Make Money From

Online Courses

A Complete Step-by-Step and Hand-in-Hand Action Plan to Create,

Market and Sell Your Own Course Even if You Have no Skills to Teach,
Taking Only a Few Hours a Day

Robert Basile
 © Copyright 2020 - All rights reserved.

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 Table Of Contents

Introduction
Courses And Content
Earning Money
Chapter 1: Picking The Right Topic
Approaches
Question #1 - Do You Have Knowledge?
Question #2 - How Deep Will You Go?
Getting Help
Chapter 2: Evaluating Demand
Finding Niches
What Have You Researched?
Volumes
Topic Versus Product
Speaking Of The Future.
Future Proof
Monetization Strategies
Competition
Audience Analysis
Chapter 3: Develop Goals
Course Outlines
Design A Journey
Developing Goals
Specific
 Measurable
Achievable And Realistic
Time Bound
Types Of Goals
Chapter 4: Create Your Course
Creating Content
Types Of Videos
Software
Tone
Tips And Tricks
Look At The Lens
Light It Up
Be Comfortable
Plan
You’re Better Than You Think You Are
Chapter 5: Uploading And Hosting
Standalone Hosting
Thinkific
Learnworlds
Teachable
Podia
Click4course
Digital Chalk
Plugins
Learndash
 Accessally
Coursecats
Marketplaces
Chapter 6: Marketing
Pre-Release
Youtube
Influencer Marketing
Instagram
Podcasts
Post Release
Email Marketing
Paid Advertising
Landing Pages
Advanced Marketing
Slack
Publish A Book
What If You Lack Knowledge?
Chapter 7: Monetization Models
Traditional Model
Lead Generation
Product Creation
Side-Hustle Business
Chapter 8: A Step-By-Step Plan And Tips To Increase Sales
A Step-By-Step Plan
Step One - One Week To One Month
 Step Two - One Month
Step Three - One Month
Step Four - One Week
Step Five - Repeat
Tips To Increase Sales
Provide Value
Go Organic
Analytics
Conclusion
References
 Introduction

A scanthemake
internet has grown in size so has the number of ways in which you
money online. In the earlier days of the internet, the most
common method of making money was to start a blog and then run ads
on it. Everything was in its infancy and people weren’t sure of what to
expect.
Fast-forward to now and businesses treat their websites with as much care
as they would treat a physical store. The web has become one large piece of
real estate and there are entire industries dedicated to educating people on
how to market their products, how to drive more traffic, how to boost
engagement and how to make sense of analytics numbers.
Information is the new currency in today’s economy. The more well-
informed you are and the more you’re up to speed with the various elements
of your field of work, the more currency you have in the marketplace. We’re
in an era where artificial intelligence and automation is increasing rapidly.
Jobs are being replaced daily and in order to keep up, people need to figure
out new ways of enhancing their skills.
As an entrepreneur this is a massive opportunity for you. You’ve
probably experienced this gap yourself. How often have you searched for
information about something online and have come away feeling
underwhelmed? Despite there being numerous sources of information online,
there is a lack of in-depth information.
Most blog posts can only cover so much and YouTube videos barely
scratch the surface in terms of delivering actionable advice. These sources of
information are free and their creators can provide help to a certain extent
before charging for more. Most people leave feeling underwhelmed as a
result.
Creating courses has been a long used tactic for marketers to boost their
sales and increase their cash flow. They spend a lot of time and money on
cheating course pages and on driving traffic to those pages. As someone who
has never created a course before, this might seem intimidating to you. How
can you hope to compete with existing course creators?
 Why would anyone want to listen to you? All of these are valid questions
but asking them upfront is adopting the wrong mindset. Instead of asking
why people would want to listen to you, ask yourself how can you get people
listening to you?
Courses and Content
An online course is a very different beast from the regular blog post.
Many content creators go on about being helpful and about providing value,
but they don’t admit (or recognize) that the blog post as a medium is
incapable of going into too much depth on a subject.
At best, it provides an introduction to a topic before directing the reader
to some other information source. If the creator of the content is genuinely
interested in imparting knowledge then they can’t cram everything into one
post. They need to split it up into pieces and this creates a less than ideal
experience for a reader. Who wants to click through multiple articles in order
to learn anything about a subject?
Online courses solve this issue by gathering all relevant content into a
single place and delivering them in an easily understood format. Learning by
video is one of the most natural ways to learn since this is how everyone
grows up absorbing information. We attend classes and listen to an instructor
explain the topic.
This is how an online course is structured as well. Psychologically, it
transports people back to a classroom and this facilitates easy learning.
What’s more, the promise of this environment justifies you collecting
payment from them. This is a barrier that many bloggers have to overcome.
Their audiences are so attuned to receiving free information that most people
end up exiting the sales funnel.
If you’re not aware of what a sales funnel is, then don’t worry. This is just
one of the many things you’ll be learning in this book. Along the way you’re
going to learn how you can structure your online course so that it delivers
maximum value to your customers. Best of all, you don’t need to have any
prior knowledge of the subject to be able to create a course. That’s right!
Even the most technical topics lend themselves to you creating a course
around them. This might seem like an absurd statement to make but it’s how
many businesses are operating these days. Many of them have even received
venture capital funding. This shows the enormous potential that exists in the
online course field.
If there is one skill you need to master, it is to understand how you can
generate traffic online. This is the key to any online business and this will
form the bulk of this book. Truth be told, once you understand some of the
best ways of generating traffic to your course page, everything else will
become extremely easy for you. Whether the course is on a topic you know a
lot about or is on a topic you know nothing about, traffic generation is the
key to success.
Master this and everything else falls into place.
Earning Money
Let me get this out of the way right now. You’ve picked up this book
because you want to learn how to make money online. The title of this book
says as much. However, there’s a difference between making money in the
short-term and cheating a resource that can provide long-term income.
Courses are a great tool to automate earnings because they require a one-
time effort. If your course is of a high quality, people will keep returning to it
and as word of mouth publicity spreads, you’ll keep earning money on it over
the long term. Maintaining such a source of income is extremely easy and
over time you can create more such sources.
There are a few resources that claim to teach you zero investment
methods to creating online courses. This is not one of those books. I’m not
going to tell you to invest thousands of dollars but it’s a good idea to have a
little bit of money in the bank, even a few hundreds, before beginning.
You’re trying to start a business and in order to succeed you need to have
some capital in the bank.
Another thing to keep in mind is that your course needs to provide people
with value. You cannot expect to throw garbage into your videos and expect
people to pay for it. Ethical issues aside, the internet has many ways of
penalizing you for doing this.
Now that these points have been cleared, it’s time to dive into the
wonderful world of online courses and figure out how you can create a
lasting source of income.
 Chapter 1

Picking the Right Topic

very course creator starts with this question: What should my topic be?
E There are many ways of answering this question, and in this chapter I’m
going to give you some of the more practical methods you can use to
choose a topic. Remember that your course needs to provide excellent value.
Without this, you don’t have a strong foundation to lean on. As long as
you’re committed to creating great content, you don’t need to worry about
issues such as not having knowledge. Your ultimate aim should always be to
educate your audience and give them maximum value.
Approaches
There are two broad ways of approaching the topic of course topics. The
first is to create courses around topics you’re knowledgeable about. The
second is to create a course around topics you’re not an expert on but have
some basic idea. In the beginning, it’s always better to go with the former
approach. This is because you’ll be able to handle setbacks and rectify
mistakes easily since you’ll be in full control of the content and processes.
This doesn’t mean you can’t create a course in topics you’re not an expert
on. You could always leverage someone else’s knowledge and collaborate
with them to create a course. You might be wondering why anyone else
would agree to this? The fact is that most people do not think like
entrepreneurs. Their aim is to earn a guaranteed stream of income and as long
as this is given to them, they’re willing to share their knowledge.
For example, if you were to approach a high school English teacher and
offer them a fixed payment in return for collaborating on creating a course
that will be offered to non-native speakers wishing to learn English, you’ll
find that most people will take you up on this. If you’ve ever taken courses
on any technical subject, or even browsed for information, you might have
bumped into the popular website Khan Academy.
Well, the above method is how the founder Salman Khan expanded his
website’s reach beyond just mathematics. He started off teaching his cousin
math using doodles and then realized people needed help with physics and
chemistry as well. He hired teachers and worked on pushing traffic to his
pages. The rest is history.
Don’t be intimidated by the size at which that organization operates. You
don’t need to be anywhere as huge as them to make an impact. Do note that if
you wish to venture into topics you don’t have knowledge about, you will
need to have capital to spend. If you feel as if you don’t have any knowledge
about anything and neither do you have capital, then you still have choices.
You could approach a family member and collaborate with them. Another
option is to develop a relationship with someone who has the knowledge and
offer them a cut of the profits from your venture. You could repeat this tactic
as you expand. The key to being successful is to have a solution oriented
mindset. Instead of focusing on the things that are limiting you, focus on
what you do have and how you can use those resources to expand.
When you’re brainstorming topics for a course, here are three questions
you need to focus on answering. The answers to these questions will
determine how you need to structure the rest of your business plan.
Question #1 - Do You Have Knowledge?
This is an extremely critical question to answer. Contrary to what you
might think, answering “no” to this question does not mean you shouldn’t
create a course. It simply means you need to install a plan that will help you
overcome this hurdle. Let’s deal with the simpler option first. If you do have
the knowledge needed to create a course how deep is your knowledge?
Do you have any certifications that you can show to prove this
knowledge? Being honest with yourself about the depth and any
shortcomings in your knowledge will help you map your course outlines
better. You don’t need to develop modules right now but be honest about
your expertise.
The internet is a place for experts. Google and other social media
platforms have conditioned users to be very finicky about authority. The
earlier days of the internet were dominated by scam artists and conspiracy
theories. While people initially laughed them off, both of these things have
come to dominate popular conversation. Conspiracy theorists have turned
into bona fide influencers. This led to Google and the social media companies
to evaluate the way in which content is promoted.
Google for example places a huge amount of weight on a content creator
being able to prove their credentials. This applies mostly to the fields of
finance and health. However, if your course is designed to be aimed at
students or a technical audience, your credentials will be taken into account
before any network promotes your content. There isn’t a single person sitting
there making these judgements. Algorithms are smart enough to figure this
out.
For this reason, if your course happens to have anything to do with
technical subjects, financial matters or anything related to health, your
credentials are far more important than your experience. This sounds unfair
but it’s how the internet works these days. Users have been conditioned to
look for proof of credentials. Even areas such as chakra healing or Reiki
where conventional licensing credentials don’t exist, a course creator has to
work hard to establish authority.
So evaluate yourself in this light. If you happen to know a lot about
personal finance and have successfully rid yourself of debt, but don’t have
any financial credentials, your chances of success are low. You’d be better
off broaching another topic you’re interested in. Hobbies are an evergreen
subject and make for great courses. Woodworking, painting, creative writing
and drawing, for example, always have high demand. If you play a musical
instrument, it’s a no-brainer to create a course around your skills.
What if you don’t have any knowledge? In this case, take some time to
create a persona that will appeal to your audience as someone who has
authority. Let’s say you want to create a course around playing the acoustic
guitar. What kind of person would convince you to take their course?
If you logged into a page that had a profile of the person teaching the
course, what would convince you to sign up for their course? Should they
have played in a band before? Created their own music? Have prior teaching
experience? Provide ongoing support? Flesh out all of these details.
 Once this is done, find such a person or locate where this kind of person
can be found. There are many online sources that host listings of music
teachers. Could you approach one of these people and pitch them your offer?
They might not be willing to create content for you without an upfront
payment. Will you split course profits with them in exchange for zero fees?
Plan your proposal beforehand and work through various scenarios that
might present themselves. You can’t account for everything beforehand but
be prepared and you’ll make it easy on yourself. Above all else, be prepared
to hear the word “no” a lot. It’s unconventional to create a course around a
topic you have no knowledge about so most people will not be prepared to
hear your proposal.
Question #2 - How Deep Will You Go?
A great way of appealing to people even if you’re not an expert in a
particular subject is to change the depth to which you’ll address the topic. For
example, you don’t need to create an A-Z course on creative writing. Instead,
you can create one that only introduces the subject and then suggests other
advanced courses.
There are many course creators who do this. This allows them to create
two income streams from one course. The first is the money they earn from
selling their own course. The second is the affiliate marketing income they
earn by promoting the more advanced course.
Affiliate marketing is a system where you earn commissions for
promoting other people’s products. If you direct enough traffic to another
person’s product page and if the people you refer end up buying the product,
you earn a commission. Course creators do not push too many affiliate
products to their customers since it comes across as spammy.
Have you ever attended school or college that pushed you to sign up for
additional coursework incessantly? You’d likely be put off by their
aggressiveness. It works the same way online. However, suggesting another
course that your learners might benefit from once they’re done with yours is a
great way to promote value.
You're directing them to another resource that offers a way for them to
increase their knowledge and aren’t being spammy about it. If a music course
promoted a great wine storage cabinet at the end of it, this would come across
as being spammy. There’s no connection between the two products. Neither
is it okay to promote a certain brand of instruments, and leave links to their
Amazon pages so that you can earn commissions.
Promote other courses and not physical products. Always add value and
don’t ever push your customers or be aggressive with them. They’ll leave you
negative reviews and your course will struggle to sell. Coming back to the
question of depth, you want to avoid being too shallow with your
information. This is something that many course creators do, and they think
they’re being extremely smart.
The way they set things up is they promote a basic course for $10 and
then lock valuable content behind another course that is $1,000 in price. The
idea is to give people a taste of how valuable the content is and this will
result in them buying the more expensive course. Even if conversion rates are
low, all it takes is two purchases per month for you to earn $2,000 in
revenues.
While this logic is sound on paper, it falls apart in practice. This is easily
proved. Imagine being exposed to a sales gimmick like this. How would you
react? It’s a bit like going to a restaurant that promised you a full rib eye
steak meal for $10 and then told you that you get one small bite of the rib eye
for $10 and you can eat the rest for $200.
You’d probably chuck the plate at the wall and walk out. Don’t try to be
too clever with your audience here. This business model works only when
you’re actually providing a ton of value at the lower price point and are
offering much more value at the higher price point. Tricking your customers
into signing up for the higher value proposition and then telling them it’s not
included in their purchase is just another way of being a scam artist.
An ideal online course will hit the sweet spot between being too shallow
and too deep. Most of your audience will not be too concerned with the
advanced technicalities of your subject matter. In fact, it’s best to spin these
off into another course of their own instead of lumping them together with
the basic material.
As a rule of thumb, you want to hit the basics, a few advanced concepts
and give them some tips and tricks. For example, let’s say you're designing a
course on speaking English which is aimed at non-native speakers who wish
to improve their English-speaking skills.
You don’t need to teach them the alphabet since they already know this.
You don’t need to go into the intricacies of gerunds and homonyms because
this is useless information for everyone except a grammar geek. You’d
probably begin with helping them with their pronunciation and giving them
tips to improve it.
You’d introduce them to more words in an effort to improve their
vocabulary. You’d offer them tips to structure their sentences better. You’d
give them resources and techniques to improve their skills. At the end you
could even offer them a private coaching session for a certain price and sell
your teaching business that way. (I’ll get to monetization later in this book, so
don’t worry about this now.)
Simply aim to provide as much value as possible. It’s best to put yourself
in the shoes of your audience members and ask yourself what you would
want to learn from your course. Some course creators even go so far as to
create customer personas to get to know their audience better. I’ll walk you
through audience analysis in the next chapter. For now, aim to develop a
high-level indication of how deep you want to go with your content.
Getting Help
Once you have an idea of what your course will be about, it’s time to get
some help. This applies to you even if you are an expert in your topic. In fact,
experts probably need this step more than anyone else because it’s easy to
lose perspective. The things you feel are important might not resonate with
your audience. At the end of the day you need to give them what they want,
not what you think they need.
The best place to gather feedback with regards to the depth of your course
is to hang out in forums dedicated to your subject. Reddit is a great place to
gather instant feedback. You don’t need to explain the full details of your
course (you have none at this point) but run the high-level details past them.
If you find people providing you with some suggestions or other
perspectives, make a note of this.
Speaking to people who are knowledgeable about this subject is also
extremely helpful. They’ll be able to look at your plans from a different
perspective and offer you suggestions. Don’t fall into the trap of asking your
greatest champions for feedback. All you’ll get are a few pats on the back and
good feelings and no concrete suggestions. Don’t try to convince yourself
that you’re always right since this is the easiest way to fail.
If you don’t have the knowledge needed to create the course material
yourself, it’s time to start hunting for those who do have the knowledge. Your
first step will be to brainstorm the places where the experts you need
hangout. Reddit is a great place to find experts or people knowledgeable on a
topic. However, you’ll need to be careful asking people here.
This website has a very particular culture and most users would not take
kindly to your request. They might view it as you trying to profit off someone
else’s hard work even if the other person has no idea how to market their
services. Freelance websites usually have a ton of experts in a subject. You
can use websites such as Fiverr or Upwork to get in touch with people who
have the knowledge you need and make them an offer. You can discuss the
specifics of it once you’ve begun a conversation.
LinkedIn is a great place to network with people who have industry
specific knowledge. The best part is that people on LinkedIn are looking to
connect and will be far friendlier to your proposal than the average Reddit
user would. You’ll need to present yourself as being a professional and as
someone who knows how to design an online course.
Many professionals love the idea of imparting knowledge they’ve
gathered over the years but have no idea how to market themselves or lack
the courage to do so. They’re crying out for someone to show them how to do
this, whether they know it or not. Your proposal to help them launch a course
in exchange for a fixed fee or cut of the profits will appeal to them.
If LinkedIn is a bit intimidating for you, consider asking people around
you if they know someone who has the knowledge you need. If your course is
going to be aimed at a technical audience or is something that a teacher or
professor could cover, approach them during their office hours and pitch
them your proposal.
A lot depends on the kind of course and the topic you’re promoting. Your
instructor could be a teacher, or they could be a full-time executive. You also
need to evaluate whether this person can explain concepts well. This is where
having limited knowledge of a subject can come in handy.
 If they can explain important subject concepts to you in an engaging way,
you’re onto a winner. Most experts are poor teachers. You want to look for
someone who is empathetic and understands the challenges a rank beginner
or a learner will face. Having them explain the subject to you in easily
understood terms is a great way to screen for good teachers.
Present yourself as a professional who knows how to design and market
courses. By the end of this book you will be one so don’t worry about this.
The idea is to promote yourself as someone who can handle the tasks that the
other person isn't good at. This is usually marketing and analyzing an
audience.
Ensure them that you’re great at this and that all they need to do is bring
their expertise to the table and you’ll have a great instructor on your hands.
It’s a good idea to schedule a sample class that covers the basics with them.
This way you can evaluate their teaching ability to a greater degree.
 Chapter 2

