The 3 Most Common Mistakes Course Creators Make

How to Ensure Your Course is a Huge Success

Grant and Gabrielle from Monetize Your Expertise go over some of the key mistakes they see the majority of new course creators make and some of the simple ways you can avoid them. Armed with these strategies, you’ll be able to create courses faster, launch them to more sales, and deliver your course to resounding cheers from your students.

---

The 3 Most Common Mistakes Course Creators Make

Grant Weherley and Gabrielle of Monetize Your Expertise break down the three most common mistakes course creators make: unrealistic timelines, videos that run too long, and skipping the promotional plan. They also share two techniques for beating decision fatigue, a ten days per module rule for scheduling a course, and how to use personal email outreach to land your first students without an existing audience.

What You’ll Learn

• How to beat decision fatigue with a first draft sprint and the touch it once method
• The three most common mistakes course creators make, and the fix for each one
• The ten days per module rule for building a realistic course timeline
• Why keeping videos under ten minutes raises course completion rates
• How to use personal email outreach to land your first students without an existing audience

Key Takeaways

• Block off dedicated sprints for each stage of course creation instead of trying to make everything perfect on the first pass
• Budget about ten days per module, then add roughly a month for promotion, when you plan your course timeline
• Keep every video under ten minutes, and split any longer lesson into multiple videos
• Build a two week rapport period before you launch, then promote heavily without worrying about overdoing it
• Use targeted personal outreach, through email, LinkedIn, podcasts, or partner webinars, to find your first students even without a big list

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Grant’s Background and Monetize Your Expertise’s Mission

So first off, a little bit about me. I’m the founder of Monetize Your Expertise, though a lot of people just call it “my” for short. I started the company about six years ago because I saw the trend of online learning and online education as a business, and I noticed the fact that there are so many people trying to build courses, and there weren’t really that many good service providers, organizations to actually help people do it, to actually execute the content creation, the graphic design, helping set up things like LifterLMS for our clients.

So that’s what we started doing about six years back, and the idea behind that, the mission behind the company, is basically to give the ability for the best thought leaders on all the different topics that exist to be able to distribute their ideas most effectively, so that anybody with an internet connection is never more than a few clicks away from the best ideas on any topic, which is the power of educational technology.

Gabrielle’s Background as an LMS and Instructional Design Expert

Hi, so yeah, I’m Gabrielle. I’m the LMS expert and content specialist here at Monetize Your Expertise. I’m an award winning web and instructional designer, I have a big soft spot for anything Star Wars related, and I have way too many pairs of glasses. As I said, I’m the LMS expert. When I was 24 I was actually headhunted by Shell Canada, and they needed someone with my web and design experience to help them change their mostly in-classroom learning into training they could do online, because they had this big influx of a younger audience who weren’t being effectively trained with the safety and process training they had at the time.

So I worked with them for a couple of years, and then once I moved on and had my family, I took my skills freelance and decided there was a lot of need in the market for online courses. About a year and a half ago I started working with Monetize Your Expertise, and we’ve been doing this ever since. So I’m super excited to talk more with you about this today.

Why Monetize Your Expertise Brings a Unique Perspective to Course Creation

One other thing to say about what we do as an organization: I think when it comes to online courses we bring a unique perspective to the table. There’s obviously a lot of information out there about how to do courses, how to create them, market them, set them up, and I think we bring a unique perspective because most of the content around that topic is from people with, you know, courses about how to create courses, or from companies like LifterLMS. If you’re going to pick between the two, definitely go with the software companies, since they typically have much better content on the topic.

But one thing I think we bring to the table that’s maybe a little unique is that we’re a service provider, so we’ve actually directly worked on these types of products a whole bunch of different ways, a whole bunch of different times, in all kinds of different industries. Through that repetition we’ve been able to build up certain processes and skill sets that I think we uniquely have, that a lot of other organizations may not, because they might have worked on a couple of courses where we’ve worked on over a hundred.

The Overwhelm Problem of Too Many Course Creation Decisions

To dive right in here: one of the main problems in the online course industry right now is that there’s a lot of different content and advice floating around about how to create courses and how to market courses, particularly around the marketing side of the equation, and a lot of people are a bit overwhelmed with the process and all the different ideas floating around. If you search “online courses” or “how to create an online course,” there’s so much different advice, so many different things you need to think about as you go about creating and marketing courses.

Just to list off some examples of the different things you might need to consider as you’re going to make a successful course product: everything from the way you’re going to structure the content, how many modules, how many lessons, are you going to have associated PDFs with each video lesson, how much are you going to price it, how are you going to set it up, is it going to be on a WordPress plugin or a cloud software delivery system, is it going to be dripped out or evergreen, how are you going to market it, are you going to use webinars, email marketing, social media. You see how it just kind of goes on and on. So if an individual is sitting down trying to create a course, you can see how that might be a little overwhelming, because you essentially have to be an expert in everything under the sun, from the actual topic of your course to the process of creating courses to basically being an internet marketing guru, just to make it work.

Decision Fatigue and Why Course Creators Get Stuck

That’s why we’re trying to simplify things and help you guys out, because there are so many different areas to focus on. To frame that a little more specifically, I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of decision fatigue. Basically, when you’re thinking about a course, there are so many different decisions you need to make, in terms of the different things you need to focus on and how you’re going to go about each of those things. A good way to think about it is if you imagine being at the end of a very long day, you’ve been working 14 hours straight, you haven’t eaten anything, and you’re basically exhausted, and you need to make some decisions at that point. What’s going to be the quality of your decisions? Probably not very good. In a way, course creators are essentially creating that kind of circumstance for themselves.

So we have a couple of techniques to approach that, to deal with that, and basically beat the decision fatigue and the overwhelm of all the different things you need to think about.

