The Essential Checklist For Selling Your Online Courses

James: [00:00:00] Hey, there we go. This is James speaking. Welcome to another Open Classroom where we talk about everything to do with membership and training sites. If you haven’t subscribed before, obviously subscribe, stay in tune stay in check. Obviously we’ll notify you every time we have a live webcast. What am I going to do today and why should you stick around?

Well, here’s the gist of it. We’ve been spending a lot of time, or I have anyway, evaluating AI tools or all these artificial intelligence tools. There’s tons of them around. There’s more coming out every day.

I think the last time I checked, there was 4100 listed at thereisanAIforthat.com, But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s probably close to 5, 000 today.

And that’s an AI tool that… Checks to see how many AI tools there are. There’s even some now that are available that will actually create online courses, and that’s time for another talk.

So here’s the thing. There’s a lot of courses becoming available, a ton of courses, and people are creating courses with these AI tools but no one’s talking about selling them. Okay, I have a course. What’s next? Where am I going to put this course and how am I going to sell the course?

So that’s what I wanted to do today is cover some of the ideas and probably things that you should consider when you’re creating the course because how you create the course has a lot to do with how you’re going to sell the course or deliver the course after.

And I think most people are missing that. So, I wanted to go over some tips and tricks. I got a list of things to consider. I am going to put a checklist together. A physical checklist on the trainingsite.IO site, which you can download as one of the resources that we have there.

But there, there’s a lot to consider.

It’s not as simple as going, Oh, I created a course or I spent my 30 a month and I used one of these AI tools that created a course for me and it built the course out, it did a thumbnail for me, it created a course description. [00:03:00] So I should be financially independent now, right? Just doesn’t happen. So let’s go through some of the pieces that we’re going to be covering today or some of the steps at the start.

Assumptions About Selling Courses Online

And I want to break it down kind of I want to break it down into a couple of pieces. The first one is there’s some assumptions that I’m making about your course. So this is even before you’re. So if you’re thinking about putting the course together, or you’re thinking about how I’m going to sell it, I just want you to, you know, I’ve got some assumptions.

I just want to make sure that we go over them so that we’re kind of all in the same page. Because these are kind of general tips. But if you’re a beginner, or it’s your first course, you may not have even thought of them. So this is something we’re going to have to spend a little bit of time on and really understand.

So let’s go back and we’ll go back and see where I’m at here on the screen. One of the other things that’s happening here too And I’m gonna be up front with you. This is true. I use chat GPT to get the notes and the tips ready for these calls. So I have in front of me. I have my chat GPT interface.

Everything is in here that I wanted to talk about. Some of the tips and the reason I use this is because it keeps me on track or focused about what it is that I want to share with you today. So I’m not using it specifically. To basically regurgitate what’s in there. What I want to do is I’m using it as a tool to supplement my thinking or thoughts on this.

So I’m not anti I’m not anti AI. I’m actually [00:05:00] all in, all for it. I think there’s a place for it and it can be used effectively to supplement what you’re already doing. So here’s kind of some of the things that I want to think about at the start.

So here’s kind of the first thing that I want to go over. I’m assuming, so these are the assumptions. I’m assuming that you’ve done some research before you’ve created your course, or as part of the process of creating your course.

An ideal Learner

I’m You’ve got an ideal learner. You have someone where, who has a problem, a specific problem. You know how to fix that specific problem that they have. You’re in a position where you have a, a solution or a sequence of steps or tasks where you can guarantee an outcome to someone. That answers their question or fixes their problem based on what it is [00:06:00] that you’re teaching them.

And I’m assuming that you’ve got these goals, these outcomes documented beforehand. Now if you don’t have that done, it doesn’t really matter where you’re selling them or how much you’re charging. Because you haven’t done the homework first. And this can cause a huge problem because a lot of times the course creator is not creating a course for the people who they’re teaching they’re creating a course for themselves for answering questions that their potential customers don’t have.

So I’m assuming that you’ve already got that done and you’ve got it You’ve got a complete picture that’s detailed on how to do that, and I’ve actually built out a couple of ChatGPT prompts that I can give you that actually help you do that beforehand for the course, so that you can use tools like ChatGPT and just actually use the prompt that I have, and it will give you specifically that target audience, what it is you’re solving.

[00:07:00] What are the pain points for them? What are the steps or the things that you’re going to be able to do or outcomes? You’re going to be able to to give them or guide them to well, they’re doing it. So that’s the first assumption that I make is that you’re doing that. The second thing is that I’m assuming that you’ve actually the right kind of online course and identified that an online course is something that’s actually needed to solve it.

