6-Step Guide on How To Create A Course That Solves Your Target Audience’s Problem

Here are 6 key steps and some on how to create a course reasons why you should be creating online courses. Everywhere you look online now, you see online courses that offer anyone who has little time and money the chance to gain new skills. With no commute to a physical classroom, these educational opportunities allow anyone no matter how busy they are, or where they’re located to learn.

3 Mistakes to Avoid When You Create a Course

Online courses are extremely popular today. Any business can create and run an online course to extend their reach, build their audience, share their expertise with the world, and turn a nice profit.

Here are three deadly mistakes that businesses often make when they create their first course.

Don’t Create a Course YOU Want (Create a Course that Your Audience Needs)

You may have a great deal of knowledge in a particular area that you can teach others. You might think you know exactly what kind, of course, your audience would like. But it’s a fatal mistake to create the course you want rather than the course your audience needs.

You may be able to create an excellent course based on what you think you should teach, but it’s not likely to reach a great number of people or earn you a profit. And then, what’s the point? You’ll have a highly informative course that no one signs up for.

Instead, you should start by considering your target audience. What problems are they struggling with? What do they need to know? What are their interests? Once you have some ideas, consider how you can help them. Try to match your audience’s needs to your skills and expertise.

For example, you may find out through surveys that your email subscribers want to know more about using LinkedIn. You can take your knowledge and experience with LinkedIn and create a course that teaches them how to set up a profile and use it.

How to Create a Course thats not Too Long

Naturally, you have a great deal of knowledge you want to drop on your course participants. It also makes perfect sense that a longer course is more bang for the buck. A long and thorough course offers more value to its participants.

The problem is that if your course is too long, it might overwhelm your students. You might lose some of them along the way. The best courses are tightly focused. They teach what they need to teach in order for students to overcome the problems they’re struggling with. Your course should be just long enough to do that.

The ideal length for an online course is five to seven modules. Each module should have three to five steps or small sections. Each course has its own needs structurally, though, so this is just a guideline.

If you find that your course is longer than three to five modules, try breaking it down into two courses. If there is a sequential relationship, you can make parts one and two. If the course is slightly too long and you feel the information is very valuable, you can remove one module and offer it as supplemental material, a bonus add-on, or an additional resource for participants.

Putting All of Your Effort on the Course but Skimping on the Marketing

It takes a great deal of work to put together and run an online course, but you can’t forget to market it. Before you even get started, make sure that you have a solid marketing plan. How will you get your course in front of your target audience? How will you advertise it and put the word out? Which marketing channels will you use and how will you use them?

If you have a topic that aligns with your target audience’s interests, a tightly focused course, and a marketing plan in place, you’re virtually guaranteed a successful course.

5 Reasons You Need to Create a Course (Online)

People Need Help, and You Can Provide It

People get on the internet to find the information they need. If you can address a need of your target market and teach them how to fulfil or solve the problem, you can help people. This benefits them but it also benefits you by building relationships. After people take your course, they’ll continue to follow you and they may take future courses. So when you create a course that solves a problem people will flock to it because it helps and adds value.

You Can Become an Expert

Creating online courses helps you to become an established expert in your field. Right now, you may not feel like much of an expert. What on earth can you possibly teach people? But if you think about it, there is a great deal of knowledge you’ve gained through running your business. This is knowledge you can easily teach others (and you can research to fill in any gaps). You’ll become the go-to for information for your audience, and their go-to when they need your products or services.

Catch up (or Surpass) the Competition

There is a good chance none of your direct competitors are running online courses for their customers. If they aren’t, this puts you in a unique position. Among the competition, you’re more than just another business but also a valuable learning resource. This gives you a tremendous competitive advantage.

If your competitors are already offering online courses, it’s even more essential that you start doing so as well. Find a unique angle or a unique approach to what you’re teaching to set your course apart.

Profits Now and in the Future

You can sell your online courses and profit from them. There are free courses available online, as well as a great deal of free information, but if you can provide real value, offer something unique, and market your courses well, you can charge a good price for them and you’ll see enrollment.

Even better, you can use your online courses as a way to build future profits as your courses build a relationship with your audience. Even if you offer a free course, you’ll establish yourself as an expert and trusted source of information. There are many ways to profit from online courses, including running a short free course that leads to a longer premium course. You can also build a passive income by creating courses that students can take at any time and that are run mostly through automation.

It’s Easy

It’s much easier than you probably imagine to create and run online courses. It just takes a bit of organizing and preparing. You can research to gather whatever information you need to fill in knowledge gaps. Your online course will exist and be managed on a platform specially designed for courses. And once you run one course, it gets much easier to do the next.

Online courses offer a great way to reach your audience and if you’re not doing it now, you’re missing out on a great opportunity.

