How to Create an Online Course for Beginners (start to finish)

I think the first time I ever heard of online courses it was in the four hour work week which was one of the books that initially got me interested in online business and digital marketing and making money online and I think it's pretty cool that even way back then 10 plus years ago we were able to see the beginning of this new industry of online courses and it was successfully predicted that it was going to be a big thing and now sure enough 10 years later online courses have become increasingly popular and in fact at

this point it kind of seems like everyone and their dog has created an online course now I'm guessing that you're watching this video today because at some point in these past 10 years you heard about online courses got interested in them and you're thinking about maybe making one for yourself now the fact that so many people have created online courses really proves this as a business model but it also might leave you feeling like maybe you missed the boat maybe the market is too saturated now and it is too late to create a successful and

by successful I really mean money making online course but here's what I want you to consider how many of your actual real life family and friends have made online courses if your family and friends are anything like my family and friends the answer is probably not very many or maybe even zero but how many of your real life family and friends have maybe tried out an online course or have at least considered doing so what this tells you is that there are a whole lot of people out there who are just now getting introduced to

online courses and who have started to purchase online courses for themselves and what that means is that this industry is still in its infancy and has a lot of room for growth so no it is not too late for you to create an online course and turn it into a success and in this video I'm going to be showing you exactly how to do that from start to finish specifically I'm going to be showing you how to choose your course topic outline your course lessons come up with a persuasive marketing message to sell your course

beta launch your course to validate your idea create your course content including filming video lessons and finally putting it all together using an online course hosting platform so that your course is fully set up to be able to sell now maybe you already know how to do part of this process or you've already done part of the process that's awesome in that case you obviously don't need to watch this whole video so be sure to check the description box down below for the table of contents for this video with clickable time stamps so that you

can just jump to the part of the video that you actually need to watch and finally one last thing before we get into this free course if you are serious about creating an online course of your own then give this video a like to let me know the very first step is one of the most important parts of the process especially because you can't move forward with creating your online course until you do this but it's also one of the places where the majority of people get hung up and it prevents them from ever creating

their course I'm talking about choosing your courses topic you can't create a course until you decide what your course is going to be about and of course if you want to choose a great topic but this makes a lot of people get stuck and they end up waffling between different ideas or never feeling like they can find a good enough idea so they never move forward alright so let's work through this process together what you need to do is grab a pen and paper or your phone or just open up Google Docs which is what

I'm going to do and I'm going to open up a new document and we're going to use this to brainstorm and sort through your different course ideas I want you to start by writing down any ideas that you already have swimming around in your head you've already been considering we need to get them onto paper now the ideas that you come up with here they might be all over the place that's okay they might be really solid course ideas or they might just be a note that you quickly jot down so maybe you have a

real Clear Vision for the end goal or maybe you don't and that's totally fine you're just brainstorming here once you've written down the ideas that you already have especially if you feel like you need more ideas you're going to want to think about any hobbies that you have any talents you have or skills that you have that maybe you use for work so for example for me one of my hobbies is watercolor painting I'm not very good at it though so this probably wouldn't be the best idea for me but I'm going to write it

down anyway because it is a hobby I have I also am interested in indoor plants or house plants and I this is kind of a hobby I homeschool my kids and then when I think about talents I have um I'm fairly talented at math I'm not sure how that would be a course but I'm going to write it down anyway specifically like algebra and then when it comes to skills that I use for work we've got marketing specifically digital marketing and typing clearly as you can tell by what I'm doing right here um and what

else obviously I've got other skills like videography skills but for the purposes of this example I think you can see where I'm going with this write down any skills any hobbies any interests you have once you've gone through this process you'll have a list of a whole bunch of different potential ideas but how do you decide which one is really the best which one you should pursue turning into a course well you'll want to consider three different factors the first factor is simply which of these ideas is the most interesting or exciting to you right

now so you'll want to go through your list and any that are the most exciting to you you can mark it in different ways you could put like an X after it or check mark um or you could have this list on paper you know it doesn't really matter but let's just say I think I'm the most interested in maybe homeschooling um so let's see like this this is how we do things in this day and age right okay um what else um marketing I'm pretty interested in digital marketing and probably not typing I don't

think that's a good choice maybe watercolor painting the next thing you'll want to consider is which of these things are you the most qualified to teach so for example I don't think I'm probably very qualified to teach typing because even though I can actually type pretty fast it's not something that I've really studied I don't know much about like the science of how to type fast I don't know how to teach someone else to type fast so that would not be a good choice also watercolor painting I'm a beginner at that so that would not

be a very good choice but something that would be a good choice is homeschooling I was homeschooled myself I've studied it quite a lot and I homeschooled my own kids and have for several years so this might be a good fit for those reasons so I'll give that one another check what else am I particularly skilled at not really website design I can do it but I'm not an expert at it indoor plants I am very skilled at this and also videography obviously I have a lot of experience with this okay and then the third

thing you'll want to consider is which of these things on your list is there the greatest demand for or in other words which one do you think other people might be the most interested in purchasing a course about now you probably don't know with certainty which one people would be the most interested in so you're just taking a guess right here and that's okay because you're gonna figure it out for sure later on now one thing you want to avoid is just paying attention to the ones that you've already given the check marks to so

