Episode 429: My top 8 course creation tips

In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you my top 8 course creation tips!

If you’ve been thinking about creating an online course, this is going to be a super helpful and practical episode for you.

Let’s dive in!

EPISODE 429: Listen using the player below, or click the links to your fave platform to subscribe and listen over there:

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This episode is for anyone who wants to create an online course. A lot of this will also relate to a membership or high-ticket group program, but some of it is more course-specific.

Let’s dive straight into my top 8 course creation tips.

1. Niche even further

When we create an online business and offer one-to-one services, there’s a lot of scope for you to be able to craft the offer and deliver the services in a bespoke way specific to the individual.

The further you go into creating group programs (and the bigger that group program is), the more you need to be able to craft something that’s going to serve everyone who does the course.

You need to be able to create something relevant to every single student. The way that you do that is to micro niche.

You may have niched to helping parents who want to be more connected to their kids and don’t want to yell as much. But when it comes to then creating an online course or program, you need to get even more specific.

You get more specific in terms of demographics, psychographics, or sensographics.

1. Demographics

You might get more specific in the niche in demographics with the parenting course by focusing on a certain age range or focusing on a certain model of parenting that they want to implement.

You could also focus on a certain family structure (ie. it’s for single moms, or it’s for parents who have meddling in-laws).

That’s the demographic of who this course is for.

2. Psychographics

You can also look at the psychographics of the individual. It might be a more specific goal: wanting to be a good parent is a very broad goal. But is there something that they specifically want to achieve or they specifically want to overcome that this course could be focused on?

It might be focused on the goal of getting your partner on board with the parenting style that you want to adopt. It might be preparing for co-parenting in the face of divorce.

The psychographic is what the things are that worry them. What’s going on in their head psychologically?

3. Sensographics

Sensographics are what is going on in their day-to-day existence. What do their five senses tell them?

What can they see, smell, hear, taste and touch that tells them something is going on that needs to be addressed or that is not what they want?

Something they’re experiencing in their day-to-day situation they want to change.

In the parenting example, it might be that they’re really struggling with mornings and getting their kids out the door. Or they’re really struggling with having conversations with other people involved in their children’s lives.

That’s how you micro-niche. Go super narrow.

If I were to ask you what the goal that you help people to achieve with this course is, you should be about to explain it without using “and”, “or” and “slash”.

I want you to get narrow and go as specific as you can with the niche. That creates a lot more strength in messaging, and it also creates a lot more clarity for people buying that course knowing it’s exactly what they need.

It’s lovely that a lot of people want to create courses to help people feel more confident. But there’s a huge difference between a course that helps me be more confident as a public speaker, versus a course that makes me more confident in the dating pool, versus a course that makes me feel more confident in my sense of identity as I start my own business and show up as myself.

If you’re not specific to the application with your course, you’re going to really struggle to create that traction in resonance.

Consider micro-niching. That’s the first of my course creation tips.

2. Create a messaging document about that course

What is the core messaging that goes with this course? Include the value proposition of the course in that document.

Value proposition is the value in the perceived gap between where they are before they buy your course, and where they are after completing your course. It’s the value of that transformation.

Think about the transformation that your course will facilitate. What change will it help people to make in their lives? What does the before doing the course look like? And what does the after doing the course look like?

The value proposition of the course is how the buyer perceives the value of that transformation.

Create a messaging document that clearly states:

• What is the niche for the program (who is this program for)?
• What does the program deliver?
• What’s the value proposition of that program?
• Why is that transformation valuable to your audience?
• What keywords and search terms would people be looking up if this course was the answer?
• What questions would they be asking?
• And what are ten sure signs that someone needs your course?

That’s the second of my course creation tips… go create your messaging document!

3. Use the Learn, Do, Share model

It’s one thing to get people to buy a course. It’s another thing to get people to actually finish the course.

Do you know what directly impacts word-of-mouth, referrals, sales and the momentum that an online course gets? It’s how many people finish the course and get the results.

One of the models that I love is the Learn, Do, Share model.

That means for every core learning that people experience, I give them something to do with that learning (an action to take) and then get them to come and share in the community (most of my courses include a community or some kind of feedback loop) what they’ve done, what they’re going to do, or what’s come up for them.

I get people to do that Learn, Do, Share at each step of the process.

For each module, what are they learning? What are they doing as a result of that learning? And what do I want them to come back and share with the group or with me?

The reason why I do that is because it creates a sense of accountability, but it also embeds the learning for adults.

If you just teach adults information but you don’t give them anything to do with that information, then the likelihood that they will figure it out for themselves or remember that information they’ve learnt diminishes significantly.

