In today’s episode, guest Emily Hall shares some amazing advice on how to create slides and workbooks for your course so that they enhance your course – and don’t distract your students! Emily is “passionate about communicating powerful messages in beautiful and authentic ways.”
In today’s episode, guest Emily Hall shares some amazing advice on how to create slides and workbooks for your course so that they enhance your course – and don’t distract your students! Emily is “passionate about communicating powerful messages in beautiful and authentic ways.”
LINKS MENTIONED
Join us for the Topic and Title Challenge for a Rockstar Course at TopicAndTitleChallenge.com.
Get Emily’s help with your slides and workbooks at this link.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.” ~ Steve Jobs
Emily works on content development with her clients… new information should be tied to a story with story-telling elements. You want to tie your stories to the types of experiences your audience has already had.
Make sure your images are licensed correctly for the way you are using them. Even when you work with a designer, get the licenses for the images used. (You can’t just pull random images from Google!) Consult your attorney to get specific advice.
Make sure your workbooks are printer-friendly (so you don’t use all the ink for your students)! Use colors as accents. Give people enough space to do the assignment in the workbook. Consider adding fillable PDFs so students can type directly into PDF.
Top 3 Pieces of Advice:
There’s no one right way to do your slides!
Hello and welcome. And today I want to talk about a piece of the puzzle for your online course that if you get it correct, almost no one will notice, but boy, if you get it wrong, everyone, including your students will notice and will have a hard time getting through your course. So let's get it right. And talk about how to design the slides that you use In your course.
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. Welcome. I'm so glad you're here today. We are off to a fantastic episode with a guest who I think you will thoroughly enjoy. Emily Hall is here with us today to talk about designing PowerPoint and keynote and Google slides for your course.
And she had so many really key insights that I've not heard anywhere else. And before we start, I wanted to tell you about the upcoming topic and title challenge for a rock star course. I would love to have you join us for the five day challenge that I'm hosting in a couple of weeks to get your topic and your title figured out for your next online course.
So just go to topic and title challenge.com and you can get signed up. I'd love to have you there. We're going to have a fantastic week of brainstorming your perfect title and your perfect topic. So that's coming up in just a couple of weeks. And then another thing I wanted to mention is that there is this really fantastic quote from Steve jobs. And he says that design is a funny word.
Some people think design means how it looks, but of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. And that's what we're talking about today. When you're creating slides that you're using and workbooks that you're using for your online course, we want them to work really, really well and kind of blend into the process of your course to where your students don't even notice them.
And if they are noticing them, it's because they're so well done. And not because they're struggling to understand what it is you're talking about. So today I have this interview with Emily Hall and make sure you listen all the way to the end. She's got some insights that are just phenomenal. And the last thing I want to tell you is I was at kid in school who always got in trouble for talking too much.
And so this episode is also similar. It's much longer than our normal episodes, just because I was having so much fun talking with Emily. So you might want to break this one into two sessions because it is longer than normal. So enjoy, I hope you have as much fun with, as I did chatting with Emily and I will catch you on the back end of the interview.
Hey, Hey, welcome everyone. I'm so excited. You are here today for the episode of the Course CreatorsHQ podcast. And I have this fantastic guest here. Emily Hall is here to join us and talk all about creating our slides and putting our presentations together so that they are fantastic. And I pulled, I pulled this from her bio on our website and I thought this was so good.
I want to talk with her about how she does this. She says, I'm passionate about communicating powerful messages in beautiful and authentic ways. So she's from the corporate world. So she knows all about how that works and how that doesn't work and how we are doing our own side hustle things. So she has created an entire business around helping people get their messages out in really fantastic ways.
So welcome Emily Hall. I'm so glad you're here. How are you doing today? I'm doing so great. Thank you so much for having me, Julie. I'm so excited to be here. Yes. And my audience is going to love you. I know it's so let's just jump into some of the good stuff and start talking about how you like to help people as far as what can they do to make sure their presentations are really,
really good. You know, we're doing these courses and we want them to be fantastic for our students. So what are some of the things that you recommend and that you'd like to see people do? Yeah. So there, there are some really easy things to do. And there are some things that require a little more planning, but the biggest thing is just to not forget the visuals,
a lot of people creating online courses and trainings and things like that. And this is something that happens in entrepreneurs space. It happens in corporate happens. It happens everywhere. Visuals tend to be that 11th hour to do that. You remember, you have to do, you're like, I'll just crank them out really fast and that can work occasionally. But generally that makes it one,
a lot more stressful for you. And two, it actually drives you to create visuals that don't, that don't work for your audience. So what happens is when you're communicating messages to your audience through a virtual stage or an in-person stage, there's kind of this wall between you, right? Like you, they don't really know you. They don't really trust you.