let's see I think people probably are interested in purchasing courses on organic gardening people definitely buy courses about web design I have no idea if people buy courses about Celtic flute maybe stuff but I just don't know watercolor painting they definitely do indoor plants I think so homeschooling yes I know they do now obviously people participate in courses about algebra but I don't know if they buy paid online courses about it I feel like normally people either just watch free videos online or else they go to a class at a college so I don't think

that that's probably something you can sell an online course about digital marketing obviously right um typing I don't know how much people actually pay for courses about typing maybe typing software and then videography yes to that one also people certainly buy courses about videography okay so now we've got this list and as you can see there's one thing on my list that got three check marks and that is homeschooling so for me that would probably be my best pick for a course topic now in your case you might have multiple things they got the same

amount of checks maybe none of them got three check marks or maybe several of them got three check marks and that is totally okay honestly I would urge you to just go with your gut maybe one of them stands out to you as something that you are particularly interested in or something that you think that there is a particularly high demand for Just go with it because here is the secret to choosing your course Topic at least initially don't put too much weight on the decision like I said before this is the decision you have

to make to be able to move forward with the entire course creation process if you don't make this decision you can't make a course so you just need to make a decision even if it's not a perfect decision also this is not a forever decision you can choose an idea now and later on you might decide it wasn't the right choice and decide to test out a different course idea because the process that I'm going to be guiding you through in this video will have you first test out your course idea before you actually create

it so you don't have to worry about wasting your time on an idea that doesn't pan out right now you're essentially in the r d phase research and development and that phase requires some wrong steps to find the right answer the next step is to create a rough draft of your courses outline so we are doing this step now before we write your marketing messages before you try to Beta launch before you try to create your course because it is going to provide direction for the rest of the process it is going to solidify what

exactly you are thinking about or trying to create this process only needs to take a few minutes but it is going to provide so much Clarity throughout the rest of the process so just like in the last step you need to start by opening up a word processing document which I have right here in front of me and for this example I'm going to pretend that I am planning a course about how to plant an organic garden so that's my course's topic now when it comes to outlining the first thing you'll need to do is

to clarify a little bit further than just what is your course's General topic you need to figure out what outcome your course is guiding your students to achieve so in this case when we think about planting an organic garden um the obvious end outcome would be to successfully plant an organic garden and re a Bountiful Harvest from it so it will make that the outcome of this course once you know what the end outcome is then you can write a list of steps that your students will need to follow to get that outcome so we'll

call this steps and the first step that they need to do maybe is plan their Garden once they have their Garden planned then they need to order seeds build planter boxes start their seeds transfer seedlings water and weed their garden and then eventually Harvest Moon just Harvest okay so obviously this is not a perfect plan this is not my area of expertise but this gives you an example after you write down this list of steps then you'll also want to think about anything that is important for your students to understand or know or be aware

of so for example maybe the answer to the question what does organic even mean or how big of a garden do you have space for or how much will your garden be able to produce and then finally you'll want to consider any potential pitfalls that your students might face or common mistakes that you see people make with this topic so for example with planting an organic garden one mistake that people might make might be ordering poor quality seeds another mistake might be starting too many seeds or growing vegetables that they don't actually want to eat

so at this point you have a list of all the different topics you'll need to cover in lessons in your course so the next step is to write each of these topics on a sticky note you'll want to have them all in separate sticky notes so that you can move them around and organize them because this is how you're going to plan out the structure of your courses content so as you're moving them around the first thing you'll want to consider is should some of these topics be combined into a single lesson so for example

maybe you want to cover the issue of ordering poor quality seeds in a lesson about ordering seeds or maybe you want to cover the issue of growing vegetables they don't actually want to eat and the lesson about planting their Garden once you've combined your sticky notes into individual lessons then you can put them into the correct order so you're sequencing your course now quite possibly this step is pretty much done for you already because when you wrote out that step by step of what people need to do you probably put that into a logical order

of the order that they would complete those steps in however you'll need to figure out where you want to fit in those other lessons about the important things they need to know and also any mistakes that they might make interspersed throughout those other lessons and you also might decide you want to change the order a little bit now is the time to do that the final step of the process of organizing your lessons is to group them into modules now technically the step is optional your horse doesn't have to have separate modules but if it

is covering a large topic then you'll probably want to do this people often ask me how many lessons or how many modules per lesson or how many modules I would say that the maximum number of lessons or lessons in a module or modules would be 10. you don't want to have more than 10 modules more than 10 lessons in a module or if you don't have modules more than 10 lessons total however the recommended number is significantly smaller than that I would recommend that you limit yourself to three to five modules total and no more

than about five to seven lessons total per module now of course there are exceptions to every Rule and maybe for some reason you need a lot more lessons than that however if that's the case I would urge you to maybe consider paring down the end goal that ultimate goal that your course is guiding people towards so that the course can be a little smaller because it'll be much easier for you to create and people are actually more likely to buy a course with a more narrow scope or a more narrow more specific and outcome and

they're also a lot more likely to be successful with it the next step is to write a marketing message for your course now a marketing message quite simply is the way that you're going to communicate to other people what your course is about and why they should buy it now of course not everyone should buy your course but that's part of your marketing message who is your course for writing your marketing message is key because you're doing all this work to create this course why well probably because you want to help people with your course

and you want to make money with it and those things can only happen if you can successfully sell your course and a marketing message is the tool that will allow you to do that now here's just a word of caution it might be attempting to wait until you've created your course to write your marketing message maybe you think oh once I make it then I'll be able to figure out how to sell it but really it tends to be way easier to decide what you're going to sell and craft a really persuasive marketing message first

