Create Online Courses: The Definitive Guide

Ready to create online courses for your business?

Did you want to create an online course but don’t know where to start?

​Don’t worry, it’s not your fault because the process can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t have the right guidance and approach.

In this post, I’m going to teach you the exact steps I use to create online courses for my business.

Once your income has increased, then you can consider allocating a small portion to paid advertising. You really have to understand that creating an online course means creating an asset that will be bringing you revenue months and years to come.

For that reason, I’m going to teach the easy, less stressful but extremely rewarding way.

Following the three phases, you are about to learn in a minute (maybe more) is what allowed me to achieve these results:

This is a screenshot from my stats on Skillshare, I also teach on three more platforms for education and my own business school (for VIP students).

If your course is going to teach me how to quickly and easily start an online business selling digital products (broad benefit), I wouldn’t care that much if your course consists of 4 modules or 8 modules (feature). If it has PDF files (feature) or not. I’d pay you for the end result, the big promise.

Each of these phases has sub-topics that I will cover, however, I also linked to the posts that go into detail on how to do a particular task. For example, how to write a lecture. My goal for you is to use this post while creating your online course from beginning to the point your course is ready to launch.

Ready to get started? Okay, Let’s rock! 🙂

If you are reading this post right now, that means you already have an idea on what to teach. You might be an expert in a particular area. You might have a burning desire to learn a particular area. This is great but I’d like to add something.

This is huge and I cannot stress it enough. If you don’t follow this principle, you will have a hard time selling your course. This is why we’re going to do a research. Contrary to popular opinion, I will encourage you to enter markets where competition exists because this is a great sign that there are customers who are buying.

For example, you are a passionate marketer and you want to create a marketing course.

All good for now but marketing is a broad subject and it has a lot of sub-topics or sub-niches such as digital marketing, email marketing, content marketing, SEO marketing, mobile marketing, etc.

I encourage you to think in sectors and sub-topics because you will need more than one idea to teach! Chances are some of your course ideas (and this is not personal) will not be worth to pursue. That’s why we do the research. If an idea doesn’t flow well through the validation process, don’t get discouraged. Your knowledge, experience, passion do not come down to a single idea.

Just forget about it and move to the next one. And it is better to make that decision in the research phase than to spend the time to create a course and find out (the hard way) it doesn’t sell. I’ve done it, it’s not pleasant.

During the research phase, we aim at two things. The first one is to validate your idea for an online course and second – to see the feedback your competitors got from customers. The first marketplace we’ll take a look at is Udemy.

You go ahead and type the main keyword of your course idea into the Udemy search box. For example, in one of my courses Copywriting Headline Masterclass, I teach people how to write headlines for digital projects such as blog posts, subject lines, ads, eBooks, etc.

Let’s say you want to create a similar course on headline writing, you type the main keyword “headline”, hit enter and observe the results (your keyword might be long-tail such as “growing tomatoes”, “dog training”, “email marketing”, etc.).

As you can see my course is #1 for the keyword “headline”. Now what you want to do is go through my course and the few that follow and see how many students and reviews they have. This will give you a rough idea if the market is mature enough.

I said roughly because one of the initial launch strategies of the majority of online instructors is to launch their online course for free for several days or maybe weeks until they get enough social proof (students and reviews) and then, they switch the course to “paid”. That’s okay, it is still an indication. The more students and reviews these courses have the better.

Next, you go to Udemy’s categories and sub-categories.

Find the niche or sub-niche you’ve chosen and do the same thing. Analyse the first several courses which appear in the sub-category.

For example, you go to IT & Software / Network And Security and you can quickly realize that the market is mature enough and these courses are selling like crazy. You see 500 reviews, 3000 reviews, I saw one with 10000 reviews.

So if network and security is your area of expertise, now you have two options. You can say: “Oh, so many people are teaching the subject, so much competition, what’s the point to create just another course on the topic…” or “Well, I’m really happy to see that there are people BUYING in this market because I’m gonna create a high-quality online course that goes above and beyond what’s already there.”

I’ve talked to hundreds of would-be online instructors, simply because I teach the subject, and the intuitive “thinking” is option #1. And that serves as an excuse not to invest time into course creation. But I’ve got news for you, NOT HERE, NOT TODAY!

Forget about your excuses and get down to work. I’d pay money to read the posts you have the opportunity to read right now when I got started teaching online. But I digress :), let’s get back to online course creation.

The research is not over! Next, we’ll visit my favorite the top 100 Amazon bestsellers.

Go to Kindle eBooks and find your niche and sub-niche. It’s very important you get to the deepest level of the category. For example, Kindle eBooks / Engineering & Transportation / Automotive / Classic Cars.

You always want to look at Top 100 Paid. The process is similar to the one you did with Udemy but this time your focus will be on the ranking of the eBook and the reviews. This is important because the eBooks on Amazon move up and down the ranking purely on the number of sales.