Click here to find out more on how to create a course

6 Key Points You Must Cover When You Create a Course in order To Guarantee it Sells

Online courses offer a great way for businesses to share their expertise with their audience. Create a course and you can:

• Establish yourself as an expert in your field and draw new people to your business
• Build a closer relationship with existing customers or potential customers
• Create high-quality content that can earn you further profits
• Learn even more about your target market through running online courses for them
• Help people who need it with your expertise

A great deal of work goes into creating and running an online course. So, how do you make sure that all this effort doesn’t go to waste? 

Here are the six key elements on how to create a course that’s guaranteed to sell.

1 – How to create a course that Solves A Problem

If your course has a specific problem it solves for your target audience, it’s sure to sell. Your audience members are suffering or are blocked by some type of obstacle. If you have a method they can implement to remove this block, kill this pain, face this challenge, or solve this problem, your course will offer great value to your audience.

Keep in mind that I didn’t say “problems.” A good online course focuses on only one problem and offers a solution. It should be straightforward and as simple as possible, while still getting the job done. 

For example, you might have a simple technique you’ve used to balance the family budget. You’ve never heard of anyone using this method before and it creates a way of easily working out your family finances. You can create a course that teaches this one unique method.

Or, through your business, you might have expertise that others could use. Maybe you have a stress-free process for managing social media that you think would be helpful for other businesses who use social media. You can create a course that teaches this one specific technique.

It’s important that you don’t try to solve every problem and you don’t offer a plethora of solutions or you’ll overwhelm your audience. The key is that they can learn your method, implement it, and see results. If you find yourself with multiple problems or solutions, pick one for this course and save the others for the next few courses.

How do you know what problems your audience face? Do some market research and try to discover the most pressing problem they’re facing now. Is there something you know about and can help with? If so, you already have the topic for your first online course. 

2 – Give Them A Reason

You might have an excellent solution to your audience’s problem, but you still must sell your course to them. Create a course that gives them clear reasons to take your course and make sure that these reasons are communicated well. 

You need to have clear learning objectives so that each prospective student knows what they will get out of the course. This communicates to them the value of the course and helps them picture the result they’ll get out of taking it. 

The learning objective for a course that teaches how to easily set a family budget might say, “By the end of this course, you will be able to set a simple budget for each member of your family which provides for painlessly paying off your debts while enjoying life.” 

The social media management course above might have a learning objective like this: “By the time you finish this course, you will be able to double the engagement on your social media channels while spending only 30 minutes per day on social media.”

With reasons like this, the prospective buyer can clearly imagine what his or her life will be like after the course is finished. They know whether the course is right for them or not. 

These benefits need to be published anywhere you’re selling your course. Try as much as possible to emphasise how your course differs from similar courses that might be on the market. A good way to drive home benefits is to explain concretely how your unique method for solving the problem saves the person money, time, or effort. Give them concrete benefits they can feel.

3 – How to create a course that has Relevant Content

For a course to be successful, it needs to be easily digestible. It needs to be organised in a logical way and all the content needs to be relevant to the learning objectives. 

Think of it this way: Your course leads the participant from Point A to Point B. At Point A, they are struggling with the problem your course seeks to solve. The course leads them step-by-step to solving this problem, solving each small problem along the way. At Point B, the end of the course, they have either solved the problem already or they’re fully prepared to take the next step and solve it.

The way this is done is to break the task down into modules and lessons. Each module tackles one task or problem they should deal with along the way. Each module is then broken down into steps or lessons. At the end of each module is a learning activity where the participant completes a task to get them closer to the goal.

If you create a course on researching competitors, for example, it might look something like this:

Module 1: The benefits of researching your competitors

Module 2: Identifying your competitors

Module 3: Identifying your competitors’ customers

Module 4: Analysing your competition

Module 5: Comparing yourself to the competition

Module 6: Next steps – Taking action on what you’ve discovered

Every single element in the course should be focused on the end goal. If there’s anything not completely relevant, trim it out. If it’s information you think the participant could use, provide a link where they can learn more. If your course gets unwieldy and you have more than 5-7 modules, consider creating two or more separate courses. If the course loses focus, your participants will too.

4 – A Marketing and Promotion Strategy

A good online course needs to have a solid marketing and promotion plan in place. There are many online courses available on the internet and you need to set yours apart and communicate its unique value to your potential students. You also need to develop a strategy for getting the word out about your course. 

A marketing strategy includes:

• Marketing content that clearly communicates the unique value of your course, including, as mentioned above, a clear message of the benefits your participants will receive. 
• SEO traffic strategies to drive potential leads to your site, where you have this messaging in place. This could include organic search SEO, social media marketing, blogging, video marketing, guest blogging, and other tactics. 
• Effective sales funnels that start with a lead magnet to draw leads into the funnel. It enables communication with the lead and builds a relationship with them, making offers along the way.