and then make the course that that marketing message can sell rather than the other way around first creating a course then trying to figure out how to sell it because a lot of the time when people do that they end up creating something that isn't particularly appealing it's not really built to sell the simplest way to craft a persuasive marketing message for your course is to answer three questions the first question is what problem does your course solve what problem would someone have in their life that would prompt them to want to buy your course

now for some courses this is going to be easier others harder let's look at a few examples I sell a course about how to grow a successful YouTube channel specifically how to get your first thousand subscribers and get your channel monetized so what problem would someone be facing that they might want to buy that course well the most obvious problem would be that they are trying to grow their YouTube channel and it's not working so they're not seeing the growth on YouTube tube that they want to see some other problems that might make them want

to buy it might be that they are not getting enough leads in their business and so they want to figure out how to attract more customers with YouTube or maybe they want to learn how to make money from home and they see YouTube as a way to do that so those are a few examples now let's look at the example of the organic gardening course so if you were selling a course about how to grow a successful organic garden the problem someone might be facing is that they want to eat organic but it's too expensive

or maybe as simple as they want to plant an organic garden but they don't know how the next question to answer is who's it for now don't make this more complicated than it needs to be you don't need to worry too much about the exact age or gender or income level or anything like that of your target market those things do matter and they can affect your marketing later on but right now we're just trying to figure out at the simplest level who is this for so for example with a course about how to plant

an organic garden the very simplest idea of who's it for is someone who wants to plant an organic garden you also might think about that problem that you talked about so for example if they want to plant an organic garden because they want to eat organic but it's too expensive then maybe your course is for someone who is willing to do the hard work to get the result they want and who is interested in planting an organic garden for example is your course for people who live in the country and want to plant an organic

garden or people who live in high rises downtown who want to plant an organic garden on their balcony because you would create a very different course for those two groups of people or with my course about how to get your first thousand subscribers on YouTube well am I making my course for people who have started their channels already but they're not seeing the growth they want or for people who are just interested in YouTube and haven't done anything about starting their channels yet because again I'm going to create two different courses depending on which of

those audiences I'm really targeting the Third third question to consider is what's the big promise another way of thinking about this is what is the end outcome of your course you'll find that your course will be the most successful and the easiest to create and your students will like it the best if the end outcome is very specific and also something that is tangible a great example of this is when I first created my YouTube course it was just about how to be successful on YouTube how to grow your channel on YouTube not very specific

not very tangible now that outcome is somewhat tangible you can see whether or not the YouTube channel has grown but it's not very specific after creating that course and selling it for a couple years I decided that the course needed a refresh so I overhauled it completely and re-filmed all of the lessons when I did this I also gave the course a much more specific and outcome now the course promised specifically to help students get their first thousand subscribers in just three months that made the course immediately really start selling much better and the students

were much more satisfied with the course and the outcome that they got from it so what you need to do right now is answer these three questions what problem does your course solve who is it for and what is the big promise of your course I know sometimes it can be really tough to answer those questions you might be tempted to move forward and think you'll Circle back around to them later but really it's going to be so much easier to create your course and your course will be so much more successful financially if you

do so please just answer them now your answers don't have to be perfect but you just need to put something down on the paper you can revise later on the next step is to validate your course idea by Beta launching your course this is really important because you are going to invest a lot of time into creating your course filming those videos writing those lessons uploading it all is going to take some time and I really don't want you to gamble your time time on an unproven idea so what you need to do is bait

along to your course so that you can find out for sure whether or not there's demand for it earn your first sales and get that proof that you need that you are on the right track that this is a good idea then once you have that proof in hand you'll be able to move forward with full confidence that you are not wasting your time there are three main ways you can test out your course idea the first option is to offer a live Workshop so rather than creating an online course at all you simply advertise

that you are going to be hosting a live workshop on the same topic as your course at a relatively affordable price now I've done this a couple times before I did it when I created my YouTube course called Creator Fast Track the first version of it was a live Workshop that I taught I charge people around 35 for the live Workshop I had about a hundred people sign up and I was like Wow people really want this so with that proof in hand I later built it out into an entire course at a premium price

point I also did this when I started startup Society the membership site I run for online entrepreneurs I was really hesitant to start a membership site even though I really wanted to I was worried that I might invest a lot of time into creating content for it because typically membership sites have a lot of content and then maybe I wouldn't be able to get very many people to sign up and it would have been a massive waste of my time so what I did was I hosted a live Workshop each month for a few months

and I had people just sign up and pay for one workshop at a time that way I was getting paid before I even created those workshops and I wasn't doing any more work than I knew people were actually interested in purchasing once I'd done that for about five months I took those workshops that I had done I put them into the membership site as the initial content and I opened it up for people to be able to join the membership site they were able to join for at that time 33 dollars a month it access

to all the workshops I had already done as well as get access to the next new workshop every single month from there on this strategy worked really well and I would highly recommend it another option for beta launching and testing your course idea would be to create a mini course that is on the same topic as the course you ultimately want to create but of course it would take you a lot less time to create and you could sell at a lower price point just to test it out now honestly I wouldn't really recommend this

approach it still could work better than just creating the whole big course but it's going to take you a fair amount of time up front and that time will be a gamble because you don't know for sure if people even want that mini course and sometimes it can be difficult to sell a mini course so I've tried the strategy a couple times myself and never found it to be very successful so that's why I wouldn't really recommend it but there's one more way you can beta launch your course and test out your idea and I