You know, you have to figure out, first of all, if the question is big enough or the problem is big enough and that it requires a multi step coach pardon me, course or a number of steps or a process to be fixed. And is that, Process or the strategies you’re applying, is it absolutely complicated enough or lengthy enough to have a course?

And you know, this is the assumption as well. I, I talk about micro courses, mini courses and courses. So micro courses are generally one lesson and they can be quite short. They’re [00:08:00] very, very easy to create and they’re usually just an answer to a question that is supplemented by some other materials.

in terms of that one single lesson, whether that be worksheets or quizzes or materials or tasks that have to be applied. A mini course tends to be under 30 or 45 minutes, can be multiple steps, multiple lessons. And again, that solves a problem or allows you to teach something that does a little more complicated as opposed to a full blown course, which tends to be quite large and can be anywhere from 30 to 50 to 100 lessons long and and usually takes about a couple hours or might even be number of stepped days to to actually Put together.

So have you picked the right type of course? I’m assuming that you I have identified, is this a micro course, a mini-course or course. Now, the reason I’m saying that is because if you’re going to be charging or trying to sell a course, [00:09:00] if it’s a micro course or even a minicourse that will dramatically change how you’re going to approach selling it and what needs to be done in order to get that course ready for selling.

So I’m assuming you’ve identified that you’ve done the research, and not only that, you figured. What kind of content should I be including in my course? Is there written content? Is it audio content? Is it visual content? Is it blended learning? You know, how do I need to teach this? What are the different learning styles and communication styles or types that I need to apply or put in this course to make it to work properly?

So that’s number two. Number three, and this is the one we’re going to talk to in a little bit later, is, Have you figured out or thought about the appropriate platform for selling your course or delivering your course? And we’re going to go over that we’re going to go over that in detail kind of in the next steps.

But I want you to think about this from the start [00:10:00] because What often happens is you will see, or you will get the idea, or you will be prompted by either another business owner, or perhaps it’s one of your fans or clients who is asking for a course, and you may kind of just get funneled into a way to deliver that course or a platform to deliver that course without evaluating all of the different types.

And I’m going to get into the three kind of main types of platforms. We’ll talk about that, but just understand that if you hear one name or one way to deliver the course. And that course format, I’m talking about the actual course, not just the way the videos are delivered if there’s videos, for example, but you may have only heard of one.

There are a whole bunch of them available. It’s not just one solution and those platforms or solutions. there’s three different platforms that you need to consider as part of it. So I’m assuming you’ve done some homework and you’re at least thinking about how am I going to deliver the course that [00:11:00] I’m creating.

And then also the way that the lessons are going to be constructed. So I’ll give you an example. If you have a written course where there is no video, There is no audio. How that course is going to be delivered is fundamentally different than if you have a course that you’ve done that has 58 videos or 60 videos or has three videos and each video is two hours long.

So you have to think about what do I need in terms of the way my lessons and my topics are put together. So that I can have the best platform to deliver that particular course. So you have to optimize the platform or optimize the course based on the the appropriate visuals that you’re going to be using to teach the activities that you’re going to be able to teach the supplemental information that you’re going to going to include after the quizzes, calls to actions, gamification.

[00:12:00] All of these pieces are important and can determine. Not only how you sell it, but where you actually sell your course. The other one I’m hoping that you’ve thought about is the sales page. There is a format for actually selling your course content, which can be a little bit daunting because the fact that you have a course doesn’t sell a course.

That’s just not enough. You need more than Your good looks and an idea for a good title to be able to sell the course. So I’m assuming you’ve done a little bit of homework there. You’ve thought about it and you’re going. Okay, I know that people want this. They’re looking for that solution. How am I going to persuade or influence or guide someone to make a decision to actually enroll in the course?

So you’re going to have a compelling sales page. I’m hoping you’ve spent a little bit of time thinking that through. And then finally, the other thing, you know, number six is I want to think about payment types and strategies, and we’ll get into that in some detail here. But there’s, [00:13:00] Multiple ways to for able as you, the instructor or the teacher or the course creator, there’s all sorts of ways for you to get compensated.

for the course content. If in fact, that’s the goal of the course. You may not even want to be selling the course. You may be using it to supplement other parts of your business. There’s all sorts of choices available there. So before you actually get into trying to sell the course, I want you to think about how does this course need to be compensated or how do I need to be compensated for this course or how does this course fit in to my business?

So you have some pricing strategies, pricing, of course, payment options, all sorts of pieces. I want you to hope that you think about you’ve done some, a little bit of work on that as well. Also the marketing channels. You know, if if we look at how courses are marketed today, it’s fundamentally different than it was a couple years ago.

