Do you know a lot about a certain subject and want to share it? You can easily learn how to make an online course, which is great for pros like you.
We’ll show you a set of steps that you can use to make lessons that help your audience and keep them interested. Come on, let’s start simple and make something useful together!
Let us first talk about what an online school is before we get into the steps.
What is a web-based class?
“Online courses are the way of the future of education because they break down barriers to learning for life.”
An online course is a program that is provided over the Internet. It is a flexible way to learn instead of going to school. It lets students all over the world receive educational content through systems like learning management systems (LMS). These classes let you study on PCs, laptops, tablets, or smartphones, so you can go at your own pace.
Schools, universities, businesses, and other places offer online classes at all skill levels, from beginner to professional. A lot of the time, they have forums, live webinars, video lessons, and interactive quizzes. By taking these classes, you can get structured material, expert advice, and a community to help you grow personally or professionally, and you don’t even have to go to a classroom.
Now we can talk about what we want to talk about how to make an online lesson.
Table of Contents
1. Figure out the chance
Making an online class is like starting a business. First, you need to find the right chance. Also, how do you find the right chance? By finding the problem and describing it.
Finding out exactly what your audience wants—what problem are they trying to solve—is the key to making a good online course. Do they want to learn Python to become a developer and move up in their job, or do they want to know the newest SEO marketing tricks to get more people to visit their website without paying for ads?
Knowledge is indeed power. People want to learn something new to change themselves with that power. Your online course is meant to help them through this process of change.
But it’s not easy to figure out what problem your audience needs help with. It will take some time and study, but you need to wait for the right chance to build something you think someone will need.
How to Find Chances to Make Money
Here are some ways to look for chances:
A poll should be sent to people on your email list to find out what they’re having trouble with or what they’d like to learn.
Pop a question or poll on your social media pages to find out what the people who follow you want or need.
Start putting in your web browser’s search bar, look at Google Trends, or use a free SEO tool to find out what people are looking for.
Ask people questions on Quora and other forums like Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Quora to find out what people are talking about. Is there a question that everyone wants to know? Do you see any patterns or themes in the questions? Do a lot of people keep asking the same questions?
The idea behind our Instagram Domination training was quickly backed up by our community. Once we were able to grow our account on the site, we wrote a short blog post to show our progress.
It got a lot of attention.
A lot of people shared the post, and every day we got dozens of emails asking us to go into more detail. Many people asked our founder and CEO, Nathan Chan if he would be willing to meet with them one-on-one because they wanted to have the same success we did.
We learned that people wanted more than just friends from the things they asked. They wanted to know how to make money from their Instagram accounts, get loyal fans, and use the app to build their brands. Each of these things was something we already did or something we could teach in a special online course.
2. Pick the right subject
You get to pick the subject, and it could be anything from beauty tips to videos on how to train your dog. Even though there are a lot of different ways to take online classes, choosing the right topic is very important for their success.
When choosing your subject, keep these things in mind:
Pick a subject to teach. Your online course should be about something you either already know a lot about or are willing to put in the time and effort to learn a lot about. In either case, you need to care about the subject. Make a list of your strengths and the things that people ask you for help with. Those are the kinds of things that usually do well in online courses. You could also ask yourself what you’d like to learn more about. By doing that, you’ll be able to teach others that subject very well. There are also Wix Learn Online Courses that you can look through to get ideas or improve your skills.
Pick something that other people want to know. Find out how much interest there is in the subject before you start making things. Ask your current readers and a group of friends what they think about the topic you were thinking about. Put up polls or online forms for your audience to fill out as a test. You can start by making a short lesson and then see how well it does. Then, after the lesson, ask your audience on social media or email if they’d like to see more of this kind of content.
Find out what’s going on. Do some study on your subject online. Are there a lot of classes already out there on your subject? Is the field ready for new content? It might be worth your time to join places that have already been used, but it might also be helpful to find smaller niches to focus on.
Figure out who you want to reach. As soon as you know who you want to reach, it will be easier to make and sell your courses. It will be easy for you to guess what kind of content your audience wants to read and how much they know about the topic you choose.
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3. Plan out your course
The hardest part of making an online course is making a plan. This is where you choose what information to give your viewers and what not to give them.
A lot of people ask and answer questions on the internet. Unless you’re teaching something completely new, likely, your material is already online somewhere, in some way. People don’t always pay for knowledge, though; sometimes they pay to be changed.
Your training is useful because it can help them get from Point A to Point B, or from where they are now to where they want to be.
Using information you already have in new ways is the easiest way to make a great course plan. Coming up with brand-new content from scratch can be a huge waste of time, and the work might not be worth it.
Check out the blog posts, articles, social media posts, guides, white papers, and talks that you already have. Make your most popular material easier to understand by putting it in the form of an online course.
But don’t get too far into the weeds yet. Remember that this is the step where you outline. Get together the course’s basic plan and put it together in the easiest way to understand.
Your information should be broken up into parts or sections. When your student finishes a lesson, it means they have learned a new skill or part of your subject well.
4. Take off with your online course
Launch time has come! But first, you need to do what you need to do to set yourself up for success.
Nobody will be able to use your online class if they can’t find it. You need a good marketing plan to back up any course that you want to do well.
Get your promotional materials ready ahead of time for launch day and beyond. That might look like this:
- Announcement of blog post
- Campaign by email
- Campaign for social change
- Ads on social networks
- Interviews on podcasts
- Promotions on YouTube
- Marketing with influencers
- Programs for affiliates
The list goes on and on. This is the last and best piece we’ve written on content marketing.