I don’t know their exact algorithm but the heaviest factor is sales. The first eBook in top 100 makes the most sales. That means the higher in the Kindle ranking, the more sales the eBook makes (which tells us, people are buying).

With that being said, you open the first several eBooks in the sub-niche and notice their Amazon Best Sellers Rank.

The closer that number to #1 is, the more sales are being generated. If the best sellers rank of the first 3-5 books is below #25000 that is a good sign. There are Amazon sales rank calculators if you want to see the number of sales generated with each ranking number but that wouldn’t be necessary to do.

If a Kindle eBook is #2000 that means it sells around 13 copies per day. If it is #100 it means it sells around 1000 eBooks per day. Keep in mind this is for the overall Amazon bestsellers rank.

However, the 4-star reviews say “I enjoyed the course (eBook) a lot but here is what I want to see improved” – BOOM, this is what you need. Copy that review and paste it in your Google Doc. Don’t cut corners on this task because it will give you a great insight and a competitive advantage.

Chances are when you gather 20-30 reviews, you will start to see patterns and your “aha” moment will come – “Yes, these courses are good but they are really missing point A“.  And this is where you come in!

During the research phase, it would be smart to look for subreddits on your topic and see what discussions and questions are going on there. This might take some time but it will show you that people are looking for solutions. That means you’d be able to identify the pain points.

For example, “I really want to create an online course and sell it. I’ve got the expertise, I know how to help people get results but the problem is I’m not a technical savvy and I don’t know how to create video lectures.”

What do you do when you see something like that? You’ve guessed it, open your Google Doc file and collect as many pain points as you can.

Next, type “Top 10 (your keyword) blogs” in Google and see what’s already there. For example, “top 10 marketing blogs”

How popular are these blogs? Do their posts get a lot of comments? Spend some time reading the comments and you already know what you are looking for – complaints, problems, pain points, etc. Gather any relevant information and put in the good old Google Doc file.

As you well know, we cannot ignore Facebook. I’d urge you to focus on groups. Depending on the market, there might be some popular groups with thousands of members. Request to join them and see what the discussion is all about right now, at this moment. Don’t forget to read the description of the group before you request to join, just to make sure, the community is a good fit with your idea.

By now, you should have a really good understanding if there is a market for your course idea. The activities with the highest priority from this research are Udemy and Amazon. If you are going to skip something, don’t skip these, please.

Well, if there aren’t Udemy courses or very few displaying weak social proof (few students and reviews). If there aren’t eBooks on the topic in the Amazon best sellers rank, if there aren’t subreddits and discussions on social media in general. Then, forget about your course idea and move to the next one.

That’s why I told you in the beginning of the post to think in sectors and sub-niches. Go ahead and validate another idea. Come one, don’t feel bad about it. That’s not the end of the world! It would be better to stop now than to spend 1-2 months on content creation and then find out it wasn’t worth it. Move on!

If the idea validation process has been successful (you saw courses, eBooks, a lot of reviews, comments, pain points, etc) it’s time to move to phase #2 – planning.

I’d assume this is your first course. A huge mistake I see would-be online entrepreneurs make is they want (and start working on) really long courses. I’ve seen courses with over 20 hours of video content that make less than $100 per month. Twenty hours of video content requires a lot of work.

However, don’t get me wrong, long online courses are great and can be extremely profitable especially on Udemy and your own platform for education (Teachable for example). After the last change to the payment model at Skillshare (now they pay per premium minute watched and not per premium enrollment as before), your long course would do well on Skillshare as well.

But there is a problem.

Even though my posts are informative, you do not have the experience yet. Your first course simply cannot be the best one you create. Please, don’t get upset, I don’t want to make you feel that way I’m just committed to present the facts as they are.

The more online courses you create, the better presenter you will become, the more masterfully you will manage information, the more interesting your lectures and the more money you will make. Period.

As a person who has sold tens of thousands of digital products, I can confirm that a huge percent of your students will buy your course and never take action on it (this has nothing to do with the quality of your course). I see that with my low-dollar products as well as high-end products.

Not an easy task you say. I agree but I told you, I’m going to help you create a kick-ass online course!

I want to share a secret. The best way to achieve these qualities (accuracy and succinctness) when creating content is to use proven models and frameworks. It’s imperative you read my post on creating lectures where you will discover the APE Model.

My advice is to focus on video lectures but also to include additional resources as PDF files.

No need to reinvent the wheel here. Find the online course on Udemy with the highest ranking and the number of positive reviews and model their curriculum. I don’t say copy it section by section, lecture by lecture – don’t do that. Just model what’s already working. Tony Robbins would be very happy if he reads right now.