Evaluating Demand

he process of evaluating demand must be conducted in parallel with the

T things you learned to do in the previous chapter. It’s best to carry this out
before you approach a subject-matter expert, in case you’re creating a
course in a subject you’re unfamiliar with. In some cases, the expert might
give you feedback as to the demand and the kinds of people who would be
attracted to the course.
When it comes to any internet-based business niche research is extremely
important. This step allows you to define what your customers look like and
it also allows you to identify niches that might be profitable for you. In the
previous chapter, you learned to explore course ideas by examining your own
interests.
This chapter is going to help you identify niches that might be profitable
and ones that you might never have heard of. If you wish to build a recurring
stream of income that sustains itself, identifying good niches is extremely
important. You can approach niche research in two ways. You can conduct it
with a view to unearthing profitable course ideas or you can use it to get to
know your audience better.
There are a few more steps involved in the former process so let’s begin
by looking at that first.
Finding Niches
There are many niches you could position yourself in these days. In case
you’re wondering, a niche is an interest that has a sizable number of people
that are interested in it. For example, dirt biking is a niche that has a good
number of people interested in it. Spelunking is an activity that has a few
hardcore followers but there just aren’t enough of them to sustain a business.
Picking a niche is a tough task but the longer you spend in this step, the
more successful you’ll be. Many people rush through this step in order to get
to the monetization part quickly but you cannot monetize a bad asset. Here
are some tips to help you pick a good niche and identify where a niche is
worth pursuing.
What Have You Researched?
Some of the best niches are ones that you have researched when you
wanted to complete a task. For example, if you were having trouble putting
together a piece of furniture, did you go on YouTube and search for
instructions? Were you converting your basement into a game room and
researched how to do this? Did you then use that information and complete
the task?
The point of producing content is to help people. This is what generates
traffic to your web assets (a course page or a website). If you searched for
help on a topic and found that the help on offer was less than spectacular,
that’s a great entry point for you. Let’s say when remodeling your basement
you found some content that addressed a few areas but didn’t help you with
everything.
You can use your personal experience to create a series of videos that
educate the viewer on the topic. You might think “That’s not a course! How
do I make money off that?” A course is something that helps people learn
new information. You don’t need to charge for information these days. There
are enough monetization strategies you can implement that work even when
giving content out for free.
So let go of the traditional thought that you need to upload a bunch of
videos behind a paywall to make money. That’s just one way of monetizing
your knowledge in the niche. Aim to create content that will always help
people and you won’t have any issues making money.
Getting back to niches you’ve researched, brainstorm a few ideas right
now. Look at the things you’re interested in, the stuff people always come to
you for help and the information you’ve researched. Include your day job
here as well. Are there any elements of it that will interest people online?
Even if your job is flipping burgers, there’s always something to share.
Perhaps you could commit to saving as much money as possible and
down the road, you can create a course titled “How to save $1,000 per month
while flipping burgers.” I’m not saying you need to make such claims to
garner attention. My aim is to get you thinking about every aspect of your life
and examine it with the aim of educating people. You always have
knowledge to share, so don’t discount yourself.
Volumes
Picking a niche is easy. However, your interest or knowledge in a niche
isn’t proof that everyone else is interested in it. For example, you might be a
world-class spelunker but this doesn’t mean everyone wants to start crawling
through caves looking for water to dive into. Search volume and demand for
information in a niche is critical for your success.
You need to pick niches that have consistent search volumes. You don’t
need to fire up Google Keyword Tool to figure this out. There are a number
of free resources you can utilize. Besides, the Keyword Tool might not be
your best choice since it’s geared towards advertisers.
The best tool to use is Google Trends. Type a few keywords related to
your niche into the tool and take a look at the results. Google Trends will
give you a chart that shows the search volumes over time. For example, if
you type Donald Trump into the tool you’ll see his name being searched or
mentioned more often as he began creating more buzz for himself. His graph
will be a line that slopes upwards.
If you searched for something like Sears, you’ll probably see a downward
graph with the left-hand side higher than the right. Some searches might
result in a flat line. The trend line on Google Trends will not be a straight
line. It will have spikes in it. What you need to focus on is the slope of the
overall line, not on the spikes.
The best niche is one that has a gentle upward slope. There are quite a
few of these. For example, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and
machine learning are some of the topics that have experienced increased
interest over time. Interestingly, Skynet is another search term that has
increased in volume. If you want to appeal to the doomsday niche, you have a
ready made audience thanks to the Terminator movies.
A flat line is also a good sign for a niche. While not as good as an upward
slope, it does indicate that search volume is consistent. For example, the NFL
will have a consistent volume associated with it, with peaks occurring when
the season is on. However, even during the off-season, search volume
remains high and doesn’t drop off precipitously.
Sport leagues around the world tend to behave this way. This is a good
way to gauge interest in sports niches. Can you create a course on how to
play basketball? How about hockey? People searching for leagues might not
be the best indicator of interest in a course but it indicates the sport is
evergreen and enough people are interested in it.
What you want to avoid is a seasonal spike that then drops off completely
during the rest of the year. For example, Christmas gifts will spike from
November and will continue until early January. The rest of the year, there
isn’t much interest in it. Special holidays behave the same way. However,
birthday gifts or anniversary gifts tend to be evergreen.
Google Trends gives you the online search volume but it won’t tell you
how hardcore is the interest in a topic. After all, a niche might have a ton of
casual fans. For example, most people searching for Donald Trump are
probably looking for political news to get outraged at. However, a significant
number of searches might be looking for comic relief as well.
Casual audience members will not pay you money for a course or any
product. To figure out whether the niche has a hardcore audience, you need to
research whether there’s a magazine or special interest website that caters to
it. For example, you might not dirt bike but there are magazines dedicated to
it. Paddleboarding is another popular activity that has magazines dedicated to
it.
Hydroponics is also a niche that is becoming more relevant and has a
good number of publications covering it. The presence of a magazine or
online publication that people pay money for is an indication that there is a
good-sized audience that is passionate enough to pay money for products in
that niche.
Another good indicator is the presence of physical products or boutique
shops. Home brewing is a good example. There are many stores that cater to
people interested in it and this is a very good sign. You don’t need both
magazines and physical products to be present, although this is ideal. Either
one is fine.
A third indicator of interest is the presence of a good number of YouTube
videos. You might think that a large number of videos might indicate
saturation. The internet is not a high street that can be saturated with certain
types of stores. It’s big enough to cater to everyone. You can find a niche for
yourself even if there are a good number of competitors. The only exception
is if you’re competing against bigger competitors on their own turf.
For example, if you’re interested in politics it makes zero sense for you to
try and compete with CNN or Fox News. You’re better off niching down and
producing content. Admittedly, the political niche doesn’t lend itself well to
course creation but this is just an example of how you can deal with
competition.
If you cannot find a decent sized audience, consider broadening the focus.
Increase the scope of your niche and see if that works. If even that results in
too small an audience then move onto your next idea. Do not get hung up
emotionally on a topic just because you’re interested in it. Stick to this
process and you’ll be fine.
Topic Versus Product
A common mistake people make is to focus on a product instead of a
topic. This happens because they place monetization ahead of providing
value. For example, washing machines is not a niche. Repairing washing
machines, choosing the best ones for your home or for industrial use are
examples of niches. If you begin with the intention of selling washing
machines to people, no one is going to buy anything from you.
Your course needs to be built around a topic, not a product. Focusing on a
topic allows you to cover more ground when creating your course. It allows
you to potentially create more streams of revenue. For example, you could
focus on the home appliances niche and promote both washing machines and
dishwashers, instead of focusing on just washing machines.
There are exceptions to this rule but very few. Every once in a while a
product takes the market by storm and everyone in the niche jumps in on it.
For example, the Instant Pot was a massive hit that spawned a ton of
cookbooks centered around creating meals using this device. A course
designed around using an Instant Pot would have been very successful as
well. There are still YouTube videos being created on this topic.
While these might have been successful there’s no guarantee that the
product will continue to remain popular. It’s a lot like focusing on a search
term or a niche that has a single spike in the middle in Google Trends but is
low during other times. Fidget spinners are a great example of this.
For a while, everyone loved these toys. There were videos that taught
people how to do cool tricks with them. These days, no one cares about them.
A lot of products end up becoming fads and this is not what you want to
target. The objective is to create a passive asset that keeps generating income
well into the future.
Speaking of the future.
Future Proof
A great niche is one that is future proof. Personal finance is a good
example. People will always need help with their finances. It’s always been
the case and will always be so. Nothing is ever going to change that.
Anything related to pets is certain to last forever. It might end when cats
decide to assume their rightful position as our overlords but until then,
creating courses around pet activities is a good idea.
An example of a niche that is not future proof is designing websites. Yes,
people will always need websites and as life moves increasingly online,
everyone will need a website one day. However, what is the demand for a
personal service that creates websites? People are more likely to hop onto
WordPress or Wix and use those platforms instead.
You could create a course that helps people design websites on a platform
and walks them through the intricacies of these. Even here you’re not future
proof since the platforms will change as they grow and as patches are added.
You’ll need to update your course constantly. If you don’t mind doing this,
then go ahead and create content.
If your aim is to create a passive source of income that requires work just
once that goes away and keeps making money for you, then this is not a good
option. In some cases you might not be able to gauge the future proof
qualities of a niche. Take a best guess as to where you see this trend in the
next five years. If you think it’s something that will have steady demand at
the very least, then go for it.
Monetization Strategies
 Most content creators start with monetization first and this is a mistake.
Understanding how you can make money from a niche is important but it’s
not the most important thing. Besides, the way most content creators
approach monetization is all wrong. They look at the average price of the
products in a niche and mentally figure out how much commissions they’d
earn by promoting these products.
What you should be looking at instead is the diversity of monetization
options. If a niche can be monetized by creating informational products (such
as books and courses), affiliate marketing, creating a physical product,
creating print on-demand products, or selling social media accounts.
For example, let’s say you pick the running niche. You can create a
course around how to become a better runner, you could write a book on the
topic, you could promote shoes and running gear for affiliate commissions,
and you could create your own running gear as well or a distance tracker or
app or some sort.
Contrast this with a niche such as writing. This isn’t a particularly bad
niche but your monetization choices are far less. You could monetize a blog
with ads, create courses, write a book and promote other products. However,
you’ll be promoting pens and paper so it’s not as if this is going to be a major
earner for you. However, there are at least two options so it’s not as if the
niche is a loser.
Take a look at your own niche and see if you can identify at least two
monetization strategies. If you can’t, pass on it. You might be wondering why
is this a relevant filter? After all, you’ll be monetizing it by creating a course
so what does it matter if this is the only way to earn money from it?
The presence of other strategies gives you a good margin of safety. You
can repackage a course in different ways and sell it. Users online are not
always ready to pay for a course. If you could repackage the course as a
series of helpful YouTube videos and monetize your channel by promoting
products or selling your own products, you’re still earning money by selling a
course even if the earning method is non-traditional.
Most successful content creators utilize this tactic extremely well. They
position their paid courses as being for those who need additional help or
those who require a motivational push. This way, their free content and paid
content overlaps but the people paying for the course pre-qualify themselves
as requiring additional help and this pushes them to sign up and not complain
about the overlap.
Another way to monetize a channel is to create your own community.
You could gather people on Slack for a certain price and promote this group
as being a supportive community of people who are on the same journey. A
lot of people would pay for such access since it functions as a mastermind
and ensures they’ll remain motivated.
In order to succeed, you need to let go of the traditional paywall concept
of monetizing courses. That model is still valid but once you begin to think
outside the box, you’ll see that there are far more options available to you.
Competition
This is a big one. Many content creators focus entirely on the competition
instead of doing all of the other things you’ve just learned about. Competition
is both important and unimportant at the same time. What does this mean?
It’s important because it provides a marker for you in terms of the quality you
need to exceed. It’s unimportant because once you exceed that quality and be
as helpful as you can, what your competition does is immaterial.
There are some niches that are extremely competitive and where Google
will require you to have credentials to succeed. Personal finance, fitness and
cooking are niches that have tremendous competition and while it’s possible
to succeed, there are so many content creators here that it’s best for you to
look elsewhere.
If you happen to be extremely passionate about it then go for it by all
means. If an alternative niche presents itself, choose that one since your
success curve will be a lot shorter. Work on the tough niche on the side. A
good way of gauging the competitiveness of a niche is to look at the kind of
keywords that are present in it.
A niche that has gaps in it that you can fill will have a bunch of keywords
that are non-competitive, yet are searched quite a lot. You can use Google's
Keyword Tool or even better, use a tool such as Ubersuggest. This tool gives
you the estimated number of monthly searches for a keyword and also gives
you other keywords related to it. It gives you a competitiveness score as well
so you have a good idea of how hard it can be to rank for it.
 There are other paid search tools you can use such as Ahrefs or Long Tail
Pro. All of them work the same way. You can even use manual methods to
analyze competition, although this will take you sometime. Type search
terms into Google and look at the results that are returned. Do the articles
address the topic directly? Or do they hint at them tangentially?
If there are enough search terms that have results that don’t address them
directly, this is a good niche for you to enter. For example, if you search for
“how to sketch a hand” and if all the results talk about sketching techniques,
sketching a flower, sketching a car and so on, you have a gap to exploit.
I’m not telling you to create a course around sketching a hand. The lack
of results for that search term merely indicates that content creators in that
niche have not filled demand as yet. This is a gap through which you can
enter the niche and expand. Analyzing a niche’s competitiveness is all about
spotting gaps that you can take advantage of.
Much like an army during the Middle Ages searched for gaps in a castle’s
walls, you are searching for gaps in the competition. Once you find it, rush in
and establish yourself. To increase your chances, you need to find a number
of gaps and these increase your chances of success.
Audience Analysis
Examining the competition will also give you a good idea of the things
that your audience is looking for. The search queries that go unanswered are
a great indicator of the kind of content you should be producing. Another
great resource is Quora. This is a website where people ask questions and
have them answered.
Type questions related to your niche, or even phrases, and you’ll receive
a bunch of questions that people have asked. This gives you valuable
information with regards to what your audience is searching for. Collect all of
this data and compile it into a list. This gives you pointers that will help you
structure your course.
Take the time to get to know your audience better. Most content creators
skip this step but it’s very important for you to create a user persona. What
kind of person will need your course? Which demographic do they belong to?
For example, which hobbies do they like, which websites do they prefer,
which social media platforms do they use? All of this will help you market
your course to them a lot better.
It seems like a lot of work but it pays dividends. Analyzing your customer
is crucial since you don’t want to be targeting people who have no use for
what you’re offering. Get to know them intimately and you’ll be able to tailor
your course offering a lot better. Many course creators simply throw
something together and leave it at that.
This is the wrong way to go about it. If anything, these course creators are
making it easier for their audience to switch to someone else. If they find
deficiencies in one course, they’ll let everyone else know about them through
a review and will switch to someone else whose course is better.
This is irrespective of whether you created your course with the best
intentions or not. A misjudgment about what your audience needs is a fatal
mistake and this is why it pays to create user personas. Spend a lot of time on
this step since it determines the extent of your success.
This is also the end of the niche research process. If you’re
knowledgeable about the subject of your course, you’re best off starting this
process from the “Volumes” subsection. The additional work you’ll have to
do if you’re not knowledgeable is picking a niche, which precedes this step.
If you’ve liked what you’ve read thus far, please leave me a review on
Amazon. This will help me know what you’ve liked and disliked about this
book and will help me make it even better.
 Chapter 3

