The Ultimate Guide To Creating Profitable Online Courses
How to Earn From Your Knowledge
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In June 2019,
I launched a course on Financial Intelligence.
The target market was people building a career in the tech space.
I had spent the nine months before that, building a personal brand around personal development and skill acquisition.
My new-found audience has been asking me mostly finance-related questions,
So a course on financial intelligence looked like a great one to launch.
I have some design skills,
So I designed a good-looking flyer and explained what I would be teaching.
After months of sharing valuable content for free,
This would be the first time that I was charging for content.
And I was so confused about what to charge,
So I ended up charging 500 Naira for the course.
The delivery method was not sophisticated,
I simply added everyone who paid to a WhatsApp group.
Then for three days(8 pm daily), I shared the lesson for the day.
After I was done, I unlocked the group and took questions
And that was it.
I didn’t earn much from that course, but it proved to me that people could pay for the knowledge that I had in my head.
Two weeks later, I ran another course and charged 1000 Naira and a lot of people also paid for access.
Below are the flyers for both courses
Then I went as extreme as possible.
I ran a product design course next and charged 25,000 Naira for it.
I also limited available slots to 12.
All slots were sold out within two days, and one more person came and pleaded to be added.
After much pleading, I accepted him and ended up having 13 students.
Bringing my total earnings for that course to 325,000 Naira
I felt on top of the world and knew that I had finally cracked the code to earn significantly from my knowledge.
In the paragraphs that follow,
I will be showing you how you can replicate the same results for yourself.
And what enabled me to move from charging 500 Naria to 25,000 Naira for an online course.
Getting The Best Value From This Guide
The best way to get value from this guide is to read it with a pen and paper beside you to take notes.
A digital note is the second best option if you don’t have a pen and paper close by.
I have done my part of making the guide engaging and straight to the point,
It’s up to you to read the right way.
Table Of Contents
The Power of Roadmaps
Course Topic Research and Student Attraction
Creating Courses that Sell
How to Turn Your Students into Your Marketers
The Power of Roadmaps
One of the biggest things that would frustrate you with online courses is confusing the map with the territory.
That something looks good on paper doesn’t mean that it would play out that way for you.
There are some things that you will never understand until you start taking action.
So the best thing that you can do for yourself at this foundational stage is to create a roadmap that will always keep you in check.
If you are currently at the point where you have not built an audience/personal brand around any topic.
Then you are six - to nine months away from earning from an online course.
This might look far away,
But if you don’t take the necessary action,
Six months will still breeze past and you will have nothing to show for it,
The only shortcut is to create a course and run Ads to push it.
Using Ads work
But it is best to build a personal brand first and earn from it before you start exploring using Ads.
That way, you will fare better in the long run.
There are other benefits to building a personal brand around a topic aside from earning from courses.
Your ideal roadmap should contain the following ;
Topics you want to build a brand around.
The platform you want to build a brand on + Realistic growth targets
Different ways that you would be able to monetize/grow your community.
Also, understand that your roadmap is more of a living document than a tablet of stone.
Be ready to make adjustments as you move.
The elements of a roadmap align with the core sections of this guide, so pay close attention.
Now is also a great time to tell you about Teach With Daba
Learn more about them and quickly join the waitlist by hitting the button below;
Teach With Daba is a platform that will enable you to Create, launch and manage a profitable learning platform, effortlessly.
By leveraging the platform, you can easily build an online academy without coding from scratch.
This is a great option for Beginners looking for a reliable place to host an online course.
Quickly Join the waitlist and grab an early access slot by clicking the button below.
Course Topic Research and Student Attraction
The easiest part about launching an online course is creating the course materials.,
That’s about 5% of the job.
The remaining 95% is creating something that people want.
Everyone knows that personal development is important.
But there are a lot of free courses out there that are not getting consumed by people who “need them”.
One of the things we learned in Biology class is that vitamins are good for the body and vital to health and development.
But how many times do you take a trip to the pharmacy just to buy vitamins?
You rarely do that.
But the moment you have a headache, you rush to buy Paracetamol.
The same thing applies to online courses.
Most people don’t buy courses because of some value they will get in the future.
