You really need to make sure there is a demand for your online course before you start creating it. Let’s say you want to create a course teaching people how to grow vegetables. Don’t immediately jump into creating course outlines or writing your course material.
Make sure there is a demand for your online course and believe me, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort. This doesn’t have to be a long and complicated process, you could do it in a couple of days. But you can’t sell a course if you don’t have anyone to sell it to, so your first step will be …
Figure out who you’re creating this course for
In answering this question you’ll be able to figure out who your target audience is. And the more specific you get – the better. So if we continue with our vegetable gardening course concept – who could our target audience be?
- People with gardens/allotments?
- People interested in gardening in general?
- People interested in sustainable living?
Women/Men or both? - Do they live in a certain geographical location?
etc.
Create a profile of who you believe your target customers are and this will help you with the next step in the process …
Find out if they’ll buy what you are selling
The easiest way to figure out if people would buy your course is to talk to them. You can do this by hanging out where your target audience hangs out online. In the case of the vegetable course, search for vegetable gardening groups on Facebook. Or find Subreddits of people talking about having problems growing vegetables.
Once you’ve found your people you can ask them if they’d be interested in your course. You could also create a survey (or a poll on Facebook) asking them what their biggest challenges are in relation to your course idea.
Having problems finding people interested in talking about your course?
Then you may need to adjust your initial idea to align with the pain points your people are having. It makes more sense to do this rather than create a course you hope an audience might want. For example. If there are lots of questions from your vegetable gardeners about growing salad vegetables in colder climates. You could refine your course to address this particular problem rather than create a general vegetable gardening course.
Once you’ve gone through these steps and found your target audience and what they’d like in a course. You can be sure that your course idea will not only be well-received, but it will be profitable too.