality course and people are learning a lot of information, they are willing to pay for it. You're going to have to gauge that before you can really come up with a good price, but I would say just generally speaking, don't undercharge for the course. You're going to regret that.
🎉 Building Hype and Releasing the Course
Finally, let's talk about building hype and releasing the course. You need to build up demand for this course and not always have it available. There's so many strategies within here that I could probably talk about this for an hour, but just to sum it up here for building hype and for releasing the course, one of the things that we did was just do a pre-sale for a course to see if there's demand for it. You can do a pre-sale before you even make it to see how many people are interested, and that can also kind of fund it and convince you to actually create the course. You might end up having to travel a bit or just doing Zoom interviews for a podcast for other people, but doing outbound to get that exposure into new audiences is going to be absolutely crucial for making sure that you really hit some big numbers on your course sale for when you launch it.
🌟 Highlights
- Identify demand and market before creating an online course.
- Figure out your course curriculum and format.
- Don't undersell yourself, don't undercharge for the course.
- Build up demand for the course and not always have it available.
🙋♀️ FAQ
Q: What is the best platform for launching an online course?
A: Thinkific is our favorite course platform for building the course.
Q: How long should an online course be?
A: For online courses, if you're going video format, you probably want them to be at least 6 to 10 hours at a minimum, but really the longer, the better.
Q: How do I build hype and release my course?
A: You need to build up demand for this course and not always have it available. You can do a pre-sale before you even make it to see how many people are interested, and that can also kind of fund it and convince you to actually create the course.
Resources:
- Thinkific: https://centralmedia.com/thinkific