Treat Your Course Like a First Draft Sprint

Diving into number one, there are two primary techniques that we advise a lot of our clients, or just people who follow us in general, to approach this and try to avoid that type of overwhelm or getting stuck. The first is basically to think about what you’re doing as a first draft sprint. One of the things that happens with a lot of the people we’ve talked to, in some cases it’s a client who went about trying to create a course, and oftentimes they’re very perfectionist. I imagine a lot of people here today, they want to create a really awesome product, they don’t want to do something mediocre, they want to have every aspect of it perfect. So one of the things that might happen is that they get a little stuck on how to actually get it done, because they’re trying to make sure everything is perfect along the way.

One of the really effective techniques to get around that is basically to just take it as a first draft sprint. If you imagine somebody who’s writing a best-selling novel, the first thing they did, right, they drafted a rough draft of it. They didn’t write a bestselling novel the first time they did it. So if you think about how much time they might have spent on the first draft versus editing at a later date, and the two different ways you can approach it, right, sitting down staring at a blank screen trying to create a perfect product from the get-go, that’s really hard, and that’s something that might get you stuck and hit a wall, staring at the blank screen, the white screen of death, the flashing cursor, trying to think of things to write. So basically, if you think about it like trying to get the first round out, the first draft, the first version of the product out, so that you can get it out in the world, start getting feedback, start selling initial versions of it, and start learning from the market in terms of what works and how you can improve it, because the best way to do that is actually to get it out in the world.

How to Break Course Creation Into Time Boxed Sprints

To dive into a little more detail about that: basically the idea would be to set up a period of time where you’re trying again to sit down, produce the first version of the product, get it out as fast as possible. Oftentimes that might sound like a haphazard way of doing things, and it might make you a little hesitant because you might think you’re going to produce something mediocre. But if you think about it in the sense that trying to make it perfect from the get-go just creates barriers, creates resistance, you want to sit down, block off a period of time, and for example create the curriculum of the course in one go. This might be like a week, might be 10 days, set aside a specific period of time, give yourself a deadline, it’ll force you to sit down and get it out, and then from there you can take it in chunks, get feedback, and make sure it’s great at the end of the day.

So some examples of what that might look like: basically sitting down, blocking off a chunk of time to create the curriculum, so maybe you set three days for that. Once you create the curriculum, maybe one of the next steps is setting aside time to shoot the videos, maybe you set aside a couple, three days, to shoot and edit the videos. Maybe one of the next steps is creating supplemental materials for the video lessons, and you set aside three days to sit down and do that. You can see how just breaking it down into these chunks, where you’re sprinting through these stages to get it out in the world, can be very effective to help overcome that kind of resistance that gets a lot of people stuck and never getting it out at the end of the day.

The Cost of Chasing Perfection From the Start

One of the examples of the contrasting version of this: we’ve had a lot of clients who ignored this kind of approach and basically tried to sit down and create something perfect on the first go. So they got hung up on very, very small minutiae type details that actually weren’t really that important, and all they did was essentially create barriers. For example, spending copious amounts of time trying to figure out what synonym for a particular word is best, or worrying about the grammar on the curriculum, which isn’t even going to be shown in the course, it’s just the structure of the course content, and spending hours or days thinking about really small things like that, which aren’t even that important and will actually be resolved by getting it out the door.

So wherever you are in the course creation process, whether you have an existing course you’re trying to refurbish and get out, or you’re trying to create your first course, basically whatever the immediate next step is that you need to do, set aside a specific amount of time, a deadline, where you have to get it out the door, and ideally it’s something that, after that deadline, you have it scheduled to show to somebody and get their feedback.

Touch It Once, the Getting Things Done Method for Course Creation

Technique number two would be to touch it once. So when you combine the first draft approach, the draft sprint approach, with touching it once, they kind of go together, very supplemental. Maybe you’ve heard of the methodology of Getting Things Done by David Allen. One of the things he talks about is touching it once. For example, I think one of the examples he uses is as you’re checking your email: if you go through your inbox and basically read all your emails, but you don’t actually do what you need to do with them, you’ve spent all this mental energy going through your inbox, reading all these emails, kind of having it nag at the back of your head about what you’re actually going to be doing, and at some point you actually have to go back and do the things you need to do based on those emails, which can be very inefficient.

Similarly, if you keep going back and fiddling with things, all the different steps of course creation, the curriculum, the lesson structure, the video editing, the PDF downloads, things like that, if you’re kind of going back and fiddling with it over and over again, oftentimes it’s super counterproductive, in many cases it actually makes the product worse at the end of the day versus actually making it better. And as you can see, it also just creates this ongoing, endless amount of revisions that will kind of prevent you from actually getting out the door.

Why Endless LMS Research Can Sabotage Your Launch

Some other examples about that might be: you’re trying to find the perfect LMS platform to host your course through. LifterLMS is obviously a great example of that, but there are actually quite a few different platforms you could use, and you could sit down and spend days, weeks, months, years, because people like Gabrielle specialize in this and actually do that, trying to figure out the exact perfect one to use, researching all of them, making pros and cons lists. At the end of the day, a lot of them can get the job done, and if you spend so many hours trying to figure out that one aspect, at the end of the day you’re just pushing things down the road in terms of actually getting the product out.

How to Turn These Two Techniques Into an Action Plan

As a specific action step that you can use to apply these two things: basically think about the steps from where you are now to the end stage of where you’re trying to get to. Again, that might be getting your first course out or your next course out. Maybe you’ve outlined it and created the curriculum, and you need to shoot the videos, create the PDFs, and set it up in an LMS. So for each of those things, break it down, set a timeline, and set caps on how much time you’re able to spend on each of those, both in terms of number of hours, or maybe for each of them you need to do a little bit of research, so you set a deadline of like, you have 10 minutes to research each of those aspects that are going to go into that next stage.

You set aside one day to work on each of those phases, and you schedule for your customers, or a trusted advisor, to review what you created at the end of that, which just forces you to get it done and have something ready to show them. That’s a way you can apply each of those, right now, based on what you’re trying to do next.