And if you look back from the old school marketers it’s [00:14:00] completely different than the way courses were marketed before. So that changes with time and there are trends or ways to channels to use or ways to market your course. So, you know, you’ve got to start writing down and thinking about, I’m doing a course on this and it’s priced at this price.

What channels are the ones that are appropriate for me to use to identify or get in front of the people who are willing to pay for it and willing to pay the amount that I’m asking for it. So you’ve got to kind of think about that, that marketing channel, whether it’s partnerships or email marketing or social media marketing or search marketing or paid advertising.

There’s just a ton of choices there that you have to kind of think through. So really, really important to have spent some time with that mentally. Before you go out and start selling your course, also things like, you know, simple things like collecting testimonials and doing test courses or test deliveries of the course to people who are already [00:15:00] customers.

So, you know At the end of the day, what I want you to remember is, you know, excuse me, we’ve gone over a couple of points here. The end of the day, when you’re selling your course or you’re getting your course ready to sell, and that’s where it is and how it’s promoted. It’s not the end of the road.

This is an iterative process. that you go through over and over again and you re evaluate based on the activities that you’re getting and the responses that you’re receiving. So I’ll put a list together of these kind of points but just understand this is stuff that I hope you know, you’ve taken the time to do beforehand as we get started on this.

Because the one thing I wanted to do, kind of the next piece on this is you know, I was thinking, sorry, I got a little tickle in my throat. I was thinking again you know, putting these all together and I’m just you know, when you’re thinking about the audience, the audience really, really, really the audience and the outcome are often connected to the [00:16:00] point where people don’t really spend enough time thinking this through.

And I’ll give you an example of how this can cause a big problem. So I have some customers who are involved in markets or topics that are not ones that are easily sold. They’re creating courses that are for a limited number of people who are looking for Other than information, they’re looking for some coaching or some blended kind of learning that goes with it or blended teaching.

So that kind of understanding that grouping of people or that target market and the objectives that you have as the teacher and the objectives that they have as the student can change where you want to How do you want to put this course and how you want to deliver it? So, you know, really, really spend some time up front with this target market part.

That was the first one on the list and it’s the one that it gets missed. [00:17:00] And I think the problem that we’re going to run into, especially with new course creators, is because it’s easy to create a course, that one piece at the start, that learning objective, that target audience, the problem that you’re solving, People who are not experts in something but have access to the information in an organized way that makes them look like an expert or allows them to be act as an expert because they understand the strategy or process, they’re going to miss out or forget about the value and the type of person that they’re providing this outcome for.

So spend a lot of time with that when you’re, when you’re thinking it through. So here’s the one I want to spend some time with just at the start. And again, if there are any questions, make sure to ask them if there’s areas that I want to go with this or there’s some something particular that when you’re selling a course or thinking about selling a course and you don’t know where to go with it.

The one thing that I wanted to kind of go through today [00:18:00] is the type of course that you’re creating. And where you’re going to sell it. So here’s, here’s the kind of gist of the different three kinds that there, that there are. So I want you to, and if you’re watching this, just again, I’ll put this in a checklist, but there’s three different styles of places to sell your courses.

So I’m assuming you’ve done the work. I’m assuming you have some kind of course, but you’re figuring out and you go, okay, great. Where am I going to put it? And how am I going to sell it? So the where I’m going to put it, this is what we’re talking about right now. So if I have a course. And I have done all the work and I’m thinking about, okay, where can I deliver this?

You have three choices. The first choice. And this, the one that was probably came out first was a course marketplace. And what a course marketplace is, is it is a single site that has a complete library of courses organized by [00:19:00] category, and those courses are created by multiple authors. So example, the big one of that, the, you know, the, the giant in the room with that one is Udemy, of course.

So if I go to Udemy right now, Let me just actually, we’ll go and take a look at We’ll go to Udemy here and I’ll see if we’ve got a screen set up for Udemy. So I’m going to go and take a look. If I go to Udemy right now, if I go to Udemy, is that the right?

There we go. If I go to Udemy right now and I’m taking a look at Udemy, I’ve got, in this case, I’ve got a site with, let me just look and we’ll see how many, development, entrepreneurship, data science, we’ve got finance and accounting, IT software, office productivity. Design marketing lifestyle. There’s just hundreds of categories and there’s tons of of different of different authors doing it.

[00:20:00]

I’m just going to type in how to sell online courses. And if I go in here, there’s 10,000 results for how to sell online courses, and there’s all sorts of them ranging from 119 or 13. 99 on sale because I’m logged in as a non registered user. But you’ve got all sorts of these different courses from a whole bunch of different authors.