What we want to do is use that Learn, Do, Share model to maximise people’s completion and take into consideration the adult learning that is needed in order for your course to deliver great results.

4. Almond milk principle

The almond milk principle is something that I’ve coined, and it’s based on the fact that if I came for a sleepover at your house, one of the things I would say to you is that I need to get almond milk for my coffee in the morning.

You wouldn’t then explain to me the history of almond milk and all the different brands out there, as well as all the different supermarkets within a 50km radius that sell almond milk.

If I came to your house for a sleepover and I said that I need to get almond milk for my coffee in the morning, you’d tell me to get in the car so we could go get some.

That is the equivalent of buying a course.

When you think about someone buying your course, they’re not buying your course because they want to understand all of the history of the world in relation to everything that’s going on.

They are buying your course because they want something. They want to be something, they want to do something, they want to have something, they want to achieve something, they want to overcome something, they want to heal something.

The job of the course is to get them that outcome as efficiently and effectively as possible.

The whole thing behind the almond milk principle is to give them exactly what they need in order to get what they want, and nothing more.

The more information you put into your course, the less likely people are to complete it. And the less that people complete your course, the less they get the outcome.

When you think about the structure of your course, I want you to ask yourself: Am I putting this in because I think more information equals more value (which is not true)? Or is this actually necessary for them to get the outcome that I promised?

If it is not necessary, do not include it.

That also goes for bonuses (which we’ll talk about soon).

Focus on just getting them what they want as quickly and effectively as possible, and keep it as simple as possible.

If I’m asking for almond milk, get me to the almond milk as quickly as possible.

5. Sell transformation, not information

People don’t buy courses to learn things. That wasn’t true in the past. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a huge shift in people’s drivers for why they purchase online courses.

The number one reason why people purchase an online course is not for information, it’s for transformation.

They want to change, do or achieve something.

I want you to think about that and remember that as you go about designing your course.

If you’re in course creation mode, a lot of people think that their number one job as a course creator is to share a lot of information.

But that knowledge is available for free on the internet. Information is no longer a valuable resource in the online world. It’s just the reality of the world that we live in.

Information is readily available, absolutely free and well-filtered through search engines or AI search tools. We are no longer living in an information economy. Information is no longer valuable in and of itself.

You are selling transformation.

That’s why people buy courses. They are at point A and they want to get to point C. It is your job is to help them get from point A to point C, and that transformation is not just purely from having information in their brain.

Our brains are already overloaded.

Your job is to help people to achieve an outcome, to achieve a goal, or to overcome a challenge. That is what people buy courses for.

The more that you focus on that as you create your course, the more effective that course will be, and the more excited people will be to buy that course.

You don’t sell information. It’s transformation.

6. Build your minimum viable product

This is what I was talking about with bonuses and extra information.

In order to be ready to sell your online course, you do not need to have 52 modules recorded, written transcripts of every module, accompanying workbooks and 16 bonus interviews with experts in the industry.

You just need a minimum viable product first and foremost.

That minimum viable product doesn’t even need to mean that the course exists.

That being said, there are a lot of people out there who recommend that you pre-sell your course without having created any of it.

I have seen my fair share of people over the years who pre-sell a course and then take over a year to deliver on their promise, or they get really behind and freaked out with course creation. It’s probably not a great idea to sell something that doesn’t even exist yet.

Inside my Leverage and Launch program in which I teach how to create and launch online programs, I say to people to at least make the slide decks for every module.

That way you know what your curriculum is, you know what’s going to be in every module, you know what your teaching points are, you know what you’re going to get your students to do, and you know what you’re going to ask them to share for every single module.

You don’t have to record those modules. You can deliver the modules live, or you can record them as you go. But I recommend at least having the slide decks for every module built because that’s minimum viable product.

It’s not a big leap to go from having your slide decks ready to recording the course.

Whilst I understand that having transcripts for accessibility is great, most video platforms that you host on now have auto-captions.

It’s not worth stopping a launch and stopping the course from existing so that you can try and do it all perfectly.

There are lots of really amazing plugins and bonuses that you can give people these days. But that’s not why they’re buying your course.

They’re not buying your course for the sexy bonuses. They’re not buying your course for the interviews with experts who are not you. They are buying it because they want to learn from you. They want to get that outcome.

Focus on minimum viable product.

What is the bare bones minimum that you need to create and have ready to feel comfortable to sell the course? And how are you going to ensure that you deliver the course once you’ve got people buying it?

You might do your first launch as a live round where you just put all your slide decks into a Facebook group, and then you go live into that group every Monday, and that’s their module for the week. You just do that every Monday for eight weeks.