Develop Goals

our course needs to deliver value but how will you deliver it? This is
Y where your course goals come into play. You need to define a clear
objective or measurable statistic that will allow you and your learner to
figure out how helpful your content has been. There aren’t too many
endeavors that do not have a measurable output to them.
For example, if you’re designing a creative writing course, a good metric
for you to use would be for your learner to score a certain score on
Grammarly or other AI-based writing evaluation platforms. Another
alternative would be for them to increase their score by at least 10%. Yet
another goal would be for them to develop an outline of their work and finish
wire framing their plot and characters.
It depends on the kind of course you’re offering but understand that
without metrics you cannot promise any value to your users and neither will
they be able to gauge your performance. You could deliver the best and most
helpful content but if your learners don’t realize objectively how much
they’ve learned, they’re not going to appreciate it.
In order to create meaningful and measurable goals, you need to begin
with creating an outline of your course.
Course Outlines
Your course outline is an important document since it defines the path
your learners will take. It’s also deeply connected to the niche research you
conducted in the previous chapter. Understanding the depth to which you’ll
be addressing issues in your niche will help you figure out the topics you
need to hit.
The first step to creating an outline is to create a topic cloud. This is a
collection of everything you’ll talk about. You don’t need to order them just
yet. The idea is to generate a large list of topics that you can create content
around. The best way to do this is to use the keyword research that you
conducted when analyzing the niche.
You’ll probably have a list of 100 keywords or so if you’ve followed the
previous steps correctly. If you don’t, head over to Google and type a search
phrase that is associated with your niche. Look at all the suggestions that
Google gives you and write them down. Click on the first result and take a
look at the “people also ask” section and note down those questions.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the suggested searches. Write
all of these down. Now, scroll back up and append the letter “a” to your
original search. See what Google suggests and write these down. Now
append the letter “b” and carry on until you hit “z.” This technique is called
the alphabet soup method and is a great way to discover all the possible
combinations of keywords and search phrases your audience is looking for on
Google.
Another good resource is answerthepublic.com. This website allows you
to search for a particular keyword or phrase and it gives you multiple lists of
related keywords and searches. Not all of these will be high-volume search
results but that’s not the point. As long as you can figure out what your
audience is looking for, it’ll serve the purpose.
Remember your job is to give your audience what they want, not what
you think they want. Many course creators get caught up with trying to
appear smart, and they end up shoving information at their audience. This is a
bad approach to adopt these days since people are used to content being
friendly and informational.
This process will help you figure out what the relevant topics in your
niche are and you can incorporate them into your outline. Once you’ve
gathered all of these topics, you can start ordering them in a logical list. If
you’re using the help of someone else to create the course, you can ask them
to help you order all of these topics. They’ll have their own inputs so make
sure to incorporate that as well.
Design a Journey
It’s helpful to think of your learner travelling on a journey as you create
your outline. If your course happens to be lengthy (anything more than 15
videos), you need to create mile markers for yourself. At each of these
markers, what do you expect your learner to be able to achieve. These are
smaller goals for your learner to target. It might be a good idea for you to
disclose these goals to them in your introductory video as well.
All courses need to begin with an introductory video. This video is where
you’ll introduce yourself (or your subject-matter expert will introduce
themselves) and you’ll explain what your learner is going to achieve. Explain
the way the course is organized so that the learner can easily understand the
logic behind the course structure.
Explain the objectives of each section of the course and if there are any
learning paths they can take. Not every topic lends itself to a clear learning
path. For example, when teaching someone how to set up an online business
you’ll need a section that will introduce your learner to the tools they’ll need
to use as support mechanisms. If your business method requires them to
create videos, you’ll need to spend some time discussing these tools. They
might be a better fit in a separate section as opposed to being a part of the
learning path.
As a rule of thumb, always have a section that provides preliminary
information or general information that outlines the tools and techniques
relevant to your course to your learner. For example, this is where you can
post videos regarding how to use a particular software that can create videos.
You have a choice with regards to how much in-depth you want to
explore these tools. A good method to use is to provide an outline of how you
use it and leave it up to them to explore the tool further. Some content
creators assume their audience already knows how to use tools. Even if your
customers are at an advanced level, it’s not a good idea to assume what they
know.
Always have a brief introduction to the tools and accessory material you
use to cover all bases. When designing the rest of your course sections, make
sure the learning path is easily understood. Organizing your course videos
into sections is important because your learner will return to them to refer to
material. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to look up
information when they return.
Developing Goals
 All of your sections and your overall course need to have goals attached
to them. The reasons for this have been explained already. When setting
goals for your courses and sections, it’s important to ensure they’re SMART.
No, I’m not talking about integrating your goals into an app of some sort.
Instead, SMART stands for (SMART Goal - Definition, Guide, and
Importance of Goal Setting, 2020):

S - Specific
M - Measurable
A - Achievable
R - Realistic
T - Time bound

Specific
It’s easy to create specific goals. Your stated goals for your learner must
be crystal clear. In order to set a specific goal, you can use the five Ws to
help outline it. The five Ws are: Who, what, when, where and why. Ask
yourself, who is involved in achieving this goal? Clearly, there are two
parties here: Your learner and the instructor (which may or may not be you).