You're giving them new information and you're going to be, you're gonna be saying a lot of things that are new and you want them to be listening to you. But if your visuals, aren't, aren't saying the same thing. If they're not reinforcing that in a positive way and really engaging with the audience in the way that the brain takes in and processes information effectively,
you're actually doing yourself a disservice. So if you are speaking to an audience, if you were teaching an online course and your audience is so bored by your visuals, that they're going to be checking their email or listening, like doing the dishes or like setting down their computer and going, like answering the door and not even really caring that it's still going,
because it's not, it's not holding their attention. It's not holding them in. They're not going to be listening to you. They're not going to be holding onto the information that you're sharing. And so it makes it really, really difficult to make sure that your audience is tracking with you and they're following your online course. And so when we have really,
really well-designed visuals created with a lot of intention and strategy that that really increases that those course creation the course completion rates, it increases that engagement and it increases your, your own credibility withyour audience, it increases your sense of authority, it creates a really cohesive brand experience that matches, you know, the rest of the thought and intention that you put into the rest of your visuals,
think about how much people put into social media posts and websites and creating an online course. Your online course is a business asset for you. And so you want that to represent what your business represents in those other areas. So there are lots of really easy things to do. Oh, good. Tell us about those. Yes, yes, yes. So there are, the first thing is plan everything out first.
So this feels a little bit weird, but it's, it's like how people will wire frame out websites before building them. When you take your ideas, you've got kind of your script. You've got, you know, here are the things that you want to say. You know, you got your Google doc with all your things, you know how what's gonna,
what's going to be kind of the flow of information, taking that out and really sketching out like, all right, how can I visualize these ideas? First allows you to focus on what is that core message you want to think of our visuals and our slides like a billboard. So your audience should be able to process that main message within like three to four seconds.
If they can't, they're gonna stop paying attention. And so you really want to make sure that they know exactly what they need to know. You, they know exactly what you want them to know in that three to four seconds. So that is, that is the first thing, planning things out to really make sure that you are focused on what the,
what that message is. And not necessarily what a slide template is telling you to do. So a lot of slide templates will drive us to bullet points and even like Canva ones, there are a lot better, but there's still a lot going on. There's a lot of stuff on there that doesn't necessarily help create clarity. It's extra design elements, it's extra lines,
it's extra all these things to kind of make it pretty and nice, but the way that the brain processes like a flat design, like a brochure is different than how the brain processes information when they're also trying to listen to you. So if you have so much there on the slide that they have to focus on that and stop listening to you, they can only do one at a time.
So you want them to be able to listen to you, see that message over and over again, like they're looking at a billboard have that really reinforce what you're teaching. And that's going to actually increase that the retention of that information so that they are able to take it and build on it and actually learn what you're, what you're teaching. So that's kind of the,
the second one is don't be afraid to, to break free of the templates. It doesn't have to be that way. It can be hard to do that. That can feel a little bit more advanced, but that's, that's something, you know, if you want to be creative, people want to kind of keep it, keep it minimal. Minimal is great,
but sometimes it's easy to just grab a template and go, but making sure that there's not too much on there on the, and I feel like it's less common in the entrepreneur space, but especially in corporate, the extras on slides are really unnecessary. Like page numbers. Don't super matter. Logos on every slides don't really need to happen. So it's like I said,
it's less common with online courses, but I just, I always like to say it because it's, it's just one of those important things. The other main thing that makes it really easy to create solid visuals. And this helps you get to that, that creating a billboard concept is make sure that each of your slides has one idea on it. I Was going to ask you about that.
Cause I heard that once and it's not how you know, PowerPoint is set up with, with doing all the bullet points. No, that doesn't work. Does It? No. Oh no. It's, it's so tragic. Somebody at Microsoft like however many years ago, decided that this is how templates are gonna work. And it just completely changed the way that we visually communicate.
And it's probably made sense at the time, but we know now that that's not how that's not how we take in information, that's not effective, but so many people are just stuck on this as the way that it is. And it's a problem that people don't realize can be solved. So I come in and I, I solve it. We fixed that.
