How to Create a Best-Selling Online Course in 7 Steps

For getting into the mindset of a successful online teacher you must fully convince yourself that this is a great path to take. So before diving into the course let's spend few minutes to discuss the power of digital products.

The path or process to create a new online course from scratch, can be divided into 7 steps. Starting from selecting a topic, building an outline, creating content, recording that content and then launching and promoting the course. In each step, we supposed to make some decisions, create something and overcome few challenges that will help us to make ongoing progress and move to the next step.

In this video we will review the needed equipment and software tools for building a very affordable home studio for recording our video lectures.

Building an online course is a few weeks and even few months project. It is really related to the complexity of a specific course and the spare time you have to develop such project. To be able to complete such kind of projects we basically need a huge amount of motivation and determination. Keep moving creating and building in small steps, even when things are not so easy and not as perfect as you expected.

Let's review few basic recommendations.

Here are some frequently asked questions:

• How can I find a relevant topic to teach?

• How long will it take me to create a course?

• How much money can I make with my first course?

• Why don’t you use talking-head recording?

• Why Udemy?

Welcome to the first step in our journey, selecting a winning topic. If you want a great starting point, you need to pick up a great topic. It is your first and very important strategic decision.

Picking a great topic for your next course is really based on your ability to collect ongoing ideas and filter out items. This can be done by building and maintaining a personal TO-DO list so you can easily pick a topic your next course with the greatest chance to be a big success.

How you supposed to filter ideas for your next course? Basically there some simple questions you should consider helping to filter out and keep the most relevant topics.

In this lecture we will learn how to use the Udemy marketplace and other tools to validate the market demand for a specific topic and better differentiate your course from the existing courses.

How can you develop a great content for your students if you don't know them? As much as you can learn about your target audience the better chance that the content you develop will fulfill their specific needs. It is all about a tailored content for a specific audience.

In this lecture we will explore some options to discover your target audience.

Let's start to be practical and build the course landing page based on information we discovered or maybe assumed about the target audience.

It is time to move to our next step - Building a Course Outline. Basically, we would like to break the topic into little pieces so we will know what to teach? What content in the context of the selected topic should be included? What kind of ideas will make our course interesting and useful?

As soon as we have such break-down, our situation is much better. We have a framework for this new project and it is easier to translate it into a clear action plan.  

An online course is basically a collection of ideas and knowledge presented in an engaging way. Creative thinking is your best friend to make your course compelling, engaging and interesting. Are you ready to unleash your creative mind?

Your creative mind is just like a car engine. You need to invest some energy to start it and get to that "optimal thinking temperature" and ideas will start appearing in your mind like waves.

The secret about creative thinking is to write your ideas on the spot. So it is time to take an empty notebook and start writing down small notes...

It is time to organize your notes and harvest useful ideas about your topic.

After investing time and effort to research, learn and develop ideas about the topic the outcome is that you will be much more confident and comfortable with your topic and now it will be much more easy to build the course outline.

We are going to dive into one of the most important steps while creating an online course – it is about creating content. Not just content, we would like to create awesome content. A content that will be useful for our audience, focused on the topic, interesting and engaging.

Creating content for our course is a time consuming task. Probably 70-80% of your time will be dedicated to this phase and if this is the case, we should do whatever is needed to make it more effective process.

There is always a good and healthy debate among teachers, if it is a smart idea to create a script for explaining something. Should I prepare a script and just read it line by line or should I improvise without a script and then maybe present it in a much more natural way.  Let's answer those important questions.

There are some best practice methods and recommendations that we can use while developing content. The first thing we need to know and remember while developing content is that any lecture is all about transformation.

In this lecture I would to review a list of recommendations that will help to build a better lecture, a better transformation for our students.  

Slides are still the dominate method to deliver lectures. In this lecture we will review some great tips to create much better presentations.

Prezi is a great tool for creating presentations. It is easy and fun and the result can be outstanding.

We can see animated videos almost everywhere. This is another nice option to create engaging lectures and in I would like to show how to create an animated video using a web-tool called PowToon.

As a teacher you should think and develop quizzes, assignments or projects helping your student to practice the subjects.

Screen-casting is a very popular method, probably all teachers are using this method in addition to other recording styles. In this section, we will first learn to select the needed equipment, set up our basic home studio and then understand how to overcome some well-known audio issues.

Getting a high-quality audio requires some investment in equipment, preparing a suitable recording environment, and also to have some basic understanding about issues related to sound quality. If you really want to be a successful and also effective online teacher than you must pay attention to your audio quality, making sure that the audio quality while recording is perfect

This is very simple, don’t use the in-build mic in your laptop or in some external desktop camera or while using a smartphone. My recommendation will be to invest in a good USB microphone like the Blue Yeti or any other similar mic.