Why You Should Not Try to Build Your Course Completely Alone

One other thing I’d like to mention along the way, and this is actually something that came up a lot in the podcast interviews we did with Chris: basically, since there are so many different things you need to think about with a course, so many different skill sets you need to do it well, a lot of times people try to sit down and do it themselves, because it’s often their business baby, it’s their lifeblood, their methodology, their unique framework they’re trying to teach to the world, and they want it to be perfect, they want to control the process along the way. But at the end of the day, I’m sure you can imagine trying to do it all yourself can be very counterproductive.

So alongside planning out these specific steps, setting deadlines for each of those steps and an amount of time you’re going to spend on each of the steps remaining, I’d encourage you also to plan to get some kind of help with the things you know are going to be the hardest for you to do. We go into that in a lot more detail on the podcast interviews, so it’s not something we have a ton of time to get into today, but just have the expectation that it’s going to be in your best interest to get some help along the way.

Recap, Beating Decision Fatigue With a First Draft Sprint

So just a quick recap: two techniques for overcoming the decision fatigue and the potential overwhelm of creating your first course or your next course. Set everything up as a specific first draft sprint, and plan to touch it once, and then get it out into the world after that. It’s Human Nature, right, all the things I mentioned, it’s definitely not something you should feel bad about if it’s happened to any of you, it’s a thing that happens to everyone almost by default, unless you acknowledge that it’s likely to happen and proactively plan around this aspect of human nature to use it to your advantage versus having it be a constraint.

Why Course Creators Repeat the Same Mistakes Again and Again

With that, the next phase of this presentation is to get into three very common mistakes that course creators make, and some specific things you can do for each of those common mistakes. Again, this is based on having done this over many, many years, something like 25 years of combined e-learning experience, working on all kinds of different projects in all kinds of different industries, and there’s a pretty specific pattern of some of the common mistakes people make, and some pretty simple things you can do to deal with those mistakes along the way.

As we mentioned before, we’re in the business of creating online courses for other people, we’ve done done-for-you services and worked with over a hundred clients in a wide variety of industries and on vastly different topics, and it’s been kind of a wild ride seeing all those online courses come through our doors. We’re not saying this to brag or as a sales pitch, but so you understand that we have a pretty unique viewpoint, and we’ve seen all of these mistakes firsthand. We’ve seen newbie course creators and experienced course creators make these exact same mistakes, and when we were first starting out, we even made them ourselves for our clients. If you avoid making these three mistakes, you’re going to get some serious course mojo going, and nothing’s going to stop you from hitting it out of the park on both the creation and the launch of your course.

Mistake One, Setting Unrealistic Timelines for Your Course

So the first mistake we see course creators make is they have really unrealistic timelines. Many people think, oh no worries, I’ll totally have it done next week, and in some cases they’re sitting literally two years later without a finished or launched course. Creating a course is a big project, and if you haven’t created one before, there are a lot of slower steps as you figure out what you’re going to be teaching and how you’re going to present it. There’s a bit of a learning curve based on the number of courses you’ve created in the past and how comfortable you are with creating a project of this type.

Many of the clients we work with have started the process on their own, and when it inevitably takes longer than they thought it would, they get really discouraged. There are many course creators out there with half-finished, unlaunched courses, because they thought it was going to be much easier than it actually is, or maybe someone told them on a webinar like this one that they could easily create a course in a weekend or over 10 days. We have these conversations all the time with our prospective clients, and with a full team of people it can take us several months to create a course. So what are the chances that you as an individual can do it five times faster than our full-time team of people, who have a combined 25 years of experience doing this?

Why You Cannot Realistically Build a Course in a Weekend

Now don’t get me wrong, it is conceivably possible for you to create an online course in 10 days. I definitely wouldn’t say you could do it in a weekend though, unless it’s a very mini course, and you probably didn’t come up for air that entire weekend. But here’s the thing: in order to cut your course creation timeline down to something like the 10 days people are saying, you’d have to completely drop everything else you were doing and focus entirely on that course. It would have to literally be your only project for the 10 day period, and you’d have to resign yourself to living basically like a hermit while you did it.

I don’t think that’s really feasible for the majority of course creators. The people we work with, and I’m sure you as well, really have their own business tasks right now, their own clients, you’re running your own business, you’ve got to do your own marketing, you’re promoting yourself to get people into these courses and into your other products, and you don’t really have that amount of time to devote specifically to one project. Ignoring everything else to create a course over 10 days is most likely just not practical for you. So of course, when the course inevitably takes longer than the 10 days they scheduled for it, or when they hit a bit of a roadblock or something comes up in their business they need to attend to, the course definitely gets abandoned, and the creator starts to think they’re a failure because they couldn’t make that course in 10 days.

How Long You Should Actually Budget for Your Course

So if most people have no idea how long it really takes to create a course, and many of them get discouraged and give up halfway through, then how long should you be estimating for a project like this? You want to make sure you’re giving yourself enough time to get it done, but you also want to make sure you’re getting it out there in the world so it can start making you money, because that’s why we do this. There’s a fine balance between the two that you have to tread. Too long, and you’re liable to get hit with decision fatigue and maybe give up. Too short, and you’ll be run ragged trying to create the course and work in your business or your job, or see your kids and loved ones during that entire period, and some of us enjoy social lives as well.

The Ten Days Per Module Rule for Course Timelines

So we’ve come up with a very easy way to sum up the course creation process in a time frame that works for the average course creator, and it works out to be about 10 days for every module you have in your course. A quick note here: sometimes wording and naming changes from provider to provider, depending on what tool you’re using in the course industry, so let me explain a little about what we mean by a module. In the courses we create for our clients, we call each individual piece of content a lesson, and each lesson is contained within an overarching container that we call a module. So a module could hold one lesson, or it could hold seven lessons.

By giving a set time span for each module, you’re able to more accurately see how long this course will realistically take you to complete, and give yourself the much needed time to create your course and not go crazy in the process. So let’s say your course has eight modules in it, then realistically you need to give yourself about 80 days to complete it. If you have four modules, then you need just over a month to complete it. Now that’s a far cry from the 10 days others are telling you it can take, but it’s also a more realistic timeline, and it helps you feel a lot less stressed and calmer about the whole process. Plus, here’s a hint for you, it also helps when you get to mistake number three.