We make it so that your visuals are pretty and easy. But having that check of all right, am I communicating one idea here is a way that is, or is, is a, is a way to kind of have that simple, like last, last check. It's easy to know how many slides to have. The other side of that coin is when you have one idea per slide,
you're going to have a lot more slides than you think. And that's okay. Because slide count is not necessarily a unit of time, even though a lot of people think that it is a lot of people think that, you know, if you ask them how long their, their courses or their training or their presentation, they'll be like, oh, it's,
it's 15 slides. And it's like, cool, cool, cool. But that doesn't mean anything. Yeah. And so it ends up being, you know, they're thinking, all right, this is how I make them. This is how I put my bullet points together. And I know that it takes me this long to present it, but that,
that doesn't, that doesn't really translate. So we want it to be instead of a unit of time, we want it to be kind of that one idea. So those are kind of the main things is planning it out beforehand, feeling comfortable enough to break out of the templates and then sticking to kind of that one idea per slide is that's those things are easy to do and make a world of difference.
You know, I'm so glad you said that because I was working on a presentation for, it was only supposed to be about 25 minutes long. And I ended up with like 70 slides and at the time, and they were really strict on their timing. And I remember thinking, oh my goodness, this, is this gonna work or not. But one of the things I realized was that I was not spending very much time at all on each slide,
like maybe 10 to 20 to 30 seconds of slide. So I could get through them pretty quickly. Now, would you say, what is the best pace then if I'm trying to help someone understand, you know, how can I use my slides to help them understand the concept and get the pacing? Right. So that it sticks with them. Do you have some suggestions on that?
Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's a range of, part of it depends on the complexity of the ideas and it depends on kind of your comfort and confidence level as a speaker. I'm some super experienced, super confident speakers can just like fly through slides, you know, every five seconds and some need a little bit more time because they want that slide as a visual cue.
And they've got a little bit more context to add in. So I would say anywhere between, you know, that five second mark, if you're really confident in anywhere from even 30 seconds to a minute, like if you go up to a minute, that's probably fine too. It's kind of, you don't really want to go more than that. But the biggest thing is making sure that you're consistent.
So if you are spending, you know, about a minute on slides for a while, and then you switch and you're all of a sudden on like a ten second transition, it's going to be pretty jarring for your audience. And it's going to be hard for you as a speaker to get your rhythm. Because having that one idea per slide allows you to really set a cadence that feels really natural.
And it brings kind of your audience along in this conversation. And it ends up, we naturally try, we naturally try to balance that. So if you've ever noticed, if you have some slides that have a whole bunch of content, you'll try and like talk through them really fast because you're like, I just, you feel like you're spending too much time on it.
And then if the other ones don't have enough, you're like trying to kind of fill this space. Cause you're like, well, the other, I talked a lot more, like, I know there's more value here, so you try and like fill it in. And so making sure that you're consistent with that and intending it to be consistent from the beginning will help you in delivering that,
especially when you're delivering a course so that you feel like you are having that you can just have a more natural rhythm of your audience. I love that. I've never heard that advice before. So thank you. That's brand new to me. So that's really makes a lot of sense. So tell me how you feel about texts versus pictures versus having both of them,
or do you have an opinion one way or the other, or does it vary? Like what do you think about that? None of them are wrong as long as they are relevant. So, so sometimes the best slide is just a giant picture. Sometimes it's three words on just a blank background. Sometimes it's a combination of things. Sometimes, sometimes it's even,
you know, it could be a small list. It can be kind of a whole bunch of different, different combinations. There are a zillion layouts. The important thing is that it's driven by the content. So everything on the slide should add to the message that you were trying to share with your audience. And if it doesn't add to that message, then it doesn't need to be there.
So that's, that's sort of the trick is as long as it's, as long as it's relevant, you don't want to just drop images in for the sake of dropping images in because your audience is going to be sitting there trying to figure out why the picture is there, or is it relevant or is it, and if it's not relevant, then it just becomes white noise.