The first round of your program is going to involve mostly validating that the process is valid, that it works, and that people don’t get stuck on something.

I delivered most of my online courses as a live round the first couple of times that I sold it, and then I recorded the modules as self-study for people to jump in and do whenever they’re ready.

Just get to the point where you’ve got something that’s minimum viable product ready to go, and don’t assume that more in the product equals more value to people.

It often just looks like more work.

I have an example from the very start of this year of a course that I didn’t buy because it looked like too much work.

I wanted to buy a course on how to improve my website because I’m doing a big website revamp. In particular, I’m wanting to learn a little bit more about SEO (search engine optimisation).

I want to be able to understand the very basics of SEO so that I can share that information with my clients, but also so that I can think about what’s critical and what’s not when I redesign my website.

I was so close to buying a very simple SEO course from an industry-renowned person who does good stuff on SEO, keywords and copy.

When I was looking into it, it was a time where I was ramping up what I was doing in my business so I was a little bit time poor and just wanted to learn nice and quickly.

When I went and looked at the sales page for the $500 course, I saw that it had six modules. The module seemed very simple and straightforward.

…but then there was this bonuses section.

In the bonuses section, there were six one-hour interviews with people who were experts in other things related to SEO. There was a Pinterest expert, there was a Google Ads expert, there was this keywords optimisation expert, etc. And I figured that if I was going to do SEO on my website, I probably needed to watch all of those as well, which meant another six hours of learning PLUS the time spent implementing.

Then there was also a 72-page SEO workbook (I don’t know if that’s for working through the modules, or if that’s in addition to what I’m doing in the modules).

Then you also got a free eBook on core SEO principles, and then you also got these bonus masterclasses.

What started out as thinking I could bang out six modules in the next couple of weeks then started to look like it was going to be six months worth of work.

That meant I didn’t buy it.

I’m sure they thought that they were making it look extra valuable by adding all those bonuses and extra resources in. But every single bonus that I read about on that sales page just sounded like more work for me.

I’m not someone who is motivated by more work. I am someone who’s motivated by more outcomes for less work.

I’m really grateful that I didn’t buy it in the end because I was telling this story at a business brunch a few weeks later, and so many people told me that they bought it and it was horrendous and had so much conflicting information in it.

But I do think that just paying attention for myself to the psychology of why I didn’t end up buying it, and then telling that story made me realise how important it is to just get to the minimum viable product and get it out there.

Don’t preemptively solve problems that don’t exist yet. That person would have made far more sales if they’d just stuck to the core messaging and the core outcome that we would buy that course for.

That’s the sixth of my course creation tips – minimum viable product.

7. Choose a simpler platform

I think that a lot of people, especially for their first online course, think that they need to buy the fanciest, most involved platform. They get really worried about protecting their intellectual property, and they get really worried about people getting access to the course who shouldn’t have access to the course.

Most of you don’t have a big enough audience to worry about that yet.

Most of you don’t have thousands of people who are desperately trying to access your course for free. And to be honest with you, if you did then you would have enough money from sales coming in that you would be able to hire someone to sort all of that out for you.

If you haven’t got a course that exists yet, just chuck all the modules up into a Facebook group, make a simple sales page, and provide people with instructions on how to request access to the group once they’ve purchased.

Alternatively, host your videos as unlisted on YouTube and embed them onto a password-protected page on your website.

It doesn’t have to be complex. You do not need to buy all those fancy tools.

Most people that I’ve seen who’ve dived into using a platform like Kajabi, Kartra, Thinkific or Teachable in their first course, have ended up really regretting it. They end up having to move platforms, or they end up spending more money on the platform than they earn making sales.

Just pick a really simple tech platform, and then validate that people will pay you for this course.

Then those people are funding you moving it over to a more in-depth platform.

Just start simple with the tech. Ultimately, we need to get proof that people will pay for this, that there’s hunger and demand, and that you can deliver on your promise before we start spending time, energy and money on fancy schmancy platforms and IP protection.

I definitely do recommend Kartra. It’s an all-in-one platform, and it’s what I used for hosting all of my courses.

But most people who ask me about Kartra are asking me when they’re creating their first-ever online course. My response to them is that they’re probably not ready for it yet, so they shouldn’t worry about it right now.

When you’re ready for it, I’ve got an affiliate link that gets you access to free trials and discounts, and I’m happy to recommend it.

Get in touch with me and ask me if you are ready to move to something that’s a bit more involved technologically. But for most people I saw to choose something much simpler than Kartra.

You can find my affiliate link HERE if you’re looking for an all-in-one hosting provider. But I would probably recommend that you’ve launched at least once or twice before jumping into something fancy like that.

