Courses have become one of the best digital businesses in today’s world. There are many course creators who have become millionaires from the comfort of their homes. And if you want to launch a course but questions like where to start, how to create online courses, how to market them, how to keep them safe from digital pirates, and how to collect payment securely worry you. Don’t worry.
Launching a course is a very easy, simple, and smooth process when you have the right tools, guidance, & knowledge.
And today, in this blog, we’re going to discuss a step-by-step process to start & scale your profitable online course even when you’re a complete beginner. You’ll learn how you can create courses, launch them, market them, generate leads, and handle sales as well as track the metrics, and optimize accordingly, with the right features & training provided by tools like FlexiFunnels, Udemy, and other funnel builders. So without wasting any time, let’s get started.
A step-by-step guide to creating and launching an online course:
Research and Planning
- Research Before Creating An Online Course
This is the most important step! Before you even start your course, do some market research to see if there are any competitors in this space already. If there are, look at their courses and see what they’re doing well or not so well. You can also use Google Trends, YouTube, Google Search, etc. to see popular keywords in your niche & find your competitors. The existence of competitors in the market shows if there’s truly a demand for this type of content or not.
- Pick A High Demand Topic For Your Course
If you have a good understanding & experience about the subject, go through the same process as above (researching competitors) and see if anyone else has done anything similar before you go ahead with it. If there is a high demand, then you know that people are willing to pay for the course that you’re planning to build.
- Research The Top Industry Experts In Your Field And See What They’re Teaching
Once you’ve determined your topic, google out the top experts in this field, and check out what they are providing. Once you’re done, you can reach out to them and ask if they’d be interested in doing an interview or sharing their expertise with your audience. If they’re not interested, don’t take it personally. Many people are busy with their businesses. But if they do agree, it will help validate your course and add credibility to its content. In case of rejection, you can always check out their course outline & what they’re teaching.
- Know Your Target Audience.
You don’t want to create a course for everyone in the world—that’s impossible! Instead, focus on one specific group or type of people who will benefit from learning from you and your content. For example, if you sell products for children, focus on parents with young kids who want to learn how to raise them well. Before you begin creating content, you need to know who your target audience is. This will help you shape the content of your course so that it appeals to them. It’s also important that the information in your course is relevant and useful for them.
Research deep into their problems, desires, goals, and their demographics before you go ahead to create your course.
Creating Course Content:
- The 1st step in creating course content is to determine the format that works best for your topic. Video, audio, and text-based courses each have their own advantages and disadvantages. There is a course named Course Launch Mastery that is specially designed to help you launch your online course successfully. It covers topics like how to create a course outline, how to develop the content for your course, and how to make good money from your course launch. Earlier it was available inside a course (Timeline Domination), but now you can get FlexiFunnels to get its access.
- Text-based courses are typically less expensive to create, but they require more time to consume. Text-based courses also tend to have lower completion rates than video or audio courses.
- Video courses have been trending a lot recently because of their engaging pattern & utilities. The major drawbacks with audio & text content are that you can not share your screen & they’re less engaging. I recommend you to have video courses with a challenge/task to get more results for your students as the success rates of your students determine how much money you’ll make!
How to set up your online course?
There are many tools that allow you to set up your online course, but there are only a few that provide you with security, minimize your costs, & provide you with the support that you need. FlexiFunnels is one such course & funnel builder tool that you can use to set up your online coaching business without spending thousands of dollars on random course builders that give you less & CHARGE YOU MORE in the long run!
The best part, you can not just set up your course but also your landing pages, funnels, and checkout pages, & run your entire online business from a single place. Thus, you don’t need to buy tools for everything & it is also very affordable.
Now, let’s move on to creating your course using FlexiFunnels:
Step1: Creating a FlexiFunnels account
- Go to the FlexiFunnels Homepage
- Click the “Buy Now” button & Get FlexiFunnels subscription for just $397 for an entire year where you can create unlimited courses, have upto 10,000-course members, sell unlimited products & get unlimited access to the 500+ Done-for-you templates
- Once you click the Buy Now button, you get redirected to the checkout page where you can fill your payment details & make the payment.
- As soon as you do it, your FlexiFunnels access is sent instantly to your email address.
- After this, you can log in to your account & follow the course creation process.
Step 2: Create a course with FlexiFunnels:
- All you need to do is click on “Projects” & select “+create new” & then click “launch a course” button
- After this, you can simply go ahead to add the modules & videos once you’re done with the pages.
Once you have added the name & thumbnail of the module, your screen will look like this. You can add any type of content that you want.
- You can simply import your videos from youtube or vimeo or upload your courses directly on FlexiFunnels(paid courses only).
- You can name your course & add the tagline you want to add. Don’t forget to press save once you’re done
- Once you have added your course, go to the pricing setting & tick the courses that you want to be visible to the viewers!
- And you’re done!
Or you can simply watch the videos above to get an idea of how you can make your first course live. The reason why I recommend FlexiFunnels over other course builders is that they give you OTT-level security for your courses, which are not available in other funnel/course builders till now!
These steps are explained more deeply in the membership and course page. Now that you know how to set up your course, let’s move ahead to do the marketing part!