The next step is to set up a place to record, this is your home studio like a quiet recording environment. Now, there are two very common problems related to the recording environment, the first one is an echo and the second one is background sounds.  

To be able to record our voice and screen, we need some screen recording software tool. In the next section, we will dive into the options that exist in Camtasia to edit our raw recording and produce really professional video files but right now let’s focus just on the screen recording capabilities.

Everything is ready, we have microphone, a place to record and a screen capture software tool. You learned how to set up, configure and test the equipment and start to record. The next thing we should consider will be to select the most effective recording strategy for the specific lecture.

Before recording our screen there are few things we need to prepare and pay more attention before and during the actual recording.

Before recording our voice there are few things we need to prepare and pay more attention before and during the actual recording. Things like speaking distance, volume, speed handling mistakes and other subjects.

In this lecture we will review in high level the Camtasia Studio user interface, including the Tools Panel, Canvas, Properties Panel and Timeline .

The timeline is used to displays the sequence of all media we would like to use in our video. It will show us how long a specific video clip or an image will be presented in the video. If we will look on a specific media, we can see that it has a specific starting and endpoint.

The canvas or sometimes it is also called the preview window is used to display a preview of how the final video will look like when we produce it. This is the working area where we can use different objects and then arrange, rotate, resize, and re-order the media on the timeline.

Annotations are basically graphics objects that we can add to the recorded video. They are a great way to draw the student’s attention to some important content.

Animations are really useful effects in Camtasia. It is helping to make the video much more engaging, to draw the student’s attention to some area, creating additional transitions between video clips and much more. We will learn to use the Zoom-n-Pan Animations and also some off-the-shelf animation templates.

Inside the Camtasia Editor, we have the option to change how to Cursor will be presented.  This is a useful option when we would like to draw attention to the mouse movements.

In this chapter, I would like to review some simple audio adjustments and also more advanced audio effects.

The production process also called rendering, creates a video file based on the sequence of media in the timeline, the video clips, audio clips, any images, and effects that we added.

Working in cycles is my recommendations to make it more easy and more effective.

Visitors that are coming from multiple marketing channels will land on that landing page. Now a portion of the incoming traffic is supposed to purchase the product and join the course, this is the conversion rate. So if the course landing page is the entrance gate, our target is very simple, improve the conversion rate, transforming more traffic into new students. If the gate will be sexy, interesting and compelling then more people will decide to enter the gate.

The course title is one of the strongest factor students are considering while scanning a landing page. It is the name of the product. You should think about the best suitable title for your new course. Making sure it is optimized to catch the target student’s attention and also for being friendly to search algorithms.

This is a very easy part and also very important. You can review the course curriculum and create a simple list of things a student will achieve when completing your course. It is based on the content you already created.

When students are looking on a list of courses, we want that our course image will grab their attention so they will click and enter the landing page.

I highly recommend to carefully plan and produce your promotion video, because it will have a dramatic impact on your conversion rate. Now, creating a really good promotion video is not so easy, and this is the place I would like to recommend you few things to consider and think about.

Don’t miss this simple tool and opportunity to communicate with your students. See how it is easy to setup the Welcome Message and Congratulations Message.

Before you are clicking on the submit course for review I would like to recommend you few things to make the process faster and more effective:

Students watching a landing page will evaluate the number of enrolled students, the overall rating and the number of reviews used to build this score. This is why social proof is one of the most critical elements for our success.

In this lecture we will review the revenue sharing model in Udemy (Organic Sales, Instructor Promotion, Paid Acquisition Sales).

To prevent any surprise, like “I didn’t know that rule”, I suggest reviewing the trust and safety web page in Udemy. It will take you a while, like 20min but this is a one-time process. You can visit this once in a while to be updated.

Hi and welcome to step #7, our last step. Step #7 is all about using different promotion strategies and handling important ongoing activities. Ongoing activates that are needed to keep your course on track, optimized and updated.

Using the instructor dashboard, you can monitor and respond to all student questions in a central location. Let’s talk about some simple useful guidelines while using this dashboard.

Emails announcements can be used for two main purposes. The first one is to increase the engagement with your course using educational announcements. And secondly for up selling, selling more courses for your existing students using promotional emails.

The second way to increase your income from the same courses you already created is to promote them by yourself. In that case, you can create a coupon code, use it somewhere and get 97% revenue for any sales. There are several ways to promote your course, some of them are easy and some of them are more complex. The concept is to build and set up a sales funnel. Bring more traffic and converting more visitors to new students.

In this lecture we will review the six promotion strategies including Social Sites, Forums, Conferences and Events, YouTube, Sales Page and a Mailing List, eBook, Paid Ads.

Congratulation, you made it!