Widespread internet connectivity has provided us with newer opportunities. Probably the best among them is to enable us to learn new things without having to be in a classroom. Online learning has now become so convenient that the masses are leaning towards this to take up new skills. The pent up demand has fueled many edupreneurs to launch their own online education business. If you are one of them and planning to launch your eLearning course, you must know how to create a successful online course.
There are thousands of rockstar online instructors in the industry who are making big money. They have an established system with huge resources. If you have to enter into their domain, you need to be strategic in your works. Take these steps as a general guideline to deploy your first online course.
How to create a successful online course that sells
Select a course topic
Online course creation starts with choosing a topic. This is certainly the most confusing matter when you have nothing at hand and just planning to dive into this realm. In most cases, people go for the topics that they think they can teach better than anything else. But don’t be surprised when we say that it’s a completely wrong idea to choose only the topics you are comfortable with. Because no matter how well you craft your lessons, people might not be that much interested in it. So put some more efforts in selecting a course topic by finding the answers of these three questions.
#What can I teach?
The first thing you’d want to know is what you can teach. There are literally billions of topics out there. You can’t fathom everything to the extent that you can teach about them. There has to be some topics that you are really good at. Find out your strong zone and list them down.
#What do people want?
Want and need are two completely different things. It might seem to you that people need to learn a certain topic because it’s too important for them. But in reality you may find people not interested in it at all. That’s because people never buy what they need. They always buy what they want. So scour through their wants and see which one of their wants can you fulfill. You can know about their wants on social media, online forums, or other eLearning websites.
#What’s the trend?
This is another vital information to have before selecting a topic for yourself. Trending topics are like untapped arenas where there is a lot of scope to explore. You can get a good look at the trending topics from Google Trends.
Make a good mix of all these answers to find out the best topic to offer your students.
Clarify the learning outcome
Always try to establish a clear picture about what your students will get if they take the course. People want to know how your course will serve their purpose. So show them the benefits of your course. A clear learning outcome makes people more interested to get enrolled in your course.
Create a course outline
Create an outline for your entire course before starting to make it. A building is only as good as its structure. So plan it well before everything. Think and decide about how many lessons will you add, how many quizzes will be there, how long will your lectures be, how you want to guide your students through lectures, etc. When you have a solid course outline, the task of creating the course becomes too easy.
Make video lectures and images
Videos and images make your lessons more interactive. So you need videos for your lectures. In addition, you need images to be used in different stages of your course. You need to use all these elements in an efficient manner to get the best output from your students. Keep these three things in mind while you’re making a video.
1. Avoid long videos
The idea of stuffing everything into one video is pretty tempting, especially when you are a new instructor. Because you want to deliver as much information as you can in every video. But this will surely backfire. Research says that people today have less time to watch a video. They almost always watch a video on the go, for example, on the commute to work, between the commercial break while watching TV, or during office breaks. The window is too small, so if you make long videos, chances are that it will go unnoticed. Rather make shorter videos so that it becomes easy for people to watch it anywhere anytime.
2. Don’t give too much or too less
If you deliver too much information in a lesson, people won’t devour it all. If you deliver too less, people will be disappointed. In both the cases, they will remain dissatisfied with your course. And that is something you don’t want. Because dissatisfaction may lead to drop out of the courses. So determine the right amount to deliver at a specific lesson. The amount should neither exhaust nor underperform.
3. Try to be versatile
Versatility is another key factor in the performance of your course. If it is too flatlined, your students will get bored. And you don’t want their boredom either as this will result in a poor performance of your course. Add different ingredients, make it more engaging, challenge your students’ capability, and they will love to participate in the course. Remember, driving on a highway may take you places, but a bumpy ride on mountain trails spikes up your adrenaline.
Uploading your course on your website
After your course is ready, it’s now time to upload it on your eLearning website. Go to the dashboard of your site and upload content. If you don’t have an eLearning website yet, make it. Because no matter what people tell you, you are going to need at one point of time. You can make your own online education website for free on WordPress. You just need to pick a comprehensive plugin that can do everything for you just like Dozent LMS. With this WordPress online LMS plugin you can create a complete eLearning website in under 5 minutes. Just go to WordPress.org and search for Dozent LMS. After installation and activation, you can create your course and upload lecture videos from the frontend/backend dashboard. Go through these documents to know the details on how the Dozent LMS works.
Make a marketing campaign
At this stage you want people to know about your course. Because it doesn’t matter how amazing your course is, if people don’t know about it, it’s doomed. So you need to let people know that you have published a course that might interest them. For that you need to spend some bucks on ads expenditure. You may use two different channels to advertise your courses.
@ Google Ads Campaign
Right now Google is the biggest source of prospects. Ruining an ad campaign on Google will give you the most exposure. To run ad campaigns on Google, go to your Google Ads account and create new campaigns from the left side menu. If you don’t know how to do it, go through this link to get an idea.
@ Social media marketing
With 3.6 billion users worldwide, social media is another great source of hunting prospects. You can create ad campaigns on Facebook or LinkedIn to get the best results.
Take feedback on courses to make it even better
Feedback is a very important factor for an online course. You develop every course to be the very best. But the truth is, people might think differently. And they have every right to do so. The general perception among us is that we try to label any negative comment as ‘troll’ or ‘deliberate defamation’. While some of your negative feedback might be that too, but considering all the negative comments against your existence is a wrong step to take. Rather take these comments as a means of developing your course even better.
Dozent LMS has a robust Ratings & Reviews system where a student can rate your course and write a review for it. These ratings and reviews will help you identify the shortcomings of your course and provide you the option to better your courses.
Wrapping Up
Selling online courses is a good source of making profits these days. And the ongoing trend is making it even better day by day. If you are planning to launch your own online education venture, we would like to bid you our best wishes. And do share your experience about creating your first online course in the comments section so that we can teach ourselves to deliver a more informed article next time.