Mistake Two, Making Videos That Are Too Long

So we can move on to mistake number two: the videos are too long. This one is a doozy. One of the services we offer here at Monetize Your Expertise is called a course audit, and this is where we go through an existing course and find ways to improve it. The main focus of our audits is student retention and increasing completion rates, but we also look for tech issues or delivery issues that may come up, and we also look for ways to further refine the messaging and better communicate the value someone is going to get from taking the course.

Our audits have resulted in some great success stories for our clients, and we’re really proud of the process we’ve created to do these audits. But the number one thing we do in almost every course audit we do is cut the videos down in length.

Why Ten Minute Videos Are Easier for Students to Fit Into Their Day

So the main reason our number one suggestion is cutting down video length is because in our experience it directly correlates to an increased completion rate amongst the courses we audit. This isn’t to say you have to rush through everything you want to say in a video in order to get it under a certain length, but rather that you should try to make each one of your videos no longer than 10 minutes, and perhaps offer more videos in order to thoroughly examine a topic. If a lesson needs more than one video, then that’s totally fine, but each individual lesson should be no more than 10 minutes.

There’s a few reasons why we suggest that nice 10 minutes. The first reason we recommend you keep your videos under 10 minutes is because a video of that length is easy to consume. When a student opens up your lesson and is greeted by a video that’s an hour long, it’s very easy for them to feel defeated right at the get-go. One of the first things that will go through their heads when greeted with a video of that length is, do I have time for this right now, and most often the answer is no. So when you make your videos 10 minutes or less, they’re really easy to fit in around your students’ existing schedule, they can watch the videos quickly in between other tasks and commitments, and it fits your course into their already busy lifestyle.

How Shorter Videos Build Learner Momentum and Confidence

The next reason we recommend making your videos shorter is because it actually fuels the learner’s momentum and keeps them motivated to continue. When they start completing lessons and modules quickly and move through your content that much faster, they get more and more confident that they can apply your information just as easily. It breaks down your large overarching concepts and techniques and breaks them into smaller, bite-sized pieces they can learn fast and apply faster. This keeps them moving forward through your course content at a good pace, and stops them from getting stalled at any one point because of a long video they need to figure out when they have time to watch.

What Attention Span Research Means for Your Course Videos

The last reason we recommend keeping your videos to under 10 minutes is because of attention span. We’ve all heard that people have attention spans the length of a goldfish, and I don’t really know if that’s an insult to us or to a goldfish, but the latest studies definitely aren’t promising. I personally think it’s a bit of a misnomer though. It’s not that attention spans have decreased so rapidly, but rather that there are a slew of things constantly vying for our attention at any given point, and if it’s not interesting, we simply don’t make time for it.

When a student is viewing your course, you have an advantage here in that they are a captured audience. They’re not scrolling through Facebook, they’re in your virtual classroom and they’re ready to learn, so the 30 second attention span doesn’t really apply here, but we do still need to keep it in mind. After a certain point, the average person’s brain starts losing focus and they get easily distracted, and after about 10 minutes that attention span starts to decrease rapidly, and the amount of knowledge retention starts to go down really fast. So by keeping your videos at that 10 minute mark, you’re not only working within their attention span limits, you’re also respecting that they have other things to do, the least of which is implementing what you’re teaching in your course content.

How Shorter Videos Raised One Client’s Completion Rate By 28 Percent

Now the best example of this is for one of our clients, Harveer. He had some amazing courses, but they weren’t doing so well in terms of completion rates. We knew that when our students did complete the courses they got some great results, but getting to that completion stage was proving really difficult. When we did his audit, we split up his 45 to 60 minute videos into smaller pieces, and his student completion rate jumped by 28 percent, and that’s a huge amount. The latest studies have been saying that course completion rates are between 8 and 12 percent, so increasing it by 28 percent was a big win for them.

And when we do these audits, we’re not getting rid of valuable content, essentially what we do is just break a larger video into smaller pieces, so it’s easier to consume, same information, just much easier for people to consume and fit into their day.

Should You Sell or Give Away Your First Draft Course

Actually, just to jump in here a little bit and tie some of this together: it came up in the questions, for that first rough draft version of a course, do you release it and sell it, or is it given away for free? So one of the things people often do is have a rough draft version of a course that they do as a live bootcamp style thing, many times it’s like a weekly webinar, and oftentimes webinars run 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, and a lot of times they record those and that ultimately becomes the course.

So tying together to breaking the videos down: if you just upload 60 to 90 minute chunks of video, then you’re going to be guilty of having overly long content videos, but it’s very easy to take, just thinking about this as an example, we’re going to have a replay of this webinar, and we could very easily break it down into a series of videos, one video that’s probably five minutes long for each of them, just as an example, to tie it back to the previous topic.

Mistake Three, Not Planning Time to Promote Your Course

Okay, now that we’ve gone over the first two mistakes many course creators make, we’re at the very last one, and this is a doozy. It can make the difference between a course launch that’s on fire or one that just kind of sizzles out. This mistake ties into the first one as well, because many course creators mistakenly plan all their time for the making of the course, and then by the time they finish that, they’re so burned out and overwhelmed by the process that the last thing they want to do is even look at that course again. So many courses just get half-heartedly pushed out into the world without much fanfare and very little promotion, so they end up doing very poorly in the launch, and the creator gets discouraged and upset that they spent so much time on the course only to have it not sell or not meet their income goals.

This is a really real problem. We’ve had tons of clients come to us with a finished course that just didn’t sell, and they mistakenly believe it’s the course itself, when the real culprit is their marketing and promotion surrounding that course. So what can you do to avoid this big mistake, because it’s a real doozy, and it can not only affect whether you ever create another course, but can also leave you with some serious cash flow problems if you focus so much time and energy on creating the course and it didn’t give you any ROI back.