So one of the things you can do, obviously, is you can spend time creating a course. And you have to think, if I’m going to be creating a course. And I have the choice of delivering it in a marketplace, how does that course fit into the marketplace? So I’ve got the course, is a Udemy course something that I want to create or what am I competing against within that particular course?

So this can be a huge problem, right? If you’re putting this course together and then you’re thinking, okay, I’m going to sell it and you only know about Udemy, which is a course [00:21:00] marketplace there’s 10, 000 courses that you’re competing against. on Udemy for that title. So think about it again. You got 10, 000 choices or 10, 000 courses came up as possible answers on how to sell online courses.

So this is a huge library. It’s like going to the library at the university or the public library, right? You have whole sections of books about particular topics. Udemy is exactly the same. You’ve got whole sections of Udemy about the topic that you happen to be selling. So, think about that and, and understand that the way that you’re going to market or sell your course is different on Udemy.

There’s a couple other things just I want you to consider. I talked about pricing. If you take a look at the pricing on here on some of the different pages, if we take a look and scroll down here on the right hand side, you’ll see that I’m logged in I’m not logged into Udemy right now. [00:22:00] So you can see that there’s courses that are regular 149 and I’m in Canada.

So it says 149. 99 in Canadian funds It might be like 119 or 97 in US funds, but that’s the normal price and they’re selling it for 16 So if I’m selling a course and I’m got a hundred and ninety lessons and it’s a huge course and everything And it’s being sold for 15. How much money are you going to earn if the course is here?

So great way to get courses out. You’re going to be in front of a lot of people But you’re going to be competing a lot of people And you’ve got to think about how much content am I putting in what kind of content am I putting in? to be able to sell it on this particular platform. So, that’s kind of the, you know, the, the first one that you’re thinking about is, okay, I have a platform that I have to choose and it is a marketplace platform.

And, and that’s kind of the one that people start off with a lot of the times. And the interesting thing that I run into is a lot of people that use that [00:23:00] actually use Udemy. for a very, very short low content courses. They use it as a lead magnet for their actual real courses, which are going to be held on some of the other pro platforms that we’re going to talk about.

So first platform is a course marketplace like you’d mean. Now here’s the second one. Second one is software as a service or SAAS. You’ll see that acronym and there’s a couple that come up with that style of platform and those are softwares as a service. So it is a website that you basically subscribe to which provides a private platform and the services around.

You know uploading your course content, creating courses, selling courses, having lead pages for courses, doing some marketing for courses, but it’s a third party software that you are using as a course creator. [00:24:00] To allow you to sort of hand off all of the stuff with courses of the where. So some examples of those are kind of the big one in the room there is Kajabi right now, because it spends more time in terms of the marketing.

Of the courses is also included in that platform There’s some other ones for example, like teachable thinkific and those are a little more course focused and not on Online course business focus. So those are some examples thinkific teachable kajabi Those ones software as a service And those are viable platforms and lots of courses you’ll find on them, lots of people that you’re using.

And there’s some really neat things. And I’ll go into the pros and cons of these in a little bit. So if I, if we take a look and I spend a little bit of time on on Kajabi here, and let me just open that one up. So we’ll go over to Kajabi and just to show you what that one looks like.[00:25:00]

So Kajabi is a website that you basically log into and you create courses. Memberships, communities, they’re trying to put everything together in here. So, it’s a place for your courses to sit. It’s a place where you can deliver your courses and have memberships and different ways of selling courses.

And also do some marketing for your courses. So, the big, big, big thing here is all the tools you need are in one place. So they’re doing it all in the one platform and they’ve removed the tech savvy stuff, right? You can do a trial that’s available for you. And here’s the one that’s that’s if interesting.

If you’re selling courses is this platform allows you to do landing page copy. And what that means is once you’ve created the course, not only can you sell it and deliver it, you have a sales page that you can use to persuade and influence people to be able to do it. Okay, so it’s all about creating [00:26:00] and growing so marketing tools and templates Funnels campaigns and content so it allows you to do some additional work In terms of the marketing the other thing is is it does have a bit of a built in crm or customer relationship management piece of software That allows you to keep track of Who’s bought my course, who I’ve been marketing to, who hasn’t bought, who’s a member, who’s not a member.

So, that’s an example of software as a service, and that’s the check in, second kind of way that you’ll be able to, to sell your courses is, is you know, have it as a service. And again, we’re going to get into the pros and cons of these, but I just want you to be aware that those are the first two ways that you can do it.

Now. The other one is, is let’s say, for example you have an existing website and you have an existing online business and you’re figuring to go, man, I want to sell some courses or I have an idea for a course and I want to sell that course [00:27:00] online. One of the things you can do is you can basically do a self hosted version of your website.