Next, what is it that the learner wants to accomplish? Define this for
yourself. When will they look to accomplish it? There are two ways of
looking at this question. The first is to use it to give it a time horizon. How
long do you want your learner to be involved with your course, roughly
speaking? Do you want them to learn all the material over a month or a few
weeks?
This depends on the answer to the “what” question. Is your learner
looking to use your course for practical purposes? In this case, you want your
information to be quickly delivered and easy to refer back to. If your course
is about a theoretical topic that can lead to more advanced information, you
can have it run for longer.
The second way of looking at the “when” question is to ask yourself
when will your learner be viewing this course? Do they have a full-time job
and are they learning this after hours? This will help you structure your
content and deliver it better. If your topic is intensely theoretical then
breaking a single subject into more lessons than usual might help your busy
learner understand information better, instead of packing everything into a
single video module.
The “where” question might not necessarily apply to your course. If your
course is aimed at teaching them new skills at a certain location (say a
workplace) then you can tailor course content that will allow them to perform
at their best in these locations.
Finally, there’s the “why” question. This is the most important one of
them all. Why is your learner interested in this course and why are you
looking to educate them? Your reasons might be money and this is perfectly
fine. As long as you're clear about your reasons, you’ll be able to deliver your
content in a coherent manner.
Measurable
Your learner’s progress must be measurable. At the end of every section,
aim to have a measurable goal that motivates your learners to study further.
Many content creators design long courses that go on forever. Midway
through the course, most students drop out since they lose motivation and
aren’t keyed into the skills they’ve learned until that point.
A great way of helping your learners realize the skills they’ve learned is
to give them a quiz at the end of each section. A quiz not only creates an air
of seriousness around your material, it also serves as a nice way for you to
communicate what the content’s relevant goals are. You’ll attract more
dedicated learners who will stick around with you for longer. Any future
material you create will likely have a ready made audience as a result.
Large marketing companies use courses and quizzes as a means to retain
leads. For example, the marketing company HubSpot offers free courses to
everyone and captures prospects’ emails. Their courses are lengthy and in-
depth. They cover every aspect of digital marketing and along the way,
HubSpot publicizes its paid tools.
Each section in a course contains a quick quiz which ensures people who
are interested in learning the material pay attention. Their courses are also a
great way for prospective customers to learn about HubSpot’s marketing
philosophy and their work culture. This brings the company closer to their
customer and when the time comes to sell a paid solution, the customer has
almost no barriers to purchase.
 Contrast this with the traditional method of course selling, which is what
universities and colleges do. These places behave as if they’re doing
applicants a favor by admitting them. They force students through a
curriculum that is not explained in advance and whose logic is never
discussed. Various instructors come and go and very few of them take an
active interest in individual learners.
The learners have just a vague idea of what the benefits will be. A job, or
a certain salary are some of the benefits but these are not measurable goals
since you cannot map your progress towards them. For example, if your GPA
is 3.1 what kind of salary can you expect once you graduate? You don’t
know. Is it worth increasing your GPA to 3.3? What is the benefit of putting
in extra hours to increase your GPA?
Having gone through the traditional education system, many content
creators default to this university model and simply throw their content up
online. Needless to say, they attract the sort of feedback that the average
university attracts. People question the relevance of the information and
wonder whether a piece of paper is worth the struggle. It’s not a coincidence
that Google has launched its own academy where people can learn new skills
for just $49 per course.
So make sure your learning goals and content have a reason to be present.
Learners are extremely sensitive to the way information is presented so give
them a clear roadmap of progress. Allow them to test themselves, and they’ll
constantly be reminded of how valuable your content is. As a result, they’ll
trust you more and this opens up monetization possibilities.
Achievable and Realistic
Remember the customer persona you created previously? You’re about to
use it here. How achievable are the goals in your course for your learner? Is it
priced at a good point so that it is financially achievable? Many content
creators think of their own business when they price their courses. They set
unrealistic price points that most of their audience cannot afford.
This is just another way to try and extort money from the market. This
approach will not work. You want to be your learner’s partner along their
journey, not some overlord who demands fealty at all times. Aim to create
achievable goals and always monitor feedback. You can adjust the goals of
your course accordingly.
Time Bound
Set a rough start and finish date for your course. I covered this in the
“Specific” section. Consider breaking up an information heavy course into
separate courses. This will keep your learners motivated, and they’ll finish
the material within a reasonable time. It’s also a great way for you to market
your course.
You could sell it with a reasonable time-bound promise to entice people
to sign up. Courses that promise to teach a new skill within “four weeks” or
some such time period are far more attractive than those that leave timelines
up in the air. While your learner will study the material at their own pace, you
still want to highlight this aspect. Assume a realistic pace of learning, and
figure out your time-based goal for your learners.
Types of Goals
There are three types of goals a course can have; skills-based, knowledge-
based and results-based.
The first type of goal that you can aim for your learners to realize is a
skills-based one. This can be anything from an academic skill to a physical
skill. Learning to play basketball better is a skill-based outcome. Your
intermediate goals (course section goals) could be to teach them to dribble,
perform a layup, dunk and so on. All of these are measurable. Have them
learn this in four weeks and you have a SMART goal.
Knowledge-based goals are another type of goal for your learner. Perhaps
they want to merely learn some information. A course about the quality of
artwork produced during the reign of the Habsburgs in late Renaissance
Austria is an example of a knowledge-based course. It might be difficult to
develop a SMART goal around a knowledge-based course. There are always
methods to quantify progress, so don’t ignore this.
Results-based goals are the most common method of quantifying goals.
They cover everything from learning a particular skill set to being able to
perform an action. Make sure the results you choose are SMART and make
sense from your learner’s perspective.
 Chapter 4

Create Your Course

ou've finished all the preliminary work. Now it’s time to dive in and
Y create your course. Remember that your course can exist in many forms.
If your audience likes reading, then your course could take the form of a
series of lengthy blog posts. If they prefer audio then you could release a
series of audio files. The most common format is video and pretty much
every course will fall into this category.
I’d also like to remind you that a course doesn’t necessarily need to be
paid for by the learner. A lot depends on how you design your monetization
strategy. The most common method is to charge your learners a fee. If your
intention is to build a brand and increase awareness of it through a course,
then publishing it for free and using HubSpot-like marketing strategies might
be your best bet.
Take some time to brainstorm your monetization strategy before you
jump into creating your course content. If your aim is to push paid services to
your customers, you need to figure out what you’ll sell to them and how you
can organically integrate it into your content.
Creating Content
Since video is the most common medium, I’m going to use that as an
example. All the steps and information mentioned here apply to written and
audio courses as well. In order to create your lessons you will need some
hardware. Hopefully, you have a functional computer!
Next, you will need a camera tripod. You don’t need to buy a professional
tripod. You can buy cheap ones online. All you need is something to hold
your smartphone camera. Yes, you read that right. You don’t need a fancy
camera either. These days smartphones have a ton of features in them and
their cameras are more than enough to record high-quality videos.
 A lot depends on what your course is about as well. If you’re going to be
active and moving around (demonstration videos as I’ll shortly explain) then
you might need some solution other than a tripod to hold your camera. Many
creators use the help of someone else to be their cameraperson while they
carry out a demonstration. Once this is done, you need to decide on the style
of your videos.
Types of Videos
Browse YouTube and you’ll find that content creators have mastered
creating a wide range of content that fits all styles. Comedians are talking
about serious topics, serious people talking about funny topics and then
there’s a guy called Ozzy Man who reviews everything as your friendly
redneck Aussie neighbor would. It can be intimidating to think how you
could ever be as entertaining as these people.
Here’s a simple fact: You’re going to find it extremely difficult to create
good videos the first few times you try it. However, once you get past the
initial issues, you’ll be able to fly through the process of creating content. A
lot depends on the style of your content.
Some course creators adopt the talking head style of video. This style is
literally a video with a person delivering information in it. Despite the name,
the entire body of the person might be visible in the video. The point is that
the focus is on one person and the tools they’re using to deliver information.
Talking head videos might not seem very sexy or entertaining, but they’re
popular in niches that require information to be delivered.
As long as you can deliver quality information to your audience, don’t
worry about what your face looks like or what your voice sounds like. I’ll
address your tone of voice and physical looks later in this chapter. There are
some easy hacks to make your video look professional. At this point, your
focus should be on delivering informative content.
Talking head videos are the easiest to shoot since all you need is a phone
and a tripod. However, they don’t work if you’re looking to demonstrate
actions. In this case, you’ll need to find other ways to deliver information.
One of the best ways of doing this is to create a whiteboard video.
A whiteboard video is one where the instructor’s voice is played while
they write on a whiteboard or blackboard. They can use differently colored
fonts to highlight different information. I mentioned Khan Academy
previously. All of their videos stick to this format. Their courses typically
deal with science and algebra and there’s no point creating a talking head
video. A video of an instructor standing beside a board would be
inconvenient.
Instead, they have the instructor talk and type the information they want
to communicate and this shows up on a whiteboard. This format is a lot like
what university professors follow when addressing a large hall of students.
They zoom their camera in on a writing pad and project that pad onto a large
wall so everyone can follow along.
A close cousin of the whiteboard video is the doodle video. If you’ve ever
searched for book reviews on YouTube, you’ll have encountered a few of
these. These videos look as if a graphic designer has sketched intricate
pictures and boards after which the creator has animated them. They look
extremely impressive but all of them are created on software. You don’t need
to learn how to draw in order to create them. I’ll discuss some of the software
you can use to create such videos shortly.
A smaller subset of videos adhere to the point-of-view or POV format.
This is usually done by mounting a camera over a person’s head or by
holding a smartphone camera close to themselves and performing an action.
POV scenes make sense in sporty niches and add to the excitement. They
don’t deliver the best lessons at all times, but they can increase the
excitement a learner has for your course.
It isn’t necessary for you to stick to one format at all times. You can
combine all of them to create an exciting package. Many courses incorporate
screen recording software or simple PowerPoint presentations with basic
animation. Remember that the fanciest video format will not make up for
poor content. Great content will overcome even the most terrible format.
Software
All computers these days come equipped with everything you need to
create amazing videos. Windows and Mac PCs have video editing software
as well that is more than enough for the average course creator. Simply
record your videos on a smartphone, upload it to your computer and fire up
the editing software.
 The basic software that is present on a Mac and PC will allow you to
create fancy introductory cards, allow you to lay text over your video and
will also allow you to zoom in for certain time periods over a particular area
of your screen. If you wish to record your screen for demonstration purposes,
you can download software such as Camtasia which do this for free.
A paid version of Camtasia allows you to edit your video as well but you
don’t need this. Simply save the file and edit it in the default software on
your PC. There are only two editing functions you need to create professional
looking videos. Both of these are present on basic software. They are splitting
and trimming.
The split function allows you to cut your video into parts. The trim
function allows you to delete unnecessary portions from your video. Not that
you can only trim portions of the video at the end or at the start. Think of it as
being the same as the “crop” function for images. You can crop the
extremities of an image but you can’t remove the stuff that is in the center of
an image.
The easiest way to use these functions is to split your video into sections
so that unnecessary parts are in the beginning or at the end of each split. Then
trim each section and combine the edited video together to form a single
video. You’ll need to play around with your video a little bit. However, once
you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to figure out.
There are paid software programs you can use to edit videos. You’ll need
these only if you’re planning on shooting from multiple angles at once. For
example, if you plan on having a side camera, a front camera and an
overhead one recording at the same time, you’ll need powerful editing
software to make sure you can combine all of them into a single video. This
costs money and if you can afford it, go for it. Here is a list of the best paid
editing software you can buy right now:

Adobe Premiere Pro

Final Cut Pro X
Adobe Premier Rush (works on phones)
Corel VideoStudio Ultimate
Filmora9 (best for special effects)
What if you want to make those cool looking animated videos? This is a
large field and a lot depends on the kind of animation you want in your
videos. Remember that if you can get away with creating a presentation on
PowerPoint and recording your screen, then do this. There’s no need to get
extremely fancy with your course material unless people expect that level of
polish from your brand or if it allows you to deliver information better to
your audience.
Here are the best whiteboard animation software:

Videoscribe
Vyond
Renderforest
Animaker (technically a doodle video creator but it works here
as well)
FilmoraPro
MySimpleShow
All of these products allow you to add images and sync them to your
voice-over. Their prices vary across the board with Videoscribe costing as
little as $8 per month and MySimpleShow coming in at $129 per month. All
of them allow you to try them for free, so make sure you use their trial offers
before signing up.
Doodle videos are a subset of animated videos and the best software to
create these are:

Powtoon
Doodly
Animaker
Moovly
GoAnimate (a much larger animated video software that
incorporates doodles)
Like with whiteboard software, these come with free trial periods and a
rich variety of features. These days, people expect HD resolution videos and
all of these software offer this for a price. Make sure you take all of them out
for a trial run before deciding to pay for one of them. When signing up, make
sure you pay the annual fee instead of the month-to-month contract. This will
result in massive savings over the course of the year since the month-to-
month prices are a lot higher than the prorated annual fees.
I haven’t addressed the issue of audio yet. One of the biggest concerns
when recording is the audio sound. You want to avoid echos as much as
possible. This distracts your viewers and makes it seem as if you’re talking to
them from inside a toilet. There are many high quality clip-on USB
microphones you can buy online.
You can even purchase a standalone mic to record yourself. If you want
to go low-tech then attach your wired hands-free earbuds and place the
microphone near your mouth when you speak. This will deliver great audio
quality. If you use wireless buds, then this solution works as well. Pop them
in your ear and speak as if you’re talking to someone on the phone.
Tone
The tone of your voice is extremely important. Many people are
uncomfortable talking on the microphone or being videotaped and this
creates a lot of awkwardness. (I’ll give you a few handy tips to avoid
awkwardness on camera, later.) A lot of problems can be avoided if you get
the tone of your voice right. The best way to get your tone right is to adopt
the tone you’d use with your neighbor (who you like, not the ones you
dislike).
Everyone on the internet is searching for information and your aim should
be to provide them with easily accessible information. Don’t adopt the tone
of the strict librarian or teacher. Instead, be the friendly person who is
guiding them through a tough task. It’s perfectly okay to be informal with
your audience since this is the standard way in which people communicate
online.
Make sure you speak clearly and use small words. Don’t speak in lengthy
sentences and your audience will have no problem understanding you. If you
need a rough idea of where your audience’s level is, keep in mind that the
average internet user can read and write at a ninth grade level.
Given that this is the internet we’re talking about, there’s considerable
variance in that average. However, it shows that you need to err on the side of
simplicity when conveying information. Don’t try to come across as the
smartest person in the room. Instead, be as helpful as possible.
Tips and Tricks
Recording yourself on video is tough when you're starting out. You will
be painfully conscious and creating even a seven-minute video will seem
impossible. You’ll lose your train of thought and will be constantly aware of
how weird you look. You won’t know where to look either. You might record
an entire video staring at your screen and only realize that this looks odd
when you're done recording. Here are a few tips to help smooth this
awkwardness out.
Look at the Lens
When recording a talking head video or a demonstration of any kind, look
into the lens of the camera. This will seem odd if you’re using a smartphone
since many of us stare at the screen naturally. If it helps, turn the screen away
from you and record using your phone’s rear facing camera. This way you
won’t be distracted by your own face on screen.
When recording on a laptop, you should look at the camera lens as well.
The only exception is if you’re showing your learners how to carry out a task
on the computer. In this case, your screen will be recorded and your face
might be minimized. In such instances feel free to look at the screen.
Light it Up
Here’s the secret to professional photography: Light! Manipulating light
and using it to great effect is the one thing all great photographers do well.
You can use the same principles when creating your videos. For starters,
don’t sit directly under a source of light. If you do this, you’ll have shadows
fall over you and your eyes will appear a shade darker than the rest of you.
No matter how cute you think pandas are, you don’t want to look like one.
Move the light source (or yourself) to a 45-degree angle from you.
Alternatively, record yourself in between two overhead light sources so that
shadows are eliminated. If this doesn’t fix the issue, then set up a source of
light behind the camera and point this to your face. This bright light will
eliminate all shadows and you’ll look your best.
You can also choose to shoot in natural light if this is a viable option. The
best time to shoot is either during the early hours of the day and just before
sunset. These so-called “golden hours” are excellent times to look your best.
Photographers love these hours and you can do the same.
Use yellow or warm light to illuminate your surroundings instead of using
blue light. Blue light does not translate well onto a recording and it
exaggerates shadows.
Be Comfortable
If you think you’re going to be uncomfortable on camera, then you might
as well make yourself as comfortable as possible before recording so that you
don’t add to your discomfort. Sit down, have a glass of water, eat something
that calms you, take a few deep breaths etc. Do whatever it takes to calm
yourself down. You might still be awkward on camera but at the very least
you’ll have tried your best.
Plan
What’s the best way to reduce the nerves you feel when in front of the
camera? Prepare beforehand, of course! Take some time preparing your
content before you record. There are two approaches to this. The first is to
map out everything you want to talk about, word for word. If you’re someone
who likes memorizing what to say then you can follow this method.
The second approach is to create a topic list. Think of these as being the
subheadings in an article. They’re the waypoints you’ll hit as you talk in your
video. The advantage of this method is you don’t need to memorize anything.
You simply outline a few points that are relevant to each waypoint and let
your brain’s natural creativity take over in the moment.
This will result in you looking less like an automaton in front of the
camera since you’ll be using your own words in the moment. Your
personality will shine through and this is what your learners want. Creating
waypoints also works well because you can address the topic until that point
and then pause your recording. Gather your thoughts about what to say next
and continue recording.
You can edit your video to make it look seamless so don’t worry about
the pauses. Pausing the recording in between will help you gather your focus
and you’ll be able to explain the topic a lot better.
You’re Better Than You Think You Are
 You don’t need to look like a movie star in front of the camera. Not
everyone is blessed with the ability to instantly love the camera like
celebrities are. In fact, many of them have had to learn how to look less
awkward in front of it. While you might feel as charismatic as a brick on
camera, understand that you’re not the focus of the video.
The internet can be a mean place but this doesn’t everyone is lining up to
make fun of you. They’re far more interested in what you have to say. As
long as you talk sense and deliver value, people will appreciate it. Your first
few videos may be awkward, but you’ll learn how to work with the skills you
have. You don’t need to put a face to your videos, remember.
You can create animated videos and doodle videos that have just your
voice-over. You could record your screen and provide instructions. If worse
comes to worst, and you find you can’t even talk properly on camera, then
hire someone to say the lines for you or use an AI tool like
onlinevoicegenerator.com to record a voice. Remember that there’s always a
way!
When dealing with all of this remember that the quality of your course is
far more important than anything else. Don’t let your fears cloud this. Even if
you’re not the smoothest on camera, deliver helpful content and everything
else will work out.
Like what you’ve read so far? Let me know what you think about it by
leaving me a review! It’ll help me understand how to improve this book and
help more people like yourself.
 Chapter 5

Uploading and Hosting

nce you’ve created all of your videos or content, it’s time to upload it and
O host it somewhere. This isn’t a terribly complicated process. There’s
enough infrastructure dedicated to helping you host your course. This
chapter is going to walk you through the pros and cons of each method and
what you can do to reduce the impact of the negatives.
Standalone Hosting
All of your course content will be hosted online. As I mentioned earlier
you could implement a nontraditional monetization model where you give
your course away for free but use it to drive traffic to other products. If this
applies to you, then your best choice of host is YouTube. It costs nothing to
upload videos and it’s relatively simple to drive traffic to them by looking at
the content that others are creating and targeting the same topics.
YouTube gives you the number of views a video has and this is extremely
powerful. It tells you which videos are popular and which search phrases are
resulting in hits right now. Look at trending videos and you’ll get a good idea
of how to position your content.
If you plan on charging for your course, then there are many options to
host it. The first is to use a standalone host. These solutions are platforms that
allow you to upload, create and host your course for a monthly fee. They’re
like Shopify, but for online courses.
All of them work the same way. You sign up for an account and create
your course material on the platform itself. They also allow you to upload
your own videos to the platform. You’ll structure your sales page and course
description page to tell learners what your course is about. You can choose
your theme (how the page looks) and have this applied to all of your videos.
Like with animated software, make sure you check them out first through
their free trial versions before committing to anything.
Thinkific
Thinkific offers a free plan that you can use indefinitely but has limited
features. The plan that will suit most people costs around $50 per month and
this reduces if you pay for an entire year upfront. The best part is that
Thinkific doesn’t charge any transaction fees. You can integrate your PayPal
account on the platform and money is transferred at the click of a button. It
integrates with Stripe as well.
LearnWorlds
This company is new on the block and it positions itself as providing
course creators with better tools that are tailor-made for premium courses.
Their tools help promote more social learning and interactivity. This is done
by offering learners the option to take notes, providing them with a fully
ready-text transcript (you don’t need to upload this) and other means to ask
questions.
The platform is mostly positioned to serve schools as e-learning becomes
the norm in a post-pandemic world. However, it serves the needs of
individual course creators as well. They have a range of plans that cost from
$24 per month to $250 per month. Most course creators will find that the $80
per month plan suits their needs the best.
Teachable
This is perhaps the most popular option and it emerged thanks to
shortcomings in some of the other popular options which I’ll highlight
shortly. The features are simple and are tailor-made for creators who are
looking to upload standalone courses without the need for advanced
classroom capabilities.
The starter plan is $29 per month when paid on an annual basis, and
payments are instant if you set up their in-house payment gateway. This is a
massive advantage when compared to PayPal which sees it fit to hold on to
your money for up to 30 days, for no apparent reason.
Podia
This platform started out in life as something that online coaches could
use. The idea was they could host live video sessions and coaching calls on
here and use the interactive tools on offer. Over time, the platform has
changed to accommodate course creators as well. The company offers two
pricing tiers, with the lower one at $39 per month and the higher one at $79
per month.
The great thing about the higher priced plan is that it integrates fully with
Zoom for no extra charge; this makes it easy to conduct any live sessions.
This is something that isn’t fully available on the other platforms. Instead,
your learners will have to log in to those specific platforms to access live
lessons - but this isn’t the case here.
You can use the platform to host webinars as well and this makes it even
more powerful. The free version allows you to do this as well but it doesn’t
include the Zoom integration.
Click4Course
This platform is aimed at corporate trainers who host a lot of lessons for
large audiences. They offer complete branding solutions and give you access
to advanced analytics. The product isn’t cheap. If you wish to sell a
standalone course, you’ll pay $79 per month. They offer solutions for large
companies to conduct in-house training, but this is probably neither relevant
nor cost effective for you.
Digital Chalk
If you plan on launching multiple language versions of your course, then
this is the best platform for you. Not only do you receive a full suite of
solutions that the previous mentioned platforms give you, you also receive a
customer service team that is fluent in nine languages to field questions from
your customers. All of this costs $25 per month. Sounds too good to be true?
Parts of it might be, to be honest. The platform’s ability to host webinars
is suspect, but technologically it is as advanced as one can be. A possible
negative is the lack of interactive features that some of the other platforms
provide.
These are the best options that are currently available if you’re looking to
host a complete done-for-you solution. If you opt for any of these platforms
you’ll have integrated email marketing and customer analytics for free.
You’ll also have the ability to receive payments directly by connecting your
payment gateway with them. The negative aspect of these platforms is that
you need to consistently generate enough sales to justify the expense of using
them.
Many course creators see an initial spike in sales, which then tails away.
You’ll have to actively generate more courses if you want to justify the costs
of using these platforms. If you can do this, opting for any of them is a no-
brainer.
Plugins
What if you don’t want to use another platform or if you already have a
website that is ready to go? Can you simply integrate your course onto it?
Yes, you can! The easiest way to achieve this is to use WordPress. If you use
other website design solutions such as Wix or Weebly, then you won’t have
any plugins or integrations that can allow you to host a course on your
website.
Here are some of the most popular plugins in the WordPress plugin store
you can use right now.
LearnDash
You’ll most probably not have to read beyond this because LearnDash is
the outright leader when it comes to designing Learning Management
Systems (LMS). The basic version costs $159 while the advanced version
costs $329. That’s not a monthly fee, it’s a one-time fee. The longer you use
the plugin, the less it costs. You’ll receive free updates and support for a year,
after which you’ll have to pay half the license fee for continued support every
year.
LearnDash allows you to integrate with a large number of third-party
providers such as Stripe, PayPal and other e-learning tools, such as
BuddyBoss. This allows you to create a member’s area and community
boards on your website. The features LearnDash has is on par with some of
the standalone systems mentioned previously. If you have your own website
and are comfortable dragging, dropping and customizing your own website,
this is your best option.
AccessAlly
 This plugin offers pretty much the same features as LearnDash, except it
comes with a built-in member’s area solution. The idea was to improve upon
an existing solution and AccessAlly has done this very well. It’s not as
popular as LearnDash, but it’s a very good plugin nonetheless. Your learners
can even submit homework and opt for interactive sessions with you. This is
available on LearnDash as well but the interface can be a bit clunky.
So why doesn’t everyone simply jump ship to this plugin? The cost is
quite high. Yearly subscription will run you $108 per month which is
significantly more than what LearnDash costs. If you’re running a large
course and need powerful tools, this plugin makes sense. If a standalone
course is all you’re looking to create, this might be overkill.
CourseCats
This plugin shares a lot of features with the previous two but its main
selling point is its price. It costs $497 for a year which makes it more
expensive than LearnDash but it has a few capabilities that LearnDash
doesn’t. This justifies the higher price. Best of all, it offers a 30-day free trial
which is the longest of any service, so it’s worth trying out.
Marketplaces
Marketplaces are websites where large numbers of people flock in search
of online courses. This gives them significant leverage over content creators
since they can behave in any way they want. It should come as no surprise
that many of them do. If your aim is to simply earn passive income, without
having to worry too much about generating traffic and relying solely on
course reviews to generate sales, then these are a good fit for you.

If you happen to be strapped for cash, then these marketplaces are also a
good idea. It costs nothing to upload a course, but you’ll end up giving away
a chunk of your earnings to the platform. Worst of all, you won’t have any
significant access to your learners since the platform will shield you from
their contact information.
The net result is that your business will not grow. If you’re a hobbyist
who wants to throw up a few courses and drive initial traffic, then these
websites are a good choice. Understand that a lot of manipulation takes place
on these platforms when it comes to reviews. In fact, there are many people
out there who sell courses on how to earn money manipulating reviews for
your courses so that they sell more.
The way it works is that you create a basic course and set its base price as
$80 or some high number (the average online marketplace course costs
around $25). You then discount the price to $35 or $30 and head over to
Fiverr, Upwork or any freelancer website. You hire someone to post fake
reviews of your course and offer them coupons at discount prices.
The marketplace algorithm sees that your course was discounted and
reviews are pouring in. This means it’s becoming popular and the platform
starts pushing your course to the top of the search results. The platform
makes money the more you sell so it’s in their interest to do this.
Genuine buyers, without coupons, come in and buy your course and you
start making money. They might leave poor reviews but the average online
user does not bother leaving reviews. As a result, your bogus reviews remain
and keep you at the top. Meanwhile, genuine course creators moan and leave
notices stating your course is fraudulent. However, the platform pays lip
service to them and might penalize you randomly. As long as you keep
selling, they really couldn’t care less.
While this is great if you want to run a fraudulent operation, it exposes
you to great risks if you’re a genuine content creator. To be fair, many
marketplaces have taken steps to minimize this sort of behavior but
commerce always comes first. These are the biggest players in this space:

Skillshare
Udemy
They’re both the same in terms of offering you access to your students,
which is to say you have none. Skillshare pays you on the basis of the
number of people enrolled, usually one to two dollars per person. If you bring
any new members in you’ll get paid $10 for them. Udemy keeps 50% of your
course fee if someone signs up for it in their marketplace. If you drive traffic
to your course, you keep 97% of the fee.