would definitely recommend this one I used this method when I created did both our validate program and also 100K Mastermind and basically what it looks like is mapping out what your course is going to cover and then just launching it like you are launching your course even though you haven't created it yet but telling people that it's going to be a live experience so every week you are going to be delivering the next lesson or module of the course to them and then you're going to be also providing Live support throughout the process now there's

lots of slightly different ways you can do this you could actually teach the lessons live using a video software like Zoom but personally I still like to pre-record the lessons and edit them because otherwise you end up having to record all of the content twice or else you have to use the low quality Zoom recordings so I like to have this great blend of running course live only creating the course if people actually sign up for it only creating it piecemeal as you're going and providing that live support short but not actually teaching live because

both it creates these lower quality lessons and also a lot of people are concerned about teaching live and that just makes them nervous so let's take a quick look at how you'd actually set up your beta launch so first of all you're going to need some sort of sales page that tells people what you are offering and gives them the option to purchase it so for example when I launched 100K Mastermind I used this short sales page right here that told them the outline of what we are going to cover in the program and told

them what the pre-sale price was and then gave them the option to sign up and I built this short sales page with Sam cart but you can use any different shopping cart software that you want to and if you have a website that you've built on Squarespace or Shopify or something like that then there's actually built-in checkout pages that you can use there so you don't need a separate software next you need the way to deliver the product that you are creating so if you are hosting a live Workshop then honestly I think Zoom is

the easiest option you probably want to pay for their 15 a month Pro Plan so that your Workshop can be longer than 40 minutes and you can have plenty of people will come to it but you could even use their free plan or you could use something like Google hangouts or something if you don't want to spend any money at all now on the other hand if you are beta launching a course that you are going to be running live at least the first time through then you will need some sort of Hosting platform to

put the video lessons on or the other course content on so that your new students can access it and so you can use teachable to set this up later on in this video I'm going to be walking you through a complete tutorial of how to set up your course with teachable which you can use for your beta launch as well and then the last thing you'll need is some sort of email delivery system to be able to send people the link to your live Workshop or the link to access the course that they purchased if

you are using teachable then you can send those emails straight from teachable but otherwise you'll need to have an email service provider so I use convertkit for example so I would just click on create new and I would recommend using live broadcasts for your beta launch rather than setting up automations the live broadcasts are emails that you write and then you can schedule them but you are manually scheduling or sending the email rather than having people go into the top of some sort of funnel and then having them automatically get certain emails because for your

beta launch it's just a lot simpler to send a live broadcast rather than setting up that whole automated system and also that way you can send them out at just the right time like right before the workshop starts you can send it an email saying we're about to get started once your beta launch comes to a close if you were able to successfully close some sales and you see that there is in fact demand for your idea then you're going to want to build out your course to be the complete package so the first step

for this part of the process is outlining your course lessons now you've already outlined your course and decided what lessons to include but now you need to actually script your lessons and decide what you're going to cover in each of them in detail as you are outlining each of your lessons these are the things that I think are important for you to cover in each lesson first of all what what are they going to learn in the lesson just tell them what you're going to cover second would be why why is this important tell them

why you're telling them what you're telling them why they need to learn what is covered in the lesson the third thing is the how so this is where you actually tell them how to do whatever the lesson is about now depending on what the lesson is about you might be able to just tell them but you might need to show them and actually demonstrate what you are describing for most things it is better to show than to tell there are some things that are just verbal Concepts like right now I'm describing how you would structure

a lesson and there's not a whole lot I can show you around this topic but whenever possible show actually demonstrate how to do the thing that you are explaining to them and then the final thing that you'll want to include is common pitfalls think about common mistakes that people make when they are doing this thing that you are describing and give them the heads up so that they can avoid those mistakes common question about outlining lessons is how much should you write should you actually write out an entire script or should you just write a

simple bullet outline I think it's best to write bullets and write a lot of bullets so every little thing that you're thinking to cover write a bullet for it especially if you're going to be including any facts or figures or examples it's great to plan those things out before you are actually recording the lesson but don't try to script every word most of the time you're gonna end up sounding a lot more Awkward if you script every word people might notice that you are reading a teleprompter or looking at your script so it's generally best

to just write a detailed outline but not script as you outline each of your lessons the next thing you'll want to do is to plan additional resources so a good way to think about this is the lessons are the instruction it's you teaching them how to do the thing but additional resources are you helping them to actually do the work you want to think about how could you do some of the work for them and the best way to answer this question is to think about what the student will need to do to take action

on the lesson and then think about if there's anything you could do to do some of that for them so let's look at an example of what this is like in one of my courses here we are inside Creator Fast Track and so first of all we have this list of lessons and they can click on each of the lessons to open up the video for that lesson but then if they scroll down the page they see action steps that's kind of a bonus resource then we've also got this resources section down here so some

of the resources that are included in this module of the program are first of all some examples of one of the concepts of what we talk about in the program we also have of this Google sheet and also an Excel version of it that allows them to assess their Channel ideas so I'm just going to open this up real quick we have it set up so that they can easily make a copy of the Google sheet so that they can actually like take a copy of it to use for themselves not right on the copy

