These days, no matter what sector you work in, you can’t just say that you have the skills, you have to prove it. And one of the best ways to show that you’re the top in your field is by creating a sellable online course.
By teaching your own courses, you can show that you’re an expert in your industry, that you are very skilled at what you do, and that you know what is needed to break into this particular industry.
Creating an online course is not only a great way to get your knowledge and experience out to others, but is also a great, semi-passive way to make money.
Once you create the course, you don’t really have to do much aside from answering queries from students and other simple admin work.
So now you may be wondering how’re supposed to create an online course. Well, that’s where Thinkific comes in! Thinkific is a platform that tasks all of the hard work out of making online courses, so you can get it out into the world faster. If you want to know who is Thinkific for, and who uses Thinkific, keep reading!
Once you get started with Thinkific, you still need to set up the basic structure of the Thinkific course. To help you out, we’ve made this step-by-step guide on everything that you need to think about when creating your online course.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all of the things that need to be planned, prepared for, and executed to successfully create and sell an online course; however, it will help you know what to expect and what the journey will look like before you get started.
But first a little about Thinkific.
What’s Thinkific?
Thinkific is a technology company that has developed a popular online course platform that enables individuals and companies to create online products (courses and communities) based on the knowledge that they already possess, and then deliver or sell those products to their audience from their own website, under their own brand! (Check out ‘What Is Thinkific Used For?)‘)
Thinkific site provides you with the tools you need for every stage of your online adventure, beginning with the course creation of your first product and continuing well after its original release.
Who Uses Thinkific?
Thinkific is for professionals who want to develop a revenue stream through online education while also sharing their expertise online with cutting-edge solutions that encourage user interaction.
People use Thinkific to teach themselves a wide variety of abilities, ranging from how to play the guitar to how to fly a drone to how to improve their digital marketing skills!
Industry leaders that maintain a blog or a YouTube channel, authors and lecturers, subject matter experts, and others utilize Thinkific products to scale up their offline businesses or monetize their skills. The possibilities for online education are virtually limitless when using Thinkific.
Thinkific is currently assisting over 25,000 educators in delivering education to students in 164 different countries.
Thinkific Use Cases
The online course creation platform can be used by many different Industries, Educators and Entrepreneurs. See some of the top Thinkific examples from today’s creators.
- Online Education: Thinkific can be used by educators to create and sell online courses to students. This can be useful for K-12 schools, colleges and universities, as well as for companies that offer training programs.
- Corporate Training: Thinkific can also be used by companies to train their employees. Companies can create courses on various topics such as compliance, sales training, customer service, and more. This can help employees stay up-to-date with the latest skills and knowledge in their field.
- Professional Development: Professionals such as coaches, consultants, and freelancers can use Thinkific to create and sell courses that help their clients improve their skills and knowledge in a specific area.
- Nonprofits: Thinkific can be used by nonprofits to create and sell courses to raise funds for their cause. For example, a nonprofit that focuses on environmental issues can create courses on sustainable living and sell them to raise money for their programs.
- E-commerce: Thinkific can be integrated with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce to sell courses as digital products. This can be a useful revenue stream for businesses that already have an online store.
Why Should You Use Thinkific?
People that use Thinkific use online groups and courses to accomplish a wide variety of professional objectives. Thinkific courses are self-guided and participatory that support every other kind of online learning to develop a stronger and long-lasting online business.
Online courses are ideal for training clients on a product or service and helping them gain the most value possible from it. It’s possible to develop courses and communities as stand-alone goods that may be sold or to connect them to produce a learning environment with several parts.
By moving their training to an online format, successful education business owners and independent consultants may make better use of their time. These are only a few examples of the many reasons why you should use Thinkific. (See also ‘How To Set Up An Account & Log Into Thinkific.’)
The Best Way To Create An Online Course
1. Choose Your Topic
Your course topic needs to be something that you’re passionate about. Your teaching will be about as interesting as a cardboard sandwich if you’re not passionate about the subject you’re teaching.
Think about the situations in life that have provided you with opportunities to develop your skills and talents. You shouldn’t feel as though you need to teach a university-level profession to offer courses to generate money.