They buy a course to solve a problem they have in the present.
So you need to avoid spending time creating a course that people don’t have an urgency to buy.
As someone who has launched over seven courses over the past few years.
Trust me, the fastest way to earn is to do the background work needed to create something people want.
And the beautiful thing about the system that I am about to share is that it helps you achieve two things.
Create a course on the right topic.
Get the initial batch of students.
Let me share something that would amaze you.
I have never created a course I was not paid upfront for.
I always sell my courses using a pre-order format.
So after all the research and market validation,
I still don’t create a course until I have money sitting in the Bank.
I always sell 10-20 copies/slots first before I start creating the course content.
This way, I have a firm assurance that I am creating something that is both valuable and needed.
And the beautiful thing is that you can use the testimonials of those who pre-ordered to sell to more people,
So it is not just you talking about the value of the course.
Word-of-mouth marketing is your best friend when it comes to marketing.
But how do you build enough confidence in those first 10 people to pay you money?
How would they believe that you will deliver?
The answer is found in whether you delivered on the first thing they paid you with.
Their Attention.
On Trading Attention
The base currency of the internet is attention.
You come online daily to view one form of content or the other.
But there is no day you wake up and open WhatsApp, Instagram, or Twitter with the sole aim of looking for what to buy.
You are coming for entertainment, information, and education.
So give that to people.
In the survey that I did before creating this guide,
I asked people what topic they believed they could launch an online course on.
I got a lot of interesting replies.
For any topic that you believe that you can teach,
There are thousands of people out there who would love to learn about it.
After determining what you want to teach people, you need to first build a personal brand around it.
People should come to know you as someone knowledgeable about that topic.
And this involves creating content.
It can be video (Instagram/TikTok) or Text (Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter) content.
Remember what I said earlier about what you come on social media for?
You come for content, not products.
And you need to create standardized content.
The previous generation was hooked on Television because shows were created to catch their interest (E.g Superstory)
So create shows and stick to a program time.
I did a little experiment some weeks back.
Every day I posted a great Ad on my WhatsApp status.
I named this show “ Ad of the Day”
After a few days of doing this, people started sending me great Ads that they saw online.
So, in just a little amount of time, I was seen as the Ad Guy.
Tomorrow, If I choose to launch a course about Ads, don’t you think it will sell?
When it comes to the kind of content you post,
You need to understand that your audience will do 80% of the work.
But you have to do your 20% first.
So let’s take one of the examples above and do some research on it.
Answer The Public is a great tool to use.
The keywords show that there are several episodes of a Grasscutter Farming-themed show that you can run.
And once you have done a few episodes, people will start asking your question or sending your resources.
One of the things that you need to do is to encourage people to ask questions.
Highlight and credit anyone who asks you a question.
And if you are going to be using WhatsApp, any time you answer a question in the DMs,
Screenshot the question and your answer and post it via a status update.
Also, have a Notion page/ Google Sheet where you post all the questions that people ask you.
After a while, check for the most reoccurring one, you can also use AI to find a reoccurring theme.
Focus more on that, research tools tell you the general needs, and personal curation tells you the needs of the people whose attention you have captured.
The more you do this, the more valuable and relevant your content becomes to your community members.
Now that you know how to both get a course topic and attract students.
Let’s talk about creating courses that sell.
Creating Courses That Sell
The best thing that you can do for yourself is to pick a topic that you are genuinely passionate about.
Remember that I said earlier that if you don’t have an audience,
That it would take you six to nine months to create something that will sell well.
Yes, it is not sweet to the ears.
I know that you need the money now.
But let me explain something to you.
The biggest harvest that you will get from this journey is not even the money that you earn.
But the growth that happens when you set out to create something valuable.
You need to understand that this is first a personal development journey.
There is no way that you will study and do that research and remain the same.
You will get more understanding of your industry and be well-positioned for other opportunities.
I have made a lot of money from selling courses, but the jobs and contracts my brand attracted were way bigger than what I earned from selling courses.
So, you need to enjoy the process and also pick something that will give you the highest compound interest.
Every effort you put into something today should bring both short-term and long-term returns.
You can’t enjoy the process if you pick something that does not resonate with you.
