You've heard it all before:
Online courses are the future of education!
Online courses are a way to make a lot of money!
But also:
People don’t finish the online courses they take!
All online courses are scams!
They’re all true. Except for the “All online courses are scams” one — even if there are definitely scams out there, and they make it harder for the rest of us when creating courses.
So here’s the deal:
In this (ridiculously complete) guide, I’ll show you how to make courses the right way, so you can:
Sounds good ? Let’s go.
This is what I asked myself when I was writing this guide, I wanted to write the best resource on the internet on online course creation, and give it all for free.
To do so, I worked with someone who has a decade of experience in course creation:
Hi, I won’t bore you with my “mindblowing results”, but please allow me just THREE bullet points to brag:
All of that matters because it gives us data on what makes a good course.
Stan Leloup, founder of SchoolMaker
Last year, we helped more than 500 course creators launch their first course, and helped many others build more profitable course businesses.
And we realized that the course creators who were generating the most revenue do a few simple things right:
Obviously, there are already a bunch of resources online on “how to make an online course”, but they basically boil down to “make some videos and upload them”.
Maybe that was enough 5 years ago, but it's not the case anymore.
That's why we created this guide. (This, and also to promote SchoolMaker - but more on that later: I promise you that 100% of the info is free and we don’t have a paid course to sell you).
In this guide, you’ll learn how to create online courses that:
If you’re creating your first course, you’ll learn how to do an awesome job on your first try.
Or if you already have some courses, I’ll show you how to take them to the next level.
Alexandru Golovatenco
In this guide on how to create an online course, you will learn:
Yes, it is entirely free.
If you spend a few hours per day on building your course, this guide can be completed entirely in 6 to 8 weeks.
I've also written an article on how much time it takes to create a course here if you're interested.
In this guide, you will pre-launch your course a few weeks after starting creating it, this is because it allows you to get market validation by getting your first sales, and increases your chances of building a more successful final product.
I added the list of tools and software you will need as you create your course on this guide's checklist page under the "Material & Software" tab.
But I don’t recommend focusing on gear now, the most important thing to do right now is to choose a course idea and validate it!
It’s always hard to know if a project will do well before starting it, so this guide focuses on a method that allows you to validate your course’s viability before you’ve even filmed your first lesson.
Through surveys and market research, the guide will help you choose the best angle and get a precise positioning that resonates with your students. Once you nail your positioning, you will focus on finishing your first module as quickly as possible to get your first pre-sales.
This approach ensures that you spend your time on the right things, and that you don’t create an online course that no one needed in the first place.
Yes, we recommend having an audience because market research, surveys, and getting beta-students are easier to do when you have an audience.
You don't necessarily need to have a huge audience to make course sales though.
Based on the hundreds of creators we helped launch their courses, we recommend having at least 300 people in your email list or 1000 subscribers on social media before pre-launching your course.
