How To Create An Online Course For Beginners in 2024 (Step by Step)

so in this video I'm going to show you how to create and launch an online course in 2024 we're going to go over a number of different steps in this video that have the potential to make you thousands of dollars we're going to talk about identifying demand making sure that there's a market for your online course figuring out what type of product you might want to sell and then also looking at potential format do you want to launch a video formatted course so you launch a monthly membership we're going to look at different pricing strategies

go with low price high price talk about the differences between those two and then also highlight things like the best platforms to launch a course on and really everything that you need to know about creating an online course that's going to make you the most amount of money possible and have happy customers so let's go ahead and get into it here now um make sure you subscribe to the channel for more videos like this we help online business owners to scale their companies so without any further Ado let's get into this video now it's with

my goal that there's going to be one thing that I say in this video maybe it's just one sentence where I say something about maybe pricing for example or curriculum and setting this up that hopefully is going to uh have a really high Roi for you and you're going to be like wow didn't think about that before and now I'm going to implement that strategy and it's going to make me you know an extra 20 30% of of what I was going to do originally that's my goal with this video um so I do recommend

you know take out a piece of paper take out a pen jot down some notes as we go through this because I think it's going to be helpful for you okay so first of all why online courses why is this something that you should consider pursuing in 20124 um this is a multi-billion dollar market um there are people who sell courses that are making hundreds of Millions of dollars from these info products um and it's it's really only an industry that is growing every year you know you look at the cost of college it's hundreds

of thousands of dollars and so online courses can be an alternative to that in some cases where if you have information people are willing to pay for it um especially if you can you know bundle that up and give it to them in a very digestible manner it's going to save people a lot of time and actually sometimes save them a lot of money as well if they're able to just buy an online course but really my favorite part about this is that you don't have what we call like a cost of good soul so

like if you sell physical products every time you sell an item like you have costs incurred with that right like you're selling vitamin gummies every time you're selling gummies like there's a cost for every item that you sell but with the course you make that and it's created and now every one that you sell it's not costing you anything else CU you've already put in the time UPF front to make that course and that's why it's a really lucrative uh business opportunity for this year now let's talk about uh in the first section identifying demand

and Market make sure that you know there's a big enough market for you to launch this course we got a lot of questions from people saying you know I'm just not sure if people are interested in my skill or I'm not sure what type of course like what do people want and what product can I actually sell and there's two ways of identifying this um and so the first and the easiest way to identify what type of uh online course or product you want to sell is if you already have an audience so like if

you're already an influencer may you already have some followers on Instagram or on YouTube or on Twitter then you probably already have a gauge of like what your followers want and what they follow you for for launching in a course now for a lot of other people watching this video maybe you're not an influencer that's totally okay how do we find if there's still that potential Market out there for us to sell a course and the other option there is to look at the current skills that you already have um and I'm not going to

touch on this too much because I think like a lot of this is pretty straightforward but you know people are willing to spend money uh for anything that you have a high skill on and I I can almost guarantee you that pretty much everyone watching this video there's something that you're better than most people at where you know you could be like really good with magic tricks or an excellent Chef um or maybe you uh understand how to trade uh options and a lot of other people don't know how to do that and they'd be

willing to pay for that so analyze your skills analyze the things that you know you can sit around the dinner table and rant about for hours what's that one thing that you're very very well versed in and then see if there is a market for that if you're not an influencer you know you can run paid ads for this um there's other ways to test demand as well where you kind of do like a pre-launch of a course I'll share that later in this video but identifying demand in a market there's pretty much a market

for everything so just write down your skills see which one you think has the best potential a lot of that's pretty straightforward so I I don't want to spend too much time on identifying demand and Market um but you can always go out and gauge uh and and and test your followers to see what they might be interested in and just you know be upfront ask them what do they want to see from you what would they be willing to pay for um and you can get quite a bit of good feedback from that okay

now let's talk about course curriculum and then also course format what is going to be the best strategy for creating your course right and so do you want something that is more of like a set and forget course where you film a bunch of videos let's say like you're an expert coder and you're teaching people uh how to do like HTML right or python should you create a course where you can make it and then you know film a bunch of videos and then sell that and not really have to like update it very often

you can sell it for years or do you want to do something like maybe a membership group where you have like weekly live streams or monthly live streams or like a Discord or other features within there and then you have to decide also if you want like a PL fee upfront price or if you want to do like a monthly subscription both can work I'm just going to tell you now though that the monthly subscriptions like the memberships are much more labor intensive it takes a lot more work than you might realize um so I

kind of lean towards that onetime fee where you might sell a course for like a couple hundred dollars and kind of lean away from the memberships that's just me personally and our business that that we do it just it makes a lot more sense for us now also how long should it be this really depends on the topic but I would say for online courses if you're going video format you probably want them to be at least 6 to 10 hours at a minimum but really the longer the better I think you'll find that as

you make an online course it'll end up being like 20 hours or 30 hours of video content that's just from my experience when we've made one in the past and then also when trying to figure out the course curriculum like what do you put inside of this online course one of my favorite ways to come up with ideas and contents for an actual course is to not try to reinvent the wheel but rather just uh get a bunch of books on the subject that you might be teaching and then read the table of contents for

