10 Steps to Creating Your First Online Course [Infographic]
This infographic breaks the online course creation process down into 10 easy-to-follow, actionable steps.
This week, we're going to mix it up a bit!
Here at Fly Plugins, we very often receive a common question in our pre-sales queue for WP Courseware...
"Do you have a checklist that will guide me through creating my first course?"
While we do have dozens of informative tutorial videos on our YouTube channel which demonstrate how to set up a course with WP Courseware, including a "getting started" playlist, we thought it might be helpful to provide a broad-stroke overview of the entire course creation process.
And we decided this might be best presented through the use of an infographic. Again, this is a high-level overview of the process and there are dozens of details involved in each step, but we hope this is helpful in getting your mind thinking about the steps you need to take.
Enjoy and feel free to share!
Brilliant! Thanks
Thanks, Jazz! Hope all is well your way.
Nice and clear infographic. And it is funny, it is the exact content (I only have some steps together, I have 7 steps)I train my students (who create courses), with one important exception. You state in your graphics that the price should be determined in step 9. Although I partially agree, I would say that this is a continuous process. In ‘Evaluate the demand’ you already have to start with it. Because depending on the number of potential customers, the price of competative products and the number of hours you estimate having to invest, it might be that -if you want at least to cover the costs- the price you have to ask is too expensive for your actual target audience. And in the end you created a course which won’t sell, or will sell with a loss.
Of course, in a small country like the Netherlands where I live this factor is much more important (Worldwide there are about 25 mln people speaking Dutch) than when you create a course in English language with a larger potential audience, but in all cases I would advise to evaluate and re-evaluate the price in every step of the process.
Additionally I would say, that Launch Strategy partially also starts as soon as one has an outline. As soon as you know where the course is all about, start blogging and building your list.
I have several customers who had huge success via getting people on their list via YouTube by posting materials which were discarded (because later decided it was off-topic) as free tips.
When you start building your audience (without having to tell there will be a course) during the creation the course, the launch gets lots easier because there is already a group of people who likes and trusts you and your knowledge on the topic.
Thank you for the insightful comments, Wilko! These are good points. We have found that many of our WP Courseware users begin the course creation process after developing some authority within the niche through blogging, ebooks, or other channels (sometimes they’ve been blogging for years). They obviously have an advantage by having an existing audience and also content to use within the course itself, but it’s never too early to start developing that authority by getting involved in the niche through publishing content, engaging in social media groups, etc.
I also agree with you that demand and pricing are often two sides of the same coin and need to be considered together. While you may be an expert on a particular topic and there are tens of thousands of people around the globe interested in that topic, it doesn’t make sense to create a course in that niche if people aren’t willing to spend money to gain knowledge of that topic. This is where tools such as Google’s keyword planner or Spyfu can be invaluable, allowing you to see if advertisers are willing to spend money on traffic and how much they are spending. If website owners are paying $1, $2, or $10 per click on a keyword in that niche, they are obviously expecting to see a good return on that investment.
And regarding the limitations of courses in certain languages, we do come across that quite often when speaking with our users and it is a real challenge for some of them. We don’t have an accurate estimate of the number of languages that WP Courseware courses are being presented in, but there are many. I will say that we often see users expanding their course’s reach by hiring translators to re-create the course content in various languages. After that I have seen a number of them create subdomains for each language…’dutch.mycourse.com’, ‘english.mycourse.com’, etc. Each subdomain then includes a translation file to translate the WP Courseware text strings for each language and obviously the course content is loaded in that language. The challenge is that if you do not speak those other languages, you need to hire a virtual assistant to manage any student interaction outside of the course, but that can often be done for a very reasonable hourly rate through Upwork or other services.
Thanks Nate, for your response. You *do* realize that the response itself was almost enough material for a new blogpost? 😉
With regards to the course translations I think you’re partially right, but not every course qualifies for internationalization. Sometimes because it is typical Dutch (we are a very particular people), sometimes because the product IS THERE, but not in Dutch. And although most Dutch speak English quite well, some of them still prefer to me taught the stuff in Dutch.
But you’re right of course in general, a product that does well in one country has -translated- good potential in other countries too. The launch will be a bit harder however, since often people have a *local* reputation, so they have to establish their name first abroad.
Ha! Yes, I may have to think about recycling that comment! 😉