And what that means is if in our case, we always. Talk about using wordpress which powers I think 40 or 50 percent somewhere in there Percent of the internet is on a wordpress site There’s a number of plugins and themes that you can use on your existing website to sell the courses, and deliver the courses, take payments for the courses, and you’ve got that all of the existing infrastructure that you have in your business, and your existing business, that is available to you, now you’re just supplementing or adding course content by adding plugins or themes or complementing your existing business.

That you’re already hosting yourself. So that’s the third way to do it. And that’s the way that that we do it as we spend time with that. I’ll actually show you we’ll go to this one here. I think this site will show you. Yeah. So for an [00:28:00] example on, on this one, if we go take a look at, at that particular site.

On this one,

I’ll open up a couple of the pages here. I actually have

I’ve got one. Let me see if I can get it open here.

There we go. Oh, that one’s not working, so I’m not going to use that one. Try a little bit different on this one. I’ll go to another page and see if we can get that to open up here.

So we’ll go to the WPGrow.com site or the trainingsite.io site. Both domains work, goes to the same place. So I’m going to open that up. And you can see on this one that we’ve got our existing WordPress site and what we’ve done is we’ve added a learning campus to it on WordPress. So I’m not logged in here.

You can see I’m not logged in. We’re in a, just browsing the site, take a look at it. And on this one we have courses. So, I’ve just used a [00:29:00] WordPress plug in to add courses. To the site. And in this case, I think we’ve got 40 different courses that are published and they’re in some different categories.

So I basically got in my case my own library, my own campus, my own training site here, and it’s part of my existing business. So it’s not something that I have to log into as a software as a service to sell and manage my courses. This is just part of our existing business where we Help people start and build and grow their training sites, which can be the do it yourself group who want to just take courses or the done for you group who just want us to take care of it for them.

So, you know, in this case, we’ve got all sorts of courses. If again, I’m not logged in here. If you haven’t logged in, you can create a free account and certainly get involved in that. We webinars, part of regular training, and that’s you know, this one right here that we’re working [00:30:00] on right now. That’s the one that we’re doing right now.

And if I actually open this, it’s probably going to show that the stream is live, but that’s, that’s today’s session right there. So this is another example of what happens when you have a couple choices, right? You’re in a situation now where you’ve got three choices for delivering. The course which one do I use and how does the one that I pick affect or change the course that I’m creating?

And this is something you got to spend some time thinking about it beforehand because if you don’t, you’re going to run into trouble later down the road. And the real, the real thing here is if you’re looking at this and you’re going, okay, great. What am I going to do? What am I going to spend time with?

How am I going to, you know, sell this course? You have to look not on just, I created a course. I want to sell it and earn a thousand dollars or 10, 000 or 50, 000 from the sale of my course, you have to think about, okay, [00:31:00] how am I going to build a training site or an education business? And am I only going to have one course?

And is this course the only part of my business? These are important questions to ask yourself because the choices that you make now. When you’re starting off selling courses may not be the ones that the choices that make may not fit your business later on down the road. So you want to think about, okay, how much flexibility do I need right now or want right now?

And then more importantly, how much flexibility do I need or want? Two years from now, five years from now, or 10 years from now, if I’m still in the business and courses are still part of my business. And again, that’s the other thing you have to remember is that in as much as you know, I could say that courses are the be all and end all.

You know, I’ve done over a different, I’ve done 100 courses, I would think in total in my career on selling stuff online I think 15 or 1600 video tutorials that we’ve [00:32:00] done now. So we’ve got a, we’ve got a where I started is not where I thought it would be put it that way. So you, you have to think about that, or at least consider that when you’re making these first choices on.

on on which one that you want to pick. Now there’s a couple other things that just to think about when you’re identifying, well, which is the one is best for me or which is the best one for me to sell my course. And here’s the, here’s, here’s for the kind of Here’s five. Let me just, let me just give you five ideas just to think about.

So again, I’ll put these in the checklist. So just remember them. Are you, or is centralized management important to you? If you’re in a position where you want to have one place, for your courses and one place to take care of the marketing of the courses, the delivery of the courses, the customers that are taking the courses everything to do with the courses.

If you want one place for that, that’s centralized management. So you’ve got [00:33:00] to put that on a scale, how important that is to me. You know, do I need to have a centralized hub? You know, do I want to create my courses there? Do I want to deliver my courses there? Do I want the courses consumed there? Do I want to be able to administer the courses from there?

Do I want to be able to market courses from there? This reduces the complexities. Of being able to administer everything in your content, so there’s less stress, less hassle, and things are definitely easier. So weigh that on the scale. Is that really, really, really important to you? Okay. The other one is consistent branding.

