Online courses or eCourses are hugely popular right now, and creating one takes a lot of work. It’s a journey and it can be overwhelming at times. However, creating your course doesn’t have to be, especially if you can avoid making easy mistakes.
When created correctly, your online course can be a very rewarding investment. Recently discussed, online courses can be a fantastic way to create passive income in your business and help position yourself as an expert in your industry. However, no matter how good your course is, there are always some mistakes to avoid that will impact your content and the quality of your online course.
Here then, are the 3 mistakes you must avoid in creating your online course:
Lack of a Defined Target Audience
You only want to create course content that your audience is interested in and will benefit from. Determining who your audience is and what they want from you is a huge process to take in creating your online course. Knowing exactly who will be interested in your product or service and how it can help make their lives easier helps you understand exactly who you’re marketing to. As well as helps shape your voice, website and social copy, your marketing materials, and even your course content.
“Don’t try to appeal to too many different people – you’ll risk appealing to no one. Be clear who your course is for and who it’s not for.”
In creating an online course, If you don’t really understand your audience, you won’t know what to make a course about. Your audience won’t feel that you understand them and won’t give you their attention. The key is to understand, in as much detail as you can, the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of the people you’re aiming to serve. Doing this ensures your online course has a clear audience in mind; people who feel like you understand their needs and wishes.
Not Putting the Student First
With success stories all over the internet of people making millions of dollars by selling courses, it’s easy to money hungry rather than education focused. But here’s the thing, we’re not creating the content for us, we’re creating it for others. With that, how you interact with your students and how you organize your online course is vital to its success.
“Focus on the fundamentals. The only way to build mastery is with a great set of fundamentals.”
It’s important to remember in creating your online course not to focus too much on a topic you think is important, without taking time to make sure it’s interesting to the audience as well. At the end of the day, creating an online course should have a clear goal—to educate. And everything that doesn’t add to that, takes away from it—being unnecessary for you to create and your students to consume. Ask the students of your online course what they need and how they think they might be best engaged. Often they will tell you exactly what you need and get you at least 50% closer to organizing your course content.
Lack of Actionable Tactics
Too many instructors focus on what they want their students to Know instead of what they want them to Do. Knowledge comes from experiences, not our courses. This is why it’s so important to not fill your online course with fluff. That’s not valuable for any of your students, and it’s a waste of your time to make.
“Make it easy for people to do the work. People show up for the tools. Give them EVERYTHING they need to learn during and after your course.”
Instead, focus only on filling your online course with actionable content that your students can implement and learn from while they’re actually going through your course. You want to leave your students feeling like they’ve got something new to do each time they finish up a module or lesson. Yes, it’s time-consuming. But don’t forget, creating your online course is a project.
The moral to the story? To ensure your online learning initiative succeeds, build it to be distinctive and engaging. Creating a successful online course isn’t impossible and it doesn’t have to be hard. You simply need to understand that it’s a big undertaking, but with its income potential, it’s not something you want to take lightly. Remember it’s about the students, so teach yourself how to teach, let your students teach each other, and make sure you cover your topic entirely, without the fluff.
Have you made any of these mistakes? If so, what did you learn from it? Share your comment down below and help others hopefully avoid making these mistakes!