And the more that you have that the less they're going to stay engaged. So you want to make sure that everything on there is super targeted to what your messages. I love that. Now I've seen some folks that try to use their slides as almost their speaker notes. So they end up almost reading that content off of the slides, which is terrible,
terrible. Don't do that. Anyone who's listening, but do you have any suggestions for people who are like, you kind of need the notes, you need to know what your content is going to be, but that shouldn't be in your slide. So what have you seen people doing to help make that whole presentation recording process a little easier? So I've got these great slides,
you know, one thought per slide, but then how do I keep up with my notes? Or have you seen anything that works really well for that? Yeah. So part of it is preference with recording. It can get a little bit, can get a little bit tricky because a lot of speakers really fuel off of the energy of an audience to kind of respond when they're trying to kind of fill in that,
that content. So if you're used to that, it can trip you up to be recording to just you yourself and you. Yeah. And so it could, that can get a little, a little tough. So in those cases I actually recommend scripting and scripting can be really easy. It can be you just dictating into Google notes on your phone and then like holding that up in front of you as you record.
So there are some really easy ways to do that. As far as building in those visual cues for yourself, it is super important. I do this for myself all the time and it's, it's easy to do if, you know, again, what you're trying, what you're trying to do in advance. So there are some, some good ways to build that in a lot of ways are tying your information together.
So I'm really connecting the dots for yourself so that, you know, okay, all of these are part of this section and then kind of memorizing. All right. I mean, I need to make sure that I hit these. These are the things that I want and using, you know, a couple of words as a visual cue for yourself or an image organizing the information visually so that you can see the relationship can help you to remind you of that relationship.
Bringing in storytelling is really, really powerful because storytelling is massive, massive tool to increase memory, increase information retention for your audience and for you as a speaker as well. And so the more that you can tie stories into what you're sharing, the easier it's going to be to recall those when you see that trigger. So that's a really great way to do it too.
Is there a good way to kind of come up with stories? I mean, I know I have a few that I use a lot and I just thinking the other day, like I really need somebody to help me find more stories. So is that something you help people with or that you could give any suggestions on or, or how does, what would you recommend?
Yeah, so I, this is one that people, it seems really difficult until we break it down. I work with all my clients on this piece of it. So anytime we work on content development for courses, trainings, things like that, we want to make sure that anytime there's new information that is coming to our audience, that it is tied up with a story.
And so that helps our audience to understand that. And by story, I don't mean like a Lord of the rings level complex saga situation. It's, it's super, super simple by story. I mean, storytelling elements and storytelling elements are anything that tie new information to existing information in our audience's mind. And so this is why audience research is really important and knowing who's going to be in that,
in that virtual room, who's going to be listening to your course who your audience is in that because you can kind of tap into what types of experiences might they have, what information might they have beforehand. So you can tie that new information into their existing memories. So it kind of is like a shortcut for the brain to be able to remember it.
So when you start thinking of stories, you can think about, you know, how might, how might they, how might this help them to remember it? How, what might they have already that I can kind of draw parallels between how did I learn this? Were there any stories or examples that really resonated with me when I was learning? Because that's the cool thing about stories is they stay with us for a long time.
So a lot of us can remember those like aha moments when this big concept clicked. And we're like, oh, okay, this happened. And sometimes sharing that part is really, really powerful for people. The cool thing with storytelling elements are we end up, we end up drawing connections to things that they've already experienced. Like I said, so it ties into their memories and we can also,
as we're sharing more developed stories, so we can use like examples of metaphors and references to pop culture. One of the coolest stories that I ever heard, like just like interesting ones was, it was like a super technical topic. And they made like a Chrissy Tiegen reference. And I was like, huh, I'm here for that. I appreciate that.
It's very creative. And it, like, I still remember the story. So that's a really cool way to do it. The other thing that it does is it helps our audience to see how they might be able to navigate this exact situation. So as they're learning something new, if you're trying to show someone a new way to do something, if you can tell a story that illustrates that, they ended up casting themselves as the hero in that story,
because we are humans and that's what we do. And they're going to, like, as you're telling the story, they're going to kind of visualize themselves going through this. So they're already, you know, the power of visualization and how it can prime our brain and prime our body to be able to do things. It, it decreases their bodies in their minds objections to when they're actually going to implement.
So it can help increase that implementation too, by using really specific stories that illustrate somebody overcoming the obstacle that are feeling, Oh, and I bet that's why when people are doing sales, when they tell the stories like about their students and how I bet that's why it helps. I never knew that that was the reason is that it helps them bridge. Oh,
that's so good. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be like a super obnoxious, here are my 17,000 testimonials perfectly. That's not super fun, but sometimes it can, it can be, you know, like you can tap into like mythology or history or, you know, current events. It can be anything kind of illustrating the general,
the general type of transformation that they're going to be going through through that. So if you're, if you're talking about adopting a new technology, you can be like, oh yeah. When they first did this, this was how people processed it. And this is how they got through it. And you're sharing this, like, I'm putting this in air quotes.