Number two is consistent branding. If, and again, I’ve, I’ve done a number of videos and I’ll probably visit this one again. Is it In many cases, when you have been online for a while, you end up with multiple domains and multiple brands, and oftentimes what we find is we have a place where there’s one part of your business is on one brand, [00:34:00] another part of your business is on another brand, and this is something that I struggle with personally all the time.

You know, with hundreds of domain names that we own there’s different strategies for domain names and different strategies on where you’re going to put the courses. If it’s keeping on the main domain, that is your brand domain, put it on a separate sub domain that keeps the courses separate. Am I going to do a completely different site?

So there’s a lot of different choices there. And you have to think through, how do I want to brand this? As part of my business, do I want to have that wall all in one platform where my entire business is there, including the courses, including the service and other products that I sell, or is it okay to have a different domain or some different branding, different colors, different look and feel for my courses only, and then have the other part of my course, Or the other part of my business in a completely different place and then try and make sure or match those up so that the brands are the same, but I’ve got two [00:35:00] different places or two different properties.

I’m trying to make the houses look the same, right? So how important is it to you for having a consistent. Branding. The other thing that happens too with this is number three is you got to streamline your marketing efforts, right? Think about this through again, if you’re selling your course, is that the only thing that you’re selling?

Because if it is, and the way you sell your courses is through a centralized hub, like a Kajabi or teachable or what have you, if you’re putting them there, first of all, can I promote my other products and services that aren’t courses from there? If I’m using Udemy as a platform, for example, a marketplace, they don’t even provide outbound marketing for me.

So I got my courses in delivery there. I get a little bit of money or check when it’s sold. But it’s not integrated into my into my brand and it’s not centrally managed. So think about that. You know, how am I going to use or [00:36:00] streamline my marketing efforts in my business today, tomorrow, a month from now, a year from now, a couple of years from now, how am I going to market all of my business and I’m going to keep it separate.

Or do I have to make it separate by doing my course part in one particular area? So think about that. Is it fully integrated into the platform? Or is it independent of the platform that you’re involved in? Here’s the other one is, and this is one that people don’t think about as often as they should, is do you have a cohesive student experience?

And this is what I mean by that. One of the biggest frustrations still for myself and clients is Usernames and passwords. Usernames and passwords are still a nightmare. And I think things are changing in some respects, but they’re still, they’re still frustrating. And I’m gonna suggest that usernames and passwords and that cohesive student experience[00:37:00] you have to think about that because if you are going to sell access to a course.

There are a number of things that happen in terms of the experience for the user. So think about what happens. You have someone who signs up for your course. They may have registered for a newsletter or a subscription or access to something that you’ve given beforehand. And you have made, have asked them for a username or an email address.

And sometimes if they had to download something, you may have asked them for a password. So they created a username and password. Now they’re going to go buy something from you and they’re going to go through the checkout process and are they going to log in before they make the actual purchase or create a username and password before they make the actual purchase?

If they have, are they going to use the same email and password that they created for the opt in that they started off with? And maybe they have a different billing address and shipping [00:38:00] address. And the credit card that they’re using or the way that they’re buying or purchasing from you. For example, a PayPal account might be a completely different email address and password than what they use to make the purchase on your website.

And also used to subscribe or opt into something. So we could have three username and password combinations there. What about support? So after the fact they want some help, you’re going to ask them to go to a help desk. Maybe you have a help desk that’s separate from your main business and you’re saying, Oh, I need a username and password.

So you’ve got four usernames and passwords, which is an again, frustrating, frustrating piece of the puzzle. So to have a consistent student experience, it’s like, how am I going to get them in? And how am I going to give them access? To the appropriate content and courses that they purchased without or removing all of the friction that happens with usernames and passwords.

And that’s just one part. That’s just one [00:39:00] part because the consistency is not only getting them logged in. It’s getting them to take the courses. It’s getting them to complete the quizzes. It’s that onboarding process. It’s getting them to be involved in the community. It’s getting them to be understand how the gamification works.

It’s also where they get downloads for additional resources. It’s also how they get access to other products and services. Is there a consistent way or a way that’s easy and frictionless for people as they’re being involved with your business and how can you actually make that as simple as possible?

Is it a single platform? Is it your own hosted platform? Is it another platform connected to your own platform? So there’s a lot there that you have to think about and, and spend some time evaluating as to the importance, not only for your student, but also for you and how it runs with your business.

And then here’s the other thing that [00:40:00] a lot of people don’t think about, which I want you to consider is number five. It’s like. What’s cost efficient? If you have, as an example if I have you know, 70, 100 courses on my website, and I’m doing a self hosted version, there is no additional charge for me using a WordPress plugin.

