As a course creation expert, I decided to ‘walk a mile’ in the shoes of my clients by creating my own course. What an eye-opening experience.
Here’s what I learnt from running my first course.
Course creators are my heroes.
There is so much time and energy that goes into creating a course. I’m in awe of their ability to take a complex concept and break it down into easily digestible chunks. For me this was difficult. I needed to break down quite challenging tech in a way that non-technical people would get. Which was the whole point of my course – teaching tech to non-technical people.
You need to get the marketing right.
Your best bet is to sell it to an already warm audience or test your idea in the market first. There are so many courses on the market and so many people have signed up for courses they’ve never completed. You’ll need to make sure your offer is compelling before anyone will sign up. It’s also important to let people know what the time investment is to complete your course. Let them know up front exactly what they’ll be getting and what they need to put in to achieve the course objective.
A personal touch is important.
The people who engaged with me the most – asking questions and asking for feedback – are the ones who managed to obtain the course objective. I needed to provide that personal service and the people who didn’t take advantage of that haven’t moved forward. So providing that guidance and support is important for a course.
You really need to get over yourself.
I’m an introvert and it took a lot for me to record videos of myself. I hated.the.entire.process. I thought I looked stupid and that people would hate it. And you know what? They didn’t hate it. It made me human and relatable, albeit a little dorky. So just get over yourself, it’s really not about you, it’s about making a connection with your people.
People aren’t going to complete your course and that’s ok.
Obviously, you need to reach out for feedback from people in case there is something that you need to improve on. But in most cases non-completion is not about you it’s completely about them. It may be a bad time for them, they may have learnt what they needed in the first few lessons or they may have just got distracted. So don’t take it personally.
The best part?
Once you’ve done it you get to re-use your content. Most of the feedback I received on my course was that it was too much to do in 6 weeks. Was it a fail? No, because I can just split my course up into sections and sell it as a bunch of smaller mini-courses. And all the work is already done. Some of the content would also work well as future freebies as lead-magnets.
So if you’re like me and your first course doesn’t go as you expected, it’s no biggie. Not only have you learnt something new. But you’ve also made connections with people who may become future clients or refer you to others they know.