How to Build a Promotional Timeline Alongside Your Course Timeline

So the best way to avoid this mistake is to plan for your promotional period when you first sit down and create your course timelines. Promotion shouldn’t be an afterthought when creating a course. In fact, the best course launches take up just as much time and effort as creating the course itself. Many course creators take the very cliche “build it and they will come” mentality when they create their courses. They created it, so why wouldn’t it sell? But the key here is that no one knows about your course, so of course they aren’t going to buy it.

Since we’ve learned that people’s attention spans are pretty short, it most likely needs to be promoted consistently and heavily for a period of time before you get some serious traction in your enrollment. This isn’t meant to make you feel defeated though, in fact it should get you excited, because once the course is created, the marketing comes so much more naturally to any course creator.

Why a Two Week Rapport Building Phase Comes Before the Launch

Now we love rules of thumb here at my, and we’re full of them when it comes to planning a course launch and marketing plan. There are a lot of different ways you can promote your course, and we won’t be getting into those today, because basically we could go on for hours and hours on that, but let’s break it down into a simple way of planning for your promotions, so that no matter what strategy or launch plan or funnel system or promotion process you use, you have enough time to implement it and feel comfortable doing so without being overwhelmed or burnt out. One of our clients used this approach on his course launch in January, and he had some overwhelmingly positive comments about it. At one point he said, this is literally the funnest and easiest launch I’ve ever had.

In terms of timing, we always recommend that you spend about two weeks building up a rapport with your audience before you get into heavy promotion mode. Usually this means sharing bits and pieces of the course content, snippets and previews, and writing social media posts and newsletters, really doing nothing but building value and showing you’re an expert in your course topic. During this initial phase you’re basically placing yourself top of mind, and making sure people get used to seeing you for a bit. Many experts we work with use this period to establish themselves with their audience, because let’s face it, when you’re head down in a course project, you probably neglected your marketing and promotions. I know I do that, and I’m certainly not the only one.

So when you plan for this two week period where you’re sharing what you know, building up that rapport again, and increasing that know, like, and trust that all the marketers are always harping on about, then after that two weeks is over, you can plan to start promoting your specific offer for the course more heavily. Now this is where your aim is to get people to that sales page and buying, you’re setting up the course as the perfect solution for their problem, and you’re going into the full-on launch for the course. A two week launch window is an ideal period for you to build interest, answer questions, handle the objections, and get people excited about your course.

Why You Should Never Worry About Over Promoting Your Course

So don’t worry about people getting bored of your messaging or upset about your promotions. There comes a time during every launch phase, and I’ve seen this so many times, where you feel as though you’re blue in the face from promoting the same thing over and over again. You’re going to assume that people are totally sick of hearing from you and that they’ve heard every variation of your promotional message, and they’re just not interested, or maybe they’re ignoring you. But trust me, for every course creator who’s thought that and eased up on their promotional activities, there were members of their audience who still had no idea they were promoting something in the first place. It’s crazy how often we’ve heard stories of course creators feeling like they had exhausted their lists, and that their audience just doesn’t want to hear about them anymore, and then they get an email asking about something they didn’t know they had a course on.

So don’t worry at all about over promotion. There’s no such thing, and you’re much better to feel as though you’re over promoting than not promoting enough and falling flat of your sales and revenue goals for your online course.

How These Three Mistakes Compound Into a Failed Launch

So can you see how those three mistakes can combine into a fairly unpleasant course creating experience? It’s no wonder that so many course creators fall flat of their goals to create and launch successful courses when they’re making these mistakes over and over again. But if you’re aware of them and plan for them, then you’re already much better off than at least 70 percent of other course creators out there.

A Numbers Based Approach to Course Marketing

So to switch gears here a little bit, we can go into one of the specific things that’s very straightforward and easy to do to get more students enrolled in your course. One thing, before we get into this, I think it’s always very helpful to start approaching your marketing from a pretty objective and numerical approach. As we alluded to earlier, there’s a lot of ideas thrown around in terms of what you can do with regards to marketing, but at the end of the day it comes down to a couple simple factors. It comes down to having your course finished and ready, and then it just comes down to what’s the number of people you’re going to get it in front of, how are you going to get it in front of them, and how many people do you really need to get it in front of to get the kind of results you’re looking for.

Then the idea is just to reverse engineer it. Okay, if I want 10 students in my first launch, and the process I’m going to use to nurture them up to buying the product, how many people do I need to email or put it in front of with Facebook ads or whatever approach I’m going to use, and start with that.

How to Use Personal Email Outreach to Find Your First Students

The specific approach we’re going to go through today is something that’s very simple and straightforward to do, and also doesn’t have the assumption that you have any particular assets. It’s something everyone can do, regardless of whether you have an email list or a social media following or not. It’s basically how to use personal email outreach, or personal outreach generally, but email is a great way for doing that. So basically the concept is thinking about, and again this is particularly good for people who don’t have large followings already, if you do have a massive email list, this is super simple, you can just release it to that group of people, but most people don’t have that.

So the idea is just to think about, okay, how many people do I need, that are in my target market, that I need to get this product in front of, and then what’s a good way to get it in front of them, and reaching out to them directly through something like email outreach can be a very effective approach. So you start by thinking about maybe your best customer and the type of person you’re trying to get it in front of, and then it’s a simple matter of sending them some emails, some valuable content, to try and get them to express interest in what you’re doing. There’s good and bad ways to do this, but the general concept for how you can do this very effectively is to find people through some kind of attribute or behavior which indicates they’re going to be very interested in what you’re doing.

Finding Interested Students Through LinkedIn Learning

One specific example of this: there’s a way to go on LinkedIn Learning, the new kind of online academy thing that LinkedIn offers, and you can find a course that’s similar to your course, and basically find all the people who liked or took the course, and if it’s on a similar topic, and maybe your course goes more in depth than the LinkedIn one, there’s a good chance they’re going to be very interested in what you’re doing, because they’re actively trying to learn something about that topic. This is just one very specific way of doing it, just to have a concrete example, but there are literally hundreds of different ways to do it. You can imagine, okay, you’re taking this LinkedIn course about Facebook ads, I have a course about Facebook ads, we’ve got a webinar, or we’ve got a series of blog posts to launch this course, and you can send that free content to them to see if that’s something they’re interested in.