The ones that we use and the ones that I’ve seen, there’s no limits. You can have one course, you could have 100, 000 courses. There’s no limit to that. However, if you use a software as a service, many of those softwares as a service you have to pay per course or poor level of course. So you may get, you know, the first five courses are this price five to 15 courses is an additional X number dollars over 15 courses is that additional money.

So you have to think about, okay, if I’m business, I’m going to be selling courses, where do they go in? How do they fit in? And how much is it going to cost me later on down the road. So spend some time thinking about that. On the other [00:41:00] hand, if you’re going, okay, I’m going to put it on WordPress. I’m going to host it myself.

There are plugins that you have to purchase and you have to pay for those on a regular basis. For example, the Lifter LMS LMS plugin, or the one that we recommend, which is LearnDash. There’s a LMS Tutor. There’s a whole bunch of them, but their purchases. With yearly upgrades or yearly renewals.

So there is a cost to that. And you’ve still got a WordPress site with hosting and all the other things if you’re doing it with WordPress. So think about the, you know, those kind of five steps. Cost of festi Sorry, I’ll go over them again. Cost efficiency, it’s the cohesive student experience, streamlined marketing efforts, consistent branding and centralized management.

Those are the ones that I want you to think about in a little bit of a checklist as you’re putting this this all together. So what are the other things that you need to think about when you’re thinking about these, these platforms? Let me go into a little bit of detail here. And again, if there’s any questions, put them in the chat [00:42:00] or if there’s something you want covered make sure to to ask it.

And I put together and we’ve been going, what, 45 minutes here. I think what I’m going to do is I do have a 10 step kind of checklist after, but it’s a little bit too long to do. Over this time. So what I’m going to do, and I also have a 10 checklist for 10 payment types, which we can think of too.

So let me just I got all this information here. I really want to share it, but I don’t know if it’s the right place to do it right now and add all these additional pieces. So if you do have any questions, make sure to put the comments below or the chat and obviously subscribe and subscribe and like the channel and more importantly go visit.

The training site dot IO site and create a free account so you can get in on our campus. So let me just see what else I have in my notes here. I’m going through stuff. What would be the best thing to do? You know what? I think I’m going to wait for another week [00:43:00] to do that. Just because there’s a lot of stuff there.

In fact, I should probably put a course together on this, right? And that’s one of the things that actually I did. So let me just open this one up and I’ll give you an example of how this fits in. So let’s go back to my courses here. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to log, I’m going to log in here so that we can actually see what happens.

So I’m going to log into our campus and you’ll be able to see how that, how that works right now. And we’ll go there and make sure we get logged in properly. There we go. So one of the things you’ll notice is that if you take a look at the top of the page, you’ll see that the menu has changed. So before it was about our agency or the services we provide to people.

Now that you’re logged in, it’s all about the community and the actual training site where we have a dashboard. courses, workshops, groups, [00:44:00] questions, answers, and additional resources that are here. So let’s just take a look at courses and I’ll show you why this you know, I was looking at these topics and they’re ones that we’ve covered as actual courses.

So I’ll just give you an example of how this might work. One of the things that we talked about or mentioned was sales pages, right? How are you going to actually sell the course or how are you going to be able to put together the course in a way that is easy to persuade and influence people. So let me do this one instead.

I’m going to do I’m going to search for sales pages and there we go. Here’s one here. So 10 modules design three types of course sales pages. So here’s a course that I put 10 modules just on the different types of sales pages. So that’s how important some of the things are to think about when you’re selling the course.

I’m going to show you too, just, there is a search function here for the courses that you can go through. The other thing is, is we also have a global search [00:45:00] for the entire site. So if I click on search at the top and I do, I’ll just type in sales pages again. This search is for the entire site, not just the courses.

And that one is going to come up with a whole bunch of different ones. For example, there’s 36 blog posts that have that 19 pages, three courses, four modules in the courses, five lessons, one quiz, and one episode of a podcast. So those are just some examples of how, how to to basically put those together.

This is an example of something came up and being able to sell courses. So I actually did a course on how to. Do sales pages in the three different kinds of sales pages that are available. So this is just an example of, you know, some of the things that can happen when you’re thinking about selling the course.

So it’s not just about creating the course. It’s putting it into your business and finding a way to deliver it that makes [00:46:00] sense in your business. And all I’m asking or suggesting is to use a checklist. Take a look at these and think them through. Think them through as you’re putting all of this work into selling a course and the reason that this is the most important part and it’s the part I want to kind of focus on as I end out here is the most important part of this is that if you don’t do this work now about where you’re going to sell it and how you’re going to sell it, the course will not sell.