The most important aspect here is to imagine you are your prospect, imagine you have the problem your course solves, and imagine you are a beginner. This will help you eliminate the curse of knowledge and help you organize your course with the student in mind. This is huge. I SAID THIS IS HUGE!

Always think about the students’ transformation. They bought your course for a reason. Your job is done when you take them from where they are right now (point A) to where they want to be (point E). These progress points B, C, D, are your sections. Stephen Covey would say “begin with the end in mind”.

Next, open the doc file with the reviews, problems, complaints and questions you have gathered during the research phase. Depending on the depth and complexity you will have to decide if you can perfectly address them with a single lecture (one per problem) or a whole section.

Do not skip this step, this is how your course is different and more complete than the competitors’ courses. Did it turn out competition is not as bad as you though? 🙂

Here is an example for you (I actually do what I teach).

Besides the outline with all sections and lectures, I’ve found out that it is extremely beneficial when I write the final outcome, the end goal of my course in that Doc file as it helps me to stay focus and whatever changes I make they will be led by the end result I want my students to achieve. After all, it’s all about them.

Here is what I mean:

As you’ve noticed this is a draft and even though the main idea is too broad it still kept me on track. Plus, I refined it a few times. And if you watch my sales video, you will notice that I explain what marketing influence is.

Did you notice the name (Marketing Psychology: Create Marketing That Sells)? That was just my 1.0 version, I wrote probably 10 more after that and I asked the subscribers in my email list which option they choose among three and that’s how I ended up with Marketing Psychology: How To Become A Master Of Influence.

Don’t forget this is the planning stage. The name of your program is critically important but it must not be the first thing you work on. The first thing is to figure out the fastest and easiest way to help your students solve their problem.

We are really close to the execution phase but first, let’s talk about the format of your video lectures.

Yes, we agreed that the majority of your lectures will be in a video format but there are two main types of video lectures. The first one is “talking head” and the second “screencast”.

Shooting and editing a talking head video is hard. You will need a lot of skills and equipment to create high-quality talking head videos. The benefit is students can see your face and get a sense of your personality. The screencast type is way easier to do and it can look very professionally.

Again, I’m assuming this is your first course – go with a screencast. I’ve seen people give up completely simply because they want to shoot talking head videos but the end result is bad and as a result, they feel very discouraged.

If you have experience with shooting videos, then mix the two formats whereas talking head can be 10-20% of the course and 80-90% screencast.

Additionally, there will be students who will judge your e-course based on how polished it is.

My question is which group would you rather satisfy (you have two options, all things being equal)?

Before we go to execution, I want to congratulate you for getting this far.

What are we gonna do here?

We are going to create high-quality content that’s gonna make us some cash and bring fulfillment (because we help people).

Let’s start with the exact process I use when creating screencast videos (I’ve done over 200).

Besides the blog post on writing lectures, I've also prepared an exemplary script for a video where I show you how I applied the APE Model and Introduce, Teach, Recap framework (these are going to make your life easier). 

Your video lectures should be recorded in high-resolution 720p or full HD 1820×1080. Your slides and images must be sharp and easy to read (not pixelated or blurry). As for the video size, Udemy’s limit is 4GB. Generally, screencasts are a lot less in size.

Video Recording Best Practices:

The sound quality of your voice is extremely important. So, don’t use the mic on your laptop. Your students have enrolled in other courses as well, they are used to listening to high-quality lectures.

Another reason, if you’re going to launch your courses on platforms for education, some of them have quality requirements. Udemy, for example, will not approve your course if the sound is not good. Review their course quality checklist here.

The USB mic I use is Blue Yeti ($130). In the past, I used iRig Mic HD – also an excellent option. Less expensive mics are Blue Snowball ($70) and Samson Go Mic ($37). Lapel clip style mic – Sony ECM CS3 ($19). These are also the Udemy’s recommendations.

I highly recommend you invest in a good USB microphone.

While reading, you will make mistakes. That’s normal, your tongue will twist at some point. When that happens, do a short pause and read the sentence again. During the editing stage, simply highlight and delete the mistaken sentence. Do this for a whole sentence, not just a word, otherwise, it might sound choppy (couldn’t find a better word).

Don't mind the typos, this is a screenshot from my draft.

There you have it! Use the three-phase process to create high-quality, student driven, high-profit-potential online courses. The steps again:

I'm confident this process will work for you because I've tested it so many times and the results are obvious. It does require work but it's worth it.

Now you have to learn how to sell your course - click here. You will find more posts on starting an online business here.

I'd like to thank for reading my post to the end. The topic is quite extensive and if you have (I hope you do) any questions, please ask in the comments below.

Do you have a friend who'd benefit from this post? Feel free to share it.

That's the best way to say "Thanks, Vlad!".

I'm looking forward to seeing your online courses live!

Stay purposeful!