Questions to ask yourself before Creating Your Online Course

As the saying goes, “Those who can’t do, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach gym.” Funny as that may sound, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, teaching is one of the most time-consuming jobs you can take on.

Is there a need?

Before asking yourself how to market an online course, the first thing you need to establish is whether or not this particular class already has a need. 

In other words: Do some market research before creating your online course.

Use tools like Answer the Public to see what people are searching for around your area of expertise and base your courses around them. 

Who is your ideal student?

Creating a student persona (your target audience) early on will save you future headaches as you will be attracting the right people. 

What’s your price point? 

This is a factor that too many online course creators leave as an afterthought. They build their product and then determine it’s value.

While you don’t need to think about the exact cost of this course, you should have a rough idea of what the price tag will be. Or, at the very least, you should determine if this will be a high-ticket course (over $1,000) or a low-ticket course (under $1000)

Lots of course creators either drastically undervalue or overvalue the worth of their online courses. So spending a little time getting the pricing right is key.

How Will You Present Your course?

You should determine how you’re going to get your knowledge to your students in a way that they’ll retain the information. A lot of that has to do with your personality and teaching style. 

But there are other factors as well:

• What’s your budget?
• What platform will you use?
• Will it be mostly video-based or text-based?

Your budget is an obvious concern. If you’re creating an online course and working with almost no money, then you need to get creative. This will also impact the platform you use to deliver your content.

Do I have the time to create a course?

Yep… I said it, course creation does take time and we need to have time to create the course, as well as sell the course so it is a really important question to know the answer to this. 

You can also, of course, outsource the creation of course materials. You can hire writers who can adapt your voice and write the course materials from your voice notes or other existing content. 

But even then, reviewing the course and creative assets your team creates will still take your time. When you’re the teacher, you’re the sun.