You're like sharing this, this history, but really you're also helping your audience to move through that transformation themselves, I love That. So you started kind of saying, this is how you work with your clients. So tell us a little bit about that process in case anyone wants some help, because I have to be honest, when I put that presentation together with the 70 slides,
it took me like six or seven hours to find all the photos and to get everything the way I wanted it. And so I would've much rather hired you and had you helped me with it. So tell us a little, like how you work with your clients and how that, how that process is. Yes, Yes. I, I have to have like the dream job.
Like I feel like most people don't love slides and slides are like my favorite thing in the world. So I work with basically service providers, consultants, coaches, anybody who is, you know, wanting to has an existing business, wanting to add or expand on an educational arm to their business, through courses, memberships, workshops, trainings, masterclasses, all that good stuff.
Can we do it through kind of two phases? So there's the content development phase where we look at all right, what is your business goal for this, this piece of content, this piece of education, and what is your audience's goal? What, what, how is it going to serve them? And then we have, we run through these content development sessions,
and I work through my framework to really build out those outlines. So depending on the size of the course, it can be anywhere from one session to two or three sessions. And then depending on, you know, how far, how far they get it's, some people have like a total brain dump of information. Some people are like, I have this idea and I know that we can do it.
And it doesn't matter. We pick it up from wherever you left it. Everyone gets stuck at a different spot. So when we pick it up from there and we build out, we build out modules, we build out lessons, we build out teaching points, sub teaching points, stories, what the implementation piece is going to be for each of those lessons,
so that you have literally everything that you need to be able to script it and go. So then I turned my clients loose and they usually take, you know, a week or two to, to dive into what we've created and just fill in those blanks with the, with the scripting pieces. And this is really where they can roll their expertise,
the details of their expertise, that aren't necessarily important for the outlining process, but are super critical for the course into those pieces that we've outlined. So in this process, we do, we do a gap analysis to make sure that we have a really cohesive student journey that the audience is going to be going on. And we make sure that there's a depth of implementation support so that they,
they can, their students can get it done and they can be successful. And my clients can have the impact that they're looking to get, and that it really does the job of enhancing their one-on-one or existing services. So that's that piece of it. So they go off and script. And then the other side of what I do is the design piece.
So sometimes my clients will, will take that and they'll, they'll design their slides themselves. If they've got, if they've got a team of designers on staff already, they're off to the races and they're happy, most of my clients want us to do it though. So from there, we pick up the script that they've created and we run these design days.
So we schedule everything out in design days and it's super, super fun. So we do a kickoff at the beginning of the day, and then either myself or one of my designers, we'll, we'll take that script that they've created. And we will just go. So we design in Canva, PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google slides. So any of the softwares for slides,
and we take your branding and your vibe, and like all these things about your speaker styles, that we make sure that everything, everything really enhances your natural strengths and the tone of your brand, so that it becomes that extension of your brand experience that we really need it to be. So we take that, we take all your content and we build out a custom template that's designed around your content types.
So different industries, different brands have different needs for content. So we build those templates and build those slides based on what you need, not necessarily based on like a quote unquote standard type. So we build that all out, super custom, super great. We do all the image sourcing. We do all of that fun stuff. So a design day will typically turn around anywhere between 80 and 120 slides,
depending on, if we've worked together before the complexity of the content, all that good stuff. So for a bigger course, we often will do anywhere from two to three design days. And then we can build, we build the workbooks for it too. So we build the workbooks in either Canva or in, in Adobe, depending on the client preference.
So we build that workbook to enhance all the things that are happening in the course, too. So with that, at the end of those, those design days, the clients walk away with workbooks slides, thumbnails. So basically everything that they need to go record the course and put it out into the world. So it's a super easy process. Most courses are done within a couple of weeks.