those books so this is what I would do if I was going to make an online course on how to invest in the stock market I would buy a bunch of books on the stock market um I'm already well versed in the space so you know like I probably wouldn't read the book or maybe I'd skim them a little bit but what I really focus on is look at the table of contents and see like how they laid out that book and then kind of take some of those ideas to make sure that I'm not

missing any ideas when I'm creating My overall curriculum and my table of contents I want to make sure I'm not missing topics just like reading those other table of contents is really going to be useful for me obviously not copying but um that's something that I've done in the past and I think it's really effective for creating your course curriculum now um if you're thinking about what platform you want to use for launching an online course uh there are a bunch of options out there the one that I would recommend using is called think ific

uh we will leave a link to it down below in the description it's an affiliate link so it helps support this channel that's why we made this video to kind of uh fund this channel uh with that affiliate link um and so uh think ific it's a pretty great platform for launching an online course they have so many different uh features within there whether you're doing like a membership or you're doing that onetime course um what I recommend doing is just build this while you're signed up for think ific so they have a free option

for this platform so you can just go in and create the course today and just start adding in things as you go as you build this out over the next month or two of creating this online course so in terms of course format though I want to just go a little bit more in depth here because you you have different options besides just video courses like an online video course is what most people think of and that probably is the best route to take you know maybe you feel like you're not like a natural speaker

that's okay you can use teleprompters we use teleprompters like not for this video but um you know if there's certain videos where we're not feeling very confident on it we just use a teleprompter you can make one with like a piece of glass and a piece of cardboard it's pretty easy or you can buy them but yes so video it's probably the best route to go if you do go that route just buy a microphone buy a camera you can probably even use your your phone these days as well uh uh phone quality video is

pretty good these days but try to get a kind of a like semi-professional setup if you do decide to go the video course route now if you want to go with something a little bit easier a little bit less like labor intensive you can honestly just launch a PDF course or like an ebook um and the only thing with that is that you're probably going to have to have a lower pricing model but it can it doesn't have to be like a video course where you're like making videos it could literally be just a course

of PDFs or a course of you know almost like just like written things or you know like a workshop where people are like doing homework rather than you just making a ton of videos I've seen those work in the past as well um and they are pretty effective and then the Third Kind of format there is is to do like that membership group where people just pay monthly and they get like live streams with you or they get access to like a Discord or some type of membership group as well all right so now let's

talk about some of the best platforms for launching an online course now there's a lot of different options out there the one that I think is going to be the all-around best option for beginner cour makers or someone who's maybe you know launched a course in the past as well is think ific I'll leave a link to thinkific Down Below in the description or you can just go to sentral media.com thinkific and this is a platform that we've used in the past thousands of people use this um and the reason why we like it is

because they have some really good pricing options but also um they have so many different features for whether you are creating that onetime course or maybe you're making a membership group or or you know you're doing something even more simple like maybe you know some type of um PDF course that you're creating they have a lot of different features on here we really like it for video courses as well but let me just take you into it and show you how to sign up for thinkific and we'll also look at the different pricing plans and

some of the features that they have available so like I said the reason why I like thinkific is because they do have a free option and so what I suggest doing is you know while you're watching this video at the very least go ahead click on the link below sign up for free for thinkific and you can just start building your course inside of here and then when you're ready to launch it you can switch to the basic or the Start Plan and that's just something that I think works really well if you do have

the budget then I obviously suggest going for at least the basic plan because you're going to get this free accelerated program to help you build your course and then also you're going to have uh a custom domain so you know we could launch a course at like sandal media.com if we wanted to also you know you have coupons and discounts and then affiliate selling as well when you upgrade so let me show you some of the things inside of here that we can do so let's just click on sign up and let's sign up right

here all right and then I am creating my account all right and so the beauty of think iic is that the dashboard as a core seller um it's super smooth and so you know they have a lot of different like video tours to show you how to you know Define your audience and they actually like if you find this video helpful you're going to find thinkific platform super helpful as well because they have a course checklist here for you and once again you can go in click the link below in the description description uh sign

up for than ific and you can uh download the content plan guide that they have and this is a full PDF that helps you to figure out you know the best way to create content for your course but then also they have things where you know they can help you to Market and sell your course right you learn about funnels um sales widgets all kinds of different things as well uh we also have things like Integrations for your course so if you want to integrate with like an email marketing platform or Google analytics cuz maybe

you're like running ads or something you can do all these different things connecting them with thinkific and once again they have you know a video here to help us out to you know understand how to navigate this platform and then they also I just want to highlight the accelerator program that thinkific has um because this is super useful for especially firsttime course creators who are looking to you know get this going um and so if you upgraded the paid plan you're going to get that you know they have tons of video content and I think

this is really worth it like if you're thinking about investing into some type of course business then you know spending $3 some dollars a month you're going to get that access to the accelerator program it's probably going to be worth it to ensure that you're able to succeed uh with your online course I just wanted to highlight some of those features in here and you know maybe I'll do like a full tutorial on thinkific if you'd like but really like once you get inside of it they have all these videos helping you out so I'll

