Course titles examples: Step-By-Step Guide 2023

Suppose you’re in the online course creation area. In that case, you’ll recognize providers such as Udacity, Linkedin learning, Masterclass, Udemy, and even skillshare for the traditional hobbyist. What all of these have in common is that they are well-recognized.

This can be due to effective email marketing, but one aspect is in the structure of their courses, as these need to be effective, as if you want an introduction to coding, for example, you want something that eases you in and doesn’t use any jargon. 

That is why you may not think it, but there is a lot linked to course titles, from demographics to SEO, so below is a complete ultimate guide to making your courses reach the broadest possible audience while being relevant Course titles examples to them.

Start By Knowing Your Audience 

Considering that dwell time, or how long an audience sticks around before moving on, can be between 5 and 45 seconds depending on the content and how deep you bury information relevant to a search.

Having a website linked to your course not only builds credibility, especially if you decide to use Google analytics to keep your sights on traffic, but lets you follow up on any leads for those on the fence about taking your course.

People want to take your course to improve their personal development, so gauging which users take an interest is a good own ideas, but if you’re unsure of your demographics, have a great course title in mind that encompasses a wide range of age groups.

What Are You Offering?

Part of this involves doing some reflection, so ideally, you want to ask what your goals are for this course and how you can market this to people as they read your copy. Keeping it short, engaging, and relevant is essential to effective programs.

It’s a good idea to look at competitors and see how they display online courses.

You can see they do this in many ways, and the main title one is to have a catchy title that says exactly what it teaches, for example, ‘coding 101’ or ‘coding for beginners. 

Here is where you want to focus more on the outcome of your course and what people will get out of it rather than putting too much thought into the teaching process itself.

As we know, there are many teaching styles, but clarity can be helpful here. 

To finish off this point, think more about your learners and where they could apply the skills you teach, so think about things such as education level, ease of access, and how accurate it is to industry standards. 

Use The Right Keywords 

The next step is to use tools that can get your site and, therefore, your course higher in Google rankings, so using the keyword planner by Google allows you to build a marketing strategy by registering your business.

Once you’ve looked into this, you can manage your online advertising budgets and plan accordingly, and with services such as these, you can find a database of millions upon billions of keywords, and all you need to get going is by searching these. 

With a set of keywords, you can test these out in areas such as auto-complete so that you can use variations, names, and alternatives so that the autocomplete feature works for you as it’s intended for.

A popular way to find how much buzz your keywords have is through Google Trends, where you can search for a term or even compare two and see how they stack up while seeing related topics and popular words that you may find useful.

Think About The Titles Themselves 

We’ve focused a lot on the course itself, but what if you’re designing your course and get stuck midway through, as it’s possible that sometimes a class can go off-topic and lose the interest of your own target audience? 

Below are a few pointers that you may want to consider regarding the specific titles, saving you time and the cost it would require to have this done for you by a professional. 

Use Power Words 

What we mean by power word is that provoke emotion or a call to do something, and there are many examples where brands have used words to make people feel fearful, inspired, valued, and rooted in reality.

In times when we see terms like revolutionary, ground-breaking, always, perfect title, impossible, and a host of other words that we’ve read in many places and doubt their validity, and these are usually in the form of superlatives. 

If you’re worried that your titles sound too much like sales pitches, get some responses from a survey or you can simply read out your titles and see what reaction comes from this.

Keep Them Simple

This one sounds easy enough but trying to compress a 10-hour plus course into an eye-catching title for your online course can be difficult, but you can combine three elements of your course and put them together, such as coding, data structures, and tools.

While we can’t give you a guarantee this will give you instant traffic, if you think about it, you can be quickly drawn to items in a list, primarily if you use provocative words.

If you’re offering a course in things like business and want to sound professional, you can use titles such as ‘the starting entrepreneur’s guide to’ (insert simple word that describes your course) or something like (course name) ‘for beginners.

Keep People Interested  

We looked briefly over titles that were rooted in reality. Still, you can take advantage of the course content you know well and add a bit of mystery to something, but don’t make it so obscure that it sounds too much like automated spam or junk advertisements. 