that everyone else is using so um here we have this spreadsheet and so they can fill it out with their channel topic idea the subtopics they're thinking about covering the number of 10 minute video ideas subtopic combine search volume these are all things we cover in the course that they know how to fill this all out but something that's really cool is that we have this spreadsheet set up to calculate for them the score for each of their Channel ideas so this this these columns here columns e through I they are things that they're going

to be scoring their Channel idea on and so then basically the spreadsheet just adds up the different scores so that they can compare their different Channel ideas it's a simple thing to create but it can be really helpful to your students we also have a way that they can analyze different channels that they're considering using as their model channels we have an article that we have included as a resource we have some other examples of value proposition statements for their Channel and brand keyword examples so as you can see here we have a mix of

some spreadsheets some examples some additional resources like articles a few other examples of additional resources you might include are done for you resources so like done for you Garden plan or done for you meal plan also blank templates for them to plan on like a blank meal plan a template or a social media calendar spreadsheets as I already mentioned like a video research spreadsheet swipe copy if there's anything they need to write like if your course includes writing any sort of email for example or writing a web page well if you can give them words

that they could just copy and paste they will love you forever with your lessons planned out and your additional resources planned you are ready to actually film your lessons now the main thing I want you to know about filming your lessons is that you have options there's no reason you need to sit down and talk to the camera talking head style the way I'm doing right here yes you can do that and students generally like that but there are other ways to do this as well one other option is maybe instead of filming yourself talking

to the camera maybe you film yourself doing the thing and then you just record a voiceover that is actually what students tend to like the very best another option is that you can create a slide deck using Google Slides or PowerPoint or something like that or keynote and then you can record your screen as you click through the slides and either record a voiceover to go along with it or have a little uh picture of your camera what am I trying to say here a little video of you in the corner of the screen as

you are teaching along with the slides students also tend to really like that option some options that I found that they don't like as much is when there are only slides and no video at all a lot of the time they feel like they wanted to see your face not to say you can't do that though just don't prefer it and then also they don't tend to prefer if you just talk to the camera and there are no Graphics or no screen shares or no demonstrations at all a few things that you will want to

consider when filming your lessons are first of all camera choice now these days honestly most people can get away with just using their phone so if that is the camera you have I would really recommend you just start with that you also might be able to use your webcam if it's a higher end webcam but most of the time a phone will be higher quality than a cheaper webcam so just something to consider or maybe you have a DSLR or a mirrorless camera you can use that can be a great option if you know how

to use it and you already have it at your disposal something else that's really important to consider is your background this can kind of make or break your course honestly your background doesn't have to be fancy but if your background looks really unprofessional if it's just your messy house in the background it's really going to reduce the perceived quality and value of your course so it's better to have just a blank wall in your background or set up a little set with you know a bookshelf or something like that behind you rather than going with

a bigger space that looks Messier of course if you have a nice looking office or something like that or a nice looking kitchen if your course relates to something more home oriented those are great options as well you'll also want to consider the lighting window lighting can be beautiful and look really nice I did a video recently on lighting you can check it out up there I talked about some different lighting setups you can use at different price points and what they look like and then you'll also want to consider what you're wearing in the

video depending on the topic you know if you're talking about gardening maybe you're going to be outside and you're going to be in your garden and clothes if you are talking about organizing your home maybe you want to put on a cute top and stand in your kitchen if you're talking about business maybe you want to wear a collared shirt or a T-shirt and sit in an office so just make sure that the appearance of your videos matches the topic because your students will have a much higher perception of the quality of your course if

those two things match if you are recording your screen for your video lessons then something that becomes even more important is the quality of the audio in your videos so you'll probably want to invest in a microphone probably a USB mic that can plug straight into your computer but you want a mic that can be really close up to your face because that's what's going to give you the best sound and it just ends up having a big impact on the end quality of your lessons I know that some of the first courses I recorded

I didn't realize what a big impact it would have so I just used the microphone that was built into my laptop and the audio sounded tinny and it made the whole course feel a bit low quality aside from the microphone itself the other thing that will have a big impact on the sound in your videos is by padding your space so you want to make sure that you are not in a big room with loss of hard surfaces but instead either record your lessons in a closet if you are just doing a voiceover or else

throw a blanket over your desk or hang audio panels on your walls anything you can do to soften the space around you and make sure that the sound is not echoing too much with your lessons filmed the next step will be editing those lessons now obviously you've got two options here you can do it yourself or you can Outsource it there are pros and cons both ways if you Outsource it honestly it's going to be kind of expensive because it takes a lot of time so if you do it yourself you're going to be spending

a lot of time editing course videos is just simply a big project so you have to decide what is more valuable to you or what you have more of time or money and then make your decision based off of that I've done it both ways the first few courses I made I edited myself it was kind of an overwhelmingly long process but I got through it but now with my more recent courses I have outsourced the editing which was a big weight off of my shoulders but also was kind of expensive so just something to

consider also if you're going to edit your videos yourself then a couple different software options that I would recommend would be iMovie if you're on Mac or if you are on Windows you might use Adobe Premiere rush or if you already have it Adobe Premiere Pro which is what I use but the reason that I recommend iMovie or Adobe Premiere Rush is because they keep the process really simple and if you're not a professional video editor yourself then you will create much better results with a software that is simpler and easier to use even if