Best Practices for Personal Outreach That Actually Converts

A couple other things about this approach: there are a couple different ways to do it, but the idea is just to have a very targeted approach, sort of like you can always think about it as a shotgun approach or a sniper approach, and especially if this is an early version of getting this out there, you want to go with more of the sniper approach, having a very clear idea of who you’re going to try to target and how you’re going to target them, and what’s going to be interesting to them. Just to hit on a couple of mistakes along the way, best practices for doing this: think about what they care about, and the value from their perspective, versus, hey, look at my thing that I’m doing, want to buy it, from your perspective of what you care about, what you’re trying to get them to do, versus, hey, here’s an outcome that you care about, I know you care about it because of the way that I found you, I have a way to help you do that. Generally it’s some kind of free content, which might ultimately lead to your course.

That kind of approach can be very effective. In some cases, when we’ve done this for clients or for our own products, we can get 20 and in some cases up to like 36 percent conversion, of the total people that we contacted, going to the materials we were sending them, checking it out and expressing interest, opting in, going to the sales page, and purchasing the product.

Other Ways to Use Personal Outreach Beyond Selling a Course

So that’s a very specific way you can do this. Obviously you want to start this yourself, maybe it’s something that at some point you could hand off to a virtual assistant, or do a number of things to improve that process or scale it over time, but really it’s a great example to start things off. There are actually other use cases you can use this approach for as well, all related to generalized course marketing. For example, one thing you can do is use the same approach again to put it in front of people who might buy your product. You can also do it to secure interviews on podcasts, and this is something I personally did several years back when we were launching a product, I basically just ran an outreach campaign, personally emailing all the people who hosted all the industry podcasts, and it was amazing the number of people who said yes, even very, very top podcasts, since they’re looking for guests. It can be very effective, also a very high percentage conversion rate.

Some other things you could do is use this personal email outreach approach to invite industry experts into interviews to create bonus content for your course, or use it to set up partner webinars, kind of like what we’re doing now, and you’d want to reach out to people who are complementary or indirect competitors to you, so basically people who serve your same market but don’t offer the same thing as you. For example, we offer primarily services, Chris offers primarily LMS software, very good match, there’s no competition there, we can both deliver value to each other’s audience, and it works really well, we’re both incentivized to do that.

Real Conversion Numbers From Personal Outreach Campaigns

So when we first explored this approach we were a little hesitant about it, because it’s pretty time consuming in some cases, and it’s kind of hard to gauge the ROI, at least initially, but we did decide to bite the bullet and give it a real go, and it worked really, really well, like I said, 20 up to 36 percent conversion rate from the outreach to checking out while we’re sending them. So that’s some stats for you. Obviously there’s good and bad ways to do this, some campaigns will succeed, some will fail, but don’t underestimate the one-on-one outreach approach for selling your course, again especially for those of you who don’t have massive audiences to start, you know you can’t do a lot of the more sophisticated internet marketing stuff where you’re putting it in front of tens of thousands of people. Obviously you’d ultimately like to get there, and that’s a really great approach, but most people can’t start there, or it doesn’t make sense to start there. So this is a great approach to start along the way.

How to Reverse Engineer Your Outreach Numbers From Your Revenue Goal

To wrap that up, what I’d encourage you to do to specifically implement this is basically start with the goal that you have for your course, in terms of revenue, number of students, things like that. Figure out, you can use some of these numbers, although obviously it’ll be a little different for yours, and reverse engineer how many people you need to get in front of, and then you can set that as a target. So we talked about planning out the marketing timeline, if you have two weeks, for example, to do it, and you know how many people you need to get it in front of, say you’re trying to get 10 people to buy your product, and there’s a 10 percent conversion rate on the sales page, and there’s a 10 percent conversion from the email to the sales page, then that would be about a thousand people. If you break that down into a daily outreach approach, divided by two weeks, that can give you a specific number, and this is only using one very specific approach, maybe email 50 people a day, or whatever it is, to get to that result.

So that’s a way to specifically implement this. Obviously along the way you’d want to really nail down your client avatar, come up with a very good way to get their contact information, and come up with a very appealing pitch to reach out to them, and that would be a way to get this started today.

A Recap of the Three Course Creation Mistakes and Their Fixes

So let’s just do a quick overview of what we covered today. The first mistake course creators make is that they don’t plan enough time for their course project, or they have unrealistic expectations for how long the project will take them. They end up overwhelmed and burned out when the course they thought would take 10 days is actually taking them six weeks or longer. The solution to that is using our rule of thumb, that you should plan at least 10 days for every module of content you have in your course. Using that 10 day guideline will help you properly allot a consistent amount of time per week or day, so you can get everything done and still have time to run your business while you’re creating this big project.

Now the second mistake is that course creators make far too long of videos, and this seriously affects their completion rates and knowledge retention rates among those students. I think the major goal of any course creator is to get as many success stories as you possibly can, right, but you can’t get those if no one is making it through your course. By creating videos that are 10 minutes or less, you’re not only going to make sure your students are engaged and can easily consume your content in and around their existing schedules, you’re going to keep them motivated to continue. It was a perfect example when I mentioned Harveer there, with his course completion rate just shooting up, that’s exactly a perfect example of the kind of results these sort of changes can bring to an existing course, and further proof that shorter videos are definitely better.

And then of course the very last mistake, which is course creators not planning enough time for the promotional phase of their course. When you spend so much time on the course itself, it can be incredibly easy to not have the energy to promote it properly. This is one of the biggest reasons we see courses fail to generate significant revenue for the people who create them, and I don’t want you to fall victim to this mistake. So when you’re first planning out your course, you can use the first guideline of 10 days per module, and then add at least a month for promotional activities to get the overall timeline for your course from start to finish. This way you’re ready for it, you’re expecting it, and it doesn’t sneak up on you at the end, thinking, oh geez, you mean I have to sell the thing now. So when you avoid that by having that proper plan, you’ve got that promotional period, just like planned for the creation stages. We’ve spoken with and interviewed many course creators who invest all their time, energy, and resources in trying to create the product, and then just run out of steam once it’s done, and they move on to the next thing, and it ends up sitting there. So instead, if you proactively allocate your resources for this, then the odds of your new course being incredibly successful go through the roof.