Courses do not sell themselves. I don’t care what other YouTube video or The other instructor says that all you have to do is create a course to earn money. It is absolutely false. It is not. And it’s going to get harder and harder to sell courses. And the big reason why is we looked at the site at Udemy and I just searched in sell online courses.

There was 10, 000 courses available just on one platform, Udemy. So it doesn’t matter what you’re selling. [00:47:00] It’s competitive. And if you. Don’t think about how you fit into the competition, and more importantly, how you’re going to get in front of the people that are potential customers for you. It doesn’t matter how great your course is, it doesn’t matter how much time, how much energy, how much effort you put into it, how beautiful it looks.

How much content is in it. If you haven’t done the work on how am I going to sell it and where am I going to sell it from? It is not going to sell. You’ll have trouble giving away courses if they’re not if you haven’t done this homework first. So take the time make sure that you spend time with it.

You know, just have some fun thinking in the. Long term or the big picture. How am I going to put this into my business? And the other thing is is understand that if you’re doing this work now Just as or when you’re building your course is it may let you know that the course isn’t or shouldn’t be made I would much rather know that it’s going to be hard and difficult to sell the [00:48:00] course Based on the topic that I’m talking about and the kind and type of course I’m creating I would rather know now that it’s not going to sell Before I put in all of the work the other thing that you’ll find in and this is Again, this is something just to consider as a lot of people or course creators We’ll talk about being able to do like a not a test course, but kind of do a pre course or a pre launch to verify the actual course creation or course content.

And I think there’s a lot of value in that with some caveats. And I’ll give you an example of one of the things that gets recommended is, let’s say, for example, you have an existing customer base or you have existing fans, or you have people who have already expressed interest in learning what it is that you’re teaching.

And you’re thinking, I’m going to put a course together. One of the things that you can do, and one of the things that I still recommend, is you can take Your digital exhaust or repurpose existing content in the form of a course and [00:49:00] create a course, which means you’re basically organizing old content as opposed to creating new content for it.

I think there’s a lot of value there. The other one that you’ll hear people talk about is if you do a dripped course and a dripped course is when you have an idea for a course and you have an outline for a course. But you don’t have the actual content yet. And what you do is you create the first lesson or the first module, the first part of the course, and you release that to your test market.

And promise that the rest of the course is going to be coming. They may show some interest, but you’re going to gather feedback as to what’s important, what’s working, what’s not, and where the other lessons should actually go. So there is some validity in doing that approach where you’re creating a course ad hoc with materials that are generated after feedback from the first lessons.

The thing that I want you to understand is that even if you’re doing that, the people that you’re getting the [00:50:00] feedback from are people who are already customers of yours, they’re already sold. So having that course complete based on the feedback from people that already love, like and know you isn’t necessarily going to guarantee that when it goes back out to the public again, that you know, you’re going to be in some serious trouble.

So think about that when you’re. Putting this all together putting these this checklist in place. And again, I’ll put them down below And make it available For you after the fact and I’m gonna go back and I’m looking at my notes here. I’m gonna go back We’ll do another session maybe next week on The we’ll do that.

Actually, I’m gonna do Payment types. I’ll do ten payment types I’ll do one on that different ways to take payments and then the other thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna talk about I’m gonna talk about let’s do this one Yeah, I’m going to talk about the other thing I’ll do is another session is on how to pick the best platform.

So there’ll be [00:51:00] 10 things on how to pick the best platform for yourself and which ones are most important to you based on the kind and type of course that you’ve put together. So I’ve been talking for 55 minutes. Man, the time flies when I’m doing these. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, if you haven’t already joined or subscribed, Make sure to subscribe to the channel and visit TrainingSite.

io or WPGrow. com. Both go to the same place. Free registration for the site. Get in there, get involved, see some of the courses that we have. I hope you enjoyed this. Again, these happen when do they happen? They happen every Wednesday at 1 o’clock. You’ll also find more information on the channel, the YouTube channel.

Been doing a lot more shorts. You’ll see those. Using a really cool tool actually to create. All of these shorts and, and many courses and breaking up stuff that we’re doing, for example, like today. So all sorts of stuff going on in this space, the training business, the membership business, teaching online, online courses.

It’s an exciting time, and we’re in a great position to take advantage of it. All I’m suggesting is you’ve got to use these [00:52:00] checklists and you’ve got to think a little bit long term. It’s not as simple as build a course and get rich. This doesn’t work anymore, and that’s not the way it’s going to work in the future.

In fact, it’s going to get a lot harder. So, hope you enjoyed this. This is James Madook speaking. Take care and expect the best.