Like the success of most products, the first part of your launch will have a big impact on how quickly and widely you are adopted. Getting this right will help your course do well in the long run.
5. Grow your neighborhood
Starting your course is only the beginning of how your students will change. Now it’s your turn to guide them along the way.
That means holding Q&As, helping students with their work, replying to emails, and talking to them. It also means going back to your course materials from time to time to review and update lessons that are out of date and add new and relevant content.
That your training is no longer useful is one of the easiest ways to become out of date. A lesson on Instagram that is three years old won’t teach you about the newest features—it needs to be updated often to stay useful.
You’ll also have to deal with the problem of finishing the course. All around, pretty bad numbers show that people finish online courses—some showing numbers as low as 4%. Some of our courses have had rates as high as 60%, but it’s not easy to find the magic recipe that will keep people from leaving.
6. Make sure that people want your training idea
Raise your hand if you don’t want to spend weeks making an online lesson that no one buys. Nope. I didn’t believe that.
The next step is to do some market research tests once you’ve chosen your online course topic (or at least whittled it down to 2, or 3). The point is to find out if people want to learn what you’re offering.
But be careful—many people who want to make courses think that if there are a lot of other courses on the same topic, it means their plan won’t work. Instead, lots of competition could mean that there is a great need for that course idea, so it is recommended to learn more about it.
If you are just starting, here are three questions that will help determine if people want your online course. These are them:
Do people want to know more about your subject and ask questions?
Do they cover anything that you do not or do not cover well?
Does someone want to pay you to solve their problem?
7. Make learning results that are captivating and appealing
Do you want to pay money for something you don’t understand or that you don’t know how it will help you? No, of course not. Remember how important learning results are for your course.
Figuring out what you want people to learn is one of the most important parts of learning how to make online classes. These are your main course goals.
These use measurable verbs to make it clear to your students what they will be able to do by the end of the term. Plus, this can help make sure that the people who click “checkout” are buying the right course for them, which means that more people will finish and be happy with the course and fewer people will ask for a return.
To write an example of a learning outcome, finish this sentence: “You will be able to ______ by the end of this course.”
That is up to you. You can show your learning results in sentence form or in some other way. With Mimi Goodwin’s Sew It! Academy lists some of their learning goals next to their price plans.
Let’s look at the Kid’s plan. Kids will learn how to use a sewing machine, cut, pin, and iron, as well as how to sew in a straight line and understand basic stitches and words. Potential students know what to expect from the class, which makes it easy for them to decide if it’s right for them.
Figure out the best and most interesting ways to teach each lesson.
You’ve made it to the middle! To sum up, you have:
- Choose the best course topic
- Proven interest in that subject
- Set learning goals that are clear and engaging
- Planned and structured your course
It’s time to choose the best way to deliver your information as we move through the stages of making a course.
When you’re thinking about how to make the best online course, you should think about how different people learn and how to make the material as interesting as possible.
- Are you going to have audio content, reading content, movies, or activities?
- What kinds of images are you going to have?
- Will there be places for people to learn together?
- How are you going to make this class fun and interesting?
- How are you going to help kids who learn in different ways?
- Film, record, and edit your online lesson to make it happen.
Your audience’s preferred learning style and the best way to meet your learning goals should determine how you teach your course. That way will probably be video in 2024, so it’s time to face the camera and press record!
People who make courses often mix these three types of recordings to make their content:
Talking heads: This is when the camera only sees your upper body. There may be a green screen behind you for lecture slides, art, or something else.
Screen recording: This is where you record the screen of your gadget. This is usually done to show people how to do something or walk them through a process. You might or might not be shown on TV.
Voiceovers: This is like screen recording, but you talk about what’s going on the screen. This is often done for speeches, and the audience doesn’t see you.
See also: How to Set Up a Studio for Recording Videos
At the time, writing down your ideas and putting them to make a course plan may have seemed hard. But it’s pretty easy to learn new software, record material, and edit videos. Do your best and don’t give up.
As you learn how to make an online lesson that you can sell, you might find it helpful to look into how to build a YouTube channel. You can find everything you need to make good videos, even if you don’t plan to use YouTube, in articles like “How to Edit YouTube Videos” or “Editing Software Roundups.”
You can hire someone to do your editing for you on job sites like Upwork and Fiverr if you need help, don’t have time, or just want a professional touch.
8. Build your pricing system.
The next thing on your “Create online course” list is to figure out how your course fits into your general business plan and how much it will cost.
Prices for online classes can range from being free to costing a lot of money. There are a few things you need to think about before you set the final price:
How does the course help you reach your goals? To put it another way, is it a free lead magnet, a side job that makes you money without you having to do anything or your main product?
Are you selling a lesson that can be used on its own, a bundle, a community, a membership, or a mix of these? What kind of packaging you use will affect how your course is put together, how valuable it is, and how you sell it.
Setting your prices doesn’t have to follow any rules. But how much you can charge will depend a lot on how valuable the content you give is.
To get started, check out how much your rivals charge. As part of confirming the market demand, you looked into how much other companies charge. Look over the notes you made.
That means you should charge more for your lesson if it’s better than the others on the market. To make your lesson more valuable, you might want to change things that make it less in-depth or less useful.
9. Now is the time to make and sell online courses
People and businesses can both gain a lot from taking online courses. Making the right courses that help people grow professionally and personally can help you meet more people, become a thought leader, and make a steady stream of money.
To make online lessons and start teaching others what you know, use powerful tools and good practices. Since eLearning keeps getting better, there’s never been a better time to make a course.
But keep in mind that the type of course maker you use is one of the things that will affect the success of your online course. It might be the best place to begin your artistic journey.