I intentionally used grasscutter farming as an example to let you know that nothing is too strange.
And believe me, the more strange your online course is, the more sales you will get.
Compared to tech courses, how many people do you think have a course on grasscutter farming?
Check the industry backing that niche, if there is money, go for it.
It Pays to Be Good
On this journey, you need to have a genuine interest in helping others.
The more people you make, the more money you will make.
The greatest asset on Earth is human beings.
Followed by time.
Some of my biggest wins when building my brand came from having a genuine interest in helping others.
I earned my first online income from blogging in 2017.
I was teaching people how to write and brand themselves properly.
I started earning from my blog early and decided to reward my blog readers who were trying to get their blogs off the ground.
I launched a writing contest and rewarded winners with a portion of my blog income.
My efforts were discovered by growth partners of the blogging platform and they started sponsoring the contest.
I ended up getting paid to run the contest.
I made my first million naira faster online because of this.
There was no way I would have been able to predict that the contest would be an income source.
I have seen things like this play out over and over again over the years.
There are a lot of ways to show you genuinely care about your audience.
You can sacrifice time, energy, and even money to give them the best experience possible.
It pays back in more ways than you can imagine.
And you can’t fake it.
So again, choose a niche that you are genuinely interested in.
A major thing that this does is that it gets people to trust you.
They know that you are out to help so any paid resource from you will be trusted and easily bought.
Test With Free Samples
I discovered NFTs in August 2021,
And some months later it went viral as more people started earning from it.
So I created a Free Five Day email course that detailed all that I learned about NFTs and how I made money from it.
The course became popular with a lot of people.
So I took the free version, added more insights and strategies,
And published it as a paid guide.
It has sold over 700 copies to date.
And yes, I still sold it on Pre-order.
So you can try out this method to further validate any course you will need to create.
Survey, Survey, Survey
As your audience grows,
Depend less on research tools and more on surveys to know what they need help with.
Your surveys need to be detailed and ask questions that would extract deeper insight.
After you have documented problems, you need to find the ones that are the most widespread.
Those are the ones to focus on.
Below is an example
From my interactions with my community members.
These five things were the most rampant challenge they had with skill acquisition.
But by forcing them to pick only one.
I knew the one that I needed to nail absolutely.
See another example below,
This is where I get my course modules from.
I also use it as marketing copy to make people see why my course can solve their problems.
When you sell to people using their own words,
They will believe that what you are selling is for them.
Then, of course, you have to deliver value.
If you do, this next thing will be easier for you to do.
How to Turn Your Students into Your Marketers
There are two types of course creators ;
The first sells a course to someone and moves on
The second sells and follows up to make sure the course is studied.
From Day One, I chose to be part of the latter category.
First, I made the courses easy to study and implement.
Then I took student accountability seriously.
I paired my WhatsApp Domination course with the 750k Income challenge.
Only a few participants hit the 750k income in one month.
But a lot earned more than they imagined they could in one month.
Student success means students sell.
The best marketer for any product is a satisfied customer
It’s hard to scale something like this.
But when starting, doing things that don’t scale is how you win.
After a while, I started onboarding my students as Affiliates for my course.
And currently, for every 3 sales I get, 2 come from Affiliate sales.
I have a generous Affiliate reward (45%), so that also helps.
The more you help your students finish the course and apply the lessons.
The more you will earn in the long term.
Conclusion
I have shared so much in this guide,
So I will make it easy for you to take action.
Here are the steps that you need to take now;
Choose what you want to create a course on.
Create a realistic roadmap that you will stick to.
Choose a social platform to grow your brand on.
Start executing and review as you go ( 90 days intervals )
Here are further resources to guide you
Grab a Slot on the Teach With DABA waitlist: 👉🏽 TWD2024
Build a Personal Brand using WhatsApp: ⤵️
If you prefer other platforms, you can indicate in the comment section and I will share a guide with you.
Create Your Roadmap With This Strategy: ⤵️
I hope that this guide helps you on your journey.
This guide took hours to write, and I would appreciate it if you drop a like.
It helps more people on Substack discover it.
Also, share the one thing that stood out for you in the comment section.
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Go forth and excel.
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