And so we just, we take that, that whole creation piece off of people's plates so that they can just keep doing the things that they're doing, because a lot of my clients are they're doing this because they're busy because they're at capacity and creating a course and figuring all this out yourself takes so much time that it's just hard to find. It's hard to do that without getting overwhelmed and feeling burned out,
and then you have to go, then you have to turn around and go launch the thing and sell the thing. And so to try and like manage this massive to do list on top of your daily life is just, it's just, it's too much. And so we take this whole piece off so that they can focus on really connecting with their audience,
making sure that they've got everything ready to go, to be able to sell it and release it out into the world. I Love that. So you mentioned something that I want to make sure we bring up and you talked about image sourcing. And so one of the things that I've seen people do in the past, and I want to make sure we talk about this is that you can't just go out to Google and type in a word,
and find a picture and put that into your course. You could get in a whole lot of trouble for that copyright infringement. And I had one of my clients once that they had used a designer to put the pictures on their website. This was for a website design, and we have these slider pictures and we got a letter from Getty images, and they're apparently pretty brutal about accidentally using their,
their images. And it was a thousand dollar bill for using one of just one of their images. And so I want to make sure if you, if you can add to that too, that everyone knows, like, how can I use photos and when can I use them and how does that work? Ooh, yes. Excellent point. And I think I said image sourcing and 99% of the time,
I say licensed image sourcing. So good catch on that. Yes, yes I knew that's what you meant. Yeah. It's a really, really good point though, because especially with presentations and especially when it's like midnight, the night before you have to do something and you're just like, get something on the slides, it can be really stressful and you can take shortcuts,
but those shortcuts can have consequences if they, you know, you're not careful. So we have memberships to stock photography sites that make sure that everything that we're creating is, is licensable the way that we need it to be licensable for our clients. So we have all of those, but there are tons of great, there are tons of great stock photography sites,
both free and paid, but just going onto Google and trying to pull, like, you have to be really careful when, if you're like pulling logos from something, if you're trying to screenshot like statistics, like you just gotta be real careful with some of those because people do watch it and they do. And especially if you, you know, you want your course to be successful,
you want it to be out there and you want it to be, you know, in the hands of as many people as possible, the more people that see it, the more you run the risk, if you did take shortcuts. So it's, it's important to be really careful about that. And if you have questions, you know, do your research consult,
you know, someone in the legal field to be able to make any clarifications on that, because there are also different, there are different rules around creating something for your own use versus creating something to sell. So those are different types of licenses. And so that's, that's really critical. That's also something, if you're going to be purchasing a template, like a side template off of creative market or something like that,
like there are some cool ones, but you have to make sure that you're purchasing the right type of license for what you're going to be using it for. So those types of things are, are important. So the way that we create them, as we built everything from scratch, and then we assign all the copyrights over to our clients. So they have full full range to be able to sell them.
They have all the commercial uses for them, so that it just makes it, makes it easy and they can use it however they need to use it in their business just to make it, make it nice, make it simple and kind of avoiding some of those, those unnecessary complications. Yeah. So just making sure when you're working with a designer that they are addressing the licensing around the images,
that's probably the, and I liked what you said about, you know, check with an attorney and make sure you're in a good, good spot with everything there. So that's great. And then also you talked about workbooks and I love workbooks and worksheets. I think they add so much to a course. So can you give us a couple suggestions on making them really outstanding?
Like what would you recommend so that you have a really good workbook for your students? Yeah. So one of the things is making sure that it's very printer friendly, we'll print out workbooks. And if your colors are super rich and bold and dark, which I have a lot of clients that are like this and that, that may be what we lead with in the slide design,
but we actually will do the inverse in the workbook. So we'll, we'll generally keep it, you know, white light grays, very keep the printers happy. So you don't like take people's all of the people's ink use those rich colors as smaller accents. You still get that vibe, but it's, it's a little bit, a little bit easier. And then making sure that,
you know, you give people enough space to be able to actually answer the questions as thoroughly as you want. It's frustrating when somebody, you know, reflect on this and then you only get two lines and you're like, okay, did you, how much did you want me to actually reflect on this? Cause this seems, this is confusing queue I've got here.
So making sure that, that, that what you're leading people to do, you give them the space to do that fully. Yeah. So gladyou said that, cause it bothers me when they have like sentences to fill in the blanks, but the blanks are not big enough for what the word is that you need to write. That really bothers me.