As with any marketplace website, the average person earns very little
because of intense competition and zero support from the platform. If you
manage to be the first or an early mover in a new niche then you stand to
make a lot of money. Enter a competitive niche and the quality of your course
won’t matter since learners will never see it.
If you’re serious about treating your course as a business, it’s hard to see
why you would opt for these solutions. You can, however, use them to
generate some capital if you’re completely strapped for cash. But, it’s much
better to create a quality course that will increase your reputation and
generate income. Read on.
 Chapter 6

Marketing

ne of the reasons content creators opt for marketplace websites that don’t
O assist their goals is because they’re unfamiliar with how to market their
course. Marketing is everything when it comes to the internet because no
one can find you if you don’t shout about how great you are. Look at some of
the biggest companies online and you’ll find that the only reason they survive
and thrive is because they understand how to generate traffic.
Facebook, Google, Uber and even Amazon to a large extent, don’t
produce anything tangible. All they have is a platform that everyone uses,
and they’re great at getting people to stay on their platform as much as
possible. In order to promote your course and control the narrative, you need
to own your marketing.
Marketing success isn’t realized overnight, but the great thing is that it
doesn’t take as much work as you think it might. The key is to utilize all the
resources available to you. If you’re hosting your course by yourself, you’ll
keep a large share of the profits and you’ll get to retarget your initial buyers
with even better courses.
This means your earnings compound and exponentially increase as long
as you’re delivering value. You can’t do this if you’re on a marketplace since
you cannot remarket to your buyers. You just have to hope those initial
buyers somehow find you again. Aim to own your customer and marketing
will get a lot easier as time goes by.
There are different stages to your course creation process. Each stage
demands a particular type of marketing effort. Let’s look at what you can do
every step of the way.
Pre-Release
This is the longest and most important step of them all. The level of buzz
you generate before your course hits the market will determine how
successful you will be. Your niche determines how much buzz you can hope
to generate for your course. A course in the make money online niche will
generate a lot of buzz. A course in linear algebra, not so much.
There are many different kinds of pre-release activities but all of them,
and indeed any marketing effort, can be classified as aiming to generate
organic traffic or paid traffic. Organic traffic or inbound traffic as it’s often
called is full of people that have searched for you or have run into you
through your various online marketing efforts and have navigated to your
page.
Paid traffic is you running an ad and getting them to click your link.
These people may or may not be interested in your content and you’ll pay for
every click. However, paid ads are a great way to clearly measure ROI and
also get a feel for how much demand there is for your course.
In the pre-launch phase, your course doesn’t exist as yet so there’s
nothing to run ads to. Instead, you’ll need to focus entirely on organic traffic
generation methods. The best way to do this is to publish content related to
your niche and course. Aim to release content at least three months prior to
your course launch. This gives you enough of a runway to build a nice buzz.
YouTube
For most course creators, YouTube is a no-brainer. It fits the medium on
which your course will be delivered (for most courses) and it’s easy to
develop a rapport with your audience. YouTube also has some of the highest
organic reach of all the social media platforms and it makes it easy for you to
generate your own traffic, compared to other social media platforms.
The key to success on YouTube is to look at the search suggestions that
the algorithm provides and to look at the number of views each video in your
topic is garnering. Look at the established channels in your niche and analyze
which of their videos received the highest number of views. What were the
topics that these videos addressed? Plan to create content similar to that.
Unlike Google search which doesn’t like promoting similar articles,
YouTube’s algorithm has no such qualms. The related videos bar is a treasure
trove of clicks for content creators. One of the best ways to gain even more
attention is to post a contrary opinion on a popular topic. You don’t need to
be wildly controversial, but if you happen to disagree with popular wisdom,
post it on there and watch as you receive a ton of clicks.
This happens because the algorithm prominently pushes such contrary
opinion videos along with the traditional opinion videos to give the user a
complete picture. You’ll need to create high-quality YouTube videos, so all
of the lessons you learned previously when it came to video lesson creation
should come in handy here.
YouTube’s algorithm values consistency. Whether you’re publishing
videos once a week or twice a month, make sure you stick to a consistent
schedule. If you have three months until your course’s launch date, you have
close to 12 weeks to publish as many videos as you can. You should aim to
have at least 20 videos out so this is a publishing rate of close to two videos
every week.
Aim to publish five to seven-minute videos on average. If you’re
addressing a meaty topic, then it’s okay to go in-depth until the 12-minute
mark. However, the average attention span is low on YouTube, especially for
new channels, so keep it short and to the point. Do not have lengthy intros
with fancy music and don’t waste time telling people to subscribe and “smash
that like button” upfront.
This works if you’re well established, but if you’re a new channel no one
knows you. Why would anyone like your videos in such a scenario? Get to
the point as quickly as you can so that people know what you’re talking
about. Leave the best for last so that your viewers stay hooked. Ask them to
subscribe to your channel and like your video in the middle. This way,
you’ve given them enough helpful information so it doesn’t come across as
being fake.
Comments are a contentious thing when it comes to YouTube’s
algorithm. There’s no doubt that comments help boost video rankings. This
has led to people buying fake comments on Fiverr and Upwork. YouTube
doesn’t filter these comments out as yet, so if you want to go down this route,
feel free to do so. But my advice is to be as authentic as possible at all times.
As long as your content is helpful, you’ll receive real engagement.
Respond to the comments you receive and engage with your audience. A
good strategy that will build anticipation for your course is to address a
problem or pain point in your niche, but talk about it at a very high level. For
example, let’s say you're creating a drop-shipping course. A common pain
point is niche selection and supplier management.
You can give your viewers the outline of how you select your niches but
don’t give them the details. Instead, say that you’ll talk about this in more
depth down the road. Similarly, tell your viewers how they can identify good
suppliers but hint that you have a few trusted suppliers you work with. This
will lead to people asking you about them in the comments.
You can use all of this interest and engagement to create a need for your
course. This works in pretty much every niche. You’ll need to spend time
developing a content release strategy if you’re implementing this. It takes
time but it’s time well spent.
A great way of shortcutting your way to the top is to create a reaction
video to something that the top influencer in the niche just said or did. You
can either agree or disagree with this person. If you're bold enough you can
even start a flame war. It works for rappers so it should work for you as well.
This will help you reach the upper tiers of the recommended videos
playlist and you’ll even make it onto the main search results list. This will
happen because your views will skyrocket and your engagement will
increase. However, be prepared to deal with a deluge of negativity if you’ve
chosen to oppose the popular view.
As long as you’re sincere and aren’t deliberately trying to throw someone
under the bus, you can pull this off. In fact, there’s no other way to pull this
off. The only exception is if you’re selling a course to teenagers, who love
this sort of drama. For everyone else, disagree but keep it respectful.
Once you’ve published 10-15 videos, it’s time to implement the next type
of organic marketing you can use.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers get a lot of hate for all the free stuff they try to score.
However, not every niche has deadbeat influencers. For example, the SEO
and online marketing niche has a huge list of heavy hitters who are genuine
experts in their field. Appealing to influencers is a matter of persistence and
providing value.
 Depending on your niche, every influencer will have a different set of
channels. Sticking with the online marketing example, you’ll find these
people on every platform except Facebook, which they’ll use for personal
purposes only. This is because Facebook’s organic reach is zero, and they
won’t waste time pushing their services there. You’ll find them on Twitter,
YouTube, on the web (websites/blogs) and Instagram.
Twitter is a particular hotspot for such people. Take some time to study
where your influencers hangout and create content along with releasing
videos on YouTube. The key to getting their attention is to provide them with
value. An easy way to do this is to appeal to their egos. This is not to say
they’re egotistical people, but everyone loves being praised.
Try to use or implement something they suggested and document the
results. Let them know what you did and release content around it. Tweet at
them (or notify them on your respective platform) and send them the link. If
they see it, they’ll be sure to highlight it on their feeds and you’ll receive a
ton of traffic.
Guest blogging is a great way to drive traffic towards your channel.
Message them as mentioned above and pitch a post that will highlight these
results. If you can’t write to save your life, hire a quality ghostwriter from
LinkedIn and publish the article or hire a terrible one from Upwork/Fiverr
and heavily edit whatever they produce before sending it over. Remember, in
general, you get what you pay for. A quality copywriter earns between $30-
60 an hour, or more. If you pay less, the results may be hit-or-miss.
What if you can’t find any actionable advice your influencer has
provided? If this is the case, you could propose your controversial/alternative
view content to them and see what they think. This is a way of getting their
attention. If they happen to be terribly sensitive, you might find them turning
on you. However, any attention is good at this point - so negative attention
isn’t a bad thing.
A third way of getting their attention is to conduct a study, or implement
a method you’ve always wanted to try, and document the results. Contact
them and let them know of this and offer to publish the work as a
collaboration between the two of you. This might sound like you’re giving
work away for free. However, if your work is of a high quality and if you can
deliver value, then you’ll only need to do this just once. The traffic that
they’ll send you will be more than enough to sustain interest in your content.
A variation of this tactic is to email them and ask whether there’s
anything they have in mind that they want to accomplish but haven’t had the
time to do so. These people are busy, and they’ll always have something that
needs getting done. Offer to do it for free and use the collaboration angle
again to drive traffic towards your web properties. Focus on maintaining your
relationship with them. You could even bounce your ideas off them to figure
out whether your course is a good idea and whether it’s targeting the right
problems. They might give you ideas that you could use in your course and
deliver even more value.
A last great and foolproof way to get their attention is to ask to interview
them. Again, this is a way to appeal to their ego and it’s a great way to talk to
them one on one. If you can do it in person this is great. If not, record the
video and post it on your channel. The influencer’s name alone should draw
enough interest. You could do this with multiple influencers to really
generate interest in your channel.
More often than not, you’ll find that they’ll propose cross-promoting both
of your products. You’ll promote one of their products in your course, and
they’ll promote yours. As long as it makes sense for your learners this is a
great opportunity for you to seize. Whether you’re running a YouTube
channel or a blog (or both), promoting an influencer's product while they
promote yours will boost your traffic levels massively.
All of these efforts will pay off and you’ll generate a decent buzz about
your content. Keep releasing new content and keep delivering value.
Instagram
Instagram is another social media channel that is on par with YouTube
when it comes to creating great and engaging content and networking with
influencers. Not every niche lends itself to Instagram, so check to see
whether there’s a fit. There’s no need for you to create one by default. You
might be wondering why I haven’t spotlighted Twitter? This is because its
organic reach is as bad as Facebook’s. It only works as a promotion platform
if you’re a celebrity.
Despite being owned by Facebook, Instagram has decent organic reach.
Through the use of hashtags and engagement you can grow your following
up to decent sized levels. Aiming to hit 100,000 followers within three
months isn’t unrealistic. The aim is to gain as many engaged followers as
possible.
When starting out, the easiest way to do this is to use the follow/unfollow
method. To do this, go to any popular account in your niche and follow the
first follower of that account. Navigate to their account and like their most
recent post and one that is from two weeks back, or two scrolls down. Do this
with everyone on the list.
They’ll follow you back thanks to reciprocation. You can unfollow them
after a few days and this will keep your followers to following count on the
right side of things. Once you’ve grown your followers past the 10,000 mark
you can implement what’s called a shout for shout (SFS). The way to do this
is to contact other accounts in your niche that are either slightly larger than
yours or of the same size and dedicate a post highlighting them. They’ll do
the same for you as well and both of your accounts will receive a boost.
You can also pay larger accounts to shout you out. The amount you’ll pay
depends on the size of the account. Use hashtags cleverly to ensure you
remain near the top of suggested content. IG stories are a great way to remain
relevant since stories are always present on the top of a user’s feed.
All of these methods will help you reach the 30-50,000 follower mark.
Once you’re there you can utilize engagement groups. These are private
groups that influencers participate in and engage with one another’s accounts.
Usually, all of them post on a cycle and everyone else in the group either
provides a shout out or engages the post with comments and likes.
Engagement groups allow your content to remain relevant for longer
since high-quality accounts (according to the IG algorithm) are engaging with
your content. This will result in a massive increase in organic followers. Over
the course of a month or so, it’s not difficult to go from 50,000 to 100,000
followers. You can aim to reach 80,000 at the very least.
Growing your following beyond this size is a matter of posting great
content and examining what sort of content works well in your niche. With
an account of that size you can engage in influencer marketing as well which
will drive traffic to your course. Take care to check your engagement
numbers. For accounts that are under 100,000 you need to have at least one to
two percent engagement on all posts.
For example, if you have 100,000 followers, your posts need to receive at
least 1,000 likes and comments combined. Anything less than this indicates
your audience isn’t too engaged with your content. You can use these metrics
to evaluate other accounts as well. Larger accounts will have lower
engagement rates but you can aim for a minimum of 0.25% engagement
rates. This is especially the case when the account has over one million
followers.
Beware of using paid services that promise to increase your account size.
These usually implement bots that like your account and leave bland
comments. Other influencers will spot these bots easily and you’re not going
to gain real followers who can buy your course so there’s no point in using
them. Not all paid services do this but you should watch out for ones that
promise massive results in no time.
Podcasts
An underrated source of organic traffic is podcasts. Podcasts are internet
radio shows and some of them are big businesses unto themselves. Many
podcasts are a part of larger production houses and some of these are even
funded by venture capitalists. This doesn’t indicate they’re successful, but
there’s no doubt that podcasts are an effective way to disseminate
information.
You can adopt two approaches to podcast marketing. The first is to
launch your own podcast. Given that you’ll be launching a YouTube channel