The exception to that is the last of my course creation tips…

8. Make a waitlist first

You may have read my previous podcast episode about validating a new offer. You can find that episode here: tashcorbin.com/416

Waitlists are a really valuable way of getting proof and validation that people are interested in your course and you’ve got a viable audience to purchase it.

But also, your waitlist is a valuable resource for insights about what will drive people to purchase your course. What is it that they’re hoping to achieve? What did they see as the core outcomes of working with you?

You can do that through emails that you send to your waitlist as you’re warming them up and asking them questions.

You can make the most of the connection that you make with people who’ve joined your waitlist. Even in the way that you get people to join your waitlist, you can get them to answer a couple of questions when they’re joining, and that will give you some really good insights into what it is that they’re looking for and what they feel like you could offer them.

It gives you insight into how they interpreted your sales page, and what they saw as the most valuable thing.

When I ask people what they’d say the most powerful thing that I teach as an online business mentor is, everyone will tell me different things. That’s a good thing! It tells me that people have found something useful for them in my content, in what I do and in how I talk about my work.

It’s helpful for you to be able to get that validation from a waitlist.

I’d absolutely recommend that you set up a waitlist.

One of my beautiful VIP clients set up a waitlist recently, and it was VERY popular VERY quickly. She sent out one email and put two posts on social media about her new program (which is going to be about $6,000) and she had 56 people sign up to the waitlist in the first week.

When you do something like that, that to me says you have very strong validation, you have a very keen interest, and it may be worthwhile jumping straight to a good hosting platform for your program.

This is because:

1. The price point says that even if she only makes two or three sales of this program the first time around, it’s going to fund the setup of that platform and the hosting of that platform for the first couple of launches of the program. The money is definitely going to be there for her.

2. Because of that price point being $6,000, people will expect a certain standard of delivery, what it looks like, the way it’s integrated, and the experience that they’re going to have doing that course.

3. She’s going to have a strong number of people who buy this course the first time around. We’ve actually made a decision to do limited spaces for the first time around to help her make sure that she’s able to manage that student experience because this is going to be a big undertaking.

Most waitlists convert between 15-20%.

If you get 100 people onto a waitlist, when you finally do open the doors, about 15 to 20 people from that waitlist will generally join the program.

There are lots of things that create differences in that percentage-wise, but that’s generally a good rule of thumb to go by.

A lot of people think that they have an amazing idea for an online course. They think that they have something that everyone in their audience is going to be so excited about. And then when they set up a waitlist for it and start talking about it, they get two people signed up to their waitlist.

They assumed everyone was going to be excited about it. They assumed that everyone was going to be pumped and keen.

If only two people are willing to give you just their name and email address to jump on the waitlist, that to me says you’ve got a core value proposition issue.

There’s a problem there. You need to make sure that you are looking at why people aren’t interested.

That sends up huge alarm bells if you tell your mailing list, the people following you on socials, and if you’re posting and promoting it.

I would recommend twenty ways to talk about your waitlist and maximise the number of people who are signing up for it. If you do those twenty things and you don’t have at least fifty people signed up to your waitlist, that to me says you’ve got a core value proposition issue.

You’ve got a messaging issue.

There’s something going on here. You’re not getting the excitement and the keenness to be on the waitlist that you assumed.

We can fix that, but that’s a really important thing to do.

That’s why I love setting up a waitlist.

There’s so much insight you can get from a waitlist. But also a lot of validation that the assumptions you’re making that your audience is going to be involved in or interested in are actually true.

That is tip number eight – set up and promote a waitlist in all the places before you dive into the course creation piece.

If you are interested in how to set up the waitlist, why to do the waitlist thing and what it should incorporate, I recommend you check out my The Waitlist Toolkit waitlist.

I’m creating an online course about how to create a waitlist… What goes on the waitlist sign-up page, what goes on the thank you page, what goes into the emails that you send to your waitlist, how to maximise the number of people signing up to the waitlist, how to maximise conversion from a waitlist into the first launch of your program, and what to do if your waitlist is not converting and people aren’t buying your thing.

If you would be interested in purchasing that course, I am going to have a waitlist special once it’s ready.

Anyone who joins the waitlist for that program will get access to more than 70% off the list price of that program when we first open the doors.

Make sure you join the waitlist here: tashcorbin.com/waitlist

I know lots of people love the model of waitlist that I teach and all the practical step-by-step strategies that I teach around using a waitlist to validate a course or online program.

Whether what you want to create is a course, membership, group program or something else where you’re working with people one-to-many in an online platform, that’s going to be a really helpful resource, and I think it’s going to be a very popular course.

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode.

Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.