The Truth About Launching Online Courses
There’s a lot that people don’t say about building online courses.
I want to be completely transparent about how the marketing and business coaching industries are misleading people about what it takes to build a successful home study course.
It sounds like a great deal: you come up with a great topic related to your business, record 10–12 videos, and package them as a program for anywhere from $95–295.
In 2020 when the pandemic hit, it seemed like the internet was full of programs on how to build a home study course, launch it, and make thousands in passive income in no time.
Now, the truth of the matter is that building a course is actually not hard. As coaches, consultants, experts, and service providers, teaching is actually the easiest part of what most of you do.
If I were to ask you to step on a stage right now and talk about what you love and what you do, many of you would be able to do it in a heartbeat.
The problem is not actually building a course – the problem is selling it.
In the past few years, I’ve met so many entrepreneurs who have spent hours and hours building home study courses only to find that no one will buy them. The truth is that if you haven’t already been cultivating a list of buyers for a year or more, it’s going to be very difficult to sell that course.
By recording a series of videos and launching them cold, you’re also missing a crucial step: testing. To rectify that, I recommend that you begin by launching a live course.
Whether you have three, four, or ten people in your course, teaching live allows you to test the process. You’re testing the price point, the content on your sales page, the structure of your course, and how actionable your content is. And finally, you’re testing whether people who leave the course want to buy from you again.
Holding a live class is an incredible learning experience – but that means that it’s also a risk. You’ll have moments of success and moments where you weren’t super successful. Maybe no one signs up for your course, or maybe people sign up but don’t show.
Struggling with certain pieces of a launch doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you or your prospective clients – it means that something about your title, subject matter, or marketing didn’t appeal to your target market enough for them to buy it.
The knowledge that you gain in this process is a gift. It allows you to go back to the drawing board, reimagine your course, and relaunch it. It’s lovely to imagine building a course and then disappearing to a beach while ten people buy it every month – but that’s not going to happen without some trial and error.
Before you to decide to sit down in front of a camera and record that course, remember these two things:
Number one: launch your course as a live program so that you can test everything and make sure that it works.
Number two: start building your online list now so that you have an audience by the time you’re ready to put your live program online.
And finally – if you’re overwhelmed with business tactics and strategies but struggling to parse the best order in which to implement them, please connect with us!