Where to Find Monetize Your Expertise Online

If you’re looking to find us online, we’d love for you to check us out on social media and visit our website as well. We’d love to talk to you more about how we can help you with your courses, whether that’s done-for-you services or one of our other options, and even if you just want to say hi and ask us any other questions you may have about creating online courses, because we can seriously geek out about this for hours.

If you’ve been enjoying the quality of this presentation, we certainly invite you to check out our online course cohort program, where we personally walk experts and entrepreneurs through our proven process of creating online courses. Over the course of the program we meet weekly for group coaching calls, and you get individualized support that can make all the difference between sitting on a course and launching it. If that’s something you’re interested in, definitely go check out the cohort, and we’d love to have you in our next run.

Should Your First Draft Course Be Free or Paid

I think it really depends on the topic itself. A lot of more technical topics need to be a little more polished before you can have people go through them, but if we’re talking about maybe a little more of a personal topic, or personal growth, something like that, I’m a big proponent of the beta idea, having the first draft sprint, doing that, getting it all down as best as you can, and then selling it as a beta, just with the idea that this isn’t perfect, this isn’t a wonderfully polished version of it, and just seeing what the reaction is to it.

A lot of the time you can just go back to a course and keep editing and keep tweaking, and making it better in every further version that you make of it. So the first draft sprint talks more about your curriculum planning and your curriculum creation, whereas when you go into the beta, that’s the actual delivery of a not 100 percent polished version.

Curriculum Planning Resources and the Content Planner Template

For curriculum planning resources for somebody starting out, and for some clarification on a template for how to structure it, one thing that helps is a mind map, and something we call a content planner, which is sort of like a glorified spreadsheet, where you break down the modules and the video lessons, and map out which are going to be voiceover slides, which are going to show somebody’s face, like a video talking head type approach, and which are going to be a screencast.

That’s a helpful thing to do along the way, just so you’re organized about which approach you’re going to use for which section of the course, because in a lot of cases there’s a particular way to do it based on what you’re trying to communicate. A given lesson topic might be best suited for showing your screen to show somebody how to do it, and in other cases, if you’re telling a personal anecdote, using talking head would be effective. Planning that out ahead of time can be very useful, and it also gets into how you can break it down into some high level details of the course, like the value proposition, your goals for the course, target audience, and then breaking it down into initial structure.

How Backwards Course Design Improves Curriculum Planning

The best resource I’ve used throughout my instructional design career has been the concept of backwards building. This is where you identify where your student is going to be at the end of completing your course, so what will they do, what will they know, what will they be able to create, what will they be able to build, and you build the steps to get there.

So we figure out where your student is going to be at the very end of your course, and then we build backwards from there. You can identify some key steps from where they are now to where they’ll be at the end, and then just fill in the gaps, which is a lot easier, I find, than starting from the beginning and going to the end, because there’s a definite cutoff of where they’re going to be. A lot of the courses I’ve worked on in the past, you can just go on forever, you could put every single piece of knowledge you know on a topic in a course, but that may not necessarily be beneficial for them to get to that specific end result. So that helps guide your curriculum planning a little better, keeps it more in scope and a little more contained, so you’re not going off on wild tangents. I really like the idea of backwards building. If you look up backwards building, even backwards building plus instructional design, in Google, you’ll get tons of resources, there are lots of great sites around that you can get some info on.

Three Proven Course Structure Frameworks

There are three really good frameworks I like to use. One is called the Big Three, so three modules with a lot of smaller lessons in them. Another one is the Six and Six, so six modules with six lessons in them. And then another one is the very quick Nine, so that’s when you’d have nine modules but maybe one or two lessons. The Magic Nine tends to work really well with technical courses, ones where you’re creating something, or if they’re project based where you get a specific thing at the end when you’ve completed it. The Big Three works really good on personal development courses, where they’re asked to go a little deeper into maybe just two or three main concepts. And the most versatile is the Six and Six, which applies really well to a broad range of topics.

Lifetime Access Versus Time Limited Course Access

I think this is more of a personal question in terms of your business. If you plan on being in your specific industry, with this specific business, for a long, long time, for the long run, then lifetime access. If your plan is to roll it into basically a membership course or something that is continuity based, then maybe you want to cap it at say a yearly cost. You’re going to get a lot of feedback from your people as well, so if you ask, would you rather have lifetime access, or would you rather it be something you pay for yearly, that frees up more funds for me to be able to constantly reiterate this and add more value and make it better each year that you go.

How Often You Should Quiz Students Based on Course Topic

Generally speaking, it depends on the topic. If your topics really build upon each other, and if you’re missing information from a previous lesson, then a later lesson in the course doesn’t make any sense, I would quiz more frequently, just because quizzes do jog the memory and help with knowledge retention.

Something like personal development, where the concepts are not so stacked vertically on top of each other in terms of knowledge retention, you can quiz a little less frequently, or even rely more on open-ended, essay type questions, where they’re relating their own experience and being able to bring that knowledge into their lives more than just a straight up quiz.

Engagement Elements That Boost Knowledge Retention

Maybe to build on that, we can touch on engagement elements generally. An engagement element is essentially anything that helps them retain the knowledge more. We call them feedback loops, we call them worksheets, we call them cheat sheets, we call them templates, anything they can use to take the knowledge you’re talking about, just in a verbal, audio, or written way, and extrapolate their own data from it and apply it to their own lives. We really love worksheets, because there’s a connection between what’s in your head and what’s in your hand, and when you write things down it tends to be retained a lot better.