You could use something like ‘(great course titles)- The secrets to success or ‘Is (course title) difficult? Common myths explained.’ You can see that even though they invite the audience to look further, they also state what specific topic or subject is being looked into. 

Keep Them Short 

Something else that can make or break your course titles is the length, or the number of characters, as it may seem tempting to try and squeeze in as much detail as possible about your course.

For example, a tile like coding for beginners: Learn the skills to become a software developer and improve your job prospects has 100 characters and is considered too long, as most of your audience would’ve switched off after they reach the colon of the title. 

Ideally, you want something between 55-65 characters long, and if you’re struggling, read the title out loud and see what you think could be cut from the title, as when you read it out loud, you want a concise and engaging set of words, which should be your benchmark.   

What If I’m Stuck For Course Names?

You might not be creatively gifted with words, so why not use a service that does this for you? It makes more sense to find unique names that go from simple to complex.

Sites such as Sellcoursesonline let you brainstorm your own title ideas that you could use in a word board that you can use for successive courses so that each one sounds different, and wouldn’t it be nice for your audience to rave about the title?

Of course, there are templates like (course name) for beginners, how to hack (course title), tips for your (title) to be practical, and how to unlock your potential titles.

These are just a few examples you can find that both present something and offer a solution or follow-up. 

How To Make My Course Titles Stand Out 

We’ve looked at keywords and wording, but are aspects making your courses seem more appealing?

We consider this as some are reading only half of your website, or 111 words, and length can add around 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words. 

To avoid your courses feeling like a grind to get through, there are some ways to make your lessons more exciting and sound more reliable to look at.

Use Reviews 

We’ve seen with some courses that as you see a course title, there is a star rating system that can tell audiences what your course is like and whether they would recommend it. 

This is important as trends have shown that over 90% of people will trust a business with a rating of 4 or above, and search engines use reviews to collate their results, so they can filter out sites they view as genuine.

Perhaps have a few people take the course, and in exchange for their views, they can have a discount on the price; if this applies, you’ll find that people want to look further, which could lead to a sale. 

Use Acronyms, If Possible 

There might be times when this works and times when it doesn’t, so if you were to have the first course in your series be something like ‘coding- learn the most of SDK,’ a beginner will look at this and be confused.

This will, in turn, lead them to search this term, which is time spent away from your site, so if you need to use acronyms to shorten terms, the one main thing to do is use them in later courses where you have already explained what that acronym means. 

This way of getting jargon out of the confusing category gives a student the feeling that they have learned something that will be used a lot at their workplace if they use this as training, so you add more immersion to the learning experience. 

Be Careful With Brands In The Titles  

Suppose you’re making courses that teach people how to use a particular piece of software from a company like Microsoft or how to maximize your selling potential through services like Amazon.

In that case, these can be a great addition as long as you use them right.

For some of these services and software, you may have to ask permission from the company before you release your course as you’re using the likeness of a business, so bear this in mind, especially for courses that look to exploit aspects of these services.

For some of these companies, you can sign up as a partner, so to find out, just search the name of the brand and use partnerships or content creator opportunities and see what comes up, so here you know you have the permission to make your course.

Think About Domain Names  

Another aspect of your course is where they are located, as you might have a separate website domain for the course, and if so, check the name and see if you need to alter the course to make it more accessible.

One of the problems with domains is that they are created, and the courses follow later, as a creator may not know what they want to do with it, so the title could be something of an afterthought.

For example, let’s say you have a coding masterclass course for advanced users. Your site could look something like a coding masterclass. Pro.

This way, your audience can easily find your classes, which is better than the .com domain, which is very common. 

The Bottom Line

With all these tips, you can simply make your courses in the 101 formats and use a 1.1-2.0 to show the user how far along in the course they are.

It’s always worth coming back to these steps and taking a moment to think about what you need to do with your title or any linking you’re using on your site for the best-selling follow-ups.

All of this can be established by a good title that says exactly what can be gained from learning this content and how ambitious your students can feel after they have finished the course, so make it easy for them, and the business should come your way.