An example of a marketing strategy is to offer a lead magnet and drive traffic to the magnet’s sales page. You would then offer the free download in exchange for the person’s name and email address. The lead magnet is closely related to your online course, so you know that if they’ve downloaded it, this means they’re interested.

Once the person is on your list, you can send them helpful content on a regular basis to build a relationship with them. Also through email marketing, you can learn more about the person to determine whether they will benefit from your online course. You can offer exclusives like webinars and free content to assess whether they’re interested. Then, advertise your course to your list members, and you’ll see them sign up.

As leads travel through to the narrow end of your sales funnel, you will have qualified them well, so that it’s almost a guarantee that they’ll sign up for your course when it’s offered.

5 – Improve with Feedback

An online course isn’t finished when you put the finishing touches on it and get ready for launch. You’ll constantly improve your course by getting feedback from your participants and making improvements. When you create a course bear in mind that it may change. Keep an open mind as it may evolve with feedback and this is totally ok. The feedback you get will help you improve the course over time.

For example, you might survey your participants when they leave and ask whether they found the course helpful. You can then ask them to explain what was helpful and what wasn’t. 

If you find that several participants felt the course wasn’t interactive enough, you can make the next course more interactive. If your participants say that they wish you’d covered a certain topic, or if there was a step along the way that they struggled with, you can focus more on that or add it to the next course. 

It can be tough to hear feedback sometimes, especially negative feedback. But keep in mind, negative feedback is the most valuable kind because it shows you the weak points. Try to get as much honest feedback as possible and use this data to make changes to your next course. 

Through your feedback, you might also discover new online course ideas. A participant might reveal to you an area where they’re struggling related to your course, and you can then add this to your idea list. 

Online courses offer a great way to help you build your expertise and turn a profit. If done correctly, they can be extremely profitable. But you learn by launching your first course and collecting feedback, so why not get started today? Click Here to build out your whole system

6 – Sell the course using a ThriveCart, members area and course platform

When you create a course you must then have a way to sell it. One of the simplest and quickest ways you can set up and start to sell your course online is to use a shopping cart system such as Thrive Cart. With its new Learn + course platform add on which you get for free when you sign up lets you sell your course.

ThriveCart Learn is an extremely powerful and flexible course platform that allows course creators to easily sell training, digital products and content to customers through highly flexible courses containing modules and lessons. Each of which has a wide range of super-powerful drip-feeding options – giving you complete customisation on how your content is delivered to your students. I have to confess its the simplest and quickest way I’ve been able to sell online with its conversion-focused checkout page. You can read my ThriveCart Review here. I highly recommend this for course creators, coaches, consultants and authors.

We a cart system such as ThriveCart you can easily increase your revenue. ThriveCart is an easy to use shopping cart software with the purpose to help online businesses increase revenue. 

It’s no secret that the eLearning industry has grown massively over the last decade – over 900 per cent since the early 2000s, to be specific. And according to Thrivecart, the eLearning industry is expected to reach $1 trillion dollars by 2027. With this in mind and putting one and one together, you’ll realise that more people are looking to learn online. That’s why selling online courses has become a great opportunity for you and many others.

With ThriveCart Lean

• Building online courses has never been so quick and easy
• Save time with the easy drag and drop course builder
• Intigrates seamlessly with ThriveCarts shopping cart feature
• No limites on how much courses you build and sell.
• Flexibile content delivery, eg drip content, or spefic times etc
• Very good fair pricing – its one of costing for life which is a no brainer

A learn + upgrade is available which allows you to have advanced features, advanced sequences, bundles, team access etc

With ThriveCart there are no monthly fees as it’s a lifetime current offer. The new course platform means you can be up and running in no time, very simple to use. It’s one of the most powerful showing carts out there.

Get access to the Lifetime ThriveCart Offer Here.

It’s one of the best investments I’ve made as a small business owner. It allows me to have sales pages up fast so I can sell and test in no time.

Now go and create a course that helps solve a problme and adds value.

Do you want to Easily Structure, Implement and Launch Your Very Own Course For Authority Status And Bigger Profits? Click here -how to create and launch your own crouse.

Do you want to Easily Structure, Implement and Launch Your Very Own Course For Authority Status And Bigger Profits? Click here -how to create and launch your own crouse.

Jatinder Palaha

Digital Business Coach | Web Revenue Strategist | Award-Winning IT Consultant | Author 

Transform Your Skills, Knowledge and Experience Into a Thriving Online Business

Get Expert Guidance and Bespoke Growth Strategies, Meticulously Crafted to Align with Your Individual Journey as a Subject Matter Expert.

With over 18 years of industry experience in business and personal development, I’ve successfully been working with coaches, consultants and authors set up the right systems and implement strategic content strategies to start, grow and scale their businesses online with automation, digital products and services. (To work with Jatinder – click here)