you are editing your lessons yourself you might consider Outsourcing the project of creating a video intro for your lessons this can be a short video clip or kind of a slideshow of photos with a title graphic that says the title of your course and you can add this to the beginning of all of your video lessons and it will make the course overall feel more professional and a bit higher end with your lesson videos all filmed the last part of the process of creating your course's content is to create those additional resources that we talked

about earlier if the content of the additional resource is written content so maybe it is a swipe copy or it is examples or anything like that start with a Google doc and write your content there because this will allow you to use word processing function which is really helpful once you have the content written then you can copy and paste it into a design for example you could use canva which is just a really easy to use free design software so you can use one of their templates and you could use that to create the

design so here's an example of a PDF you could create inside of canva Now using graphic design software to polish up your additional resources is optional it kind of depends on what the content is sometimes it creates a huge impact to make it look pretty especially if the content itself is maybe kind of sparse maybe it's just like a simple list putting it on a nice looking PDF can go a long way but on the other hand if something like swipe copy that they're going to be copying and pasting it might be more useful for

them to have it in a word processor type format and so you might just want to export your Google doc as a PDF at this point and you have done all the planning process you've beta launched your course you have created the actual content for your course so the final step is just to put all of this together into a course hosting platform so that your students can access it and this is actually one of the easiest parts of the process I'm gonna walk you through the entire process step by step and show you how

to do it inside a teachable which is my go-to there are a few reasons I love using teachable first of all it's really easy for me to use as the Creator second it is really professional looking and the students really enjoy it and then third I find their pricing quite reasonable now this is an area where I actually see a lot of people get hung up and I got hung up here myself as well when I was first creating my course I didn't want to spend money like 30 or 40 dollars a month on course

hosting platform because I didn't know if my course was going to be successful so I looked around at a lot of different free course hosting options and tried a few of them out but they were very very frustrating and I could never get them to look the way I wanted them to look and now since that time I have taught literally thousands of other people how to create online courses and there's always some people who really want to use a free option so they go and they try these other options and honestly they almost always

end up giving up sometimes they don't end up creating a course at all or they end up going with something like teachable because the free options that are out there just super hard to use they never end up looking that great and a lot of the time there's also some hidden costs like maybe you have to install it on your website so you're paying for your website hosting or maybe you can only do so much with their free plan and so you end up having to upgrade to their paid plan just as a few examples

so my favorite strategy is to use teachable but start with their free plan and stay on their free plan until you are successfully selling your course and then switch to one of their paid plans for the additional features that you can get from their paid plans so we're here on the teachable website and the first thing we're going to take a look at is is their pricing page we can talk about your different options when it comes to plans as you can see they have several different plans at very different price points they have some

different features that are included in each and their different transaction fees when you're first starting out you might not want to spend a lot because you're not yet selling your course that's totally fine as you can see they have this free plan and this isn't just a free trial this is a free forever plan so I would highly recommend that you start with the free plan while you're setting up your course and setting up your school and getting everything ready and then once you are ready to start selling or even after you start selling once

you start actually making sales successfully then upgrade to their basic plan and as your volume of sales increases you might choose to upgrade even to their Pro Plan because paying that extra roughly 70 dollars per month will actually save you money based off of of the lower amount that you'll be paying for those transaction fees but like I said recommend starting with a free plan so that's what we're going to do right now just click that start for free now it's immediately logged me in because I already have a teachable account but if you don't

it'll walk you through that very simple account creation process once you are here inside of your account then you'll click to create a new school so I'm going to go ahead and call this the 100K Mastermind example School we'll just get rid of the rest of that and we'll click to create that school then it's going to ask you a few more questions and don't worry too much about the answer to these it doesn't matter very much but are you a business owner we'll say we work in our business part-time I identify as a content

creator which topic is the most relevant business and marketing what category describes your business stage we're going to say we're not making much money yet have are you already teaching an online course I'm teaching but not online I don't know it doesn't matter very much right now what's the size of your audience our audience is real small that's okay though okay so now we are inside the school itself and this is their guided tutorial for setting up your school so you will want to work through each of these different steps we have already named the

school customizing the domain you don't need to worry about this right away because you are not going to be relying on like search traffic or having people type in the URL for your school you're going to be sending people directly to it so you can configure this later but it's not important right at the start we are going to take a look at setting up the brand so we can go ahead and upload a logo here so bear with me for a second while I find it there we go so I'm just using the 100K

Mastermind logo which is uploading and then you could also use that as your thumbnail which is the image that represents your school in your teachable account dashboard and also as your favicon which is this tiny little image right here that shows up in the browser tab um if you want to upgrade your account or when you upgrade your account you'll be able to remove The teachable Branding but their branding is not very obtrusive so it's not really a problem for now you can choose a font that matches your branding if you have a particular font

that you want to use however if not I'd recommend probably just sticking with their Proxima default font because it looks nice then down here you can add in the colors for your branding they also have these preset options I'm just going to go with one of those right now this one's fairly similar to 100K Mastermind branding anyway and it'll save us some time so I'm going to hit save here and now we're going to preview this school by hitting this button now as you can see there are some things about this that are good we've

got some colors that are kind of on brand a simple font which you can't see very well right here is the logo is showing up but obviously we're missing some important content here and also um the yeah it just needs to be filled in a lot now keep in mind this is your school's home page this is like a website for your school you don't actually need to do a bunch of customization to this you don't need to build out this page unless you want to okay if you don't have a website then this stands

