Considering an online course? Here are 6 questions that every course creator should answer before they start their next course. Host Julie Hood is helping aspiring course creators answer them as part of her 5-day challenge at TopicAndTitleChallenge.com.
Considering an online course? Here are 6 questions that every course creator should answer before they start their next course. Host Julie Hood is helping aspiring course creators answer them as part of her 5-day challenge at TopicAndTitleChallenge.com.
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Jump into the FREE 5 day challenge at TopicAndTitleChallenge.com to find your rockstar course idea and name your course!
Join us for the next round of group coaching for the 24 Hour Course Creator DAILY program… spend an hour a day to create your online course. Save your spot at https://www.24HourCourseCreator.com/Daily
Get your free course, Is My Course Idea Any Good? here.
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6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Your Next Online Course
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So, where should you start? If you're considering creating an online course today, I want to share six essential questions for you to contemplate before you begin. So grab a piece of paper and Let's get to it. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood.
So before I jump in to these Amazing questions, I want to tell You that there are two different ways that you can get help from me. If you're Stuck a little bit, trying to answer each of these questions, first off, I'm doing a free topic and title challenge for a rockstar course. It's five days of free training with me. So just go to coursecreatorshq.com/41. And I have the link to sign up at no charge. It's free training, and we're going to have a blast talking about what your perfect course should be about what to call it, what not to call it and what you should include or leave out. I can't wait to get into all the details with you. So I really hope you'll sign up and join us for the topic entitled challenge.
And then second, I'd really love for you to start thinking about whether you can join us for the next group coaching program that I'm doing. It's 24 hour course creator daily. So the concept is that if you want to think about it, imagine spending an hour a day and then getting your course finished. We're going to start in June and finish the course in July.
And so no more of this telling yourself I've got to get this started. I really got to get to this course. Let's just do it together. I tell you exactly what to do. You sit down at the computer and I say, okay, today I want you to spend an hour and do this tomorrow. I want you to spend an hour and do this.
And by the end, we'll have your course created. So if you're interested, just go to, or even if you just kind of want to check it out and see what I'm talking about. Go to 24hourcoursecreator.com/daily and sign up and I'll give you a little secret right now. The pricing is not updated yet. It's on the old pricing of just $497.
So it's a huge discount you're going to, you can get in. If you run and get signed up before I get the page upgraded, the price is going up to $797. So see if you can beat me there and go to 24hourcoursecreator.com/daily to get in. And I'd love to get to work with you, okay. Onto the six questions.
And by the way, I have put them in the show notes. At coursecreatorshq.com/41. So you can go grab them from there and let's see, what should you be asking yourself before you create your next online course? And the first question I want you to think about is who do I want to help or serve? And I think it's really funny sometimes when people will say,
oh, you need to know exactly who your customer is going to be, but you haven't worked with anyone yet. So I know this question is a little bit tough to try to answer, but just start thinking about groups of people and how they identify themselves and how you might want to be able to work with them. So I know you won't have this completely figured out,
but I want you to start thinking about it. And here's why when I started online, I was helping people put up websites, WordPress blogs, helping them do email newsletters and online marketing. And it was really tough to try to get traction because internet marketing is very covers a lot of different industries. So one day I'd get someone that had a restaurant.
The next day, I get someone that was an author and trying to speak to. Each of them was really, really tough. And it wasn't until I narrowed down my niche enough to course creators that I could speak directly to you and what your problems are and what you're looking for. Instead of talking about selling pizzas, we could talk specifically about selling courses.
So it makes your messaging so much easier. And then on the other end of that, receiving it, hear you. And they're like, oh my gosh, I have to have this expert because they are the one who help people like me. They don't just generally help people across the board. They help people just like me. So start thinking about it.
I give you permission to change this audience as you go, but just make some notes about some groups of people that you want to serve. Secondly, I want you to start noting what kind of problems they have, what sort of things do they talk about in Facebook groups, in books that you read in different topics that you see them addressing? Like what kinds of problems are they asking about and what are they trying to figure out?
And I'll give you a visual image to use here. When my daughter was young, she loved a show called Dora the Explorer. And if, and if you've ever seen it, it's a great show for kids. It helps them learn to navigate because Dora is going on adventures. And one of the characters is the map and which was one of my favorite characters,
by the way, the map always had three different locations that they would need to visit on their way to reach the end goal, to reach the, the adventure as they were. And so what I want you to be doing is to put together a customer journey map where you're thinking about what's going on for your potential students, what kinds of things are they running into?