by default, incorporating a podcast into it isn’t all that difficult. What you’ll
need to do is record your podcast and post the video on YouTube.
The average podcast lasts for around 25 minutes, with 5 minutes devoted
to ads so this is a lot longer than your average YouTube video. What you can
do is split the podcast video into smaller videos and post them. A single
podcast show of yours could address multiple topics. Split each of these
topics into a separate video and post it.
Podcasts are a great tool to use if you want to get in touch with
influencers. Larger influencers won’t bother showing up for a podcast that
has just begun but smaller ones will. Conduct good interviews and you’ll
generate a nice buzz. Your podcast’s page can direct people to your YouTube
channel and from there you could redirect them to your website or course
page, when the time comes.
Creating your own podcast is pretty simple. You’ll need to record
yourself talking, edit the audio and host it online. This is done through online
hosts such as SoundCloud or Libsyn. These are paid services. Once you’ve
uploaded your audio files to these hosts you can add your podcast to the
iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcast stores. These directories will
help you get more listeners.
The organic reach of these directories is pretty low, so you won’t get
many followers. However, once you become more popular these directories
will push your podcast in their recommended sections and you’ll receive a
boost. Also, having a podcast gives you more authority in a niche, even if
your mom is the only one who listens to you.
Down the road you can monetize your podcast by selling ad spots in it.
This is another great monetization strategy you can utilize by giving your
courses away for free. For every 1,000 listeners you have, you can charge
$18 for a 30-second spot (Podcast Advertising Rates 2020, 2020). This means
if you have 10,000 listeners you can earn $180 by selling a single 30-second
time slot to advertisers. If you run four shows per month, that’s $720 from
two minutes’ worth of ads. Sell a minute and you’ll earn $1,440 from ads
every month. Compare this to selling a course for $30. You’ll need to sell 48
units of your course to earn the same amount.
What’s more, you’ll need to keep marketing your course throughout the
year to sustain interest. A free course can be publicized through your web
assets and you can simply monetize those channels. Add the YouTube
channel’s revenue, and other monetization strategies such as affiliate
marketing, and you can potentially earn a lot more by giving your course
away for free.
If creating your own podcast is too much of a hassle, you can pitch
yourself as an interview guest to other podcasts in your niche. This is a lot
like influencer marketing and your pitch will need to follow the guest post
guidelines I mentioned previously. It can be hit-or-miss. The only publicity
you’ll receive is from a single show and you’ll need to lineup multiple
interviews to drum up enthusiasm. It’s far better to invest in your own
podcast, instead, since you can attract people to you instead of going out and
finding them.
Between all of these methods, you’ll be able to generate a nice level of
buzz around your course and content. Publicizing it is as simple as letting
people know about your course and leaving links to it in the descriptions in
your posts. You might be wondering whether it makes sense to start a blog?
Getting organic traffic through blog posts is quite tough and you’ll need at
least a year to be able to hit any kind of reasonable traffic figure.
There are exceptions, of course, but this is the norm when it comes to
search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. If you plan on releasing multiple
courses within your niche, then creating a website and blog is a good idea. As
you keep releasing courses, your blog will add another layer of traffic that
will allow you to generate a high level of buzz around your products.
Post Release
Once your course launches, you’ll begin to receive sign ups from people
and you’ll start monetizing your content. Your marketing tasks haven’t
ended. While pre-launch activities were all about organic marketing, now that
you have a fully fleshed-out course it’s time to start adding more layers to
your marketing efforts. You need to continue to run your organic marketing
efforts in parallel with the following techniques.
Email Marketing
Once your course is up, you need to collect your learners’ emails. These
emails are extremely valuable. Course creators who choose to host their
courses on Udemy and other marketplace websites lose this valuable
information. It’s a bit like deciding to forego the piece of gold you see lying
in the street. You cannot hope to have any form of business success if you
aren’t collecting emails.
The best way to conduct email marketing is to use software such as
Mailchimp. This will allow you to run newsletters to the people in your
niche, and you’ll also be able to analyze how well they’re responding to your
content. The frequency with which you’ll run newsletters depends on your
niche. The average frequency is twice a month.
Monitor your analytics to make sure your engagement rates are high. Use
your newsletters to gauge interest for future courses as well. Your email list
is your business’ most treasured asset. It’ll play an important role in the next
method of marketing.
Paid Advertising
Paid ads are what most people associate with digital marketing. As you
can see, it’s just one element in a much larger picture. There are two major
options you have when it comes to running paid ads. The first is Facebook
and the second is Google. Both of them work in the same manner, with some
small distinctions.
Both ad networks have extensive reach, thanks to the kinds of data they
collect about their users. If you’re running paid ads, it isn’t worth it to run it
on any other platform. Pinterest is a viable option, but you want to be running
Facebook and Google ads at the very least.
The problem with Facebook and Google is that finding an audience from
the billions of people who use the internet is tricky. Facebook allows you to
narrow your audience down based on their interests and Google allows you to
narrow it down using keywords searched. Google Ads is the more powerful
platform and allows you the ability to create an audience based on their
behavior. For example, you can target people who visit a certain website (or
websites) and/or those who download certain apps from the Google Play
Store.
Despite such powerful targeting, creating an audience is a tough task.
You’ll never know whether you have a dedicated core group of customers or
not. You’ll be paying every step of the way, so you need to make sure you’re
earning the highest return on your spending.
This is why running paid ads during the pre-launch step isn’t efficient.
It’s possible to gather a committed audience, but it isn’t a process that gives
you the highest success rate. Organic marketing is slow, but once you collect
an initial list of emails, your marketing becomes even more powerful with
paid ads.
Let’s deal with Facebook first. The first step you should take is to create a
custom audience. Your custom audience is full of the people who have paid
for your course. Now, create a lookalike audience based on your custom
audience. When you do this, you’re telling Facebook to find people who
share similar characteristics with the people who have paid for your course.
 Given the data that they collect, doing this is easy for them. Run ads for
your course to this lookalike audience and allow Facebook to expand your
audience size, if it might result in more clicks. You’ll see a much higher
return on your ad spend this way, and will be able to skip the painful
audience discovery process. It’s best to begin slowly with paid ads.
Set a maximum budget of $5 every day and run your ads for a week. If
you see high conversions, increase your spend to $10 per day until you keep
receiving conversions. As your conversions increase, so do the emails you’re
collecting and these can be used to create even more accurate lookalike
audiences.
Next, you need to set up your ads on Google. Google offers a number of
ads and it’s best for you to opt for all of them. Like with Facebook, start with
a small budget that you can afford to lose and measure your success rate. If
you’re earning a good amount of money on your ad spend, then expand your
budget.
Google uses different terms than Facebook. A custom audience on
Google Ads is different than what it is on Facebook. What you want to do on
Google is, instead, create a “Customer list.” This allows you to export your
customers’ information via a file along with their emails. You can run ads to
your customers now using this list.
Next, you want to create a “similar audience’” This is Google’s term for a
lookalike audience. Much like with Facebook, you can run ads to this new
audience and Google uses its data to find these people. You can measure ad
success every step of the way, so keep a good track of your metrics.
Paid ads offer you a ton of data analytics and it’s possible to get lost in
them. At the very least you need to track your click-through rate, your cost
per click and cost per conversion (cost per course bought). As long as you’re
making money on your ad spend, you’re doing great.
You can test different ad formats if you wish. With paid ads it’s best to
keep it as simple as possible. So implement whatever test you want as long as
it seems simple to you. Don’t get lost in the paid ads data. Remember that
your course content is what matters the most. Keep providing good value and
you’ll earn repeat customers.
Landing Pages
 Once your course is launched, you’ll have a dedicated website for it. The
exception is if you’ve opted to host it on a marketplace. In that case, this
section doesn’t apply to you and you can skip forward. On your course’s
website, or on your business’ website, you’ll need to create what is called a
“landing page.”
A landing page is a sales letter that is used to highlight your course’s
benefits. You can spotlight previous learners’ testimonials as well as the
quotes other influencers have said about you. It’s pretty easy to design a
landing page and their formats are quite standard.
You’ll need to have a video on top that introduces your course to a first-
time viewer, a few testimonials from your learners and highlight the course
modules and benefits. You can use a tool such as Thrive Architect to build
beautiful landing pages. When running paid ads, you can use the landing
page as the URL you’ll guide users to once they click your ad.
Advanced Marketing
The content of this section might not apply to you. If you’re interested in
building a business from creating courses, you’ll need to implement the
strategies here. If you’re content with earning side income, you don’t
necessarily need to implement what you’ll learn here. Nonetheless, it’s a
good idea to learn these concepts since you can always use them elsewhere.
The best way of sustaining a business or an online income stream is to
create a community. This is what the big tech companies realized before
everyone else. They do their best to keep users on their platforms as much as
possible. Facebook does not like redirecting traffic to YouTube. This is why
it plays videos on the platform itself and makes it hard to share these videos.
Google in turn does not make it easy to share anything on Facebook.
Apple strongly restricts the number of apps and types of software its
buyers can use with their products. So does every other smartphone
manufacturer. The lesson for you in all of this is you need to do your best to
retain and own your customer. If you don’t own your customer you’re one
step away from being wiped out by an algorithm change. People who sell
products on Amazon routinely experience this.
They’re seduced by the promise of large visitor traffic and give up the
need to own their customer. Amazon makes money, collects data about their
product and launches a lower priced version of it. Overnight, the individual
seller’s business disappears. You need to be smarter than these people.
You might have a wildly successful YouTube channel, but YouTube still
owns your subscribers. If the platform decides to change the manner in which
it shows its results, your viewer numbers will disappear overnight. Where
does that leave you, then? Collecting customer emails is a great way to own
your customer but it’s just the first step.
You need to go ahead and build a community from there. I’m not talking
about building a cult like Apple has. You need to engage with them and
foster a spirit of togetherness. People are increasingly physically distanced
from one another. Give them a spirit of connection and you’ll increase the
likelihood they'll buy your products. Here are some tools and methods you
can use to build a community.
Slack
Remember forums? You don’t see many of them anymore. There was a
time during the early web 2.0 days when every website had a forum attached
to it. Forums are tough to maintain and a headache to police. All it takes is
one troll or one bad actor to ruin the experience for everyone. The positives
of a forum are immense, though. Everyone interacts with one another and
you can get instant feedback on your products. You have a captive audience
and you don’t need to ever run paid ads if you want to launch a new product.
Thankfully, Slack exists. Slack is a tool that is used for workplace
communication. People can update one another regarding their projects. In
this age of remote employees it’s a powerful tool. However, it also functions
as a forum. Best of all, it’s free. If you want your users to be able to search
for unlimited messages you’ll need to pay around $10 every month.
However, you can mostly get by with the free version.
Use Slack to generate interest and comments about your niche. All of
your learners have shared interests. This is a great way to encourage them to
interact with one another. You could use Slack to answer questions or recruit
advanced learners to answer beginner level questions. You can create an
online school of sorts and not have to worry about generating content to keep
your learners happy. They’ll do it themselves.
Build a tight-knit community and you won’t have any issues launching a
new product or podcast in the future. Any future courses can be vetted before
launch as well so you won’t have to worry about it missing the mark.
Publish a Book
Publishing a book is a great way to build a community. The best way to
drum up enthusiasm is to publish a free book on Amazon’s Kindle platform.
The intention here is to gather as many email addresses as possible and guide
them to your existing communities and courses.
Publishing a high quality, but short e-book gives you the chance to get
your name to a new audience of people and it gives you free publicity.
Another option is to launch a book to establish credibility. If you have an
existing audience, you can drive them to it easily and you can add the words
“Best Selling Author” to your professional profile. This is an instant
credibility boost.
Once your community is big enough, expand to other social media
platforms and encourage your learners to create content. For example, open
an Instagram page and ask people to tag you. Repost their content on your
profile and add a few posts of your own. This will excite people and best of
all, you don’t need to worry about generating content. You can do the same
on Twitter as well. The stronger your community’s bond is the better your
business will be.
Consider organizing a meetup or a donation for a good cause. You could
announce that 10% of all course earnings will go towards funding the
building of a village in an underdeveloped part of the world for example.
Share regular updates on progress and you’ll bring your audience closer to
one another. Give people a good reason to belong, and they'll reward you
with their money. Every successful business knows this and executes this
very well.
Look at the big tech giants for inspiration if you need more pointers on
how to build a community.
What if You Lack Knowledge?
Reading all of this, you might have been wondering how you’d be able to
pull all of this off if you’re relying on someone else to create content?
Admittedly, some of these steps might not be efficient for you. For example,
you cannot present yourself as the course creator when reaching out to
influencers. If you don’t know much about the topic you can’t interview
people as well.
It is still possible to create an organic buzz. You need to brand your
channel as being a “school” of some sort and make it clear that there will be
multiple course creators. You can reach out to podcasts and influencers to
highlight your channel, while making this clear. It might not be as effective
but you will gather some momentum.
Once you get a few sales, you can run paid ads. You’ll have to lean more
heavily on paid ads than organic reach. However, using the lookalike
audience method you can create a community and expand your email
marketing efforts. It might take a bit longer than someone who knows about
the subject, but it’s perfectly possible to achieve the same results. Create a
community as mentioned in the previous section and you’ll be able to
generate organic buzz for your next release. At that point, you’ll be on an
even playing field with a course creator who’s knowledgeable about the
topic.
If you think all of this information has helped you develop a clear
framework with regards to developing a great course and monetizing it,
please consider leaving me a review. I’d appreciate it!
 Chapter 7