in that place and saves you from having to create a separate website which is really really nice but if you already have a website or if right now you're going to be sending people just directly to your course then you don't have to build out this entire page right now now if you do want to use this page then what you're going to do is just hit this edit button right here which will open up this edit system and you can click on the different parts of it to edit them so for example we could

click on this main section we could replace the image we could change this to say 100K Mastermind for example and then add that descriptive subtitle right there so it's really easy to edit this page and like I said if you don't have a website you'll probably want to do that if you do have a website you don't need to once you have this page looking how you want it to then you'll click the publish button right here to make that be saved and the The View that people will see if they visit this page okay

so now we're going to go back over here and we are going to also go back to this because these are the main things you need to work on um so this is the landing page this is like the sales page for your specific course you will probably want to use this page but you've got options you can if you have your own website already you can just create your sales page or your landing page on your website and Link directly to your teachable shopping cart page like the checkout page itself or if for some

reason you don't want to do that on your website either because you don't have a website or because creating new pages on your website is challenging then you can definitely edit this landing page as well and then you will be ready to create your course so creating your course we're going to work through that in a separate video but I mean it basically just involves uploading your content and configuring a few things and then the final step that they have right here is setting up payments and this is something you will need to do in

order to be able to sell with teachable so it is an important part of setting up your teachable school so it starts by just selecting what country you are in way down here in the use and I live in Oregon LMNO one more okay there we go and it will prompt you to type in your phone number right here and then it will ask you a few questions about your tax filing status if you are new to your business and you haven't figured out your business taxes exactly yet that's actually totally fine if you are

being a solopreneur if you are being a sole proprietor so all you need to do in that case is just choose the individual option and you'll just type in your personal tax information and there's no problem with that at all I'm choosing the business because my business is an LLC and then we're going to tell them for this part I'm going to type in my actual numbers because it's for taxes you know and then we'll just continue on and as it says right here you will be taken to stripe to continue the payment setup so

if you don't already have a stripe account you may need to create one to be able to finish configuring this but Stripes account creation process is really simple and easy and free so no worries about that at all and let us know if you need help at all configuring those things so that's pretty much all there is to it it's now sending me this verification code but then the two things will be linked and we'll be able to start accepting payments so after entering that verification code it's prompted me to this page to tell me

a little bit more about their about my business and so it looks like they're going to guide you through the process of creating your stripe account right here which is really nice you don't even have to do that separately okay so now let's hop down here to the courses section because this is where most of the action is really going to happen and where you're going to spend most of your time so once I click on courses I can click this new course button or I could click this little plus symbol right here but all

we need to do is give our course a name so I'm just going to call this awesome example course and then under bio you would need to enter the bio of the person who is creating it now if you've already created your bio inside of the settings then it will actually be available here at the drop down but because we didn't do that we need to add our bio now okay so now I've created my bio I just entered my name my title and you'll want to enter a title that's relevant to your course of

course so if you have some level of expertise piece or you do something related to the topic of your course you'll just want to enter whatever that title is here and then a description here and you can of course use these different buttons to italicize different things or bold things or even enter HTML and then I've added in my image so I'll add that bio and now I am the author of this course and then for the subtitle let's just add the most amazing course you'll ever take okay so now that we've done that little

bit of work we are going to click create course and our online course will actually be created now of course we still have to do all of the work of adding in the lessons but the course exists and it was that easy okay so inside of the curriculum part of your course which is the main part we can create sections and we can also create lessons to create a new section we would just push this button that says new section and that would create a new section and we need to give it a name so

we'll name this module one and then then we'll just click create section okay and I see that it created also this one automatically so we're going to just change the title of this one to actually be module 2 and then we'll move it to be after module one so now all you need to do here is just grab this hamburger stack right here and then you can actually just drag it which is so incredibly helpful because often you'll get your lessons in here in a mixed up order and you need to drag them around or

maybe you'll decide that you want to move a lesson from one module to another so I'm just going to create one more module here because I want my course to have three modules so I'm going to push new section again and choose module three and then I will create that section okay so now we've got three modules and now to create a lesson inside of a module we just need to click new lecture okay so here we are inside of the new lecture that we just created and the first thing that we need to do

is name it I'm just going to name this one lesson one getting started but you of course can name it whatever you want okay so then I'll save that and now here's where you can add in all of the information about this lesson so up here we can either add in files we could add a video we could add an audio file a PDF or any other sort of file here if we add a video that is going to show up at the very top of the lesson page anything else will get added right below

that here we could actually type in text directly so you could just type in the lesson if you don't want to add it as a PDF you can even add a quiz or you can add an HTML code and make your lesson look exactly how you want now most of the time what I do when I'm creating my lessons is I'm adding two or three things I'm adding a video always and then I'm also often adding some PDF files and then I also frequently am adding some text to give some explanation for what's included in

this lesson okay so let's go ahead and add a video file here so I'm just going to click choose files and search my computer now I obviously haven't created new video lessons for this specific course but I do have some of the course creator lessons on here so I'm just going to use one of those and it really doesn't matter which one but I'm just going to pop it in there and then I am going to click the upload button now this does take a little bit of time to upload because you are actually really

uploading the entire video file and it's going to be hosted with teachable okay so the video file has now been uploaded and it's currently being optimized for playback so that's basically teachable is just working on getting everything set up so that that video will play properly now of course we could also add in a PDF file so let's just go ahead and grab one of those so that we can see how that will end up looking on this page so let's again add in one of those course creator PDFs that I've created for the course