Yeah. Yeah. It's super frustrating. And then you're like, okay, what am I even doing? And that is the, I mean, the workbook is the implementation piece. So they're going to be learning from you in this course. They're going to be kind of pulling that down into their life and the implementation that workbook is how they're going to,
that's how they're going to cement all of that learning in. And so you really, really want to make sure that you, you do that right, so that they do it so that they finish it because if they go to do that and they're frustrated, they're not going to go back and log in for another lesson. So making sure that they feel really supported through that workbook experience and really,
you know, thinking about what questions might they answer, how might they want to consume this? And with that, you know, some people like to create, they like to have a fillable version. So having both a, a fillable and a printable version, you know, a fillable PDF is really helpful too, so that people can, if they are on a tablet,
if they're traveling, if they want to be able to type it out, if they don't have a printer, there are all sorts of things that we want to think about so that our courses become accessible for people that consume content in different ways. I'm So glad you told us that. Cause I, I, that's one of the things, one of the places where I think I could do better,
cause my PDFs are not always the fillable kind. So that's a good, good advice there. So kind of wrap us up here. If you have, if you're talking to a course creator, what would be like your three top things that you would tell them, you know, you're working on your slides and we want to make sure your course is fantastic.
What recap for us kind of the three big things. And actually before you do that, I want to tell everyone we have a special link in the show notes just to get a hold of Emily. So I'm, I've partnered with her so that you can get access to her and her team. So please go to the show notes for this episode and check that out if you want to work with her more.
So, okay. The three things you would tell course creators, and we've probably talked about it, but just kind of, you know, what you would, the recap for us, what you would think would be some key things. Yes. Yeah. Plan out your content first. Yes. Number one, number one. And that helps to organize your ideas that helps to save you time on your visuals that helps so many things.
And it makes your course better too, you know? Yes. Yes. Because once the information is out of your head, you can do something with it. Right? Super, super important to plan out your content. First, the second thing is less, is more so a lot of times when course creators make content, you, you really think about it as,
you know, how can I give my expertise to this person, to this audience? And what we really want to be thinking about is what does this audience need from me to get this result? And often times it's not everything that we know it's really defining what that goal is. And then making sure that you're giving them everything that they need to be successful in that and nothing more and nothing less,
if there's extra stuff that they might want to know, hello, resources section. That is where that belongs. Bonuses. Yes, so many bonuses. And that's where that stuff is. It's like, okay, if you want to dive deeper, if you want this extra special tutorial on this random thing, that's where that goes. It doesn't need to live in kind of the main course that will help,
will confuse people if that doesn't apply to them. So anything in the course should apply to everyone. And that will be the third one, I guess that's kind of a third one. Now that I'm saying it out loud. So yes, less is more. And then making sure that everything that you do have applies to everybody in your audience. So if you're,
if somebody is going through the course, if they hit a spot where they, and this is both content wise and visual wise, if they see a spot where it's like, okay, this doesn't quite relate to me, this, this doesn't really make a lot of sense. I'm not really getting it. And this is where, you know, using the right stories,
using the right sort of visualizations of your ideas is really important. They're going to disqualify themselves and they're going to think, oh, this isn't for me. And they're going to move on with their lives. And they're not going to come back and Ask for a refund. So we don't want that. No, no, No, no, no. It's like one of the worst things you want people to get to the end.
You want them to do the things and get the results. That's the whole point, right? Yeah. So those are kind of, those are kind of the main things. And then just, you know, giving yourself, giving yourself the creative freedom to be able to experiment and try new things and do slides differently than you think you have to. There's no,
there's no one right way to do them. There's several wrong ways to do that, but there's no, there's no one right way. It can be. It can be whatever your content needs it to be Fantastic. Oh my gosh, you gave us so much good information and ideas. And I know everyone's going to be listening and percolating on how they can improve these and hopefully giving you,
contacting you so that you can help them and take some of this off their plate. So thank you so much, Emily. I appreciate your time. And the advice that you've given us, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun. So I hope you enjoyed this chat with Emily. As much as I did.
She gave us some outstanding information on making our core slides in our workbooks so much better. And she set up a special page just for the course creators HQ listeners. So if you go to the show notes, at coursecreatorshq.com/42 that's coursecreatorshq.com/42. You can get the special link just for course, creation, work with Emily and sign up to talk with her a little bit more about how she could possibly help you,
especially if this is not your strength and you want a little bit of help in making your slides and your workbooks even better. So thanks so much for listening and subscribing. I truly appreciate you and all that you do to help spread the message about course creators HQ have a fantastic week and I can't wait to connect with you next time.