leave a link to them down below it's an affiliate link so you know help support the channel if you click on it and sign up for it you know we make a little bit of money for that uh it's just you know one of the reasons to kind of support this Channel and help us grow so I'll leave that link down below and let's continue on here talking about some other things important uh to launching an online course all right now let's talk about pricing strategies this is something a lot of people get wrong when

they are creating an online course so let's take two different examples because I think a lot of people think like they don't want to charge too much for their course they feel bad um so they end up charging like $50 for a course let's say it's a course on um how to get a job on Wall Street now you could charge $50 or you could charge $500 let's look at the difference between these two if you charge $50 $50 for the course and you get a th000 people to sign up for that course you're going

to make about $50,000 right now if you raise the price to $500 instead of $50 just stick with me here on the math if you raise the price to $500 instead of 50 to make the same amount of money you only have to get 100 people to sign up for the course so then you have to ask yourself the question when figuring out pricing are you going to have a 900 people drop off from raising the price from $50 to 500 are you going to have 900 people drop off and only 100 out of those,

that were originally going to buy it for $50 end up buying it for $500 and in a lot of cases the answer is going to be no because people who want to buy a course people who want that information are typically going to buy it regardless of price and so you might see a slight drop off as you raise the price for a course but generally speaking you're not going to see a 90% drop off like that and so this is why I really urge people to charge what I would say is a fair market

price for a course and see how much people are willing to pay for basically the point here on pricing is don't undersell yourself don't under charge cuz if you end up charging like 20 or $30 you really could have made a lot more and as long as you're making a really high quality course and people are learning a lot of information like they are willing to pay for it and you're going to know like if if you sell a course for too much money and the quality is not good people are going to tell you

they're going to ask for refunds you should Al also always offer refunds for people just so that you don't make anyone mad and you don't you know get on anyone's bad side generally speaking keep the prices relatively high like with a course that teaches people how to get a job on Wall Street I would pay $500 for that because it's probably going to make me tens of thousands of dollars because I'm going to learn a lot of information that I wouldn't otherwise have um and so think about it in terms of Roi how much money

is your course going to make somebody if they take it now if it's something like maybe you're teaching people how to be an excellent Chef maybe you want to go on the lower cost for that because it doesn't have like that like very clear Roi for someone of like or if you're teaching someone how to become an expert uh basket we Weaver right maybe you have to charge a little bit less on that you have to like analyze your demographic and think about who's buying it um if it's students if it's kids you're going to

have to charge less versus if it's um working professionals who on average make $100,000 a year at their consulting job then you can charge a lot more so analyze your demographics see who your followers are who the potential customers are and how big their wallet is or how much their appetite is to spend money you're going to have to gauge that before you can really come up with a good price but I would say just generally speak speaking don't under charge for the course you're going to regret that and that's one of the big things

that we've learned so let's finally talk about kind of building hype uh for the course and releasing the course you want to do this properly because I've also seen people mess this up where they kind of just like quietly release a course and then it's always available and so it doesn't feel very special for people the way to do this is you need to uh build up demand for this course and not always have it available there's so many strategies within here that I could probably talk about this for an hour but just to sum

it up here for building hype and for releasing the course um one of the things that we did was just do a pre-sale for a course to see if there's demand for it so you can do a pre-sale before you even make it to see how many people are interested and that can also kind of like fund it and convince you to actually create the course you know if you launch a pre-sale and nobody buys it then maybe maybe don't launch the course or maybe you know think about launching a different type of course or

figure out how it failed but pre-sales are very effective and then also yeah making sure that it's not always available so you can do like course drops where you make it available for like one day and you only sell like 50 uh like copies of the course and then you close down the program for like you know maybe a month and then like every month or two you open it back up to new people and you have like 50 spots available or 100 spots available uh that way there is creating that kind of limited supply

of it and people will be more uh likely to to buy the courtz because they know that you know it's not always going to be around and they really want it basic supply and demand you know if you limit the supply that can kind of uh get demand to kind of pour in a little bit more or kind of incentivize them to purchase the course and then the other thing that you should really do and this is especially like if you're not an influencer already but even if you are is going on tour when I

say this I mean like going on other people's podcasts and on shows and on other YouTube channels and collaborating with as many influencers as possible this is something that is not new okay uh anyone who writes a book they go on like what we call book tours and they just go on every podcast sometimes they hire like a PR person to line up Podcast interviews for them but you really should do this when you are launching your course and leading up to launching your course um so you go on like a podcast per day for

30 days you're basically going on tour you might end up having to travel a bit or just doing Zoom interviews for for a podcast for other people but doing outbound uh to get that exposure into new audiences is going to be absolutely crucial for making sure that you really hit some big numbers on your course sale for when you launch it so just like with books you want to have that going on tour effect as well so uh that my suggestions for you for creating an online course I hope this video was valuable to you

if you have any questions leave them down below in the comment section like I said I'll leave a link to thinkific which is our favorite course platform for building the course you can just start building it within there on that platform and you can sign up for free with that option so thanks for watching the video I hope you found this one valuable and I'll see everybody sometime in a future video