The variety of topics that could be covered in a course is virtually limitless, with Thinkific for example offering courses on everything from data analysis to roller skating.
In a nutshell, to have a topic and knowledge that can be monetized, you must first love your topic, then be good at your topic, then have experience in it, and finally, it must fill a gap in the market and be interesting to people.
2. Make Sure There’s Demand For Your Course
Raise your hand if you want to spend the next several weeks of your life developing an online course that absolutely no one will purchase. Nope. It didn’t seem likely to me.
After you have selected the subject matter for your online class, the next step is to carry out market research to determine whether or not there’s a demand for the course.
If during your research you find that there are already a lot of courses in your subject area, then you may think about giving up on your teaching prospects. But having some competition is never a bad thing!
This in fact demonstrates that there’s a high probability of there being a large market demand for that course idea, and as a result, it’s well worth researching further.
Here are some of the things that you should be looking out for:
- Are people looking for it, and do they have questions about it?
- Can you offer something slightly new and different than your competitors? Have they missed something?
- Will someone be willing to pay for what your course offers?
Your idea for a course has the potential to become a best-seller if you answered “yes” to all the questions above.
There are many different things you may do to ensure that there’s market potential for your online course, including:
Pre-selling The Course
Pre-selling your course is an excellent strategy for avoiding the terrible outcome of developing a program that nobody ends up purchasing. It’s not uncommon for people to purchase courses before they have even been developed.
When it comes to kicking off an online class, this is one of the most effective strategies.
Keyword Research
You may find out how many people are looking for courses similar to yours on Google by using the Keyword Planner tool offered by the platform. Pay attention to the “bid cost,” as products that are more likely to result in a profit typically have a higher cost per click.
Check The Competition
Rival businesses that offer online training programs that are similar to your own are not necessarily a reason to give up your teaching dreams about course business success. This actually indicates that there’s a potential source of income that you can capitalize on.
In addition to being a useful place to get a rapid overview of the available options, online course marketplaces can be an effective marketing tool when used along with your primary online course website.
Talk To The Target Audience
If you’re not actively interacting with your audience, you’re passing up a lot of opportunities to gain new perspectives. Ask about the difficulties they face and whether or not they would be willing to pay for a class to help them overcome those difficulties.
3. Create Learning Outcomes
People often overlook learning outcomes when creating a course, but their importance cannot be overstated.
If you don’t do this for your online courses, you could be putting your reputation and your financial line at serious risk, not to mention making the process of creating your courses a difficult and frustrating one.
Your students can transition from where they are in their lives now to where they want to be in the future with the help of the online courses you offer.
Would you give someone your money for a thing that you don’t fully understand and have no concept of what the product can achieve for you? Of course not.
Even while you’re aware of the benefits that your class will provide to your students during their entire student journey, this doesn’t guarantee that they’ll also be aware of these benefits. It’s doubtful that your students will sign up for your course if they are uncertain about the contents or how the course will benefit them.
The learning outcomes for your course should make all of this crystal clear to potential students. They need to know what they’ll learn, what skills they will gain, and how your course will benefit them in the long run.
4. Create And Gather Course Content
At this stage, many people fall victim to procrastination, because this is typically the longest and most tedious part of the course-creating journey.
The sheer quantity of information that we either have in our heads or that is all about us (in books, on our hard drives, in our notepads, and so on) is typically the primary factor that causes us to become stressed and overwhelmed in this situation.
At this point, the challenge is not simply determining which topics should be covered in our curriculum; rather, it’s working out what to leave out.
This is the point in the process where the research you will have completed throughout the market testing phase as well as the learning outcomes now became very helpful.
Throw out anything that doesn’t directly relate to the accomplishment of a learning outcome as you’re sorting through the stacks of content you have collected.
Next, check to see that all of the learning outcomes do, in fact, have content that is connected to them. Include only content that provides solutions to the most pressing problems faced by your audience or addresses unmet needs that haven’t been addressed by your rivals.
Another option is to find out what your most popular content is and bundle it into a more structured learning path if you already have content and an existing audience, such as from a Facebook group, a blog, or a YouTube channel.
5. Structure Your Course And Modules
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