creator course and this is just so met up we can't even handle it huh so now we're going to click the upload button and that PDF will show up right here and then we also can turn on comments so that people could leave comments and by people I mean your students can leave comments on this lesson they could ask questions about the lesson and then you could actually answer their questions okay and then let's also just add in a little bit of text so that we see where the text is actually going to show up

okay so so now I'm just going to click the save button here and then I'm going to up here click the publish button okay so now my lesson has been published and I have three options I can either click this button right here to go back to the course curriculum page and see all the curriculum that I've created so far or I can push this button to create a new lecture right now so I could just make the very next lesson right away or I can click this button to preview the lecture that I just

created and see what it looks like and that's what I'm gonna do okay so here we are inside of this lesson that we just created here is going to be the curriculum list where we can see all of the different modules and the lessons inside of them right now because we only have one lesson only that module that has the lesson in it is showing up but there would be multiple modules that we could click through here is the video that we added to this video Lesson and it is currently being encoded so that's what's

going on here in just a couple minutes it will be completely ready to go and people will see this video ready to play when they click on this lesson and so here's the PDF that we added to this lesson and people can click these buttons to scroll through it or they can actually just scroll through it like this and right now there isn't a button here to download it and that's actually because we need to change a little setting inside our course curriculum and I'll show you how to do that in just a minute but

that is an option for you to either allow people to download your PDFs and your videos or not allow them to do that okay so there's the PDF that we added and then down below that here is the text that we added and of course we could have added a lot more text now below that we've got the discussion your students and you as the instructor can leave comments here so that you can answer their questions okay so that's that first lesson that we created and now we are going to go back over here to

where we created that lesson and we're going to go back to our curriculum list here and we're going to just add a lecture real quick to each of these modules and I'm not going to take the time to upload videos to them but I want you to see how the course actually looks with multiple modules and multiple lessons in each module alright so now I've added a few more lessons I have two lessons inside of module two and one lesson inside of module three and over here is where you can choose to make it downloadable

or not so if you push this button right here then that means that your students that are enrolled in your course will be able to download your videos and your PDFs which is something that you may or may not want to allow then you can also click this button this I if you want to and I'm going to choose that for the very first lesson and this makes it available for preview so that means that people will actually be able to see this lesson and watch the videos read the content before they buy and this

is like a try before you buy giving them a little sample of what's going to be included so now we have created our modules we've created our lessons we've added some content to the first one and from here all you need to keep doing is adding more modules adding more lessons and putting the content into them so now now what we're going to do is we are going to preview our course okay so here we are inside the course and right now we aren't in any of the lessons so we are in this class curriculum

Tab and then down here there's the your instructor tab which gives the information about me now right now it does it has my face my name and this one sentence that I added but you could have added a lot more information about you so let's go back to the class curriculum and let us click on this first lesson so that you can see what happens people can either click right here or they can click Start or they could click Start next lecture and it would make people start the next lesson that they hadn't done yet

okay so now that I'm inside this first lesson we can see that videos are now ready to go and over here on the sidebar we have these different modules module one two and three and the lessons inside of each of them and I can click on these different lessons and right now these lessons don't have any content but I could be taken to any one of them I can see here that we've got this open circle for a lesson that I'm not on and I haven't completed yet we have this half colored Circle for a

lesson I'm currently working on and then if I complete this lesson if I watch this video then it would be fully colored in and this would then say something like 25 complete now depending on how you set your settings the lesson will either be marked as complete when the video finishes playing or when people click the complete and continue button so I've pushed that button and now it says that I am 25 done with the course and you can see that this lesson is checked off and grayed out now of course students still can go

back and click on this lesson and watch that video again if they want to but now that they've completed it they are automatically being prompted to move on to the next lesson and they then have the option to click previous lecture or complete and continue okay so here we are back inside the course curriculum and then we can go all the way back to the school dashboard where we can now see that we have one course under our list of courses but we can create as many courses as we want and that brings us to

the end of this tutorial on how to create an online course from start to finish now this video does only cover the how to create an online course we didn't get into the marketing at all but this video is getting pretty long so I think we should wrap it up at this point but obviously marketing your course is uh big and very important part of this process right there's no point in creating an online course if you don't effectively Market it because it's not going to be able to help anyone if they don't get their

hands on it it's not going to help you if you are not earning a profit from it so I would love to talk more about that and teach you how to successfully Market your course if that's something you would be interested in learning about give this video a like to let me know that you enjoyed this video and you want more and also leave a comment down below and let me know that you want to learn how to Market your course a couple final thoughts first of all this process only works if you do right

it doesn't matter that you now know how to create an online course if you don't start taking action on these steps that I covered in this video then this information isn't going to help you at all your very first step is just decide what course you're going to create choose the topic of your course as we discussed at the beginning of this video start with that then move on to the next step creating and selling online courses has completely changed my life over the past few years it's my main source of income and it is

a great way to make a living because it's something you can do from anywhere on your own schedule and you are completely in control of the process so I love it and I really think you will too if you'll give it a try if you have any questions about how to create your online course then leave them down below in the comments I am in those comments at least on a weekly basis and I try to answer as many questions as I can and of course if you're new here and you want to learn more

about how to create and sell online courses and how to make money online then be sure to subscribe because I make new videos about these topics every single week and I would love to have you join me for the next one thanks so much for watching I hope you're having an amazing week and I'll see you next time