Monetization Models

onetization is an all-important aspect of your business strategy. As I’ve

M already mentioned, there are different monetization strategies you can
implement. Technically speaking, you could have a large number of
monetization strategies with any online business. All of your marketing
channels could theoretically support themselves, if you monetize them
properly.
The strategy you pursue depends on the type of course you’re creating.
Some niches won’t support nontraditional monetization models. For example,
if you're selling courses to high school students and continuing education
learners, you won’t be able to sell any products to them. Your course itself is
the product.
Let’s look at a few monetization strategies to see which niches they could
fit well into.
Traditional Model
The traditional course monetization model is where you sell the course
for a sum of money and leave it at that. This is a pretty easy model to set up
and as long as you drive traffic to your course page you’ll earn money
instantly. The positive aspect of this strategy is that it’s easy to understand
and anyone can implement it.
The negative aspect is that it can be hard to communicate value to your
audience when you do this. For instance, there’s only so much content you
can give away for free on your YouTube and social media channels when
publicizing your course. Give away too much and your audience won’t see
the need to pay you money for the course.
Give away too little and you might not entice them. It’s tough to get the
balance right and your marketing will need to be geared towards
communicating the value of signing up with you, instead of communicating
the value of the course. For example, Khan Academy delivers value by
collecting all relevant math and science courses under one roof. A learner
doesn’t have to go elsewhere to access that information. They don’t publicize
the benefit of their individual courses, apart from stating that they’re of a high
quality.
If you already have a captive audience, then launching a traditionally
monetized course is a good idea. However, most content creators aren’t in
this position. This is why the majority of course creators on course
marketplace websites fail. They don’t have a captive audience and rely on
running paid ads to a course page. Their success is hit-or-miss, as a result.
The exception to this rule is if you create a course in a niche that is
completely empty. Once in a while people get lucky and manage to land on a
niche where they become the first mover, just as interest is taking off. If this
is the case, the traditional model works very well and delivers instant profits
to you.
If this scenario doesn’t apply to you, you need to get creative with your
monetization strategy.
Lead Generation
This is a model that not many people use. However, it's an extremely
popular model in the business to business (B2B) niche. B2B companies
typically produce dry content that is full of technical material. Their
audiences are sophisticated and these companies need to educate them on the
finer points of their product.
B2B companies give away a lot of material for free in exchange for a
lead. Research reports, white papers, case studies, and blog posts are just
some of the material that is given away. You might not think of these as
being courses in the traditional sense, but they are educational material,
which is what you’re trying to sell as well.
In exchange for downloading a white paper or other content, these
companies collect an email. This email is then used to build an audience and
email marketing and paid ads swing into action. The reason these companies
can afford to give away so much for free is because their products cost a lot.
A single sale validates the cost of producing all that content.
 Is there a lucrative product you can sell in your niche? It doesn’t have to
be a one-time sale. You could borrow one more strategy from the B2B
playbook and sell a product as a service. For example, let’s say you design a
course that is centered in the beauty niche. You could design a course that
teaches hair stylists a better way to cut hair, or something that is useful to
their everyday jobs.
Give away this course for free and collect the information of the people
signing up for your course. The beauty industry is full of products you can
sell to people. You know these people work in salons. Perhaps you could
push your own line of subscription boxes to these salons? Each box would
cost $25 per month and would contain all beauty essentials that would last the
buyer a month at the most.
They could pay you for a year in advance. This will net you $300 per
sale. If you don’t have your own product to sell, you could sell the contact list
to agencies who are interested in procuring this information. I mentioned
earlier how emails are like finding gold in the wild. Smart marketers know
their value and will give you money for it.
This is how the debt relief industry runs. Debt management firms pay a
lot of money for solid leads. What if you could create a simple “Get out of
debt and simplify your budget” course that’s filled with great information and
is free? Sell the customer lists to these firms and earn commissions per lead.
Using the lead gen model you can identify a number of industries that pay
handsomely for leads. This will lead you to create courses in non-traditional
areas. For example, no one would ever think of creating a course that walks
people through the process of setting up an offshore company in Dubai or
some other tax haven.
Yet, business setup firms and agents pay handsomely for leads. If you
could market your course well and get enough interest in it, you’ll have a
great audience, and you can earn money by referring them to business setup
firms and lawyers. These firms pay per lead, or they pay you a cut of the fees
they earn. Refer enough people and you’ll earn steady income over time.
I’m not saying it’s an easy model to monetize. However, by thinking
laterally like this you can create money by providing information for free.
This is the model that large marketing firms such as HubSpot use and it
works very well. HubSpot in turn probably learned this model from Google.
Why does Google not monetize Android? If they charged just 99 cents for
every Android license, they’d earn over $300 million (Smartphone Sales by
Year by OS 2009-2018, 2009).
However, they did the smart thing and gave it away for free. They collect
user data and use it to make their ad platform better. This allows them to earn
$160.74 billion through ads alone (Google: Ad Revenue 2001-2018, 2019).
Would you rather earn $300 million or $160 billion?
Product Creation
Much like HubSpot does, you can give away courses for free and push
your products to your learners. The previous example of the beauty
subscription box is relevant here. One of the biggest risks of creating a
product is to launch it and see it fall flat. Creating a course allows you to test
your product with an interested audience before you launch it.
You can further reduce risk by crowdfunding your product idea. The
reasons many crowdfunding campaigns fail is because they don’t generate
enough buzz with their audience or fail to generate enough audience numbers
to begin with. This won’t be a problem for you since you’ll have a large
captive audience.
Brainstorm some of the products you can sell your audience right now.
Once you start thinking outside the box, you’ll manage to generate great
ideas and strategies.
Side-Hustle Business
The previous monetization strategies were quite ambitious and were
aimed at earning you a full-time income from your courses. What if you’re
not interested in assuming the responsibility that comes with running such a
business? In that case you can tailor your course to pay what a side-hustle
would.
In this model, you’ll concentrate on releasing regular updates to your
social media channels and charge people for access to the course. If you want
to make it really passive, you can charge a monthly subscription fee and keep
releasing relevant content behind a paywall. This will give you steady
monthly income and you’ll be able to monitor engagement rates.
 You’ll also be able to release new courses to your students and gain the
benefits of having a community provide you with feedback instantly.
 Chapter 8

A Step-by-Step Plan and Tips to Increase Sales

ou’ve now learned pretty much everything there is to learn about creating
Y a course and monetizing it. All that remains now is for you to take action.
To help you do this, I’m going to give you a simple step-by-step action
plan you can use to implement your course structure.
Let’s dive right into it.
A Step-by-Step Plan
You’ve consumed a lot of information thus far, and it can be
overwhelming. Follow this step-by-step plan to ensure your course launch is
a success.
Step One - One Week to One Month
The first month is when you’ll conduct niche research and get to know
what kinds of courses you can create. I’m going to assume you have a full-
time job and have limited time to dedicate to these tasks. If you already have
a topic in mind, this is great. If you don’t have a topic in mind, niche research
will give you ideas; so either way, you need to devote time to carrying this
out.
Don’t impose arbitrary deadlines to finish niche research. Take as long as
you need with this step. Without fully understanding your niche, you won’t
have any hope of success. This doesn’t mean you get stuck forever
researching your niche but make sure you conduct thorough research. This
step can last anywhere from a week to a month.
Make sure you take the time to really get to know your niche well. This
includes making a list of influencers that are present in your niche who you
can network with down the road.
Step Two - One Month
 You should have completed your niche research by this point. It’s now
time to design your course and to decide how much in-depth you’ll go with
your material. If you’re using the services of someone else to create your
course you’ll need their help recording material for you YouTube channel as
well.
Plan your content at least two weeks ahead of time so that you have a
good buffer of content to release. Remember that YouTube loves
consistency, so make sure you’re regularly posting videos. Make a note of all
relevant topics your competitors are talking about and release content that
either disagrees with their opinion or is similar to it. At the very least, you
should aim to release one major video that disagrees with common wisdom in
your niche.
You should start messaging other influencers in the niche who are of
similar size and see if you can collaborate with them. You can also start
laying the ground with future influencers by interacting with their content and
leaving messages on their posts. Whatever your medium is, be it Instagram or
YouTube, building a relationship is key, so work on this.
Step Three - One Month
We’re about one month away from course launch at this point. Your
course must be designed and you should put the finishing touches to it. Why
should you have your course prepared this much in advance? Simply put,
you’ll need to use it for marketing. You can use snippets of it to market it on
YouTube and other social media channels.
You can use these little snippets as teasers for your students to entice
them to sign up for your course. Meanwhile, start marketing yourself to
influencers using the methods I’ve already shown you. Reach out to them,
interview them and build a relationship. Don’t pitch your course just yet.
Bring it up once you’ve interacted with them a few times.
By this point your other marketing strategies will be gaining ground and
you should be getting nice boosts from them. You don’t need to be a huge
mover and shaker in your niche but if you’re a medium-sized influencer by
this point, you’re doing very well. Make sure your course content is top-
notch and conduct thorough reviews of it. Run it past a few experts to see if
the content makes sense.
 Release a few teasers to build excitement. Your podcast networking
should be carried out in parallel with influencer marketing. Get in touch with
them and start promoting yourself. If you’re starting your own podcast, then
do so at the beginning of this step. You’ll have decent traffic numbers so
there will be a good number of people tuning in to listen to you.
By the end of this step you should have good visit numbers, a good
number of people inquiring about your course, all logistics planned out
(course hosting, product manufacturing, if it applies) and you should be ready
to launch.
Step Four - One Week
It’s time to launch! Post links to your course sign up page wherever you
can think of. It’s time to start running paid ads using the techniques I
described earlier. Let your email newsletter subscribers know your course is
live. Run ads to lookalike audiences and start monitoring your analytics.
You’ll be pretty busy during the previous stages but, counterintuitively,
this stage isn’t all that hectic. Your work is done and it’s just a matter of
making sure all loose ends are tied up. Keep collecting emails and implement
processes that can automate your marketing tasks. You’ll be earning money
now, so you can afford to hire assistants who can set up your ads, post your
podcasts, edit your videos, etc.
Take a breather and monitor your analytics. Gather as much feedback as
you can.
Step Five - Repeat
Once your first course is live, it’s time to do it all over again. This time
your steps will be a lot shorter since you’ve already built enough credibility
with your audience. You have a large captive audience as well, so it shouldn’t
take too long for you to evaluate demand. Don’t bombard your audience with
courses.
Instead, take their temperature and offer them further courses that can
enhance their knowledge. Once you figure out which course to offer, carry
out the previous steps again and you’ll have a winner on your hands. If you
decide to move into another niche, you’ll face the same timelines as before.
Tips to Increase Sales
 Here are a few tips and tricks you can use to ensure your courses sell in
good numbers.
Provide Value
This has been a common refrain throughout this book, and I’ll say it
again: Provide value. Without this, your course is useless. You cannot get
away with throwing something together and hoping that no one asks you for a
refund. If you create bogus material, you’ll end up becoming a joke on the
internet, like a few famous internet marketers who posted videos of
themselves in mansions and driving Lamborghinis.
Provide value every step of the way and you won’t need to worry about
customer retention or any other buzzword that digital marketers love talking
about.
Go Organic
No, I’m not talking about your diet. I’m talking about your marketing.
Focusing on organic marketing instead of paid ads upfront is great because it
helps you get to know your niche a lot better. Developing an organic
following also reduces your cost of paid ads later. Many course creators get
impatient with the initial stages and resort to paid ads.
This is a mistake. You cannot force your content down people’s throats
just because you’re running paid ads. Nothing can make up for poor content.
If your organic reach isn’t increasing, this is a good sign that your audience
doesn’t find your content too useful.
Analytics
Success on the internet is all about analyzing your analytics. Whether it’s
the analytics from paid ads, from your course host or from any other social
media platform you host your content on. At first, you’ll find all those
numbers intimidating. However, take some time to look at the simple ones
and work your way forward from there.
Some course creators shy away from analytics because it’s too
intimidating, and they try to get by without it. This is a bit like being thirsty
and refusing to drink a bottle of water that someone offers you. If your aim is
to increase the popularity of your course, why would you run away from
analytics?
 Take the time to understand what those numbers mean and focus on the
simple ones. Analytics platforms are powerful, but you don’t need all that
firepower to figure out how your course is doing. The better you can
understand your learners’ behavior, the more value you can provide them and
the more money you’ll make.
 Conclusion

A scome
we come to the end of this book, you probably realize how far we’ve
since where we started. We began by understanding how to
research a niche and how to truly understand your customers. You then
learned all about course design and structure and how to figure out the depth
to which your course needs to go.
Remember that while your objective is to make money, you won’t make
any of it unless your course provides value to your customers. Get to know
them as well as you can and figure them out. Creating customer personas is
extremely helpful. What’s more, these will also help you figure out how to
market to them down the road.
Influencer marketing is extremely important for your success despite the
bad press these people sometimes get. No matter your niche, someone’s
already out there dominating it. Use the techniques in this book to get close to
them and leverage their audience to increase yours. Network with other
influencers in your niche and expand your footprint.
Remember that for long-term success you need to own your customer.
This is why marketplaces are not a good option for you. They’re simply not
sustainable in the long run. You’ll need to market your courses over and over
again, and this consumes a lot of time. Instead, build your audience and put in
the effort once. After that, your efforts will sustain themselves.
Podcasts are a great tool to spread the word about your course. You can
also use them to invite influencers and build relationships with them. Use all
the social media channels that can expand your reach. You don’t have to be
present on every outlet at the same time. This will only tire you out. Focus on
the ones that bring you the most traffic and aim to capture as much
information about them as you can.
Building a course that sells will seem impossible at first. Focus on the
steps you need to execute and, slowly but surely, you’ll manage to get there.
I wish you all the luck in the world. Let me know how this book has
helped you by leaving me a review! Happy course building!
 References

Google: ad revenue 2001-2018. (n.d.). Statista.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google
Podcast Advertising Rates 2020. (2020). Advertisecast.com.
https://www.advertisecast.com/podcast-advertising-rates
SMART Goal - Definition, Guide, and Importance of Goal Setting. (n.d.)
Corporate Finance Institute.
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/smart-goal
Smartphone sales by year by OS 2009-2018. (2009). Statista.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266219/global-smartphone-sales-since-
1st-quarter-2009-by-operating-system/