So worksheets are good to be able to have them reiterate key topics, to be able to put it through their own filter, to be able to apply it to their own specific situation, because a lot of times we’re talking about some esoteric topics, or topics that are just kind of conceptual, that are hard to apply to a specific person’s unique situation. So when you bring in things like worksheets and cheat sheets and workbooks, stuff like that, you really get them to engage with it more and really retain that knowledge more, and then they can get better success using your knowledge and your courses to create change in their own lives or their own businesses.

Should You Hire a Paid Traffic Expert to Refill Your Funnel

There’s definitely people out there, actually there’s a guy locally in town who specializes in, I think it’s YouTube ads for info product creators, but generally people like that, the paid experts you’d hire for this, they typically only want to work with people who have a funnel that’s proven, and they’d be running the traffic through the funnel, but they’d want to know that it converts first, otherwise typically they don’t want to work with you, to be honest.

So one of the things to line up would be looking at the stats of the funnel you’ve used, and see how well it converted based on the traffic you’ve run through it. If it’s very effective, getting some support in that area could be a great thing to explore. Typically they’ll do it as some kind of rev share model, or you can find somebody who would do that, so that kind of minimizes your risk, but definitely get your stats first.

How to Re-Engage Your Email List Without Being Annoying

There’s a lot of different ways to get people into funnels, you don’t necessarily need to use paid advertising. In fact, a lot of people talk about things like Facebook ads or AdWords, and oftentimes people who advocate that, they’ve worked very well for them, but in some cases they’re very confident it will work and it doesn’t always necessarily work. We’ve actually hired Facebook ads, AdWords people, a couple different times, for them to drive traffic through funnels for our offering, for our services, and it didn’t work at all, actually I think we got like one email opt-in and zero sales calls, nothing worked at all. So that’s pretty normal, some campaigns work, some campaigns fail, but I wouldn’t get yourself completely restricted to paid advertising.

One thing, you said you already ran it to your list, there’s actually, it’s not necessarily something where, because you’ve emailed it once, now your list is burnt, there’s actually other ways to reiterate it to your list in a way that’s not annoying. Some ideas off the top of my head would just be creating new, unique content related to the topic of the course, and releasing that over time, and promoting that to your email list who’s already seen the product, and then on the back end of that piece of content, you can promote the course, and it’s still like a novel experience. ActiveCampaign, which you said you’re using specifically, has some cool features where you can resend a campaign to anybody who hasn’t opened the email, so you could just do that, anybody who hasn’t actually seen it, there’s a way to send out a campaign just to that list of people, so that could be really effective, and would take you like 10 seconds to do, and that might just immediately generate sales, although it’s obviously not a long-term solution.

Using Facebook Retargeting to Bring Warm Leads Back

One other thing: you could also take the list you have, and assuming it’s substantial enough, rather than running ads to new random people to try and get that to work, you could upload the list as a custom audience to something like Facebook ads retargeting, and bring people back to it who have already been exposed to it, but through a new channel, and in some cases that’ll work, and can be a lot more effective and cost effective than trying to promote it to new people.

Building More Funnel Traffic Through Podcasts and Guest Posts

Another way to keep getting people into your funnel is to again do that personal outreach, in terms of horizontal target markets, so maybe connecting with podcasts, connecting with other experts, doing guest posting, trying to get your name out there more, and the webinar as well, right, because you’re essentially promoting the webinar, and that’s going to lead them into your funnel. So the more people you can partner with, the more people you can get talking about it, the better for you. So definitely I do a lot of podcast guest speaking, reach out for guest posts, and literally just talk about it as much as possible.

I think, to a previous point, erring on the side of promoting too much is generally better than erring on the side of being nervous to bug your audience about it. They’re your audience for a reason, most people generally wouldn’t mind, or if they would, they probably wouldn’t end up being a customer anyway.

How to Get Clarity on Your Ideal Student Avatar

There’s definitely a lot of ways to do this. Maybe I’ll start with the ways not to do it, or the way people do it that’s not super helpful, and then get into some best practices. One thing people often do: let’s say you have some kind of personal development course, and they might define their customer avatar as somebody who wants to be happier and improve their lives, or something like that, basically somebody who would want to buy the course, that’s actually pretty common, but it typically isn’t the right approach, because the things you’re trying to identify are characteristics you can screen for or find people through. A 35 year old man who’s switching careers, making a career transition, but has been making over $100,000 a year up until that point, that’s something you could define, and then specifically find people through some of those characteristics, through LinkedIn Sales Navigator and things like that, as an example.

Another thing that’s helpful is to find ways to define where those people would hang out together. This depends a little on where you are in the process. Let’s say you’ve been selling your course, and it’s sold to a decent number of people, just interview them, ask, and “Ask” by Ryan Levesque, that book is a good way of thinking about that, it’s basically interviewing your customers, sending them a survey, setting up a series of calls to understand your customer avatar a bit better. That’s going to be better generally than trying to make hypotheses and run campaigns that maybe will work, but you won’t really know for three to six months until you get feedback. So just talk to the customers you do have, and try to draw out those specific descriptions or characteristics that you could theoretically find other people through.

And just one more point on that: the best customers you can possibly find are ones who have already purchased similar courses or similar products to yours. If you’re able to identify people who are already buying, say, business courses, if you have a business course, then that’s a surefire bet that they’re a better quality target audience than someone who only invests in business books, because those are two different types of people.

Does Monetize Your Expertise Help With Course Marketing

Yes, absolutely, we typically try to be a little selective about how we help clients with marketing. First and foremost, the course creators we’ve actually worked with on their product directly, we start with them. In some cases we’ll work with somebody just on the marketing side of things, but we’re a little more selective about that, because as you can imagine, a lot of people come to us and basically say, I have a product, it’s not selling, sell it for me, and in some cases that can be really challenging without the context of having worked on the product.

Free Tools and Resources From Monetize Your Expertise

Definitely do check out our website and the different things we have there, including some really effective case studies and tools. There’s an ROI calculator where you can fill out a survey and it’ll give you an estimate of how much revenue your course could generate, and there are some other cool tools we’ve built out as well, along with different case studies you can follow along with and get some new ideas from.