What are they doing? Because those different milestones and different things that are happening in their lives, that's where you can step up and either offer your course or offer your freebie or jump in. So a concrete example of this is all of my course creators need to know if their idea is any good. So I have a training that I'm giving away to my podcast listeners,
and it's all about is your idea any good? So you can get that at coursecreatorshq.com/idea, and kind of see how, how I'm working with, but I know that that's a problem that comes up for a lot of folks. So that's question number two is start thinking about the different problems that they're having. And then take that to the next step.
Question. Number three is what result or transformation can I provide? What results or transformation can I provide? So you're going to take these problems that they're having and you're going to help them solve them. Now it may not be a huge problem. May not be their big overall arching problem. It may just be pieces of the puzzle that you're helping them fill in the blanks,
but start jotting down. Okay. These are some ways that I can help. So for example, if you like to help people with baking, maybe you help them get started with sourdough bread. You're not going to teach them everything there is to know about baking, but you're going to start and teach them a little bit about baking with sourdough. Okay?
Question number four are people paying for the answer to this problem? And there's a few different ways you can check this. I'll give you some quick ones. It's not an absolute, but it does give you a place to start first, go out to Google, type it in your topic idea and make sure that you see some ads up at the top of the screen,
because that means people are paying to advertise to the people that are typing in what you are typing. So that's a really good way to know that if they're advertising, there's some money to be made there. You can also go out to Amazon and see if there are books about your topic, because that means people are buying some books and you can also just type in your topic and the word course and see what comes up.
See if people are already selling something. Now don't let this knock you off guard or say, Hey, there's lots of people already doing what I want to do, because what you're going to teach will be unique. It's going to be unique to your experiences, unique to what you know, unique to the way that you're going to share it and the way you're going to work with your students.
So it's fantastic if there's already some courses out there, that means that there's some interest and I don't know about you, but I usually don't just get one answer to a problem that I have, especially if it's a really important problem, I go out and I buy three courses and 15 books and try to get everything I can on the topic and go from there.
So don't worry if you find some other courses, that's actually a good thing. So that's question number, number four, are people paying for the answer to this problem? And then question number five is what title will grab their attention. And this is really essential because in addition to the headline that you use on your sales page, the title really needs to make them inquisitive,
make them go. Hmm. Maybe I need that. Oh, I wonder what that's about. I wonder if it'll be helpful and we're going to talk about how you actually do this during the five day challenge, because there is a bit of a art and a science to coming up with titles that get people's attention. It all ties back to the specific language that you're using.
I like to see people use main titles, like a shorter, maybe three word title of your course, and then a subtitle. So you can throw in a lot more details about who it's for and how you're helping them. So that'll, that's very, very basic. We're really going to jump into this during the topic entitled challenge. So I hope you can join us.
It's free. And the link is in the show notes. So come join us and we'll dig into your specific topic and your title. Okay. Question number six then, and this gets a little bit deeper. It's not something I know that you'll get all the way through in your few minutes with me, but this is something that I want you to start thinking about.
And that's what modules, lessons, and content do I need to include in order to help get this result for my students. And one of the best ways I think to do this is just sit down and start brainstorming everything you can think of related to this specific problem. And then you're going to go back and you're going to reorder and put it in a logical groupings.
So those groupings of lessons are your modules. When you group a bunch of lessons together, you get a module. And then also another one of the things that can really make your course stand out is when you include checklists, when you include a template, those sort of things help your students in a way that a lot of other courses don't. So it's not just you spewing out to your students,
it's you actually giving them action oriented guides to help them finish and get through the course and do what you're asking them to do. So I want to recap these six questions really quickly. So you can think through them as you're driving home and get inspired when you're in the shower to think about your next course, the first one is who do I want to help or serve?
The second one is what problems do they have? The third is what result or transformation can I provide to help them? Even if it's just a piece of the bigger problem, number four, are people paying for the answer to this problem? Number five, what title will grab their attention? What words are intriguing? And then number six, what modules,
lessons, and content do I need to include to make sure that they can actually get the results from the course. So I hope that gave you a little bit of a thought for the week. Some things that maybe you hadn't considered yet, and it really doesn't have to be difficult to create your next course. I promise I'm making this as simple as possible.
I don't like complicated online things. I want to make your life as easy as I can. So I'd really love for you to join us for the challenge. Go to coursecreatorshq.com/41. Join us for the challenge and think about signing up for the group coaching program. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for reviewing.
I really, really appreciate the fact that you give me space in your listening devices. Every week you light up my week, your reviews helped me and I ended up doing happy dances around my office. So thank you so much. I appreciate all that you are doing not only for me, but to make the world a better place. I truly believe that course creators can change the world.
When we help people have better lives, have better families have better businesses. We are going to, as Steve jobs said, put a dent in the universe With our courses. So thanks for joining me. I will catch you next week and have a fantastic week. Take care.