Step 3: Marketing Your Course
- Creating a marketing plan
The first step in marketing your course is to create a marketing plan. This will help you determine which channels to use, how much time to spend on each channel, and how much time & money you should spend on each channel. Some of the marketing channels that you can use are – SMS marketing, paid advertisements, social media channels like (Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, etc), Influencer marketing, Email marketing, etc.
- Creating Funnels and Landing Pages
A good lead magnet (like free webinars) helps in generating quality leads, and strong copywriting on all the landing pages, like the sales page, thank you page, opt-in page, and others, boosts the conversions.
You can simply choose from 500+ Done-For-You Landing Page templates given inside FlexiFunnels. All these templates are made by expert designers & formatted by copywriters so that you don’t need to invest too much time & energy to get started.
You need – a lead generation page, a thank you page, a sales page, a checkout page 1 more thankyou page (for the people who buy your products). All of this is given inside FlexiFunnels, you can select the templates in 1 click & start using them after a little bit of customization.
- Promoting your course through social media, emails, and webinars
You can market your course through social media, emails, webinars, and Facebook ads & all the marketing channels that I’ve mentioned above. (in the marketing plan section). If you are a complete beginner & you don’t know where to start, you can watch all the marketing trainings inside FlexiFunnels where they show you the step-by-step process to build a successful online course creation business.
Remember: the only way to succeed in the online business in the course industry is to give as much value as possible. So I always recommend you to promote your course with a valuable content piece so that people can trust you. (only promotions won’t take you anywhere).
Step 4: Launching your course through FlexiFunnels
Once you’re done with all the beta testing & doing a pilot test of your course on a small number of people & taking feedback, now it’s time to fully launch your courses in the market.
Here you would be doing paid/ free webinars, influencer marketing & the different marketing channels that we discussed above to sell your course. I also suggest you to reach out some affiliates who have a big audience size to increase the exposure & sales of your courses.
Once you are done with the launch, now it’s time to keep selling & monitor the metrics so that you can take good decisions that bring in money for you.
- Monitoring course sales and performance through FlexiFunnels
Sales metrics that you need to track after your sale starts are:
- Average Revenue Per User
- Monthly Revenue
- Quarterly revenue
- Long-Term Customer Value
- Profits
- Number of Sales per day/week/month
Once you have launched a course on FlexiFunnels, you can monitor its sales and performance through the advanced analytics dashboard. Here you can see how many people have taken the course so far and how many have converted into paying customers (i.e., those who have paid for the product). You can also see which marketing channels are driving more sales for you and use this information to optimize future campaigns for increased results.
- Collecting and responding to feedback
You need to take regular feedback to make your customers happy with your courses & buy more from you. If you take feedback, this not just makes them feel important but also improves the quality of your products, & brings in referrals for you.
- Improving your course based on feedback through FlexiFunnels
Once you are done with the feedback, you can now add new content, change existing material based on the student feedback. For example, if a student says that they don’t understand a certain concept in your course, you can add an explanation video or even update the entire section of the course if necessary.
So far we have seen how FlexiFunnels helps content creators like you create and launch courses and make money online but FlexiFunnels is not the only one in the market, there are other course builders as well. So to give you a short overview of all course builders, here is a table comparing some leading course builders.
Every funnel builder provides a lot of features to help you launch a course but if you don’t want to end up paying too much, you might want to go with FlexiFunnels.
On the other hand, UDemy charges you 63% in commissions if your course is sold on its platform! Remember, you are not paying for the profits, but instead for the revenue. So you’re losing a big chunk of revenue right at the front end & after paying salaries & other expenses, you might end up with very thin profits. Here is a support document from UDemy.
Final Conclusion
The course creation industry has grown like anything in the last few years. The overall global eLearning market is expected to hit $350 billion by 2025. And thus, it becomes crucial for you to take advantage of this rising industry before it becomes saturated. You don’t need any fancy cameras, dresses, etc. to create a course. Even if you just have knowledge that can actually make a difference in someone’s work or life. You’re good to go.
As far as the course builders are concerned, this article has provided you a very deep understanding of how to build a course step by step & the features that some of the powerful funnel builders in the market have. Rest we have also given you the table to compare and research so that you can go ahead with the right tool for yourself.. Best of luck.
FAQs
Q1 – How can I launch my online courses?
Ans – You can launch your online course by doing research, making an outline, recording the course, and setting up the course using platforms like FlexiFunnels/Kartra/Kajabi, etc & once you are done with that, you can start marketing, selling & improvising it.
Q2 – How do I protect my courses from piracy?
Ans – Piracy is one of the big problems in the market right now. While researching tools for this article, we found that FlexiFunnels provides OTT-level piracy security for the courses, which we didn’t find in any funnel & course builder. They also have right-click disabled inside the membership area that doesn’t allow anyone to scrape your videos, & there are more course security features that you’ll find interesting.
Q3 – Do I need technical skills to start a course?
Ans – Not at all. Today, there are multiple tools that allow you to set up your online course with simple drag & drop.
Q4 – How do I sell my online course?
Ans – There are multiple ways you can sell your courses online. Some of these ways are webinars, social media content, influencer marketing, email marketing, and asking affiliates to promote your courses.
