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3 Common Course Models

Many coaches have transformed the way they do business and live life through online courses. Whether you’re looking for a way to serve more clients or for more personal freedom, creating an online course will be a great way to take that next step. let’s look at some of the most common ways coaches use online courses.

Mini-Courses

This model involves offering online courses for free, to help you generate leads for your coaching business. Going this route helps educate and qualify prospective clients before they work with you. Such as a mini-course, this is your “foot in the door” product that can appeal to a range of audiences.

Courses like these may be free and used as an email magnet or can be priced at a low price of $49. The purpose of mini courses are to serve those who do not qualify for your coaching or consulting services but still are interested in learning from you.

This type of product can catch a variety of people’s attention: from people who haven’t started their businesses yet to entrepreneurs a few years in looking to brush up their bookkeeping skills.

The benefits of mini-courses include:

Grow your audience

“a mini course can earn you recognition as an expert for a very specific topic.”

If your biggest concern right now is finding and growing an online audience, a mini course is an incredible tool for doing so, especially if you offer your course for free as a lead magnet.

Brand a theme or topic

Every brand is known for a specific theme, topic, or product; their ‘must have’ feature or benefit. Something that sets him or her apart from everyone else who sells digital products on the Internet.

“Mini courses give your audience an understanding of who you are”

A mini course can demonstrate to your target audience what your brand represents. It shows what approach you take to online learning, what topics you find most important, and what theme you’ll maintain through the life of your business.

Start making money sooner

A full-length course can seem overwhelming for new entrepreneurs. However, you can’t generate revenue if you don’t have any products. Creating a mini course allows you to shrink down the startup time and that overwhelming feeling, and start earning money faster, putting the profits back into your business.

Take that first small step with a mini course to get comfortable with Miestro’s tools. Once you’re bringing in money, you can analyze your approach and find ways to improve upon it.

Mirror Your Business

This model uses online courses to productize your coaching program, turning it into a fully-fledged online information product. The idea is that you probably have more demand for your coaching than you have time to coach people, and if you don’t already, you’ll get to that point as your business grows.

“Mapping out the same ideas that you walk through in your coaching business.”

This is also a great opportunity to create an online course for the exact people who do qualify for your coaching program.

Having this program established allows you more flexibility among other benefits such as:

Work with more people

In a years time, working 1:1 with tens of thousands of people may not be so easy; you can however, enroll tens of thousands of people into a course.

Choose who you work with

Offering a program of your services to those who don’t exactly fit your criteria is an excellent way to pick and choose who you can work with, and not hurt any feelings along the way. Work with clients who aren’t ready for your services

There are going to be people who would love to work with you, but they simply can’t afford to. Creating a cheaper product can help you help more people.

Client-Only Training

This involves creating exclusive online training for clients you’re working with one on one. This is different from a single online course or a group coaching model in the way that each client receives customized online training, in addition to face time with you.

While you are still serving clients one on one, you are able to charge a higher rate for your mentorship. You are also able to save time by providing supplemental online curriculum for clients to use between meetings and calls with you.

Pricing Your Course

To start off, the biggest problem is that most course creators usually don’t charge enough for their online product! $1oo should be minimum for a basic online course, and oftentimes, even that’s too low.

As a quick guide for how much you should be charging:

  • Mini courses – FREE (or up to $50)
  • Regular courses – $100-$899
  • Flagship programs – $899+.

Charging more for your course can be intimidating, yes, but it will help you maintain inner peace and reach your revenue goals. Let’s discuss why that is:

  1. Perceived value: Your customers are going to believe that a higher priced course will provide more value.
  2. Weed out students: Cheaper courses will attract students who aren’t really in your target audience, which means they might not experience your intended outcome. Also students who are not ready for your coaching or consulting services may benefit greatly from a program instead.
  3. Reach your goals: If you are trying to make $2,000 with your online course, it’ll be easier to convince four people to pay you $500 than it will be to convince 40 people to pay you $50. The lower you price your course, the larger your audience will need to be to hit your goals.

It’s also great to have multiple tiers to your business so you can serve customers at all levels. As some aren’t quite ready for your 1:1 coaching quite yet, they could benefit from other products or services to help them reach that level.

And if you’re a coach and a course creator, let us know in the comments what you think the pros and cons of each are!